From Greece to Palestine: Archiving as a Form of Solidarity

My fascination with archives of revolutionary causes and the history of liberation struggles started early on during my first year of university in Athens in 2016 and it evolved along with my political organising and maturing. I first started archiving around 2016-2017, when I became interested in the Kurdish liberation struggle through my political involvement and organising in Greece. Αt the time, I did not even consider what I was doing as ‘archiving’, I was purely collecting material from different political festivals in Greece, such as the No Borders Camp in Salonica in 2016, the B-Fest in Athens in 2016 & 2017, and so on. It was indeed through B-Fest 2017 that I first became aware of the term ‘digital commons’ and its potential for radical organising online. Later, around 2020-2021, I started learning more about Palestine and engage with Palestinians, I began to collect material related to the Greek solidarity movement to Palestine, along with ‘undusting’ my aunt’s archives, who was an organiser in the Greek solidarity with Palestine movement from the 1980s onwards.

I started learning about the Palestinian struggle and the Greek solidarity movement through my aunt’s books from the 1980s, while I also started looking for material from second-hand bookshops all around Athens, in Exarcheia. This is important in order to understand how the Greek movement of solidarity to Palestine has changed over the years and how this is reflected in the scarcity of Greek sources; during my university years, the books available to me in Greek to learn about Palestine were scarce compared to the abundance of radical material translated into Greek one could find in second hand bookshops from the 1980s.¹ Therefore, the first three years of collecting material, it was something entirely personal, trying to learn from here and there, but as my political thought and ideas regarding archiving practices and sources from below evolved, I started scanning a lot of this material to make it available for people interested in learning more, sending it to people I knew might find it interesting. Archives have been my love language ever since. The first people I started annoying with archives were close friends from the movement and people who were interested in the cause. Many of the people I met along the way through sharing archives became, from simple acquittances, friends and comrades.

Fast forward to October: On October 21, 2023, I put a post/story respectively on both my Facebook and Instagram account sharing that I had scanned the book Beirut: A City in Crisis by the photographer Don McCullin, and I could share it with everyone interested in having it. The book is a black and white documentation of the Lebanese Civil War, mainly following the Palestinians during that time. I scanned the book based on this logic of ‘digital commons’, according to which educational resources and knowledge should be available for everyone interested in learning. The book, which now is hard to find or extremely expensive, belonged to my aunt, and I inherited it, along with all her books & archives, when she died. Many of my Palestinian, both residing in Greece and outside, Lebanese friends, and Greek friends contacted me to send them the scanned copy of the book, and the same day, I decided to start making material related to the Greek solidarity movement to Palestine available to everyone. Palestine Solidarity Archive: From Greece to Palestine was born a day after. I decided to make some of these materials ‘visible’ in the public through an Instagram page, to tell a different, from the past, story, that of solidarity of the Greek people to the Palestinian struggle and how it has changed over the years, with both nostalgia and critique. From the 1970s and 1980s nostalgia when solidarity with Palestine was at the forefront of Greek political organising to the current critique towards certain groups that were quick to condemn the resistance following October.

In that sense, I started to understand ‘archiving’ and ‘digitising’ as practices in themselves that help build solidarity. And through building new, non-hierarchical relations, archiving becomes a liberatory practice, always expanding to include more not solely from the past, but also from the present. Open, from the bottom, archives pave the way for conversation otherwise impossible; from people contacting to learn more to those who wish to contribute something from their past, open access digital archives open up various new possibilities for engaging not solely with the past, but with the future as well. Archiving and digitising the history of Greek solidarity with Palestine became such a practice. During my fieldwork, I learned about archiving as a form of political struggle; documenting and preserving revolutionary struggle is an act of struggle in itself, which could also have a mobilising effect through archiving past acts of political struggle. This is achieved through both learning directly from the oppressed/colonised subject, and through the call to join the struggle in various ways. The authors and editors of such material regularly push for direct involvement in the struggle and, hence, discursively create a desire for becoming a revolutionary subject.² By digitising this material and making it available to reach a broader audience, this call-to-action extends into the future for a next generation of potential revolutionary subjects.

The Greek solidarity movement with Palestine has changed a lot throughout the years, along with the developments in Greece’s political history. It exists within the context of Greek revolutionary history and social struggles, and it has become subject to changes along with that. Some archives help you travel back to the 1960s/1970s struggle; the dictatorial regime known as Chounta ton Syntagmatarchon forced thousands of leftists to leave Greece from 1967 to 1974 while imprisoning and sending to exile many others. The Greek militants especially in France, but also in Italy and other European countries, through their interaction with intellectuals from the Global South saw similarities in the Palestinian and Greek struggles, struggles against imperialism and oppression and they define it as such in their publications. Greek students abroad saw the Greek anti-dictatorship struggle on equal terms with the struggles in the Global South, from Palestine to Vietnam, and their publications reflected that. With the fall of the Regime of the Colonels (Chounta ton Syntagmatarchon) in 1974, the geography of radical solidarity moved from France to Greece. At the same time, the arrival of Palestinians in Greece during the mid-1970s/1980s had a clear impact on the struggle, as they were able to narrate their story without intermediaries. Palestinian students in Greece started organising along with the Greek students.

