In 2022, we decided to dedicate this issue of Souffles to the history of Moroccan people’s engagement with Palestine since the 1920s. Engrossed in the work of commissioning new essays and excavating and translating others from earlier periods, two years have passed since then but the world around us has changed drastically since October 7, 2023. Were it not for our prior commitment to publish these essays, we would not undertake this work in the current circumstances. We believe that the Palestinian cause has entered an entirely new stage in its history, requiring a totally different framing than the historical one we are using here. As of November 21, 2024, the Palestinian Health Ministry reported a death toll of 44,056 and 104,268 wounded in Gaza since October 2023,[1] requiring a totally different framework of analysis of the unprecedented mass destruction and loss of life. Neither Hamas’s sudden attacks on Israeli settlements around Gaza on October 7th, 2023, which left close to 1,200 dead and over a hundred prisoners, nor Israel’s devasting and unchecked use of the most lethal weapons in its war on Palestinians, including detention of more than 9000 prisoners from the West Bank and Gaza since October 8, 2023, were anticipated as we planned this issue. Seen from a large-scale crisis management perspective, some readers will certainly even argue that today’s dire humanitarian reality in Palestine is more urgent than any endeavor to excavate this cultural history. We cannot agree more, but our goal is to highlight the history of Moroccan people’s mobilization on the behalf of the people of Palestine since the 1920s without disregarding or downplaying the ravages of the ongoing war on Palestinians.
The failure of the Oslo process compounded with years of Israeli embargo on Gazans and illegal settlements in the West Bank came to the limelight when the news of October 7th broke out. Both the UN Security Council’s resolutions calling for a ceasefire and the ICJ’s January 24th order to the Israeli government to take measures that would prevent an unfolding genocide failed to protect Palestinians. Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on Palestine, has critiqued Israel’s “continuous, relentless, vilifying assault of the United Nations, on top of millions of Palestinians.”[2] Both these criticisms and the issuance of arrests warrants against Israeli officials went unheard and failed to make any difference in the way the war on Gaza has unfolded for an entire year. The Western-centric international community has failed miserably in the test of upholding its own much-touted norms for human rights and international legality.[3] In its broadest implications, Israel’s ongoing war on Palestinians since October 8, 2023 has created a new geopolitical reality whose accumulated humanitarian, historical, environmental, territorial, and demographic consequences will take years to be fully assessed and understood.
This special issue emanated from the backlash elicited by the Moroccan state’s resumption of open diplomatic and commercial relations with Israel in December 2020. Taken aback by the fact that the agreement was announced by Donald Trump and by the fact that the signatory of the accord on the Moroccan side was none other than Saadeddine El Othmani, the then-Islamist prime minister, Moroccans watched in disbelief as what they have always called their “sacred cause” of the Sahara issue was inextricably tied to the colonization of Palestine.[4] The Moroccan people’s verdict did not take long, the Justice Development Party (PJD) was irrecoverably defeated in the elections less than a year later.[5] Ahmed Ouyahman, the secretary of the Moroccan Observatory against Normalization, has declared that “the resounding defeat of the Justice and Development Party in elections was the appropriate price for the crime of normalization that its leadership has been dragged into cowardly.”[6] Since then, the Moroccan BDS movement, launched by several activists and led by Sion Assidon, a Jewish Moroccan who participated in the Marxist-Leninist Movement of the 1960s/1970s, has regained momentum through the daily protests that Moroccan activists have been organizing throughout the country.[7] While Moroccan publics understand the centrality of Palestine in the country, international readerships do not necessarily have access to the sources that can help them appreciate how, independently of what the Moroccan state does or does not do, the question of Palestine has transcended ideologies and partisan politics in Moroccan society. As scholars with deep interest in cultural history and historical anthropology, we believe that unearthing how Moroccans have mobilized for, interacted with, theorized through, and reacted to the Palestinian issue is also important to understand how Palestine has become and remains a fundamental aspect of Moroccan culture and identity since the 1920s. Throughout this past year, Moroccans have organized protests across the country to denounce the continuity of their government’s ties with Israel amidst the war on Gaza, demonstrating that the question of Palestine remains deeply ingrained in the Moroccan colletive consciousness despite the overt official rush to normalize relations on all levels since 2020.
