The Palestinian Left: Past, Present, and Future offers a sweeping assessment of fifty years of revolutionary struggle, decline, and possibility. Beginning with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s 1969 Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, the book revisits a time when anti-imperialist movements across the Global South were at their height and Palestine was central to visions of worldwide revolution. Drawing on decades of international solidarity work, the author situates the Palestinian Left within global transformations—from the revolutionary wave of the 1960s, through the defeats of the 1980s and 1990s, to today’s ongoing crisis.
With clarity and urgency, the book traces the dilemmas of strategy, organization, and class analysis, interrogating the roles of Arab nationalism, Islamism, imperialism, and settler colonialism. It explores why no strategy has yet succeeded in bringing about liberation, while insisting that the struggle for a secular, socialist Palestine remains inseparable from the fate of global movements against exploitation and oppression.
At once historical and analytical, deeply committed yet unflinching in critique, The Palestinian Left: Past, Present, and Future is a call to rethink revolutionary strategy in light of past lessons and present contradictions.
About the Author
Torkil Lauesen is a longtime anti-imperialist activist and writer living in Denmark. From 1970 to 1989, he was a full-time member of a communist antiimperialist group, supporting Third World liberation movements by both legal and illegal means. He worked occasionally as a glass factory worker, mail carrier, and laboratory worker, in order to be able to stay on the dole. In connection with support work, he has traveled in Lebanon, Syria, Zimbabwe, South Africa, the Philippines, and Mexico. In the 1990s, while incarcerated, he was involved in prison activism and received a Master’s degree in political science. He is currently a member of International Forum, an anti-imperialist organization based in Denmark.