Conflicted Solidarity: Palestinians, the West German Left, and the Fate of a Global Movement

• Department of Law

The EUI Working Group on Palestine welcomes Joseph Ben Prestel (Freie Universität Berlin) for a discussion on pro-Palestinian solidarity movements.

Abstract

From confrontations on college campuses in the United States to media rows surrounding art exhibitions in Europe, solidarity movements with Palestinians are at the center of controversial debates today. Many of these debates have an element in common: A disagreement about the historical roots of pro-Palestinian activism. How can we explain the shifting tides of solidarity movements with Palestinians? This talk zooms in on the case of West Germany, where leftist solidarity with Palestinians surged in the 1960s and declined in the 1980s. Based on oral history interviews and extensive archival research in Lebanon, the United States, and Europe, the talk provides a fresh vista on the fate of pro-Palestinian activism, in the twentieth century. It challenges the widely accepted assumption that the trajectory of solidarity movements in Western Europe was mainly driven by the changing preferences of the left. Instead, the talk will shed light on the strategies of transnational Palestinian groups together with the emergence of a worldwide Palestinian diaspora as central factors underpinning the historical spread of pro-Palestinian activism. By presenting the untold story of a global solidarity movement through the prism of a concrete setting, the talk highlights the impact of migration on political activism and the historical ties that came to bind Western Europe and the Middle East.

Speaker

Joseph Ben Prestel is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at Roskilde University and lecturer in history at Freie Universität Berlin. His research and teaching focus on modern global and urban history with an emphasis on the entangled histories of Europe and the Middle East. His first book Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860-1910 was published with Oxford University Press, in 2017. An Arabic translation of the book was published, in 2024. Joseph is currently completing a book manuscript about the rise and decline of the solidarity movement with Palestinians in West Germany between the 1950s and 1980s. An article that stems from this research was published in The American Historical Review (September 2022 issue) with the title A Diaspora Moment: Writing Global History Through Palestinian-West German Ties. Joseph has also written about Palestinian history and the solidarity movement for publications like Berlin Review, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Merkur.