Morocco’s Palestine is neither an ephemeral slogan nor a temporary fad. It is rather deeply imbricated with most Moroccans people’s sense of self. At the center of this selfhood is the attachment to Jerusalem as the third holiest site in Islam. Jerusalem (al-Quds al-Sharif), distant as it is, is a tenet of Friday sermons and an important name that fills Moroccan publics’ aural and sonic space. Beyond the importance of Jerusalem as a holy city, Palestine, in its broadest significance, has been the Moroccan youth’s entryway into political awareness during what is commonly known as the “years of lead” (1956-1999) and beyond. It is the unresolved decolonization question that accompanies them through their university years, informing their understanding of interconnections between colonialism and global imperialism. For many of those who came of age in the 1990s and the early 2000s, the first school presentation they ever attended was probably dedicated to the occupation of Palestine. This reality cannot be understood without its contextualization within the longer trajectory of student activism in the country. Since the 1950s, the motto of the Moroccan Student Union has been the Moroccan revolution within the broader Arab revolution, which made democratic change and economic prosperity throughout what was then understood as a homogeneous Arab World contingent on the end of Arab reactionary regimes,[8] which, the accusation went, instrumentalized the Palestinian cause for their own agendas.[9]
If there is one topic that rallied Moroccans together since independence, it is their support for Palestine and Palestinians despite the antithetical ways in which this support was translated by political actors and ordinary people. The rootedness of Palestine in the Moroccan consciousness does not, however, mean that Moroccans are monolithic or that Moroccan society is not traversed by currents of thought that disagree with some of these positions or do not necessarily entirely espouse the premises of the revolution embedded in them. Most importantly, the strength of the Moroccan people’s support for Palestine never meant a binary choice between supporting Palestine, which they have done since the 1920s, and disowning the millennial history of Moroccan Judaism, which is deeply engraved in Moroccan landscape and culture. The ability to support decolonization in colonized Palestine under the British and later the occupied Palestine under Israel after 1948, on the one hand, and to make sure that Jewish Moroccans who lived in the country felt that they are citizens at home, on the other hand, required a fine balance that has rendered Morocco a unique case throughout Tamazgha and the Middle East. Support for Palestine and celebrating an indigenous Moroccan Judaism within the borders of the country are not and should not be mutually exclusive for Moroccans. It is exactly because of this ability to both look inward in order not to alienate Jewish Moroccans who lived in Morocco and outward to stand in solidarity with Palestinians that Morocco, unlike any other country in the region, witnessed the emergence of incredibly influential leaders and thinkers, such as Abraham Serfaty, Sion Assidon, Simon Levy, Edmond Amran El Maleh, and Raymond Benaim, who harbored dreams of a proletarian revolution within Morocco despite the heavy toll it took on them.[10] This Moroccan equation has not been repeated in any other country in the region, and it is enough to confirm the complexity of the Moroccan situation. The synergies that could have emerged from the continued existence of a sizable number of Jews in Morocco and their participation in the political and cultural life in the country are one of the dire losses that ensued from their mass emigration.[11]
