The Palestinian student as well as youth movements and organizations represent some of the most capable and advanced organizations and unions for carrying out the popular struggle and democratic processes. The movement has played a major role in all key moments of the Palestinian national liberation struggle. Indeed, the Palestinian student movement was not only a union movement with its own goals, but also a political movement and institution of struggle concerned with all affairs of Palestinian society and the Palestinian cause.
Following the Nakba and the “declaration” of the Zionist entity in 1948, Palestinian students in the diaspora assumed their responsibilities. They played an important and central role in the Palestinian and Arab arenas, contributing to the establishment of the first nuclei of the Arab revolutionary movements, such as the Arab Nationalist Movement, the Arab Redemption Brigades, the Heroes of Return, and others. Thus, the Palestinian students escalated their role in confronting the forces of colonialism, Zionism and reaction.
After several qualitative developments that occurred on the Arab arena, such as the Egyptian revolution in 1952 and the tripartite aggression against Egypt in 1956, the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS) was established in 1958 in Cairo. This was a natural development for Palestinian student work on the one hand, and as a qualitative step to escalate the struggle on the other hand. The founding of GUPS placed the students and youth of Palestine before a new revolutionary stage, in which their national role in both the liberation struggle and student union organizing escalated. The GUPS played a central role in promoting Palestinian national identity and the unity of our Palestinian people by unifying student ties and organizing the first cells of fedayee action at the beginning of the 1960s.
A few years later, the Union officially became the first Palestinian institution to contribute to supporting the Algerian revolution and the broader Arab liberation movement, while taking a prominent role in strengthening its relationships of joint struggle with liberation movements throughout the world.
With the launch of the new era of the Palestinian struggle in the late 1960s and the development of the modern Palestinian national movement, university graduates, youth workers and cadres of the Palestinian student movement played a pivotal role in building and leading the Palestinian fedayeen, establishing Palestinian resistance factions, building institutions, and forming popular organizations and labor unions. They played a central role in all battles in defense of the Palestinian revolution and in leading and directing the great popular Intifada.
The Oslo Accords of 1993, and the process of liquidation and concessions that they represented, constituted a new Nakba for the Palestinian people. The Palestinian diaspora was completely isolated from the political process and Palestinian institutions and prevented from participating in political decision-making. The institutions of the Palestine Liberation Organization outside Palestine were systematically dismantled or left to rot away, especially after the establishment of the “self-rule” Palestinian Authority in 1994 and the transfer of official Palestinian politics to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Student intifada
2024 has seen the re-emergence and intensification of the global student movement for Palestinian liberation and resistance, as a result of the heroic al-Aqsa Flood operation on October 7th and the launch of the genocidal war on Gaza that followed.
In the midst of the destruction of Gaza, claiming the lives of thousands of Palestinian students, alongside the hundreds of imprisoned students and martyrdom of their professors and teachers, students in the imperial core set up encampments to resist their universities’ complicity and investment in genocide, colonialism and imperialism. These encampments represent a qualitative development in expanding the project of confronting the Zionist entity to include the diaspora and internationalists far from the borders of Palestine, as well as connecting them to the national movement and its resistance.
All while resisting heavy police and state repression, revolutionary Palestinian, Arab and Internationalist students and their organizations have imposed heavy pressure, remained steadfast and, by looking toward the great leadership of the Arab Resistance in Gaza, Yemen and Lebanon, have shown the world how to open a new front of struggle against the Zionist occupation of Palestine as well as those who finance and legitimise it.
Students in Palestine
Since the launch of al-Aqsa Flood, thousands of Palestinian students, youth and academic workers have been martyred in the Gaza Strip, along with an unknowable number of abductees placed in prison camps. The Zionist entity has also systematically destroyed the institutions of Gazan education so as to sabotage its reorganisation during the phase of rebuilding. In the West Bank and the occupied interior hundreds of students and youth have been kidnapped from their homes and places of study, often without charge or trial.
Especially targeted are those student organisers associated with the pro-resistance Islamic, national and progressive student blocs, which have been growing rapidly in membership, influence and organisation. The intensified attacks on the student movement expose the fragility of the Zionist colonial project, which understands the foundational and immovable role of students and youth in building and supporting the resistance and national movements. The martyrs and prisoners, as well as the most recent West Bank student elections, show that the resistance and its popular cradle are strong, capable and steadfast in all of historic Palestine.
These facts obligate the students and youth of the Arab world, diaspora and in the imperial core to build their institutions and political line to comprehensively confront the Zionist entity and its interests in congruence with the movement inside Palestine. In the face of genocide, deepening colonisation and repression, the struggle of Palestinian students and youth requires escalation and long-term planning in the Arab and international arenas.
