Arab Solidarities of Principle and Affect

The Arab-Arab and South-South affinities expressed in the 1972 student uprising have received little attention as phenomena of popular politics, even as transnational solidarity has become a prominent theme in global histories of decolonization. Where some of this literature has looked beyond state-centered self-determination projects to individual leaders’ political thought, I focus here on the practices of collectives, whose worldmaking proceeded from below.Footnote ¹⁹ How can we understand their claims to speak as Arabs, and their invocations of Arab national liberation? Political and social theorists have often pointed to the limits of shared geography, attributes, or historical experience as a basis for solidarity practice, insisting on principles and visions as key instead.Footnote ²⁰ Human geographers also challenge the notion of “pre-existing commonality” as underpinning effective solidarity: their work examines solidarity across difference, and emphasizes that shared principles and visions have to be worked out continually and cumulatively in order to have effect.Footnote ²¹ I share this emphasis on the relational and agentive nature of principled solidarity—“a relation forged through political struggle which seeks to challenge forms of oppression”—as well as on its unfolding spatially through connections forged between places.Footnote ²² Accordingly, this article adopts the conceptual framework of solidarity to illuminate Egyptian students’ initiatives to connect with Palestinians on their own terms after 1967, and the new communities of belonging this built, alongside new political constellations to hold and represent them.

Engaging the role of affect, and the ways in which it can prompt and reinforce principled solidarity making, enhances this perspective. Indeed, doing so takes seriously the sentiments expressed consistently in all the student statements and life histories collected for this research, such as dignity, pride, sorrow, anger, and hope. Firstly, this approach recognizes that a principled commitment to solidarity is itself constituted by a range of sensibilities and impulses that move individuals to action. Affects and emotions may circulate between bodies, spaces, and signs to ensure continuity in social relations, but they may also be propelled into different configurations that produce new collectivities, such as when anger “shudders us into new ways of being,” in Sara Ahmed’s evocative words.Footnote ²³ Clare Hemmings has described a similar process as “affective dissonance” between “self-narration and social reality,” which can lead to a desire for a transformation that will rectify injustice.Footnote ²⁴ In the Egyptian case the students experienced affective dissonance between their collective sense of self as leaders of an Arab front and the reality of Israeli occupation, which spurred them to action.

Secondly, considering affect deepens our grasp of the symbolic registers through which the spatial politics of solidarity unfold. This can illuminate the specificity of the Arab-Arab cases of solidarity and nationalist identification considered here. This is because affects—whether named as emotions, or inchoate and eluding naming—take their force as much from longstanding cultural traditions and practices as from contingencies and conjuncture. Solidarities may thus be built by creative reference to, and engagement with, pertinent cultural signs and practices, and by mobilizing their associated affects.Footnote ²⁵ Through such powerful associations, perceptions of shared struggle can inspire great personal sacrifice. In the Egyptian case, students’ solidarities flowed from principles, such as justice, which were nurtured affectively in the socio-cultural contexts and exchanges of the colonized Arab world and the wider anticolonial struggles of the Third World, as well as during confrontations with Sadat’s policy overhauls. This in turn evidences the translocal nature of solidarity connections, attending to the situatedness of certain affects in place but also their contingency on connections between places, and the cultural politics of these connections.Footnote ²⁶ Drawing these strands together, popular Egyptian-Palestinian relations can be analyzed fruitfully through the lens of affective solidarity, highlighting both the construction of connection between people and places in pursuit of shared principles and visions, and the affective nature of this process.

Formation: Egypt as a Palestinian Political Field

In the name of the refugee, in the name of his rights in Palestine

In the name of our blood, of the martyrs, the fedayeen

Matalib Sha‘b [“A People’s Demands”], 1966

The Egyptian students who led the 1972 uprising were born with the July Revolution of 1952 and the Free Officers’ challenge to the British imperial order in Egypt. Palestine first entered their consciousness under the hegemony of the Nasserist state and its ideological programs, which framed liberation across the Arab world as a popular issue. At the same time, Palestine was an Arab cause that predated Abdel Nasser. His policies built on a tradition of grassroots solidarity that had grown in the 1930s, as Zionist settlement intensified and the theft of Palestinian land came to the attention of the Egyptian political class.Footnote ²⁷ Egyptian public concern with Palestine also grew with the gains Egypt’s nationalists were able to make from British rule, and the pressure they were able to exert on Egyptian authorities to reflect the popular mood. This tradition became formative of a kind of politics of accountability with the state, generating expectations of support for the Palestinians.

There were precedents dating as far back as the 1920s for the Palestine solidarity practices of the 1970s student movement, from fundraising to political advocacy. In the 1920s, Egyptians engaged with Palestinian political affairs mainly through the issue of Islam’s holy sites. In 1929, during the violence over rights to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the Egyptian Young Men’s Muslim Association (YMMA), founded in 1927, began fundraisers for Palestinian medical relief,Footnote ²⁸ while secular Egyptian elites volunteered to provide representation.Footnote ²⁹ In this period, the colonial politics of British pressure on Egyptian elites worked to subdue popular sentiment. However, by the 1930s, Egypt saw a swell of new organizations devoted to fostering Egypt’s Arab identity and ties, and a flurry of exchange and travel, particularly between Egyptians and Arabs of the Mashriq. With the regional rise of Arab nationalism, and the clearer implications of the British-backed Zionist project, popular Egyptian engagement increased.Footnote ³⁰