In curating and translating this broad range of materials, we present our readers with Palestine as it has historically evolved in Moroccan society across all political, social, and cultural spectra. We here present a small selection of primary sources that were initially produced in French and Arabic, and which have become part of both an archive and “other-archive” of Moroccan cultural memory of solidarity with Palestine.[12] These documents cover a period between 1960 and the present time. Although Palestine is the central concern, these primary sources historicize, speak the minds, and convey their authors’ changing liberation-oriented ideas and aspirations over a sixty-year period of history. The quirkiness of the writing style bears the marks of the revolutionary movements of the 1960s and the 1970s, which also reveal the linguistic and stylistic rhetoric of the time when they were written. Some terminology is no longer used in written Arabic and Francophone media and the authors of this introduction disagree with it, but these historical documents introduce the readers to a different mindset and its revolutionary language. Class struggle and decolonial endeavors underlie much of the analyses and statements presented in this selection. The documents that we were able to select from encompass activism, political theory, literature, economics, history, and post-colonial writing, among others. The diversity of these materials is a testament to Palestine’s all-encompassing nature and its penetration of all aspects of Moroccan life. Palestine informed student activism, drove partisan politics, and even birthed the Moroccan Marxist-Leninist Movement in the aftermath the June 1967 war.[13] Therefore, it is not an exaggeration to say that Palestine acted in Moroccan sociopolitical landscape both as an agent of political change and a tool for political conservatism. On the one hand, Palestine allowed the emergence of a line of activism that sought to launch the proletarian revolution against the post-independence regime.[14] On the other hand, King Hassan II elevated the Palestinian issue to one of the tenets of his foreign policy to assuange internal turmoil against his regime and gain serve as a meditor between foreign and Arab stakeholders.[15] The daily engagement with Palestine as a fundamental question of decolonization cannot be captured by any polarized partisan politics. If politicians deployed Palestine for their own political agendas, ordinary Moroccan citizens have continuously understood the Palestinian issue as the embodiment of the Muslim ummah’s and the Arab regimes’ inability to leverage their strengths to achieve a just and equitable solution that would recognize Palestinians’ peoplehood. As a result, Palestine has acted as a catalyst of thought, literature, music, and cinema, which worked as loci of popular conscientization and social resistance.[16] This tradition continues in the popular chants, theater, hip hop, and athletic events produced or organized by younger Moroccans, and which convey their discontent with the inaptitude of the Arab states. In the meantime, another section of this Moroccan youth has produced an impressive body of work that takes pride in the erstwhile Jewish existence in the country, nuancing the anti-Jewish nomenclature of some of the older generation.
Palestine has also served as a connector between Morocco and the Middle East. As is shown in Hasna Daoud’s historical article about the ties between the northern city of Tetouan and the city of Nablus in Palestine and with Palestinian activists and dignitaries in later years, Palestine was only the title for Morocco’s emerging integration into the Arab world in the inter-war period. Although ties between Morocco and the Arab East predate the twentieth century, the 1920s witnessed an important increase in the traffic between Moroccan cities of Tetouan, Fez, Sale, and Rabat, on the one hand, and Cairo, Damascus, Nablus, and Baghdad, on the other hand. As the emerging influential class of Moroccan politicians in Sale, Rabat, Meknes, Fes, and Tetouan gained more awareness of its connection to Arabness, it centered Palestine in its discourse as a throbbing heart for this inextricably profound relationship. Hence, Palestine is the name of a deeper relationship with Arabness, rooted in a link between the Andalusians of Morocco and bilād al-shām that Moroccan travelers have described in their narratives since the Middle Ages. This Arab-nationalist discourse shaped the self-declared identity of the post-independence Moroccan state.
