In 2015, Franco Fontana, an Italian man who had taken up arms with the Marxist-Leninist Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) in the mid-1970s, was laid to rest in Beirut’s Cemetery of the Martyrs of the Palestinian Revolution. Fontana’s enlistment in what had become the third most significant Palestinian group of the time is unusual, though not entirely exceptional. Beside his grave rest the French nurse Françoise Kesteman, who fought within the ranks of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), and Okudaira Tsuyoshi and Yasuda Yasuyuki, two members of the Japanese Red Army who allied with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Yet, Fontana’s story remains largely unknown within the Italian and broader transnational currents of international solidarity with Palestine.
What can this history tell us about how transnational solidarity with liberation movements was forged? And what relevance might it hold for present-day activism? Fontana’s enlistment in the DFLP can be traced to a political praxis shaped by anti-imperialism, workers’ unity across national boundaries, and anti-colonial resistance based on assuming personal sacrifice as an organising principle. This is a political praxis that can inform and offer valuable historical context for the present insurgent terrain of leftist internationalism in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Internationalist solidarity today has been marked by a resurgence of union-led strikes, flotillas seeking to break the siege of Gaza, and blockades of logistical routes and supply-chain nodes that sustain the circulation of weapons and capital to the Israeli settler colony.
Fontana’s story speaks to an earlier iteration of the long-standing international solidarity movement with Palestine. There are difficulties involved in researching internationalist fighters due to the scarce primary sources available. Yet, I draw on archives of the New Left in Italy, oral testimonies, personal documents, and secondary sources to reconstruct Fontana’s journey to joining the Palestinian armed struggle in the 1970s – also known as the Palestinian revolution.
The Palestinian revolution refers to a period of armed struggle under the leadership of the PLO between 1965-82, when dispossessed refugees transformed into Third World liberation fighters. Palestinian revolutionaries sought to recover political representation and national unity, and above all their lost homeland. Academic scholarship on the international dimensions of the Palestinian revolution has focused on the PLO’s diplomatic strategies on the global stage, the diverse political traditions that informed its internationalism, and the social history of European activists who helped internationalise the Palestinian cause. Studies of militant solidarity have focused on Japanese Red Army members and American activists aligned with the PFLP, who participated in armed operations. While research has shown that Italian leftists visited Palestinian military training camps in the 1970s, cases in which visitors, like Fontana, went on to join the armed struggle as resistance fighters are underexplored.
In his hometown of Budrio on the outskirts of Bologna, Fontana was among the founders of the local ‘Circolo Lenin’, one of numerous splinters from established Communist parties that sprang up in the wake of Italy’s 1968 movement. This was a militant conjuncture marked by widespread student uprisings and workers’ strikes – and shaped by internationalist currents. Fontana and his comrades were influenced by Marx, Lenin, and Mao Zedong, as well as labour struggles and anti-fascism. One of their first gestures of solidarity with an internationalist cause was a medical aid campaign for the victims of the Vietnam war, organised in 1968.
That same year, the Palestinian revolution emerged as a crucible of internationalist mobilisation following the Battle of Karameh. During this battle, approximately 300 Palestinian guerrillas, alongside Jordanian forces, held off an estimated 15,000 Israeli soldiers in a stand-off. Images of the fidayeen (Palestinian guerrillas) subsequently circulated through newsletters and pamphlets produced by anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and national liberation movements, as well as by student organisations, political parties, and trade unions across the world. Showing how practices of solidarity circulated across different causes, the announcement for a photographic exhibition organised by the Circolo Lenin Budrio included leaflets promoting a medical aid campaign in support of the Palestinian revolution, illustrated with drawings of armed fighters and bearing the text: ‘Blood drive for the guerrillas. Our blood donation could mean an extra rifle for the Palestinian resistance’. By evading the constraints of liberal humanitarian solidarity, these medical aid and relief practices centered Palestinians as agents of resistance rather than as passive victims.
