Mick Hartley

Ella Kenan on The Forgotten Origin of the ‘Free Palestine’ movement:

Long before it showed up on banners in Western protests, the phrase “Free Palestine” had an entirely different origin story. It didn’t start in the Arab world. It didn’t begin with the PLO.

It began with Jewish Zionist movements in the United States.

In the 1940s, American Jewish groups like the Zionist Organization of America (founded in 1897) and the American League for a Free Palestine (founded in 1944) ran large-scale campaigns to raise money and support for one goal: ending British rule in the Land of Israel, or what was then called the British Mandate of Palestine.

They chose the slogan “Free Palestine”, meaning, free the Jewish homeland from the British Mandate so the Jewish people could build a sovereign state.

Back then, “Palestine” referred to the British name for the land Jews had called home for over 3000 years. It was a name of a region given by the Romans instead of Judea, And “Free Palestine” meant freeing it from the British colonial rule – for the Jews.

About two decades later, in a radically different political moment, the slogan was picked up again, this time by Arab movements. In the West Bank (under Jordanian rule) and Gaza (under Egyptian rule), the newly formed PLO adopted “Free Palestine” as part of its agenda, with help from the Soviet Union, which had cut diplomatic ties with Israel, due its choice to side with the West.

The Soviets saw the Palestinian cause as a way to build an anti-Western, anti-Israel coalition across the developing world, as a way to earn a win against the U.S. during the cold war.

And it worked. With Soviet backing, the PLO built a powerful narrative that framed Israel as the root of colonial evil, and the Palestinians as its eternal victims, completely disregarding documented history and nuance.

And here we are today. “Free Palestine” now means the erasure of Israel.