The last year or so was a long string of anniversaries of crucial moments in modern Palestinian political history: 100 years since the Balfour Declaration, seventy years since the 1948 war and the nakba, fifty years since the 1967 war, fifty years since the battle at Karama, thirty years since the First Intifada, and twenty-five years since the signing of the Oslo Accords. Each resulted in a slew of thoughtful essays, including an ongoing rumination on the meaning of anniversary and commemoration itself. These pieces lived simultaneously with intensified local mobilizations, particularly in Gaza as part of the Great Return March, haunting them with an urgency and hopeful reminder of the stillpresent call for freedom. 1 For the historian of Palestine and the Palestinians, all these moments raise an ever-present dilemma: how do we write histories of revolt and revolution after ruin, disappearance, and archival and political collapse? The archive, though a concept tied in metaphorical knots, has material body. But are its present constitution and usages capable of telling the stories that remain to be told about the Palestinian left? This essay does not seek to propose answers to the question of how Palestinian revolutionary history should be written. Instead, it offers three forms of historical method that may be useful for the expansion of histories of the Palestinian left, and broader popular movements, beyond the narrow confines of geostrategic and statist analyses. Of course, writing social histories of the left does not mean to dismiss political history or histories of left political thought. Rather, it is to bring in lives and thoughts ignored, and in doing so, to reorient historiography on the Palestinians. These forms can push against a methodological eclecticism seemingly unable to read political life outside of preset notions and epistemologies that prioritize and often only see already legible practices, collectivities, and imaginaries. 2 These three forms are: the scale of the social; the conjuring of an archive of those still present; and a move against citational erasure. None is methodologically innovative. However, together they can potentially strike a different tonality in the writing of left life amid ongoing destruction and displacement. 3 Global history has offered a method for considering a broader scale of networks and ties between leftist movements, ideas, and institutions. The scale of the social, in other words granular microhistories, of those same mobilizations, would allow us to think of them in fuller context, and examine more closely conditions and contingencies in the history of popular mobilization and the everyday life of movement work. This social scale expands who we read as the agent and author of left politics. It democratizes the writing on popular movements, and unravels the weaving of rhetorics of unity to find not only fissures and silences, but also the constitution of political discipline and cohesion in particular sites and communities: Why did people come together, how ...