In 1935, the Muslim Brotherhood took up the cause of Palestine, which its leadership correctly calculated would swiftly swell its ranks. With the Palestinian Arab Revolt of 1936–1939, the Brotherhood’s participation intensified, spanning Palestine-related preaching, solidarity statements and mass rallies, and the organization of committees to collect donations, through a structure founded with the YMMA.Footnote ³¹ Also vocal in protest was the Young Egypt Party, which condemned the 1937 Peel Partition Plan as another British imperialist scheme to divide the Arabs.Footnote ³² The Egyptian Feminist Union convened a Conference for the Defense of Palestine in 1938, in response to a call from Palestinian feminists, and collected donations,Footnote ³³ as did various youth organizations—student groups from Al-Azhar and the Egyptian (later Cairo) University, and youth groups from the Nationalist and Saadist Parties.Footnote ³⁴ The newly formed Wafdist youth held meetings with their Palestinian counterparts, whilst pro-Wafdist Egyptian and Palestinian scouting movements, which were independently adopting anticolonial nationalist politics, exchanged visits, and agreed on the need to resist European Jewish settlement.Footnote ³⁵ Culturally, the press reflected Egyptians’ increasingly emotional responses to the struggle of the Palestinians, as an example to all Arabs and Muslims in the fight against imperialism, and as part of a united religious community.Footnote ³⁶

The Egyptian and Palestinian political scenes became closely intertwined in the 1940s. Across the political opposition, there was growing recognition of the impact of a potential Jewish state in Palestine on Egypt’s political and economic affairs. Egypt’s communist movement—the political heritage of many 1970s student leaders—consistently opposed the Zionist colonization of Palestine, calling for Arab unity as early as 1929.Footnote ³⁷ As many of its leaders were themselves Jewish, the communist movement also carefully distinguished between Egypt’s own Jews and the Zionist movement.Footnote ³⁸ Nevertheless, when the Soviet Union endorsed partition in 1947, the communist Democratic Movement for National Liberation followed suit, generating consternation within the movement and a controversial legacy.Footnote ³⁹ Meanwhile, on the right, the Brotherhood used its paramilitary “Special Apparatus” to target British figures, Egyptian parliamentary elites, and entire Egyptian Jewish neighborhoods, which they subjected to blanket accusations of Zionist sympathy. When the 1948 War for Palestine broke out, Brotherhood and Young Egypt members readily volunteered.Footnote ⁴⁰

Palestine had clearly become a rallying cause across the political spectrum by the time of the 1948 War, which was a significant contributor to King Faruq’s decision to join it. Despite his and the Wafd government’s fears of British intervention, the king judged it both an opportunity and a necessity, as rival Arab leaders were making claims to playing a role in defending Palestine. Thereafter, Egyptian political actors persisted in competitive posturing over the issue of Palestine. When Faruq declared martial law, he seized the opportunity to arrest thousands in the leftist opposition, declaring them traitors to the Palestinian cause.Footnote ⁴¹ In December, a Brotherhood member assassinated Prime Minister Mahmoud al-Nuqrashi, accusing him of having betrayed both Egypt and Palestine when he outlawed the organization weeks earlier. After the Palestine War, Egypt’s poor performance became a national scandal and was blamed on “defective weapons”—left over from World War II—that the palace and military elites had supplied to Egyptian troops.Footnote ⁴² This experience deepened the polarization between Egyptians and their leaders and set the stage for the anti-British popular resistance of 1951–1952, in which veterans of the 1948 War from the Brotherhood, as well as communists, socialists, and leftist Wafdists all participated.

The July 1952 coup itself was partly compelled by the Free Officers’ understanding of the implications for Egypt of the Palestinian Nakba. Abdel Nasser was enduringly marked by his experience fighting in Palestine in 1948—where he began recruiting to the Free Officers—and its liberation was a prominent theme in his earliest official and private political discourse.Footnote ⁴³ His only published book, The Philosophy of the Revolution, recounted his participation as a schoolboy in annual demonstrations against the Balfour Declaration. He described bitterly his experience of Egypt’s lack of preparedness for the war, and his conviction, while besieged in Fallujah, that the fate of the Palestinians awaited Egyptians if the status quo persisted.Footnote ⁴⁴ Abdel Nasser’s popularity grew in large part from his projection of a worldview in which imperialist forces were a common foe, keeping the peoples of the Arab world, and the Third World beyond it, mired in underdevelopment. The solution he proposed lay in their unity, pooling sovereignty and resources in order to break free from their dependency on Europe and the United States, and to heal wounds such as that of Palestine.Footnote ⁴⁵ This project saw the transformation of Cairo into a hub for Arab and Afro-Asian liberation movements, with the Palestinians among the first to receive support.Footnote ⁴⁶

The Nasserist state nurtured citizens’ affective identification with Palestinians in terms of both kinship and the common pursuit of justice. Then in 1956, Egypt’s resistance to the Tripartite Aggression by Israel, Britain, and France in the Suez War cemented its nationalist opposition to the Zionist project, with the support of millions across the Arab world.Footnote ⁴⁷ Egypt was transformed into a field of Palestinian political action during this time. Since the 1950s, there had been Palestinian student activism on campuses and growing recognition of Palestinian political and cultural affairs.Footnote ⁴⁸ Abdel Nasser’s moves to offer Palestinians scholarships to study in Egypt, as well as the right to work, facilitated this, in stark contrast to regional states such as Lebanon.Footnote ⁴⁹ Palestinian organizing in Cairo grew with the formation of the PLO in 1964, after an Arab League meeting held in Egypt in January. Since 1956, a Palestine program had been part of the popular pan-Arab radio broadcasting of Sawt al-‘Arab (“The Voice of the Arabs”) from Cairo.Footnote ⁵⁰ In March 1965, the PLO was able to take this over and begin its own broadcasts using Egyptian resources.Footnote ⁵¹

Political ties between Egypt and Palestine were greatly enhanced through Abdel Nasser’s relations with the PLO. In May 1965, for example, Abdel Nasser made an unexpected address at the second session of the Palestine National Council (PNC). Egypt’s daily Al-Ahram quoted his affirmations that “Arab revolutionary action was the path to the liberation of Palestine,” that the Palestinian people were its “vanguard,” and that the people of Egypt were by their side.Footnote ⁵² By the late 1960s, PLO publications had become readily available in Cairo.Footnote ⁵³ Young Egyptians now had access to Palestinian political and cultural output, as well as the astute Palestine analysis of left-leaning Egyptian magazines such as Al-Katib and Al-Tali‘a. Footnote ⁵⁴ The former had been founded in 1961, published by the state’s Al-Tahrir publishing house, and headed by left-leaning Free Officers and ministers. The latter was published from 1965 by the state’s Al-Ahram publishing house, but produced by members of Egypt’s communist old guard. Its founding followed their release from prison, in return for the dissolution of their organizations and membership of the Arab Socialist Union (ASU).Footnote ⁵⁵

