24hrs/Palestine is building a global network for collective action and resistance

Led by members from Morocco, Palestine, Egypt and Burkina Faso, the anti-imperialist, anticolonial “global radio action” 24hrs/Palestine strives to demonstrate the interconnectedness of political struggles throughout the world.

This feature was produced in collaboration with Radio alHara as part of their Crack Magazine Issue 168 takeover.

24hrs/Palestine is a multilingual live radio event that was launched on Radio alHara, on 18 February 2024, as part of the Bethlehem-based radio station’s programming for Palestine during the earliest months of the nearly two-year-long Israeli onslaught on Gaza. 

Self-defined as anti-imperialist and anti-colonial, its founders – who prefer not to be named in order to maintain the collective nature of the project – brought together a global network of activists, academics, cultural workers and researchers to launch the 24-hour programme, with the aim of connecting struggles around the world to what was unfolding in Palestine. They wanted to identify the universalism at the centre of these struggles and their interconnectedness through “a global radio action”.

24hrs/Palestine has since aired three more broadcasts and is planning to launch as a platform with more consistent programming, with the ultimate aim of turning it into a dedicated channel. Besides broadcasting, the collective wants to create a network of existing independent radio stations to serve as an infrastructure that can be activated if needed. 

Motivated by the censorship around Palestine and related organising across Europe, the collective – comprising members from Morocco, Burkina Faso, Egypt and Palestine – wanted a platform through which to discuss what was happening in Gaza as well as in their own locations, and how it all ties together. Radio proved to be the perfect medium for this, especially with freedom of movement limited for invited participants, many of whom did not possess European passports allowing them to travel. Radio, as a medium, also offers a break from the constant inundation of incendiary imagery we encounter daily, refocusing attention on meaningful listening and information. 

24hrs/Palestine does not maintain an editorial or political line. Instead, it sees itself as a channel through which different articulations of political struggle around the world can converge, from Jakarta to Santiago to New Zealand to Algeria to Korea. The platform also aims to centre other struggles that have not received significant media attention, such as in Congo, Sudan and Kashmir, among many others. Its plurilingual nature is central to its political messaging; it serves as a way to disseminate programming beyond the geographical confines of the Anglophone and Francophone worlds, while maintaining regional specificity. 

Historically, radio has been the most important medium for transmitting political and anti-colonial messaging in the global south. Broadcasts such as Cairo Radio or Sawt al-Arab are two examples of this kind of project – the latter, translating to ‘Voice of the Arabs’, was established in Cairo in 1953. Radio might not appear so influential today, when knowledge proliferates everywhere via the internet, but at the time, Sawt al-Arab’s influence was pronounced; it effectively ended Britain’s monopoly on propaganda in the Middle East, to the extent that British bombers targeted Radio Cairo’s transmitter in the tripartite aggression following Egypt’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal.

The mobilising role of Cairo Radio was embedded in this embryonic Arab and African solidarity project. It embodied both national liberation and national development in tandem, serving as a microcosm of the Egyptian national project at the time – an anti-colonial effort through and through. To foster ties with countries in the Nile Valley, Cairo Radio launched broadcast programmes in Amharic, Sudanese and Swahili in 1954, affirming Egypt’s support for African issues such as the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. The broadcasts were widely popular, and those helming them were paid generous salaries by the state to tempt them away from other international broadcasters. 

While radio may not be as profitable any more, initiatives like 24hrs/Palestine and Radio alHara have shown the medium still stands as a means through which different vocabularies of emancipation can be articulated and disseminated – as a form of cultural resistance, and as a way of emphasising the political nature of art.