Editor’s Note: This work serves as a foundational political education piece with Black people who are unfamiliar with the oppression and occupation of Palestine entirely in mind. Over the next week, we will publish work that is explorative, analytical, and detailed in the various ways the oppression of Palestinians and Black people are connected.
By Brittany Frederick
This week, Israeli forces killed sixty-two people who were protesting their right to return to their former homes in territory that is now part of Israel, while the United States opened an embassy in Jerusalem. While some have argued that the Black Lives Matter Network has been unusually quiet about these attacks, the history of Black solidarity for Palestinians is a decades’ long tradition rooted in the shared understanding of imperial colonialism.
Following World War II, some Black activists initially were in support of the nation of Israel. However, in 1967, Black support waned following the Six-Day War which resulted in the Israeli government seizing the Holy City of Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and more territory from their Muslim neighbors. The control of that territory meant that hundreds of thousands of Muslim Palestinians who lived there were now under Jewish Israeli control. Like much of the Middle East, interference from the United Nations created the conditions for this conflict over the holy land.
In creating the state of Israel, Zionists wanted to place the new Jewish state on land sacred to indigenous Muslim populations, and were empowered by the United Nations who carved fictional borders to create a nation that now violently oppresses Palestinians through physical, legal, economic, and social force.
These events marked a call for unity and solidarity from Black liberationists who connected to Palestinians who were surviving under the weight of settler colonialism. By occupying Palestine, Israel became a colonial power. In the United States, the removal and destruction of Indigenous communities alongside the forced enslavement of Black Africans made the United States a colonial power.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, several pro-Black organizations and activists spoke out about Palestine. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee published “The Palestine Problem” to counter Black nationalist approval of Israel as an example of a separatist state. Angela Davis, during her time in prison, received letters of support from Palestinian prisoners. Huey Newton of the Black Panther Party was also a vocal supporter of Palestine.
More recently, the coinciding events of state violence in both Ferguson and Gaza moment brought this historical solidarity to our attention. While the residents of Ferguson, Missouri were on the street protesting for Mike Brown and against policing systems, Israel launched an airstrike during what came to be called the 50 Days War. Through Twitter, protesters in Gaza communicated to BLM activists how to protect themselves from tear gas and expressed their solidarity with the movement.
Since these connections were first sparked, activists and organizers within the Movement for Black Lives sent a delegation to Palestine to express solidarity and learn of the extents of Israeli occupation. That delegation recorded their flash mob in which they sang the words of the late and brilliant Ella Baker who said “We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it’s won.”
The 2007 blockade to prevent Palestinian movement after protesters attempted to seize the Gaza Strip, has made Gaza “unlivable” with residents forced to contend with very little electricity, clean water, and housing, a plight that many Black Americans can empathize with following the horrific conditions in New Orleans and Flint, Michigan, and the massive state-sanctioned initiatives to gentrify urban cities, while neglecting Black rural communities.
Scholarship on the shared bonds between Black liberation and Palestine’s freedom is dense and wide-ranging. One thinker who stands out is Asef Bayat, an Iranian Global Studies researcher, who argued in his book Life as Politics that the politically weak – through their refusal to be removed from territory – are able to change political landscapes through their presence, and yet, for that to work, state governments would need to have actual empathy for human suffering which they do not have.
If state government has no capacity for empathy, then what are we as marginalized communities left to do? The intertwined legacies of past and present colonialism is are complicated, with many of our stories whitewashed and lost. While the path for liberation may not be clear, it is clear that we need to expand our solidarity and activism to those outside the United States. We need to recognize that by dismantling the U.S. Empire we will free many abroad living in conditions supported by our state.
Suggested Reading
“Black–Palestinian Solidarity in the Ferguson–Gaza Era” – Kristian Davis Bailey, The American Studies Association (2015)
“How the Black Lives Matter Movement and Palestinian Movements Converged” – Anna Isaacs, Moment Magazine (March 14th, 2016)
“Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement” – Angela Y. Davis (2016)
Brittany Frederick is a Black feminist activist and scholar from Boston, MA. She’s interested in Black arts, culture, and history. Follow her on Twitter @Britt_LF.
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