It is important here to recognize that the Arab-nationalist policies have been detrimental to Imazighen who found themselves marginalized and excluded after independence. Although Imazitghen paid 400,000 of their lives in resistance against French occupiers’ attempts to dominate the tribal territories even after the major cities were subdued by France’s colonial army,[17] the Arab-nationalist fashioning of the identity of the independent Moroccan state as an Arab state deprived them of their linguistic and cultural rights. This has alienated some Amazigh elements who have critiqued the hypocrisy of Arab nationalism, which, on the one hand, has supported Palestinian people’s rights to self-determination while, on the other hand, engaged in implementing de-Amazighizing policies at home. This resentment against Arab nationalism’s disastrous anti-Amazigh rhetoric and policies has translated into unjustifiable reactionary and pro-colonial positions among a very marginal section of Amazigh activists who have confounded solidarity with Palestine with support for Arabness.[18]
Imazighen have particularly been vilified in Arab-nationalist media since the emergence of the Amazigh Cultural Movement (ACM) in 1966. Instead of addressing the legitimate Amazigh cultural and linguistic demands, Arab-nationalist political regimes and the parties aligned with their ideology accused- both historically and continuing today- of undermining national unity nation and serving Israeli agendas to divide Arab societies. This cannot be any further from the truth. The origins of this Amazigh-bogeyman-mentality date back to the 1930 when Moroccan nationalists invented the “Berber Dahir,” which wrongly associated Imazighen with French colonial policy.[19] Instead of taking the colonizer and the Makhzan to task for the reforms their 1930 decree attempted to make to the justice system, Moroccan nationalists called the decree the “Berber Dahir,” smearing the reputation of Imazighen. This deliberate portrayal of Amazigh demands as a result of foreign intervention can no longer be taken seriously, particularly that the ongoing war on Gaza has demonstrated the extent to which Arab Zionism and Salafi Zionism traverses the entire region from the Maghreb to the Gulf.[20] Although Imazighen are not monolithic, there seems to be an intentional project to cast them as being pro-Israel in order to undermine their advocacy for citizenship and recognition.
These sample materials indicate the extent to which Palestine informed both art and thought in Morocco. In terms of the artistic scene, poets, musicians, novelists, thespians, and plastic artists all engaged with Palestine.[21] Commitment to Palestine was not a fashionable whim; it has rather been a moral compass to gage one’s attitude vis-à-vis all injustices in the world. For Moroccan artists, commitment to Palestine was not just a commitment to Palestinians per se but rather a commitment to denouncing other tragedies, including the ones that had befallen Jews during the Holocaust. Palestine as a moral compass extends to all situations of injustice that require the mobilization of empathy and solidarity, and the Moroccan groups who support Palestine supported Iraq during the American invasion and have expressed solidarity with other areas where people faced repression. These transactional solidarities continue to transcend the borders of the so-called Arab world to extend to all situations of human suffering. These artistic and literary works, which center Palestine, reflect a deeply humanist ideal that draws a clear distinction between the celebration of a homegrown Moroccan Judaism and the rejection of colonialism.
This issue also features several essays about specific topics related to Morocco’s Palestine. In an article from Aomar Boum and Abdessamad Fatmi, they examine the politics of toponymy in the city of Meknes between the 1960s and the 1970s. Tracking the challenges in the composition of the city council and keeping in mind the transformations that happened in Palestine, Boum and Fatmi reveal the imbrication of Palestine and local politics in Morocco. Adey Almohsen discusses the intersections between the work of Souffles and the work of Palestinian journals. Almohsen demonstrates how the culture of resistance traveled between Morocco and Palestine. Tina Barouti examines the artistic scene in the city of Tetouan to foreground the connections between Palestine and the issue of the Rif revolution in 1958. Simon Bitton gives a testimony of her own trajectory as a Jewish Moroccan who “abandoned direct political activism thirty years ago to devote [herself] to a more personal work” in the form of film when she realized Israel’s lack of political will to honor a lasting settlement with Palestinians.
As we wrap up this introduction, we would like to reiterate that the dimensions of Morocco’s Palestine are way bigger than what one issue can contain. Judging from the history of the city of Tetouan with Palestine in the 1920s, it is clear that the Moroccan engagement with the Palestinian question is older than Moroccan nationalism, which only emerged in the 1930s. Hence, no matter how much we tried to be inclusive, we had to leave much material outside the scope of this issue, which proves the difficulty we faced to account fully for the cultural and mnemonic production that centers the Morocco’s century-old relationship to Palestine. Nonetheless, we invite our readers to engage with these works as a representative sample of what it was and is like to support Palestine and live and act in the world as a pro-Palestinian in Morocco. We would have loved to add more contemporary essays to this rich material, but time constraints and the tardiness of the issue entailed making some difficult decisions about what to include. We invite readers to consult the bibliographical list in this issue and listen to the many sonic “other-archives” of Morocco’s Palestine, which are easily accessible online.