State solidarity practice was enhanced by the affective power of the music, drama, and literature of the time, in what can be described as the “affective state” Abdel Nasser built.Footnote ⁵⁶ On Radio Cairo, a popular repertoire of patriotic music filled the airwaves, aligning references to a joyful future for Egypt with others to the liberation of Palestine.Footnote ⁵⁷ With state television in 1960, the reach of such cultural production was magnified. In cinema, the first film about Palestine had been made in 1948,Footnote ⁵⁸ followed by productions such as 1957’s Ard Al-Salam (“Land of Peace”), in which stars Omar Sharif and Fatin Hamama played an Egyptian soldier and Palestinian refugee, united in struggle and later in love. Meanwhile, the poetry of Egyptians articulated affects of loss and hope with the Palestinian cause, as did the poems of Palestinians themselves, which were read widely.Footnote ⁵⁹ This all formed part of the state’s broader anticolonial cultural project, celebrating Egyptian and global struggles for independence, and harnessing Egyptian and translated literature alike.Footnote ⁶⁰

For the majority of the 1972 protagonists, this official culture of anticolonial nationalism enjoyed a relatively secure hegemony until 1967. Although there were differences of class, gender, geographical origin, and political experience among them, the place of Palestine in their early political consciousness was remarkably consistent. A significant group of early 1970s organizers were graduates of Egypt’s Socialist Youth Organization branches, which had been established in schools and university faculties in 1966.Footnote ⁶¹ While these aimed at organizing young people into loyalist groups, they nevertheless offered members a rigorous political education in the ideologies and praxis associated with the state’s recently espoused “Arab socialism.”Footnote ⁶² A smaller number of 1970s leaders were members of fledgling clandestine Marxist groups. They had broken with the previous generation’s accommodation to Nasserism and their acceptance of Palestine’s partition.Footnote ⁶³ They were simultaneously critical of Abdel Nasser for his state’s bourgeois authoritarianism and appreciative of his anti-Zionist position. These groups’ broad agreement on the injustice of the situation in Palestine continued well into the 1970s as new groups began to form.Footnote ⁶⁴

In marked contrast, by far the largest group of student activists were not politically organized: as Cairo University Arts graduate Hayat al-Shimi put it, “we were the majority, millions!”Footnote ⁶⁵ She had been most influenced by the nationalist education system and its allied cultural production, which had nurtured in her cohort a powerful affective identification with the Palestinian cause. Others included those from the Suez Canal area, who had suffered forced internal migration due to the 1967 War and evacuation during the 1969–1970 War of Attrition with Israel. Nearly one million Egyptians in total were forcibly displaced from Port Said, Ismailiyya, and Suez.Footnote ⁶⁶ As Cairo Arts graduate Muhammad al-Baghdadi recalls, this transformative experience disposed them to political and even militant action with fellow Egyptians against the Israeli occupation.Footnote ⁶⁷ They began their university years with a clear sense of the unity of their cause with that of the Palestinians.

Campus Organizing after 1967: Seeking “A New Way”

Arriving at university in cohorts from 1968 to 1971, the 1972 student leaders had all undergone the traumatic moral shock of the 1967 War. It was during this period that many experienced the affective dissonance that would radicalize them. When Abdel Nasser resigned on 9 June, most joined the demonstrations calling on him to stay but had already been plunged into a state of deep and anguished reflection. In different ways, these students felt a disconnect between what they thought they knew—about Egypt’s place in the Arab world and its capacity to support the Palestinians and other oppressed peoples—and what they learned after the defeat—that Egypt was now on the defensive. This experience transformed many future activists from Nasserists, or even “semi-Nasserists” as Cairo University Political Science graduate Hani Shukrallah put it, to seekers of a new way.Footnote ⁶⁸ Declaring themselves Marxists, students like him sought a genuine socialist transformation in Egypt and criticized the state as bourgeois and conservative. Others maintained their faith in the state project but wished for more meaningful political participation.Footnote ⁶⁹ Contrary to several accounts of post-1967 Egypt, the defeat did not transform the majority naturally into Islamists.Footnote ⁷⁰ As its leaders recall, the nascent Islamist presence on the early 1970s campuses was small and focused on pious practice initially, advocating a return to God as the solution to Egypt’s problems.Footnote ⁷¹ Whilst keeping their distance from nationalist groups’ activism accordingly, Palestine nevertheless remained a regional issue of common concern.Footnote ⁷² Across the spectrum, Egyptian students found the Palestinian issue to be both a mirror and a mobilizer for them. There soon followed enthusiastic student engagement with the ideal of armed struggle as the route out of the Arabs’ post-1967 predicament.

The defeat had brought about a new material reality—the occupation of Sinai—which deepened the affective bonds between Egyptians and Palestinians forged in resistance to Zionism. According to Shukrallah, in his cohort, “The association between [the loss of] Sinai and Palestine was almost identical.”Footnote ⁷³ Affects long related to Palestine now circulated in connection with Egypt’s changed realities. The students recognized that the injustice of the Palestinian situation was now engulfing Egypt and blighting their own futures, which looked set to feature extended military service, deferred employment, and wartime austerity.Footnote ⁷⁴ Given this entanglement, students reasoned that supporting the Palestinians was a matter of self-preservation. As former Youth Organization member, Engineering graduate, and leftist uprising leader Ahmad Bahaa’ Sha‘baan wrote in 1976: “The plan for the elimination of the Palestinian Revolution … is the rehearsal for more moves to abort all our dreams of victory. … Therefore the solidarity movement with the Palestinian Revolution had to continue and affirm its identity day after day, crystallizing in continuous influential forms and activities. …”Footnote ⁷⁵ This recognition compelled many, whether Marxist or Nasserist inclined, to innovate new channels for engagement with Palestine, and to think and organize more independently of the state.