Fontana’s travels to key hubs of anticolonial and Third Worldist revolution across the world shaped him into an internationalist fighter. He went on solidarity trips to Ireland, the Arabian Gulf, Yemen, Palestine, and eventually Lebanon, and returned to Italy to transmit what he had learned from these respective revolutionary struggles. One article he published in the Circolo Lenin’s monthly periodical Lotta di Classe (Class Struggle), was based on his visit to the liberated areas of Dhofar (in Oman), where Britain was fighting a colonial war. The aim of the article was to shed light on the history of a liberation struggle unknown to most of the Italian Left at the time. Fontana’s assessment of the strategy adopted in Dhofar by the fighters of the Marxist revolutionary organisation, the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf (PFLOAG), was influenced by his first-hand experience in the Dhofar revolution. There, he learned about the centrality of Mao Zedong’s notion of a ‘people’s war’–a rural strategy of guerrilla warfare that involved mobilising peasants–and the different tactics employed to resist British colonial counterinsurgency.
Photographs taken by Fontana of fighters in military training camps in Dhofar during the trip were included in the Lotta di Classe article and later published in the prominent Italian left-wing newspaper l’Unità. Fontana’s journey to Dhofar in the early 1970s took place during a period when the DFLP had established growing links with the PFLOAG. This emerging alliance was prominently featured at the time in numerous issues of the political magazine Al-Sharara, published in Italian by supporters of the DFLP. For Farid Adly, a Libyan journalist and activist involved in the student Palestine solidarity movement in Italy and an acquaintance of Fontana, the trip to Dhofar was facilitated by the PFLOAG, which covered all travel and accommodation expenses. The organisation helped Fontana obtain a visa to enter South Yemen and then accompanied him across the al-Mahra desert on foot to reach Dhofar.
Armed with this first-hand experience, Fontana joined the Palestinian revolutionary struggle in Lebanon a few years later. From his DFLP military identity card we find that he held the rank of ‘fighter’ and adopted ‘Joseph Ibrahim’ as his nom de guerre. According to his battalion commander, Ahmed Ajaj, Fontana initially volunteered with the DFLP in southern Lebanon, in the Nabatiyeh area. He took part in reconnaissance missions and combat patrols before receiving training with the artillery division, where he subsequently served. A remarkable photograph shared by his commander shows him as the driver of a truck carrying three other fighters, equipped with a machine gun and an RPG rocket launcher.
Beyond photographic evidence of his membership in a Palestinian liberation force, a number of his battlefield exploits are known. For example, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, his commander recalled an ambush against Israeli forces in Anqoun, in which Fontana participated. Armed with an RPG launcher, he successfully destroyed an Israeli tank. His solidarity on the battlefield demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice a safer life at home and bear the physical stakes of asymmetric guerrilla warfare against an imperially sponsored settler colonial state. Fontana’s decision to join the Palestinian armed struggle can be tied to, among other factors, disillusionment with the Italian revolutionary experience. Faced with a choice between what he described as the ‘ill-fated’ Red Brigades – responsible for the 1978 kidnapping and killing of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro – and going to the Middle East to confront imperialism, he chose the latter.
In 1982, Fontana returned to Bologna following the Israeli invasion of Beirut and the evacuation of thousands of Palestinian fighters, as the PLO was forced out of Lebanon. Part of the reason his story was not publicised at the time was the need to maintain secrecy in order to avoid potential reprisals from Israeli intelligence. After 33 years, in 2015, Fontana returned to Lebanon to visit the Palestinian camp of Mar Elias that had hosted him. Shortly after his arrival, he died of an illness while in Beirut, but the DFLP honoured his last wish by arranging his funeral in Shatila’s refugee camp, and issued a poster saluting ‘Comrade Franco Fontana’.
Fontana’s story offers a small window into an extraordinary moment of global Third Worldist ties that were made across borders. His path to becoming an internationalist fighter reveals a legacy of direct, militant action rooted in an iteration of international solidarity with the national liberation struggle in Palestine that was common to the 1960-70s. Yet, the demise of international fighters joining the Palestinian resistance invites activists to reflect on how present strategies of solidarity may build upon earlier traditions, while simultaneously rethinking internationalism in forms suited for the contemporary conjuncture. Today’s resurgence of militant activism including strikes, the blockade of logistics routes and maritime ports to disrupt supply chains, and campaigns against the arms trade, can be understood as part of a longer history of international solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.