Summary
The Palestine Liberation Organization’s research centre (Markaz al-Abhath al-Filastini), founded in Beirut in February 1965, whose theorisation of Zionist settler colonial racism Feldman places at the centre of the genealogy of UN Resolution 3379 and of Black Power’s Palestine (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 261-289, 447-457).
Details
- Between 1965 and 1982 the PRC produced over 400 monographs, pamphlets and maps in Arabic, English, French and Spanish, plus the quarterly Shu’un Filastiniya; its library held approximately 25,000 bound volumes at its height (line 267).
- It was initially run by Fayez Sayegh, then by his brother Anis Sayegh; other directors named are Sabri Jiryis and Mahmoud Darwish (lines 267-269).
- Its publications in part 1 include Sayegh’s “Zionist Colonialism of Palestine” (September 1965), Hasan Sa’b’s “Zionism and Racism” (1965), the anonymously authored “Israeli Racism” (September 1975), and Do You Know? Twenty Basic Facts about the Palestine Problem (September 1966), its first “Facts and Figures” pamphlet (lines 271-277).
- Fully fifteen of that pamphlet’s twenty facts appear verbatim or nearly so in SNCC’s August 1967 “Third World Round-up”; the SNCC article’s anti-Semitic tropes on Jewish financial dominance do not appear in the PRC pamphlet (lines 447-449).
- The PRC was looted during Israel’s invasion of West Beirut in September 1982 and demolished by a fatal car bomb in early 1983; most contents were returned to the PLO in a November 1983 prisoner swap and deposited in Nicosia, Cyprus, according to Jiryis (line 267).
- Feldman’s chapter 1 notes add that Fayez Sayegh’s brothers Anis and Yusuf also took substantive roles in the center’s leadership, Anis directing it after his elder brother’s departure, and that Yusuf’s wife, Rosemary Sayigh, became a groundbreaking ethnographer of Palestinian refugee experiences; the notes also record Thomas Friedman’s claim that the PRC was one of two key targets of the Israeli invasion in 1982, the other being the refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 1547-1551).
Related pages
A Shadow over Palestine, Fayez Sayegh, Palestine Liberation Organization, UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine