Introduction

Mjriam Abu Samra

The emergence and development of the global student movement for Palestine reflects a much longer historical process of resistance and transnational solidarity that stretches across decades of anti-colonial struggle. In Palestinian history, the student movement played a central role in the making of anti-colonial consciousness. From the immediate aftermath of the Nakba onward, it took a transnational dimension and moved along two interconnected trajectories: the reorganization of the national movement around revolutionary political visions that broke with the dominant political frameworks of the region, and the transnational and international mobilization of the student sector itself. It was students in Arab universities in Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad in the early 1950s who clandestinely gave life to the political currents that later became the leading forces of the Palestinian resistance movement, most notably Fateh and the Arab Nationalist Movement, which later became the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. At the same time, in 1959 Palestinian students founded the first transnational Palestinian organization, the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS), even before the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) itself. GUPS remained the principal model for the subsequent reorganization of other sectors of Palestinian society at a transnational level, managing to counter the geographic fragmentation generated by colonization, expulsion, and exile.

Within this transnational political mobilization, which laid the foundations for the later development of the revolutionary national liberation movement, students functioned as an anti-colonial organic vanguard. They became the driving force of the Palestinian political project, giving voice to the political aspirations of their people in international spaces while remaining deeply connected to the masses themselves. They were “organic” to their people not only because they articulated a political vision that resonated widely, but because they were capable of mobilizing society and remaining an organizational reference point for it. This process of ideological elaboration and organizational practice rested on a clear anti-colonial understanding of the Palestinian question and on an analysis of the colonial project capable of situating Zionist colonial ambitions in Palestine within the longer history of European colonialism and Western imperialism. This analysis positioned Palestinian students within the broader landscape of the “Third World movements” of the 1950s and 1960s and contributed to the emergence of anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist visions rooted in joint struggle among oppressed peoples and sectors. During the years of decolonization, young Palestinians in exile exposed the hypocrisy of an international system that recognized the independence of some peoples while continuing to legitimize the Zionist colonial project.

However, in the 1990s, in the wake of the Oslo process, the language of anti-colonial liberation underwent a profound transformation. The Palestinian struggle was increasingly reduced to a question of state-building within a neoliberal framework. This shift had profound consequences for the student movement and for Palestinian political life more broadly. The representative structures, unions, and mass organizations that had once linked Palestinians across different geographies increasingly weakened, became bureaucratized, or were absorbed into factional and institutional logics. The revolutionary language of liberation, return, anti-colonial struggle, and transnational solidarity was gradually displaced by the vocabulary of governance, development, institution-building, donor agendas, and technocratic management. The post-Oslo generation therefore inherited a fragmented political field marked not by the absence of institutions, but by the paralysis of existing ones. Unlike earlier generations, which had been tasked with constructing representative frameworks where none existed, young Palestinians in the post-Oslo era were confronted with institutions that formally existed but no longer seemed capable of expressing collective aspirations or mobilizing society.

It is precisely this condition that forced a new generation of Palestinian activists and students to reorganize and  recover political languages that had been marginalized or lost. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, youth formations in Palestine and in exile increasingly turned back to earlier traditions of anti-colonial organizing, revolutionary internationalism, and transnational popular struggle in order to think through the crises of the present. This process was not a simple return to the past, nor an attempt to mechanically reproduce earlier movements. Rather, it involved a selective retrieval of political concepts, organizational repertoires, and strategic lessons from previous generations. Earlier movements became pedagogical archives through which younger Palestinians could begin to reconstruct forms of political belonging, collective identity, and anti-colonial struggle under radically different historical conditions.

These initiatives were often limited in scale and uneven in their impact. Many remained localized, temporary, or unable to build durable organizational structures. Others struggled with questions of leadership, political program, internal democracy, or the relationship between grassroots mobilization and existing institutions. Yet taken together, they played an important role in preserving and renewing an anti-colonial political horizon during a period in which the dominant Palestinian political field appeared increasingly exhausted. They kept alive forms of political language, organizational practice, and collective memory that would later prove essential.