University campuses provided the ideal environment for nationalist organizing, given students’ mounting efforts to create a space for political expression in the wake of 1967. In February 1968, students had rebelled for the first time since the 1951–1952 mobilizations of students and workers against the British occupation, which had featured student participation in guerrilla fighting in the Suez Canal Zone.Footnote ⁷⁶ The trigger was popular anger at the government’s handling of the defeat, and its outcome was a determination to organize independently of official organizations on campus.Footnote ⁷⁷ A student leader in both 1968 and 1972 was Zayn Al-Abidin Fuad, son of Cairo’s popular quarters and vernacular poet of their people’s struggles, himself an early communist recruit. As he recalls, this was the “emergence” moment, with small leaderships forming in different faculties, supplanting the Youth Organization.Footnote ⁷⁸ Politicized students like him built on this, producing “wall magazines”—articles and artwork copied onto large sheets and mounted on faculty walls to trigger discussion—and founding student societies to sustain their critique.Footnote ⁷⁹ Their analyses consistently made the link between the loss of Egyptian and Palestinian lands and the antidemocratic nature of the government.

Indeed, as early as June 1967, future student leaders began to realize the limitations of their peers’ understandings of the struggle against Israel: “We discovered through these debates their poor knowledge of the enemy and even its geography. …”Footnote ⁸⁰ They blamed the state’s seeming monopoly on expressions of support for Palestine, but also their own consent. As Shukrallah put it, “Palestine was always the heart of Arabism, the stolen land, the national humiliation, the Arab wound, but we only got to know Palestinians themselves with the resistance.”Footnote ⁸¹ This was another kind of affective dissonance, generating a desire to close this gap between their self-image as the Palestinians’ comrades and the reality of their deference to the state in this regard. Of course, the Egyptian leadership had itself embraced the Palestinian armed struggle in this period—Cairo hosted the fourth Palestine National Council session in July 1968.Footnote ⁸² According to Egypt’s strategy—which evolved into the Attrition War of 1969–1970—Egyptian commando operations against Israel would prevent the ceasefire lines from becoming a de facto border, while Egypt rebuilt its army. Egypt would coordinate with Palestinian groups within this context. In this sense, as the students began looking to Palestinian freedom fighters as nationalist role models, they were not stepping that far outside the state’s orbit.

Several students now resolved to educate themselves about the Palestinian Revolution, the most attractive aspect of which was its defiant militancy. They eagerly followed press coverage on the different guerrilla factions’ activities. A key experience here was the 21 March 1968 battle at the town of Karama in the Jordan Valley, in which the young guerrillas of Fateh supported Jordanian troops in inflicting heavy losses on the Israeli army.Footnote ⁸³ Al-Ahram called it “the most dangerous military operation since the June war” and described the Palestinian fighters’ bravery in resisting Israel’s attacks.Footnote ⁸⁴ Karama—meaning “dignity”—had occurred within weeks of the public outcry over the government’s handling of 1967 and acquired mythical status due to the imbalance of forces on the ground. It duly inspired animated discussion in the press and on campus around the merits of regular versus people’s war. The event catapulted Fateh to regional acclaim and boosted the credibility of the Palestinian national movement. Indeed, Karama had precipitated the first meeting between Abdel Nasser and Fateh leaders Yasser Arafat, Salah Khalaf, and Faruq al-Qaddumi, after which military support and intelligence sharing began.Footnote ⁸⁵

For many students, whilst Abdel Nasser was developing a dual strategy of regular and popular warfare, it was the latter that fired their imaginations. As then Engineering student and later Palestine organizer Ahmad Hisham recalls, “Although the Ras al-‘Ish battle of 1 July 1967, Egyptian air strikes on the Israelis in Sinai on 14-5 July, and strikes on Eilat on 21 October had partially restored confidence in the army, they did not restore our belief in the claim that we were the strongest army in the region, nor in our ability to retake the land.” He continues: “I had a latent awareness, following the February 1968 protests, that the regular army would not work against Israel, and that we needed popular resistance instead: Karama affirmed this.”Footnote ⁸⁶ As Bahaa Sha‘baan put it, Karama was “an objective response to the defeat: a fighting people, a genuine fida’i confrontation with the enemy.”Footnote ⁸⁷ His words harkened back to Egypt’s fida’i operations against the British in Suez, years before the Palestinian Revolution. Just two months after Karama took place, Fateh was reporting an influx of volunteer applications, including up to 20,000 students and soldiers from Egypt.Footnote ⁸⁸ In December 1968, Al-Tali‘a’s editor, socialist intellectual Lutfi Al-Khuli, noted this expansion with effusive praise, attributing it to Fateh being the most responsive Palestinian resistance to the needs of its time, hence its celebration throughout the Third World.Footnote ⁸⁹ Reading this kind of analysis, Shukrallah recalled: “the Karama Battle was for so many of my generation a moment of transition: ‘no, there is another way.’”Footnote ⁹⁰

The same students looked for further inspiration to Vietnam and Cuba, whose examples underlined the attraction of the guerrilla strategy, and with whose defiance of U.S. imperialism they identified. Here they drew on the leftist press, which ran features on “the necessity of armed struggle,” discussing “sources of inspiration” from Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara to Frantz Fanon and Stokely Carmichael.Footnote ⁹¹ Meanwhile, the Palestinian Revolution’s own support for the Vietnamese and Cuban experiences reinforced this message. In August 1970, the PLO factions had declared: “We must make the Middle East a second Vietnam to defeat Zionism and imperialism. …”Footnote ⁹² Student societies duly invited embassy officials, journalists, and writers to speak on campus, and wrote their own endorsements in wall magazines. As Bahaa Sha‘baan explains, the students reasoned that “if a poor peasant people had confronted the mightiest imperialism in history, we too could win.” Meanwhile, Cuban icon Che Guevara offered a “noble model of self-sacrifice, leaving the temptations of life and position behind, to respond to the call of revolution.”Footnote ⁹³ For these students, meanings of “revolution” now migrated away from the July state of Abdel Nasser to connote instead a robust people’s army of anticolonial insurgents across the globe.

