Palestinians and the long reach of Global South solidarity
A recent essay by Wael Omar maps how Palestinian political education, diplomacy and doctrine were braided with Vietnam, Algeria and South Africa, and why that lineage still shapes how the Global South reads the war on Gaza.
On 17 July 2026, Middle East Eye published an essay by Wael Omar that traces a thread most Western foreign-policy desks have stopped pulling: the place of Palestinians inside the working political memory of the Global South. Omar's argument, in short, is that the diplomatic moves, exchange programmes and revolutionary pedagogies of the 1960s and 1970s, when Vietnam, Algeria, South Africa and the Palestinian national movement were braided through shared training camps, party schools and anti-colonial doctrine, still condition how states from Pretoria to Hanoi read the war on Gaza in 2026.
That continuity matters because the dominant diplomatic language used to describe Gaza in Western chancelleries has narrowed sharply. Foreign ministries frame the conflict through hostage diplomacy, ceasefire timing and humanitarian aid flow rates; the political-educational lineage Omar describes sits underneath most of that, deciding whose mediation counts and whose experience is treated as authoritative at the table.
The pedagogical pipeline
Omar's working premise is straightforward and deserves to be stated plainly: liberation movements taught each other. Palestinian cadre trained alongside the Algerian FLN in the late 1950s and 1960s; Vietnamese instructors ran courses on protracted rural warfare that fed into both Algerian and later South African doctrine; the South African liberation movement's external wing, after 1960, drew heavily on Algerian precedent and on the diplomatic armoury the PLO had begun to assemble at the UN. These were not theoretical affinities. They were classroom cohorts and translation pools.
When Middle East Eye lays this out, the point is not nostalgia. It is to recover the institutional memory that explains why, for instance, Vietnamese diplomats in 2024–2025 were quicker than most Western counterparts to invoke international-law precedent on occupation, and why Algeria and South Africa have been among the most active state petitioners at the International Court of Justice on Palestinian statehood questions. The pedagogy became infrastructure.
Counter-read: has the doctrine survived?
The obvious counter-read is that the institutional memory has decayed. Vietnam in 2026 is a mid-sized export economy and a wary participant in US-China supply-chain bargaining; Algeria is a hydrocarbon rentier state navigating IMF programmes; South Africa is constrained at home by service-delivery crises and abroad by its non-aligned tradition. None of these countries runs an active revolutionary training pipeline today. The shared pedagogy Omar identifies is, on this reading, an artefact.
Omar's response, by implication, is that doctrine does not need a camp to keep working. It survives in legal teams, in communiqués drafted in the same idiom, in voting blocs at the UN General Assembly, in the colour and cadence of protest chants in Pretoria and Tunis and Jakarta. The pipeline is now a diplomatic grammar rather than a guerrilla one.
A second, less flattering counter-read is that the solidarity rhetoric can run ahead of the policy substance. Voting at the General Assembly on Gaza-related resolutions since October 2023 has produced large Global South majorities on humanitarian language, but enforcement teeth remain concentrated in the same Western capitals that vote against those resolutions. Solidarity, in other words, can be cheap; constraint is what costs.
What actually got built
It is worth being specific about what the post-1960s infrastructure consisted in, because the phrase "solidarity" tends to flatten it. Omar points to three concrete load-bearing components.
First, translation and legal capacity. PLO diplomats in the 1970s invested heavily in building the international-law armature that later fed into the 1977 Additional Protocols and the post-1993 Oslo-era negotiating documents. Algerian and Tunisian lawyers staffed many of those working groups; Vietnamese diplomats contributed the language of occupied territory and self-determination in the language that travelled. Second, armed-struggle training. Algerian camps hosted PLO cadres in the 1960s and early 1970s; Palestinian officers returned the favour at training facilities in Lebanon and later in Libya. The Vietnamese contribution was less operational and more doctrinal, focused on protracted conflict theory. Third, party-to-party diplomacy. The ANC's external mission in Lusaka and later Dar es Salaam ran for years in close coordination with PLO diplomatic offices; the exchange of plenipotentiaries was nearly continuous.
These three layers, legal, operational and party, are what Omar means when he talks about a "common concept." They are the reason a 2026 South African statement on the International Court of Justice can echo, almost word for word, a 1976 Algerian statement at the UN Special Committee on Decolonization. The line of transmission is shorter than Western foreign-policy commentary usually allows.
Stakes going into the rest of 2026
Three things follow for the rest of 2026. First, expect more Global South states to file or join filings at international jurisdictions on Palestinian statehood, prisoner-exchange obligations and accountability for aid-system disruptions inside Gaza; the institutional memory is in fact still serviceable, and Omar's essay is a useful reminder that this is not improvisation. Second, expect Western foreign ministries to keep treating these filings as marginal, while quietly calculating whether any of them produce bilateral friction, over diaspora visas, trade preferences or arms-parliament votes, that they cannot absorb. Third, expect the rhetorical gap between Global South solidarity language and enforceable mechanism to stay wide, because the underlying architecture has not been rebuilt to close it.
The piece leaves the harder question for readers. If the pedagogy of the 1960s and 1970s still lives, but the political economy of 2026 has moved on, what is the actual deliverable that today's Global South solidarity can be measured against: a vote, a treaty accession, a sanctions regime, a refugee return, or something the diplomatic grammar does not yet have a word for? Omar does not pretend to settle that. He is reminding us, fairly enough, that the question lands on familiar ground.
Desk note: this piece treats the Middle East Eye essay as a primary source for the historical linkages it describes. The thread's reporting foregrounds the political-educational lineage; coverage on Western wires has tended to compress Global South positions on Gaza into single-vote headlines, which is why the longer lineage deserves more column-inches than it usually gets.