The Palestinian Left: Past, Present, and Future: An Evaluation of Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine

by Torkil Lauesen

The Palestinian Left: Past, Present, and Future offers a sweeping assessment of fifty years of revolutionary struggle, decline, and possibility. Beginning with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s 1969 Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, the book revisits a time when anti-imperialist movements across the Global South were at their height and Palestine was central to visions of worldwide revolution. Drawing on decades of international solidarity work, the author situates the Palestinian Left within global transformations—from the revolutionary wave of the 1960s, through the defeats of the 1980s and 1990s, to today’s ongoing crisis.

With clarity and urgency, the book traces the dilemmas of strategy, organization, and class analysis, interrogating the roles of Arab nationalism, Islamism, imperialism, and settler colonialism. It explores why no strategy has yet succeeded in bringing about liberation, while insisting that the struggle for a secular, socialist Palestine remains inseparable from the fate of global movements against exploitation and oppression.

At once historical and analytical, deeply committed yet unflinching in critique, The Palestinian Left: Past, Present, and Future is a call to rethink revolutionary strategy in light of past lessons and present contradictions.

110 pages, Paperback

Published October 5, 2025

About the author

Torkil Lauesen (born 1952, Korsør) is a Danish communist writer. From 1971 to 1989, he was a member of the Kommunistisk Arbejdskreds and later a co-founder of the Manifest-Kommunistisk Arbejdsgruppe (referred to in the press as the Blekingegade Gang) in Copenhagen, supporting anti-imperialist struggle in the Third World, especially in Palestine, by legal and illegal means. In connection with his anti-imperialist work, he has traveled to Lebanon, Syria, Zimbabwe, South Africa, the Philippines, and Mexico. He is currently a member of the Internationalt Forum and is a board member of the Arghiri Emmanuel Association.

After the Blekingegade Gang's robbery of Købmagergade Post Office on 3 November 1988, Lauesen was arrested on 13 April 1989 and sentenced to ten years in prison on 2 May 1991. He served his prison sentence in Vridsløselille Prison until he was released on parole on 13 December 1995. While in prison, he began studying political science as a self-study master's student at the University of Copenhagen, obtaining his degree in June 1997.