“The Palestinian cause is not a cause for Palestinians only, but a cause for every revolutionary, wherever he is, as a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses in our era.” — Ghassan Kanafani
The murder of George Floyd in 2020 afflicted millions around the world, Palestinians took to the streets to mourn his death and call for justice—a mural was even painted on the separation wall in Bethlehem to honor him. Just a few days later, Israeli police murdered Eyad Al Hallaq, an unarmed autistic Palestinian man, shooting him at least seven times. These two tragedies were a stark reminder of the shared lineages of abuse both Palestinians and black people in the United States suffer on a daily basis. The indisputable parallels between the two struggles are part of a much longer history of transnational Black-Palestinian struggle.
The Black and Palestinian liberation movements, at their most radical ends, are united by anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, and inherent challenges to racial oppression. After the 1967 Naksa, there was an evolution in Black opinions vis-a-vis Palestine, with much more leaning into the pro-Palestinian side. This caused a split amongst Black radicals as many also believed this support for Palestine would cause tensions between Jewish and Black people in the US. Many believed that outwardly voicing their support for Palestine would ‘create more enemies’ against Black liberation movements. Despite these frictions, crucial elements of the Black struggle were anti-imperialism and racial capitalism, concerns that were perfectly aligned with the Palestinian cause.
One of the earliest attempts at voicing concerns for Palestine came from Malcolm X when he published Zionist Logic in the Egyptian Gazette in 1964. In the article, he derived and laid out the similarities between the oppression of Palestinians and Africans. He denied that the occupation was a religious conflict, focusing on how in reality, it is a colonial project that upholds the agendas of imperialist European ideologies. Soon after the article was published, he became one of the first Black leaders to meet with the PLO and affirmed his solidarity with multiple visits to Palestine.
These Israeli Zionists religiously believe their Jewish God has chosen them to replace the outdated European colonialism with a new form of colonialism, so well disguised that it will enable them to deceive the African masses into submitting willingly to their “divine” authority and guidance, without the African masses being aware that they are still colonized.
After the 1967 War, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating System (SNCC) released an article detailing the history of the Zionist occupation and highlighting its role as a tool of US imperialism. The article caused internal disputes among members of the SNCC with then-administrator John Williams, denouncing it at a press conference. It was then re-released with added context around the Holocaust and the Jewish Americans who had protested the occupation’s course of action. An excerpt from the original statement read:
Gentlemen, it is clearly a question of right and wrong. In the Middle-East, America has worked with and used the powerful organized Zionist movement to take over another people’s home and to replace these people with a partner who has well served America’s purpose, a partner that can help the United States and other white western countries to exploit and control the nations of Africa, the Middle-East, and Africa!
It was in 1970 when the first statement from the Black Panthers was issued in support of Palestine, where they proclaimed that “we support the Palestinian’s just struggle for liberation one hundred percent. We will go on doing this, and we would like for all of the progressive people of the world to join in our ranks in order to make a world in which all people can live.” Later on, the Black Panthers’ global newspaper, The Black Panther Intercommunal News Agency, discussed the situation in Palestine while focusing on racial capitalism and imperialism – their coverage tied the struggle to the various anti-imperialist struggles that were being contemporaneously waged in Cuba, Angola, and Mozambique. The newspaper also openly supported the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and regularly featured works from the organization to relay the Palestinian struggles to foreign audiences. As time passed, the Black Panther Party remained a steadfast ally of Palestine and still found Zionism to be an extension of American imperialism but also criticized the racial exclusions laced in Arab nationalism.
What makes Black-Palestinian solidarity so important is the material parallels between the Black experience in the United States and the Palestinian experience under Zionist occupation. Mass incarceration of Black and Brown people in the U.S. is at an all-time high, making up 20% of the entire world’s prison population. The Black experience in American prisons is mirrored by the experience of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. Palestinians are never provided with the reasoning as to why they are being held, and are refused a trial and bail, all while facing abuse and brutality from Israeli correctional officers. While one of the pivotal points of the Black Lives Matter movement was its opposition to the abuses of power committed by US police officers. Black communities are closely surveilled by the authorities in an attempt to catch the slightest misstep to punish and brutalize these communities—an experience Palestinians are all too familiar with. Another parallel is racial profiling in which policies are placed that disproportionately target people of color, Black people in the United States are automatically labeled ‘criminals,’ while Palestinians are labeled ‘terrorists.’ The racial profiling in Palestine is so extreme that Israeli authorities will often kill other Israelis after mistaking them for Palestinians. The incarceration of Black and Palestinian youth in their respective areas is alarming, 41% of incarcerated youths in the United States are Black while 5 of the 240 released detainees from the 28th of November were as young as 14 years old and unconvicted. Both victims of a carceral system seeking to violently suppress “surplus” or “undesirable” populations, their fight is united against national oppression rooted in the barbaric legacies of European settler colonialism.
As both struggles have transformed across the last 50 years, the connections between Palestinian and Black liberation have been constantly reworked and reinvigorated Palestinian-American community organizer, Rasmea Odeh says, “Black-Palestinian unity and solidarity is at its absolute height in the US, because both peoples recognize that the racist nature of the US government and the racist nature of Israel are the same.” These two groups have stood by each other because their experiences echo each other’s struggles, one group is fighting American imperialism while the other fights its extension: Zionism. Another example of these expressions of solidarity between the two communities is the 2015 Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine signed by over 1,100 Black activists, scholars, artists, and students. The statement was made to commemorate one year since the murder of Michael Brown, a black teenager whose death coincided with the 50-day war on Gaza. Cofounder of the BDS, Omar Barghouti, responded to the statement: “This deeply moving and noble declaration by our Black brothers and sisters in the US and elsewhere is not just a genuine expression of effective, altruistic international solidarity. It is a poignant testament to the organic links that connect the Palestinian struggle for self-determination with the struggle of the oppressed around the world, including ongoing struggles for racial and economic justice by black people in the US and across the world.”
The murder of 18-year-old Michael Brown coincided with the height of the fifty-day War on Gaza. Police brutality protesters in the United States chanted, “From Ferguson to Palestine, occupation is a crime” bringing attention to the shared lineages of abuse between the Black population in the U.S. and Palestinians under occupation.
And despite pathetic attempts at blackwashing, the Zionist occupation has had a long history of discriminating against Black refugees. In 2013, the occupation faced backlash after it was revealed it forced Ethiopian immigrants to take birth control injections, a standard that was not applied to non-black immigrants the settler colony sustains itself with. The occupation’s government has also coerced over 20,000 African immigrants to return to their countries. The treatment of Black people in Israel mirrors the attitude that the United States has toward its Black citizens and the violent treatment of immigrants all around the world. In recent times, speaking out for Palestine has become dangerous. Important figures in the Black liberation movement have faced backlash, such as Angela Davis’ award for Human Rights being revoked under claims of her ‘anti-semitism.’ But thankfully, this has not stopped Black leaders and activists from speaking out for Palestine. These two groups recognize that the struggle for freedom transcends race and borders and that if we do not stand by each other, things might never change.
Edited by Bachar Bzeih