Palestine as political grammar: transnational solidarity in South Africa, Brazil and India

Movements across the Global South increasingly mobilise Palestinian political vocabulary – apartheid, occupation, settler colonialism, Nakba – not merely as expressions of distant solidarity, but as analytical tools for interpreting their own conditions of domination. This article proposes the concept of Palestine as political grammar to analyse this phenomenon: the process through which categories elaborated through Palestinian resistance circulate transnationally and are translated into specific local contexts. Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork in South Africa, Brazil and India (Kashmir) between 2023 and 2025, I trace how this grammar operates across three dimensions: semantic (vocabulary adoption), organisational (boycott, divestment and sanctions networks, delegations, coalitions), and epistemic (new ways of theorising local violence). The analysis reveals that Palestinian grammar circulates not through abstract ideology but through material infrastructures – weapons contracts, surveillance technologies, training programmes – that connect sites of racialised violence and create conditions for political recognition. I argue that this form of South–South solidarity challenges dominant models of transnational activism by operating horizontally between peripheralised communities, bypassing Northern mediation, and revealing connections already present in global security markets rather than bridging separate struggles.