By Rawan Tayoon
I went to the Yasser Arafat Museum here in Ramallah, and there her name was. Fatima Bernawi. Her name was among the names of Palestinian political prisoners who lost their freedom, and many times their lives, for resisting Israeli colonialism. “Fatima Bernawi was the first female Palestinian political prisoner” reads the plaque which honors her. As a major, she was the highest ranking woman in the Fateh militia. Her father fought in the 1936 Palestinian Revolt, and in 1948(when she was nine years old), she fled with the rest of her family from their home in Jerusalem to a refugee camp in Jordan before eventually making their way back to Jerusalem.
Bernawi and her family are members of the Afro-Palestinian community, who descended from African immigrants to Palestine who have since become an integral part of Palestinian society. Bernawi has faced anti-Black racism being Black and Palestinian. While working as a nurse for the Arab-American Oil Company (ARAMCO) in Saudi Arabia during the mid-1950s, she described how the company “refused to let me give shots because my color is [B]lack, even though I am a Palestinian.”
She also faced colonial racism from Israeli soldiers who continued to occupy her city. She eventually attempted an attack on the Zion Cinema for its celebration of the 1967 War that killed and displaced about 400,000 Palestinians. She was eventually jailed for ten years, but did not serve her full life sentence due to a prisoners exchange.
I knew this before I went to the museum—Bernawi had always stood out to me as someone who sacrificed so much to resist Israeli colonialism while facing the hyper-racism that comes with being a Black Palestinian. But seeing her name so proudly displayed on that wall had me thinking anew about the current Palestinian liberation movement and what Black-Palestinian solidarity means today.
I am a non-Black Palestinian raised in the U.S. with the commitment to care about justice for the oppressed. Growing up in the States, I learned about how police brutality and anti-Black racism exist here, with the understanding of how today’s mass incarceration connects to chattel-based slavery.
I was about 14 when Trayvon Martin was killed, and I clearly remember how my mother, nearly tearful, was angry about Zimmerman’s lack of conviction, and the adjacent media that refused to scrutinize his behavior. Having grown up in Palestine under Israel military occupation, she recognized the brutality of state violence and the media that normalizes it.
She saw how the media always framed armed soldiers fearing for their lives, while civilian Palestinians were always the threat. She was nowhere near the only Palestinian to make the connection either. Liberation News documented how “many Palestinians circulated pictures of themselves holding signs that read: ‘Palestinians stand with those who mourn Trayvon Martin’s death. We know what it feels like to lose loved ones and to watch the murderers evade justice.’”
That Afro-Palestinians and Black Americans also face anti-Blackness from non-Black Palestinians is a deep injustice that is not only morally abhorrent, but deeply hypocritical from a people fighting against the colonial racial supremacy that has created and maintained racial hierarchy with white people being firmly positioned on top, and Black people locked in a permanent underclass.
Knowing this, activists and organizers fighting for Palestinian liberation need to ask ourselves what does it mean to fight for freedom from racist state violence for Black Americans, non-Black Palestinians, and Afro-Palestinians? How have these struggles been linked? How did past solidarity look like, and what does it look like now?
To understand how crucial those questions are requires a brief overview of the connections between Black and Palestinian solidarity. At the core of the conflict is the 1948 Nakba, or the “Catastrophe” in Arabic. This was the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Zionist militias in order to establish the current ethnostate of Israel.
Afro-Palestinians were at the heart of armed resistance and experienced the crushing loss of their homes, thus making them refugees. According to Afro-Palestinian community leader Mahmoud Jiddah, “Africans… played a key role in the Jerusalem battles during the 1948 Nakba…in fact, the commander of the battalion that prevented the fall of Jabal al-Mukkaber – an east Jerusalem neighborhood – in 1948 was Nigerian-born Muhammad Tariq al-Afriqi.” They were also among the displaced, with about a quarter of the African population in Jerusalem becoming refugees in neighboring countries.
After the Six Day War (1967) displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians once again, solidarity between radical Black American groups and Palestinians grew tremendously, with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee publishing a statement against Zionism, and with the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Black Panther Party drawing “comparisons between racial capitalism in the United States and Israel, in addition to strategizing together while in Algiers-all under a project of revolutionary internationalism and anti-imperialism.”
This era was also characterized by the solidarity between Palestinian and Black American prisoners, two populations that are heavily targeted under mass incarceration.