Whilst the Palestinian Revolution seemed to offer a confident answer to the question of how and with whom to resist Israeli occupation, there were ambiguities in the students’ understanding of the exigencies of a people’s war. Many students had an attitude infused with significant idealism and rapture at the Vietnamese example. At Alexandria University, Engineering student leader Galal Maqlid recalled “causing a storm” by criticizing Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, Al-Ahram’s powerful managing editor, who had downplayed the idea of popular warfare as capable of victory alone.Footnote ⁹⁴ In this period, 1967–1968, the official press was supporting the government’s dual strategy of rebuilding the army while using guerrilla tactics.Footnote ⁹⁵ Maqlid wrote his riposte in his first wall magazine article, which “[he claims] took the faculty out of the state of fear, quietism, and anxiety that had accompanied the events of November [1968].”Footnote ⁹⁶ Recalling such events today, Maqlid and his comrades candidly note that their understanding at the time of how a people’s war could be waged specifically in the Egyptian context was limited: they were above all concerned with establishing the principle.Footnote ⁹⁷

Communist student leader Zayn al-Abidin Fuad offered a slightly different perspective, insisting that he and his comrades invoked a people’s war as a way of pressing for popular participation and of criticizing the corruption that had occurred within the army leading up to 1967, rather than as an alternative to its forces.Footnote ⁹⁸ Fuad recalled that in 1969, Vietnamese General Võ Nguyên Giáp’s People’s War, People’s Army (1961) was a bestseller in Cairo, after the General Book Organization’s publication of an affordable translation. Fuad toured Egypt with its translator, Tahir Abdel Hakim, to present it and read poetry to audiences from the intelligentsia. His view chimes with Al-Tali‘a’s treatment of the subject, covering its history as a national tradition since the Napoleonic invasion of 1798, its theory as part of a dynamic all-terrain battle alongside the army, and its currency through the law establishing “Popular Defence Army” units in October 1968.Footnote ⁹⁹

As the students thus engaged creatively but differently with the prospect of popular warfare, the affective power of events like Karama moved them to engage in a flurry of political education and organizing around Palestine, which ultimately generated new structures on campus. A case in point of this arc of solidarity was the Partisans of the Palestinian Revolution Society (PPRS), based in Cairo University’s Engineering Faculty. It originated in conversations amongst Engineering students following the reopening of universities in January 1969, two months after the November 1968 demonstrations.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ These revolved around the Youth Organization and Students Union’s failure as vehicles for student interests, prompting a need for new organizations. Rashiq Rifaat’s vision was for a social forum with a large base, whilst Alaa Bakish imagined a small and cohesive group. Rifaat set up a student society called Al-Singab (“The Squirrel”); Bakish formed the Culture and Arts Appreciation Society.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Al-Singab took up the mantle of Palestine activism in Engineering, which soon became a model for other faculties. One of its opening events came on the initiative of younger student Ahmad Hisham and commemorated the first anniversary of the Karama Battle. The students sought out their Palestinian peers at university, as well as senior members of the resistance in Cairo to speak. Hisham, Rifaat, and fellow Engineering student Layla Basim began by inviting the General Union of Palestinian Students representative in Cairo, Sakhr Bseiso, and the ASU Secretary in Giza, Farid Abd al-Karim. Next, they organized fundraisers for the Palestinian fighters: donations were gathered from students, but also from workers at the nearby battery and Matossian cigarette factories in Giza, who insisted on donating their entire day’s wages rather than the quarter suggested.Footnote ¹⁰² Bakish recalls the students’ surprise: it “showed us that there was a very developed feeling at the time regarding the common enemy of Egyptians and Palestinians.” He notes: “The total donations were huge, whether from workers, academics or students, and surpassed tens of thousands. …”Footnote ¹⁰³ In what became a week-long celebration of the Palestinian Revolution, the students convened a conference in the Engineering Faculty’s Al-Saawi Lecture Theatre on 21 March, with Bseiso and Abd al-Karim as speakers.

Hisham continued making concerted efforts to meet with Fateh leaders in Cairo: “On 31 December 1969, I went to the Palestinian Students Union in Gawad Husni Street, after I learned that Abu Ammar was going to be present, to commemorate the Palestinian Revolution’s fourth anniversary. Abu Ammar, Abu Iyad and Abul Lutuf were all present. I spent New Year’s Eve listening to stories of revolution. …”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Such activities bridged the learned affects of loss and anger associated with the injustice in Palestine, and the students’ own joyful defiance and enthusiasm, which they now articulated with feelings of dignity in the Palestinian struggle. The leftist press had continued to nurture this trajectory with a flow of articles celebrating the figures and perspectives of the Palestinian Revolution in 1969–1970.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Less than a year after their founding, Al-Singab and the Culture and Arts Appreciation Society joined to commemorate the launch of the Palestinian Revolution on 1 January 1970, and Karama on 31 March.

In a sign of their enthusiasm, Hisham and several other Al-Singab members organized a Cairo Engineering students fieldtrip to Jordan in June 1970. For these five men and two women, the ostensible goal was training, but their genuine motivation was to get to know the Palestinian struggle and its heroes. Hisham describes his euphoria at arriving in “Amman, the Hanoi of the Arabs,” and being near Al-Aghwar, the Palestinian fighters’ base. It was exhilarating “to see the military vehicles driven by fedayeen, the images of martyrs on the buildings, and the flags of the Palestinian factions. …”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ These students’ time in Jordan ended with a sense of foreboding, however, as King Hussein’s brutal campaign against the fedayeen began. In the days after, they followed in disbelief the news of the Jordanian army’s massacres of Palestinians in refugee camps, which became known as Black September.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This experience produced further affective dissonance, between their self-narration as part of an Arab unity, upholding Palestinian rights, and the reality of Arab duplicity, causing Palestinian deaths. Condemning this betrayal would become a recurrent trope in the students’ activism.