We understand this project as a necessity and responsibility in rebuilding the student movement internationally with the aim of liberation from the river to the sea. The Palestinian student movement has offered martyrs and prisoners since its establishment and continues to do so in this newest era of struggle which started on 7 October 2023. Internationally, our organisations and initiatives with and for the youth and students of Palestine must continue to develop and solidify even after encampments are dismantled or the genocidal war ends until the full liberation of Palestine.
Foundations of Struggle
The Tariq El-Tahrir Youth and Student Network was established by a decision issued by the Fourth Annual Conference of the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement, October 2024, expressing the urgent desire of Palestinian students to restore their leading national role, and for Palestinian, Arab, and Internationalist students to assume their responsibilities and revitalize and unite the student movement by building bridges of work and cooperation with the student movement in the whole of occupied Palestine. In this sense, our new Tariq El-Tahrir Youth and Student Network constitutes a mass and organizing arm of the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement and is based on the following foundations and positions:
First: Palestine, with its historical borders, is a single territorial unit. No distinction is made between the part of Palestine which fell under Zionist occupation in 1948 or 1967. Palestine is an integral part of the great Arab homeland, and it is the natural home of the Palestinian people.
Second: The Nakba (catastrophe) experienced by the Palestinian people since 1947, including uprooting, displacement, ethnic cleansing, denial of the right to return, colonization and the dismantling of the social, economic and political structures of Palestinian society, represents a continuous and ongoing historical injustice practiced by the Zionist movement and its state entity, supported by global imperialism and reactionary local forces.
Third: There can be no end to the historical and ongoing injustice inflicted upon the Palestinian people except through the full implementation of the right to return of the Palestinian people to their original homes, not a partial or incomplete return, and obtaining compensation in addition to their return, for all of the crimes that have been committed against them.
Fourth: The Palestinian people, in their struggle for the liberation of their homeland, their return to that land and their self-determination upon it, were organized within the framework of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Palestinian people defined their goals and means of struggle in the Palestinian National Charter approved at the fourth session of the Palestinian National Council (Cairo, July 17, 1968). Any amendment to this charter affecting the complete liberation of and full return to Palestine is considered null, void and rejected.
Fifth: All agreements, understandings and settlements concluded since the Madrid Conference of 1991 are considered null, void and rejected. No Palestinian project or entity has any legitimacy unless it adheres to the following principles: a) the land of Palestine is one single unit. B) the full right of return of refugees and displaced persons to their original homes, restoration of their properties and compensation for their damages and losses; c) the right of the Palestinian people, in full, wherever they are, to determine their own destiny on the land of Palestine.
Sixth: The relationship between the various components of the Palestinian people, inside Palestine and in shatat (diaspora), is an integrated and unitary relationship. No area of struggle is “unique” except for the contributions it may make and roles it may play to further the creative integration of collective struggle, leading to the achievement of total liberation of Palestine.
Seventh: The Palestinian people, who are struggling against a Zionist colonial project supported by all imperialist and reactionary forces, draw lessons from and inherit the achievements and legacies of global national liberation movements and are companions and comrades for all of these movements.
Eighth: Every attempt to block or suppress the progress of the Palestinian people’s struggle, in whatever form, constitutes complicity with and support for the crimes of Zionist colonialism that are committed daily against the Palestinian people.
Ninth: The Palestinian people, recognizing their role as an advance vanguard of the Arab liberation movement in the struggle against imperialism and Zionism, calls upon all of the democratic and progressive forces and popular movements of the world to provide all forms of support to the struggle to achieve their full rights and national liberation.
Tenth : The Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path and all its branches and committees depend mainly on self-financing and popular support, and categorically rejects conditional funding from any party or economic dependence on any international, Arab or Palestinian state or apparatus.
Objectives of this network
In a response to the 2024 student uprising, the Palestinian student movement in Gaza has called for a revolutionary escalation of the global student intifada for Palestine. We see in this moment an important opportunity for building a global force that supports the Palestinian national liberation struggle, the Palestinian resistance and the right of return. The objectives of the Tariq El-Tahrir Youth and Student Network are as follows:
– Establishing a student network that gathers a revolutionary youth vanguard around the foundations of struggle of the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement, to uplift each other and combat feelings of isolation with political clarity
– Building and coordinating international actions and events between the different students camps and student groups that align with our foundations of struggle
– Strengthening the relationships of the Palestinian student movements in diaspora and throughout occupied Palestine
– Developing our internationalist analysis and supporting each other in doing so, i.e. by sharing educational resources with each other
– Exchanging experiences in order to learn from one another and develop our strategies, such as how to confront repression