The Unity Intifada of May 2021 initially represented the clearest expression of this renewed political horizon. Its importance lay not only in the fact that Palestinians across Gaza, the West Bank, Palestine 48, Jerusalem, refugee camps,and the diaspora, raised up inhe unison and were able to show that the fragmentation colonialism imposes on us has broken neither our  intergenerational continuity nor our political ambition. It also reshaped political strategy and collective imagination. The Unity Intifada demonstrated that the Palestinian struggle could once again be articulated beyond the categories imposed by Oslo: beyond the geographical separation of refugee and citizen, Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank, Palestinians inside and Palestinian in exile. These distinctions did not disappear, of course, but they ceased, however briefly, to function as insurmountable political barriers.

This was especially significant for Palestinians inside 1948, whose role in the uprising reverberated across all Palestinian geographies. For decades, Palestinians inside the Green Line had been positioned by the Zionist state as a depoliticized minority disconnected from the broader Palestinian body politic. May 2021 disrupted this logic. Young Palestinians in Haifa, Lydd, Akka (Acre), an-Nasira (Nazareth), Umm al-Fahm, and elsewhere built local structures of mobilization, legal defense, mutual aid, and political coordination at remarkable speed. In doing so, they challenged not only the violence of the Israeli state, but also the fragmentation through which colonial power had sought to isolate them from the broader Palestinian struggle.

The reverberations of this moment extended far beyond Palestine itself. The mobilization of ‘48 Palestinians became a source of inspiration for activists in exile and in the diaspora, demonstrating the possibility of rebuilding political life from below even under conditions of profound fragmentation. May 2021 revitalized the movement in exile by restoring a sense of collective political identity and by reaffirming the possibility of transnational Palestinian mobilization. It helped pave the way for the sustained organizing that would emerge after October 2023 and for the consolidation of what has increasingly been described as a global movement for Palestine.

The essays gathered in this cluster can be read as part of this broader trajectory. They move across Palestine and the United States, from 2021 to 2023, across different forms of organizing and different experiences of solidarity, exhaustion, repression, and political discovery. Yet they are connected by a shared concern: how to transform outrage into organization, and how to build forms of collective political life under conditions of fragmentation. The essays repeatedly return to the tension between spontaneity and structure, visibility and sustainability, symbolic protest and durable organizing. They ask how encampments, occupations, and moments of collective rupture can become something more enduring: forms of political education, infrastructures of care, and mechanisms of collective responsibility capable of surviving beyond the immediacy of the current moment.

At the same time, the current movement also confronts serious limits and unresolved questions. The encampments have generated extraordinary forms of solidarity and political imagination, but they also face difficult questions regarding sustainability, leadership, repression, co-optation, and the challenge of transforming moments of rupture into durable political structures. How can encampments and occupations be sustained once the camps are dismantled and the academic year ends? How can students avoid becoming trapped within cycles of symbolic protest, temporary visibility, and institutional co-optation? How can they build structures durable enough to survive repression, leadership turnover and fragmentation? How can they maintain ties with broader social sectors—workers, migrants, local communities, and movements beyond the university—without losing the specificity of student organizing itself?

These questions are not signs of failure. They are the same questions that earlier generations of Palestinian students confronted as they tried to transform moments of rupture into lasting political infrastructures. The history of Palestinian student movements offers both inspiration, and cautionary lessons about bureaucratization, centralization, factionalism, and the dangers of becoming disconnected from the communities and struggles that gave these movements meaning in the first place.

The future of the #StudentIntifada will depend in large part on whether it can move beyond the university without abandoning it as a site of struggle. It will depend on whether students can transform temporary coalitions into durable structures, connect campus organizing to wider sectors of society within a structured project and culture, with discipline, commitment that sustain an anti-colonial political horizon beyond the immediacy of the present moment.

The essays in this cluster do not offer a blueprint for how to do this. But they do offer something perhaps more important: they show that a generation has already begun the work.