On his return, Hisham came upon a 1969 pamphlet by senior PLO leader Faruq Al-Qaddumi entitled “The Palestinian Revolution as an Axis for the Arab Cause.” What the Revolution needed from the Arab world, he wrote, was the formation of groups to support it: “What is asked of the youth of the Arab nation is not that they join the revolution’s ranks as fighters, but rather that they understand the nature of the conflict with the Zionist enemy—as a civilisational and long-term conflict, where victory will come to those who remain steadfast—and that they protect, embrace, and preserve the Palestinian Revolution, as pivotal to the Arab cause. …”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Hisham promptly applied to form the Palestine Revolution Partisans: in October 1970 he secured the faculty student union’s permission to launch it, and publish its wall magazine, Al-Thawra (“Revolution”). The PPRS gathered a relatively small and already politicized group of vocal and talented students, including future uprising leaders Bahaa Sha‘baan and Siham Sabri.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The founders’ move from traveling to Jordan uninvited, to responding to a clear Palestinian call for a specific kind of support, reflects the maturation of their solidarity practices. The PPRS soon superseded al-Singab as its Wednesday meetings began to attract larger crowds, both in Engineering and beyond.Footnote ¹¹⁰

The affective surges that moved the students to action on these issues were nurtured through the cultural and artistic modes in which they pursued their solidarities. Public performance and singing in concert became a key mobilizing practice in the students’ repertoire, spreading political awareness and building affective ties on campus. The symbols and news of faraway causes were interpreted through the creative local comparisons and cultural frames of Egyptian and Arab artists.Footnote ¹¹¹ For example, news of Che Guevara’s execution in 1967 came just as Egyptians confronted their own trauma and was treated by the students as “a heroic martyrdom.”Footnote ¹¹² Emblematic of this was the dirge Guevara Maat (“Guevara is Dead”), composed by the underground leftist duo singer-songwriter Sheikh Imam and poet Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm, who performed frequently to audiences of rebellious students.Footnote ¹¹³ For Engineering student leader Kamal Khalil, a Youth Organization graduate turned communist, the first time he read this poem left a profound impression. It had been handwritten and pinned to a tree on campus, causing him to search for those who had displayed it to learn more.Footnote ¹¹⁴ He describes the kind of energizing joy sparked by finding friends one never knew one had—a solidarity that eclipsed his sense of affective dissonance.

A similar Nigm-Imam classic was the rousing Ya Falastiniyya (“O Palestinians”) of 1969, which expressed Egyptians’ longing to join the armed struggle and wove in the inspiration of Vietnam: “O Palestinians/ Vietnam is your omen/ Rising in victory/ From a hundred thousand raids/ With the candle lit/ The Americans defeated/ They’re returning, bewildered/ Here’s to your turn.” Alongside Nigm and Imam, the popular group Awlad Al-Ard (“Children of the Land”) from Suez would also frequently come to campus, offering their own regional musical style and representing “the voice of the popular resistance.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Such artistic and cultural practices built an emotive tradition that could be tapped at high-stakes moments such as 1972.

Sadat and the Massification of Protest

The death of Abdel Nasser was the event that towered over the start of the 1970 academic year, and the matriculation of the youngest student leaders of 1972. Most of them joined Abdel Nasser’s historic funeral on 1 October and began their studies just days later. For millions, his death—part-way through preparations for a liberation war—compounded the crisis of 1967. Egyptian students soon found themselves confronting Anwar Sadat’s new regime, in which the quest for national liberation no longer trumped political freedoms but now appeared just as gravely under threat. The students’ anger and frustration, already associated with the injustice of the loss of Palestine, and having already circulated to the Egyptian context after 1967, now did so again with Sadat, intensifying their sense of affective dissonance. This was now embodied in statements and collective actions targeting the Egyptian state. No longer primarily the focus of a dynamic solidarity relation against Israel, Palestine now helped crystallize, galvanize, and massify student campaigns for political and social freedoms at home.

Sadat’s break with Nasserism began early: in February 1971, he had publicly and unilaterally proposed the reopening of the Suez Canal in return for partial Israeli withdrawal.Footnote ¹¹⁷ This entrenched a feud with members of the political elites still loyal to Abdel Nasser’s policies, prompting Sadat to remove them in his “Corrective Revolution” of May 1971. The name was carefully chosen: on the one hand, the regime asserted its own revolutionary credentials in continuity with Egypt’s recent past and with the wider anticolonial present. On the other, it was a thinly veiled retort to the July Revolution, given that it required correcting through such a violent purge of erstwhile comrades. Constructive ambiguity was indeed Sadat’s modus operandi in this phase. Whilst imprisoning many senior Free Officers, Sadat retained others for careful balance and acceded to Soviet requests for reassurances, signing a Soviet-Egyptian friendship treaty on 27 May.Footnote ¹¹⁸ He also appointed Marxists from the Al-Tali‘a circle, playing on their differences with Free Officer “centrists.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Sadat endeavored to chart a new path to legitimacy through the language and limited measures of liberalization. Further restrictions on student organizing were lifted, from campus police involvement to the tutelage of teaching staff.Footnote ¹²⁰ Sadat’s earliest changes were thus carefully calibrated, leaving observers in some consternation as to his intentions at first.

