UC San Diego

This dissertation analyzes the frameworks and praxes of Palestinian resistance and revolution alongside the Lebanese civil war to offer a new lens through which to understand these two respective and seemingly disconnected markers of Arab history. Through examining the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Lebanese National Movement (LNM) as co-constitutive arbiters of revolutionary struggle, this dissertation offers a new analytical lens through which to examine and reframe Palestinian resistance and the Lebanese civil war as common discursive framings of the 1970s in Lebanon. It demonstrates the possibilities of new and different readings and analyses of historical and contemporary moments and social movements by considering alliance, which offers a new narrative that shifts and subverts popular articulations and discourses.

This dissertation analyzes nation-building through a transnational, stateless subjectivity birthed as a result of Zionist settler colonialism while also framing the sets of relations imposed upon formerly colonized states visa vi national elites and western imperialist powers. I develop analyses around the tensions between internalized orientalist tropes and the growth of Arabness as oppositional cultural identities. Further, I analyze the different modes and tactics of resistance mobilized by the PLO and LNM to defeat Zionist settler colonialism and western imperialism and liberate land and people. It looks at three aspects of ‘revolution’ according to the PLO-LNM alliance: formation building and sustenance, armed struggle, and popular, sector-based labor. It also considers the relationship of revolution to time and place, postulating whether or not revolution can be temporally and spatially confined.

I dissect and analyze the tools and praxis of ‘revolution’ and highlight how formation and alliance building are enacted as part of this praxis. I highlight the contradictions that arise based on proximities to and dynamics of power, particularly where material and fiscal resources and decision-making are concerned. I look at the assumption of armed struggle as a tactic and gendered labor as a dynamic internally to offer critiques about the relationship between colonial power and hegemonic understandings of violence and to debate different conversations around women and gender in the movement, their role and their labor.

In striving for broader applicability, I look at this moment to ask: how has the context of the Palestinian and Lebanese revolutions to overthrow the colonial, imperialist, economic elite government systems advanced our understanding of the question of revolution and revolutionary praxis? What ideological, material and other tools were mobilized in the name of revolution and what internal (and external) dynamics were at play that hindered the actualization of the revolutionary goals?