Arguably, the solidarity movement in the 1970s/1980s was fundamentally different - more radical - as it centred narratives of Palestinians themselves. The arrival of Palestinians in the early 1970s in Greece had a clear effect on the translation of Palestinian literature, political sources, and poetry, previously unavailable to the Greek audience. The late 1970s/early 1980s saw translations of Palestinian poetry by the General Association of Palestinian Students (Γενική Ένωση Παλαιστινίων Φοιτητών). ³ One of them, the Poihmata tis Palaistiniakis Epanastasis (trans. Poems of the Palestinian Revolution) was published in 1977. The archives from the time reflect the political struggle taking place in Greece; the late 1970s saw Greeks and Palestinians organising and protesting against the Turkish invasion of Cyprus of 1974, and mobilised for Cyprus and Palestine alike, seeing those two struggles as similar, calling for liberation and an end to occupation in both.

The 1980s is seen as the ‘golden age’ of Palestinian and Greek solidarity, with the Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou and Yasser Arafat personal connection at the core of this. Andreas Papandreou was a politician and a central figure in Greek politics throughout the 1960s until his death in the late 1980s. His friendship with Arafat had begun earlier, during the dictatorship, when Arafat offered to provide military training in the Middle East for young Greek resistance fighters, members of Papandreou’s anti-dictatorship resistance movement, the Panhellenic Liberation Movement.⁴ Following Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut in 1982, Arafat asked Andreas Papandreou for protection when the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) was forced to leave the city.⁵ Papandreou immediately agreed to offer a safe passage, with Arafat arriving to Faliro on September 1, 1982, in the south of Athens. Then-Prime Minister Papandreou and other high-ranking government officials welcomed him warmly to the dockside upon his arrival in Athens. A small group of Palestinians living in Greece and members of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) also stood by, chanting slogans in support of the Palestinian cause. This golden age is reflected in various sources of governmental and non-governmental archives; from posters to photographs centring the personal friendship of the two.⁶ Jocelyn Saab’s film The Ship to Exile (1982) is a unique representation of this time and moment of Greek-Palestinian solidarity, following Arafat’s journey aboard Atlantis from war-torn Beirut to the south of Athens, to exile in Tunis.

From the 1990s and 2000s and onwards, the support of the Palestinian cause in Greece became closely associated with mostly left-wing, libertarian, and radical movements. The 1990s/2000s archives transfer you to the streets of Exarcheia, a neighbourhood in the heart of Athens and the heart of political struggles, where the 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos was killed in 2008. Grigoropoulos was shot by Greek Police Special Guard Epaminondas Korkoneas in the intersection of Messolongiou and Tzavella streets, in the heart of Exarcheia.

The December Uprising that followed his death triggered new connections of solidarity and a wave of publications about oppressed populations around the world. Exarcheia itself has always been a living archive of solidarity, with its streets full of posters and graffiti of solidarity to Palestine from several political groups operating in the area. To this day, walking through Exarcheia is like exploring a radical street archive without knowing it. The chaotic small allies tell stories of solidarity with Palestine, mingled with Greek and other international struggles. Understanding Exarcheia as a street archive in itself, which academic historians would not typically cite as a source in their bibliography, has significant power for writing history from below and exploring alternative archiving practices. This ‘other-archive’, to use Brahim El Guabli’s term, is part of the everyday Greek social struggle.⁷

Here, it should be mentioned that the creation of this archive and the digitisation of archival material was also a form of political protest against the conditional solidarity with Palestine by certain libertarian/left wing groups in the wake of October 7, 2023. It was an attempt to push more Greek people to engage with the Palestinian cause by unconditionally supporting the resistance and Palestinians, against any solutionism on their behalf that felt entitled to dictate how the liberation of Palestine would or should look like. The unconditional support of the cause is necessary to move beyond the fragmented organising that characterises the Greek movement. The fragmentation is a result of Greece’s politicised history, and it is not limited to the Palestinian solidarity movement- Greece is a political country, our universities are political, our streets are also political, with each group having crystallised ideas about what their future utopias should look like. Yet for Palestine, we need to move beyond this fragmentation, amplify Palestinian voices in Greece, and organise more against this ongoing genocide. This potential exists in Greece through Somoud – the newly founded Palestinian centre in Exarcheia, which opened in May 2023 and its aim is to build closer connections with the Greek movement to mobilise for Palestine.

My next steps include digitising as much material as possible and upload everything to a website I will create in the next few months for people interested in the Greek solidarity to the Palestinian cause and translating some of the Greek material into other languages. Most of the material I have gathered is available online yet scattered in different sites from different political collectives all around Greece, in several archival institutions from and beyond Greece, while, as mentioned, many others are from my own personal archive, found in random second-hand bookshops from Athens.

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Christina Chatzitheodorou

Christina Chatzitheodorou is a PhD student, focusing on women's invovlement in left-wing resistance movements during the Second World War. Her research interests include social movements, particularly women's involvement, violence and its multiple dimensions, and the politics of memory. She speaks fluently Greek, English, Spanish, Italian, French and Portuguese and she currently learns Arabic and Swahili.
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