The 1990s witnessed two of the oldest national liberation movements governing after nearly a century of organized resistance: the liberation movement in South Africa led by the African National Congress (ANC) and the Palestinian liberation movement led by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). The preceding decade was decisive: In the 1980s, mass uprisings shifted the momentum of what had been exile-based liberation movements back into South Africa and Palestine, carrying both the ANC and the PLO into negotiations with their opponents. With these massive uprisings both movements had achieved more than at any time in the decades since their emergence...

A national liberation movement’s ability to realize its objective and the objective itself are forged simultaneously over time. The “democracy” that successful movements ultimately deliver to their followers is constituted during the process of national liberation. As such, two literatures guide this investigation: social movements and democratization. Both are examined and their contribution to the study of national liberation movements identified. From there I present a synthesis that places class at the center of attempts to understand both the process and the product of movements of national liberation.

Broadly conceived, social movements are collective efforts to achieve political objectives through...

British moves to secure their interests on the African continent and in the Middle East presented Africans and Arabs with fundamentally new political realities early in the century. In 1910, Britain, without regard for the indigenous African population’s concerns or aspirations, turned political control over to the whites in what would become South Africa. In 1917, the British occupied Palestine, reneged on their promise of independence to the Arabs, and later secured a League of Nations mandate for their rule. Multiple, fragmented territories with no history of unity were merged to form the Union of South Africa, while Palestine was...

In 1948, both Africans and Palestinians confronted dramatic evidence of the failure of their national movements to thwart their opponents’ objectives and the consequences of their differential inclusion/exclusion. The introduction of apartheid in 1948 reflected whites’ determination to preserve their access to cheap black labor, that is, inclusion, while reinforcing the political and social exclusion of blacks from “white South Africa.” The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 was accompanied by the expulsion of Palestinians, reflecting the dispensability of Palestinian labor to the Zionist settler project and the goal of colonizing the land while excluding the people.

In...

With African and Palestinian resistance quelled, both South Africa and Israel would enjoy a period of relative stability and prosperity. Repression had generated economic gains as no political or trade union organizations stood in the way of putting black and Palestinian workers to work on South African and Israeli employers’ terms. Signs of renewed militance, however, began to appear. New, defiant social forces began to coalesce, aided by the nature of South Africa’s economic expansion and the integration of the Palestinian territories’ economies with Israel’s.

With the first signs of the resurgence of resistance, struggles would ensue within the South...

In the early 1990s, several decades after other national liberation movements had attained governance, black South Africans and Palestinians would begin to govern themselves. Both movements, which emerged in the 1910s, owed this accomplishment to massive uprisings in the 1980s that substantially raised the costs of maintaining white minority rule in South Africa and Israeli military rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In both cases, a well-organized mass base delivered leverage to their respective liberation organizations, which the latter carried into negotiations with their opponents to secure democracies long promised South Africans and Palestinians. Despite notable parallels in...