The students, however, were quick to react: the transition from Abdel Nasser to Sadat triggered an equally sharp shift in the rationale and momentum of their organizing. Whilst most of these students had vigorously criticized the state’s methods throughout the late 1960s, they now reaffirmed its nationalist claims. The first and only printed version of the PPRS wall magazine, Al-Thawra (“Revolution”), published in January 1971, reflects the students’ early sense of affective dissonance amidst Sadat’s changes. Comprising thirty-two A5 pages, its “Statement Number One” focused on the loss of Abdel Nasser and the need for popular forces to reassume the responsibility he had carried whilst in power. It affirmed the centrality of the Palestinian Revolution, and the need for a people’s war.Footnote ¹²¹ The illustrations reflected the artists’ soaring hopes for the cause—a galloping horse and a fida’i with a rifle, both under a blazing sun. Conveying this sense of movement and agency from below, the article insisted that “our Arab masses had to take up their decisive role in defending the revolutionaries, not only against Israel but against treasonous Arabs, and against all efforts to harm our revolution, the revolution of the struggling Palestinian people.”Footnote ¹²² PPRS organizing underlined these themes in practice: in March 1971, it established the “Week of Support for Worldwide Liberation Movements,” alongside its commemoration of the Karama Battle, screening films and inviting representatives of Cairo-based liberation movements to speak, from Vietnam, Angola, and Cape Verde, alongside the PLO.Footnote ¹²³

Dozens of student societies now sprang up on campus: the numbers of students they attracted made this a qualitatively different phase of affective solidarity from what had gone before. Although influential accounts such as that of Political Science graduate and student leader Ahmed Abdalla have often cited the PPRS in isolation, not least due to its role in sparking the 1972 protests, it was by no means the only organization celebrating the Palestinian Revolution on Egyptian campuses in the early 1970s. In the Faculty of Arts, Zayn al-Abidin Fuad recalls having begun a Palestinian Revolution Week in 1970 and comments that “in 1971 and 1972 the numbers involved were huge—in 1972 I counted over fifty faculties [involved], from Assiut to Alexandria.”Footnote ¹²⁴ At Cairo University, student societies or “families” included “Gawad Husni” at the Engineering Faculty, the “Egypt” and “Abdullah Al-Nadim” societies at the Arts Faculty, “Abd Al-Hakam Garrahi” at the Economics and Political Science Faculty, and “Abd Al-Magid Mursi” at the Agriculture Faculty, many of them named after martyred Egyptian nationalists.Footnote ¹²⁵ At Ain Shams University, similar events were run by the “Anti-Imperialist Society” at the Faculty of Medicine, amongst others.Footnote ¹²⁶ According to Hisham, with the Palestinian Revolution’s rising profile, even after the PLO’s expulsion from Jordan in 1970–1971, “ordinary people began to be interested—because we all oppose Israel—and they effected the transformation to a popular movement. …”Footnote ¹²⁷

Through their Palestine organizing, the students forged the relations and autonomous structures that would become key to expressing their broader grievances against the regime. Their demands in substance thus drove their realization in form. As Khalil recalls, the main difference between 1968 and 1972 was the cumulative nature of the 1972 uprising, having developed through widening organization and debate on campus, unlike the swift boiling over and containment of 1968, which had moved to the streets straight away.Footnote ¹²⁸ At this point, the most influential political organizing was led by budding Marxists, only few with connections to emerging clandestine groupsFootnote ¹²⁹ but all in agreement on the Palestinian cause. That said, Ahmad Bahaa’ Sha‘baan notes that the key reason for the superior organizing of the PPRS was the prior training of several of its leaders and cadres in the Socialist Youth Organization.Footnote ¹³⁰

On the eve of the student uprising, hundreds of students had just taken part in one of the most vibrant Palestine Weeks yet, held across Egypt’s different campuses in December 1971. At Cairo University, the Student Union’s Cultural and Political Committee had released a statement that prefigured the demands of the following month’s uprising. Its language revealed the students’ vision for “Arab liberation” as a victory over Israel, but also over any unrepresentative Arab regime, whose illegitimacy was manifest in its betrayal of the Palestinians. Meanwhile, “revolution” was the means, understood as armed struggle bolstered by popular Arab mobilization and political representation:

We, Cairo University students, declare that:

• 1. The Palestinian Revolution is the vanguard of the armed popular struggle for the achievement of a final victory against the Zionist presence in Israel;

• 2. The only formula for the formation of a front for the Palestinian Revolution in confronting the threats it faces is armed struggle against the enemy;

• 3. The isolation and exposure of the treasonous Jordanian regime is a necessity for the victory of the Arab revolution in its struggle for liberation;

• 4. Arab popular support for the Palestinian Revolution, fighting on all Arab fronts [with Israel], and mobilization of our masses, is the only formula for victory.

The critical juncture came when Sadat gave a speech on 13 January 1972, announcing that Egypt would not be launching its liberation war that year as expected, due to a “fog” in the international climate caused by the Indo-Pakistani war. A furious student reaction spread instantly across Egyptian universities. That day, a relatively unknown student named Sami Al-Brins wrote an article entitled “Mr. President, If Only You Had Not Spoken” in the wall magazine The Battle: it expressed the sentiments of hundreds, who gathered to discuss it.Footnote ¹³¹ As Shukrallah recalls: “I arrived to find the walls of our floor completely covered in magazines, brought by regular students … by non-activist groups. …”Footnote ¹³²

As it happened, between 16 and 18 January, the students had organized a three-night poetry reading off campus featuring Palestinian poets Muin Bseiso and Mahmud Darwish, alongside student activist-poet Zayn Al-Abidin Fuad.Footnote ¹³³ As the angry wall papers proliferated, the event provided a space from which to plan next steps. At Cairo, the initiative came from the Palestine Partisans, who called an Engineering Faculty student conference for 17 January. They announced a larger conference on 19 January, and a sit-in to begin if no government response was forthcoming. This then began on 18 January, after the press ignored their statements. Meanwhile, similar meetings had taken place in Medicine and Political Science, which decided to support the Engineering sit-in decision. In this way, the movement grew across all Egypt’s university campuses: Cairo, Ain Shams, Alexandria, Assiut, and Al-Azhar.

