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Before he was an internationally acclaimed poet, Mahmoud Darwish spent his twenties as an editor and columnist for al-Ittihad and al-Jadid, the Arabic-language publications of the Israeli Communist Party. In February 1962 he reported on the second Afro-Asian Writers Association Conference in Cairo, where writers from sixty countries gathered to discuss how they could forge a sense of solidarity based on their geographical and historical ties. Darwish articulated the impetus for the conference by noting that in the years immediately preceding it, "The East has stood on its feet and unleashed its energy, which has changed the face of humanity's history and cleansed it of imperialism's filth . . . . In this solidarity the writers of Asia and Africa have found a path towards unifying their shared forces."1 While Darwish's account vividly conveyed his excitement about the conference, one thing was missing: Darwish himself. As a Palestinian living in Israel, Darwish could not attend the conference, due both to Israel's ban on travel to Arab countries and to the Arab boycott of Israel. Nonetheless, Darwish's enthusiasm for the conference clearly reflected a broader, yet frequently overlooked, aspect of Palestinian discourse in Israel. Despite their physical and geographical isolation, Palestinian activists and intellectuals repeat- edly sought to affirm their solidarity with global decolonizing movements and liberation struggles. In doing so, they subtly contested elements of the Zionist narrative that portrayed Israel itself as part of the decolonizing world.
Until recently, much of the scholarship on the pre-1967 Palestinian minority in Israel has characterized it as politically quiescent and isolated, in contrast to the more robust political assertiveness of later generations of activists.2 More recent studies have challenged this picture of quiescence, highlighting early acts of resistance despite the dominance of the Israeli military regime.3 Additional work has also shed new light on what Ghassan Kanafani in 1966 termed the "resistance literature in occupied Palestine," showing how poetry festivals and Arabic literary journals provided impor- tant outlets for poetic expressions of nationalist sentiment and opposition to Israeli policies during the pre-1967 period.4 These studies, however, focus primarily on state-minority interactions and tend to locate the Palestinian community squarely within the confines of the nation-state. A few scholars have noted the consumption of Arab media by Palestinians...