The 1960s and 1970s are often remembered as the age of the Third World guerrilla. But by the mid-1970s, the seemingly unstoppable force of secular Third World liberation, embodied by the Tricontinental Conference, had lost momentum. A new generation of liberation fighters mobilizing sectarian and ethnic identities in local struggles gradually overtook secular left-wing revolutionaries.

Nowhere were these changes more pronounced than the Middle East. During the heyday of the Third World guerrilla, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) captured attention by casting itself as an Arab Viet Cong. Despite spectacular operations against Israel and its Western supporters, the PLO could not achieve lasting gains. By the mid-1970s, Palestinian fighters were pulled into the bloody Lebanese Civil War, which devolved into a conflict between rival sectarian groups. Soon after, the 1979 Revolution in Iran demonstrated that theocratic radicalism had become a significant player on the world stage. By the late 1980s, secular liberation fighters such as the PLO were replaced by the likes of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Mujahideen as the vanguard of revolutionary forces in the Middle East.

In later years, Israel’s relationship with the United Nations changed. After occupation by Israel in 1967 of the two sectors of Palestine that had remained beyond its control in 1949, the General Assembly and Security Council challenged Israel over its claim to sovereignty in Jerusalem and over its promotion of settlement by its citizens in these areas. Israel was denounced as a racist state by Third World countries, and the General Assembly adopted a resolution pronouncing Zionism to be racist. The Palestine Liberation Organization accepted Israel as a state and said that it respected Israel’s right to exist in peace. When the prospect of Israel–Palestine negotiations arose, the General Assembly rescinded its resolution on Zionist as being racist.

This chapter continues the bottom-up approach to history with a focus on a specific day of crowd action, Quds Day. History infuses this day of protest with immense meaning and importance. In the 1970s all revolutionary factions in Iran championed throughout the region were championing Palestinian liberation, and the Islamists institutionalized the emancipation of Palestine as an integral part of the state’s ideology after consolidating power. Freeing Palestine became part of the nation’s visual culture, and the discourse of Palestinian liberation was taught to a generation of Iranian youth raised under the banner of the Islamic Republic. The state even designated the last Friday of Ramadan as Quds Day (Jerusalem Day). Thirty years later, Iranian youth used the occasion of Jerusalem Day to circumvent the security crackdown, re-emerging to protest the election results and the state that had ratified them. They used specific Palestine-centered imagery and slogans to either negate the state, or to legitimate their own uprising and portray the state as the usurper of power akin to Israel. The protest was continued online with specific digital displays of subversion.