Through the protests, the students began crystallizing their vision for armed struggle against Israel. In the 17 January congress, Engineering students insisted on the arming of ordinary citizens, and the military training of students “to serve as a rearguard to the regular forces in case of war.”Footnote ¹³⁴ They further demanded disengagement from U.S.- or United Nations-sponsored peace plans, and “cutting off the godfather of the enemy, U.S. imperialism.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Amidst the escalating protest, the affects of anger and defiance that had tied the students to the Palestinian cause now surged in relation to the Egyptian situation, emboldening them to call out political relations in Egypt. A key instance was ASU Youth Secretary Kamal Abul Magd’s visit to the gathering, where he faced the students’ insistent questioning and left conceding that he had no answers.Footnote ¹³⁶ The students then rebuffed government offers to train them merely for the protection of civilians.Footnote ¹³⁷ By 21 January, university buildings were filled with posters proclaiming emotive slogans such as “We Die and Egypt Lives,” which came from Egypt’s 1919 uprising, alongside others like “Cut Ties with the Butcher of Amman,” in reference to King Hussein’s war on the Palestinian fedayeen, and, finally, “The Political Solution Does Not Exist,” which they elaborated “ends the state of war at a time when Arab lands are still occupied.”Footnote ¹³⁸ At Ain Shams, the same demands were made, including support for the Palestinian Revolution. The students specifically demanded the release of four Palestinians who had assassinated Jordanian Prime Minister Wasfi Al-Tal in Cairo in November 1971 for his leading role in Black September.Footnote ¹³⁹ These slogans and demands reflected the students’ ongoing concern both with Palestine solidarity, expressed here in an Arab nationalist frame, and with Egypt’s own conflict with Israel.

Simultaneously, the protests underlined the need for democratic institutions, as the students self-consciously built representative structures themselves. The Faculty of Arts Committee statement made the protests’ dual dimension clear: “The cause of the battle is linked to the cause of democracy. We demand the lifting of all forms of tutelage on the unions and political organizations of the masses, and we demand the freedom of the press. …”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ The students’ prior Palestine organizing had laid firm foundations for the novel representative structures of the uprising. At the 19 January meeting, the most politically experienced students—all of them Palestine activists—quickly suggested the election of new student committees in every faculty, to represent this unprecedented gathering and thereby eclipse the student union structure. As Kristin Ross has written of May 1968 in France, “students and other social groups could only become politicized if the forms of organization and political militantism currently available were themselves radically restructured.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ The faculty committees decided to elect one Higher National Committee of Students (HNCS), recalling the anticolonial struggle of the 1946 National Committee of Students and Workers and sharing in its historic legitimacy.Footnote ¹⁴² The HNCS went on to supervise the larger sit-in in Cairo University’s main hall and was declared the students’ sole representative in liaising with the authorities.

With great speed, the HNCS leaders put together a central “Students’ Document,” making copies using university printers on 20 January and distributing them in working class areas and on campus.Footnote ¹⁴³ The strongly worded statement began with a critique of the government’s undemocratic “concealing of the truth” behind slogans such as “deterrence” and “decisiveness,” and then demanded a rejection of UN Resolution 242, the establishment of a genuine war economy, the military training of students, and the mobilization of workers and peasants. Fuad clarified the students’ demands for popular military preparedness as a necessary support to, and check on, the army’s activities, and a way of ensuring “an army in the street” in case of war.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The document was approved by a mass vote in the rapturous sit-in the same day, to be delivered to the presidency by a delegation of committee members. Its language and form were then echoed almost exactly across Cairo University faculty statements, from Engineering to the Arts.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ These were also now signed uniformly: “Absolute sacrifice for the nation, absolute democracy for the people.” The phrase, coined by leading HCNS member Ahmed Abdalla, distilled their grievances clearly into the twin causes of national and political freedoms.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

The students’ prior organizing had not only given them the institutional bases from which to call such action, but also the representational legitimacy to make their claims. This made it harder for Sadat to reduce them to a delinquent and foreign-backed minority, as he attempted to do in successive speeches.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ The HNCS was empowered by the large numbers who had amassed behind it and now moved to take up the position of national representative. As a condition of the sit-in’s closure, the document insisted that the university recognize the HNCS as the students’ legitimate representative. The rector of Cairo University, Dr. Hassan Ismail, issued a statement to this effect on 23 January.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The students were duly invited to parliament, where a 200-strong delegation presented its demands. Momentously, they left with promises that the press would publish them in amended form the following day.

The students’ position proved too much for the new regime to bear, however, and the sit-in was broken by force at dawn on 24 January. Hundreds were arrested from both the Cairo and Ain Shams campuses, and hundreds more from Tahrir Square, where they had gathered in protest later and the following day. The uprising now became headline news and sparked a national conversation. Here, again, the Palestinian thread was intact. Prominent professional syndicates, parliamentarians, and intellectuals all issued sympathetic statements, which echoed the students in the breadth of issues raised.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The Lawyers’ Syndicate, for example, insisted on “democracy for the masses and protection for the Palestinian resistance.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ From critiquing relations with the U.S. to insisting on armed struggle and the need for political freedoms, the students appeared to have sketched the outlines of a wide-ranging counter-agenda with great public resonance.

Sadat would have to use speeches—by turns cajoling or condemning the students, the state-sponsored media, and further repression to stifle the revolt in subsequent months.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Indeed, as various analysts agree, Sadat could ultimately only neutralize the sting of such mass protest—at least temporarily—by moving to fight the October War of 1973.Footnote ¹⁵² As Aijaz Ahmad put it, “the rising tide of worker-student militancy, particularly in early 1973, showed that Sadat’s only chance of arresting the growth of a mass movement was to outflank the Left from a position of the farther Left: by launching, for example, a war before the universities reopened in mid-October.”Footnote ¹⁵³ Thus, in accounting for the launch of the October War, attending to the popular level enhances—not least on the question of timing—elite-focused explanations of Sadat’s authorization of the war plan. These have analyzed Sadat’s plan as a surprise but limited attack, calculated to jumpstart negotiations.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The above account brings into the frame, alongside the Israelis and Americans, the perspective and influence of the Egyptian people, in their historical context. Indeed, after the war, Sadat worked assiduously to tighten his grip on political expression in the country, introducing a carefully controlled multipartism, but also pursuing overt and clandestine policies of Islamist incorporation to counterbalance the left-nationalist current and increasingly delegitimize it.Footnote ¹⁵⁵