Palestine in the 1972 Egyptian Student Uprising: Arab Solidarities of Principle and Affect

Abstract In January 1972, Egypt’s university campuses were shut down by a wave of student protest, after President Anwar Sadat appeared to be abandoning plans for a military response to the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. The uprising, culminating in hundreds of arrests, marked the first significant mobilization against Sadat’s new regime and drew widespread public sympathy. Drawing on life history interviews, memoirs, press archives, lawyers’ records, and student publications, this article examines how solidarity with the Palestinian cause shaped the political formation of the Egyptian student movement and catalyzed its emergence. It argues that the students engaged in profoundly affective solidarity practices with Palestine, first in affirmation of longstanding Egyptian nationalist frameworks of opposition to Zionism, and further in contestation of wider political relations under Sadat. Whilst transnational solidarity features prominently in global histories of decolonization, it has rarely been used to interrogate Egyptian popular politics in the 1970s. By foregrounding Egyptians’ evolving affective solidarities with Palestine, this article challenges dominant narratives around the decline of Arab nationalism after 1967 and the rise of Islamism in its place. In doing so, the article reveals the complex dynamics of Egyptian-Palestinian relations over time, within a broader landscape of Arab and global anticolonial struggles.