The Palestinian liberation struggle has long been a standard-bearer for anti-colonial movements around the world. Rarely, however, have scholars investigated the historical process by which Palestinians embedded their cause within other struggles in the global south. The Palestinian Americas is the first project to document in detail how Palestinians forged such ties in a specific geographical context: that of Latin America in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Rather than assume Third World solidarities to have been produced across discrete national or regional blocs operating under Cold War logics, the project focuses on the revolutionary activism of diasporic Palestinians, emphasising forms of south-south migration and connectivity that bypassed European and North American channels. Since the early 20th century, Latin America has been home to the largest number of Palestinians in the world outside the Middle East (around 1 million), with particularly high concentrations in Central America and Chile. While these communities have long been known for their success as business entrepreneurs, significant numbers joined Latin American revolutionary movements from the 1950s onwards. Against a backdrop of rising Third World solidarity, this new generation of activists came into increasing contact with the nascent Palestinian liberation struggle as they sought to link their local activism to a global picture of anti-imperial resistance. Yet they also had to contend with hostility among fellow Palestinians in Latin America who often viewed involvement in left-wing activism as a threat to their economic interests. The project explores the complexity and specificity of these diasporic spaces, providing new insight on the struggles involved in forming south-south solidarities in the mid-20th century. From indigenous demands for land reform in El Salvador, to student movements in Chile, to the Sandinista uprising in Nicaragua, Palestinian revolutionaries in Latin America were embedded within distinctly local socio-political contexts. At the same time, their activism frequently forced them into clandestine lifestyles as they escaped persecution and sought to build new ties of solidarity. Using carefully chosen case studies, the research probes this interplay between movement, localised space and revolutionary activism through a combination of ethnographic and documentary sources, reconstructing the networks of kin and ideology that sustained diasporic Palestinians in their precarious journeys across disparate locations. The research is geared towards 3 main outputs. Firstly, an article in a leading journal of global history will look at Santiago de Chile as a hub for Palestinian revolutionary activists from across Latin America and the Middle East in order to make a broader intervention in how global historians can explore south-south solidarities in the era of Third World revolution. Secondly, an international conference and resulting special issue will establish a new, collective research agenda looking at the Arab diaspora's historic engagement with the Palestinian struggle. Thirdly, the project will digitise materials held in Chile, El Salvador and France to produce 3 new collections and 2 digital stories in the Planet Bethlehem Archive, an online resource that documents the diasporic heritage of Bethlehem - the town that produced the majority of Palestinian migration to the Americas. The project will make these outputs useful to key stakeholders beyond the academic sector through a consultative engagement programme that sees the PI partnering with archives and cultural organisations in Latin America, as well as a group of diasporic Palestinian writers and artists, to shape collectively a series of public events, educational materials and media publications. The PI will also draft a book aimed at a general readership which tells the story of Latin America's entanglement with the Palestinian struggle in the 20th century.

Bethlehem holds an iconic status around the world, but the town and its people remain little understood. With two key outputs in the form of a digital archive and a monograph, and an accompanying campaign of public engagement, this project brings to life Bethlehem's modern history of global movement and exchange. In so doing, it creates a new way of thinking about the role of global influences in Middle Eastern history. Between 1860 and 1930 merchants from the town circulated the globe, selling Bethlehem-made devotional objects such as crosses, rosaries and model shrines. Their creation of a Bethlehem 'brand' helped produce today's image of the sleepy hilltop village of the nativity. But it also brought unprecedented change to the real Bethlehem. As the town's residents adopted increasingly transnational lifestyles, they transformed tiny Bethlehem into one of the most globally connected, socially dynamic towns anywhere in the Middle East. This matters to wider understandings of the region because global dynamics in this critical period are usually presented as arriving from the 'outside' via European imperialism, Zionism, and western missionaries. By contrast this project reinstates Arab Palestinians as active shapers of the region's entanglement with globalisation. Recent scholarship has paid close attention to the mass migrations out of Ottoman Syria (which included Palestine) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - movements that laid the foundations of today's global Arab diaspora. But the impact of these migrations on local Middle Eastern society has not yet been systematically explored. Bethlehem provides the opportunity to do this, not just because its residents' migrations were inherently circular, but also because they served as 'pioneers' for hundreds of thousands to follow in their wake. People from all over the region mimicked their success selling 'Holy Land' objects, often feigning affiliation with Bethlehem and Jerusalem where none existed. As with the Bethlehem merchants, they largely hailed from small towns and tended to reinvest their new wealth back in their place of origin. By the turn of the 20th century a discernible migrant 'nouveau riche' had appeared across the Middle East, exerting a disruptive but hitherto undocumented impact on structures of class, family, gender and religiosity. The project's two major outputs will explore this interplay between global migration and localised social change from differing yet complementary angles. First, the digital archive will provide an open access, online resource consisting of thousands of images, video/audio recordings, and interactive 3-D models that allow users to trace the global networks that have shaped Bethlehem's development. Once the archive's initial collection is made publicly accessible it will expand through crowd-sourced contributions from Bethlehem and its diaspora. Second, a monograph using a 'global microhistory' methodology will build on materials collected in the archive to reconstruct seminal moments in the life of one merchant from the town that encapsulate the transformations wrought by Bethlehem's global interactions. The PI's partnership with Leila Sansour, an acclaimed film-maker from Bethlehem, will locate this work between and beyond the academy, using Bethlehem as a case study to shed new light on pressing public debates surrounding Middle Eastern migration and mobility. Today we are used to images of Palestinians being restricted in their movements, but we are rarely presented with any longer historical context. The project's outreach programme will address this gap by contrasting the hyper-mobility once enjoyed by Bethlehem with the grave problems the town faces today on the fault-lines of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These activities will help restore Bethlehem's former sense of connectedness by bringing its unique story to new public audiences, as well as re-forging links across its global diaspora.