Since its creation, Israel has detained one million Palestinians, and since 1967 Israel has jailed 20% of the total Palestinian population in the occupied territories and 40% of the total male population. Similarly, in 2014 Black Americans comprised 34% of the total prison population with Black Americans being incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites.
Black Panther George Jackson had correspondence with Palestinians while he was imprisoned, to the extent that poems written to him by Palestinian leader Samih al-Qasim were misattributed to Jackson and published in the Black Panther party newspaper. Dr. Greg Thomas, who crafted the exhibition “George Jackson in the Sun of Palestine” refers to this as a “magical mistake born of radical kinship.”
This exhibit was hosted in Oakland as well as by the African Community Center in Jerusalem which was attended by none other than Mahmoud Jiddah, the Afro-Palestinian community leader who spoke on the role Afro-Palestinians had in the Nakba. He first heard of George Jackson during his own prison time in Israeli occupation jails, bringing the connection between between Black Americans and Palestinians full circle.
Resistance against Israeli occupation continued into the 21st century; during the Second Intifada that spanned from the years 2000-2005, Afro-Palestinian Osaama Jebdeh was one of the first Palestinians Israeli soldiers murdered. Afro-Palestinians in Jerusalem today live between multiple Israeli police checkpoints and are harassed daily, with specific reference to their Blackness.
Ali Jiddeh, a leader of the Afro-Palestinian community who was imprisoned for his involvement with the Palestinian Marxist-Leninist group PFLP described how Israeli soldiers routinely interrogate and arrest the youth of his community, and what makes the younger generation different than his own: “They are watching TV and constantly browsing the internet. They make comparisons with what they see in other countries.”
Today, solidarity between Black Americans Afro-Palestinians and non-Black Palestinians continues, with two key incidents – the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson and the bombing of the open-air prison in the Gaza Strip — being yet another tragic comparison in state-sanctioned brutality.
Clearly, history shows the deep rooted solidarity that exists between Black Americans and Palestinians, and now we must consider how this legacy can and should inform our activism today. Harrowingly, the same brand of teargas used against Palestinians was used in Ferguson, and in targeting for-profit companies who profit from the co-existent brutalization of Black Americans and Palestinians. Multiple companies profit off the technologies that are tested on one population to be used on the other as well as the “exchange of tactics” that frequently occur between American police departments and the Israeli military.
The Jewish Voice For Peace campaign to End the Deadly Exchange, which target programs that bring together U.S and Israeli police in order to “promote and extend discriminatory and repressive policing practices that already exist in both countries, including extrajudicial executions, shoot-to-kill policies, police murders, racial profiling, massive spying and surveillance, and attacks on human rights defenders.” This is crucial in understanding why many U.S residents describe their local police department as an occupying force.
The partnership between U.S and Israeli settler colonialism is obvious in the technology used to suppress protests such as the “Israeli Skunk Spray.” Developed by Israeli police in collaboration with Odortec, it emits a foul smell described as a mix of animal carcasses and human excrement, it was used on unarmed Palestinian protesters before it was bought by the St. Louis Police Department to be used against protesters in Ferguson.
Activism against Israeli and American state violence must build off the history of solidarity between Black Americans and Palestinians, the similar ways racist dehumanizing rhetoric is used to excuse the inexcusable, and a determination to end the way racist capitalism uses the same companies and technology to profit off of the mass incarceration and mass murder of both groups.
All those who don’t see eliminating anti-Blackness within Palestinian communities as a priority side with oppressors and betray the very justice they claim to be fighting for. Those who think our struggles are separate are simply mistaken. Black American and Palestinian activists who’ve worked hand in hand for decades now understood that a blow to empire anywhere is a blow to racist America at the source. So I think about George Jackson, Fatima Bernawi,Samih Al-Qasim and all those who understood before us that solidarity is not simply an option, it’s how we will live long past the forces of our oppression, and how we will win.
Suggested Readings
“America’s history exposes how Israel’s “two state solution” is a cover for further land theft“— josh briond and Da’Shaun Harrison, RaceBaitR (May 22, 2018)
“Black History in Occupied Territory: On the Entanglements of Slavery and Settler Colonialism” Justin Leroy, Theory & Event, vol. 19 no. 4, 2016
“A Historical Framework for Black Palestinian Solidarity” — Devyn Springer, Mondoweiss (
Rawan Tayoon is a Palestinian American activist currently based in Los Angeles and Ramallah.A Political Science and Middle East Studies major at the University of Southern California, she is organizing with Students for Justice in Palestine and Young Democratic Socialists of America in coalition with other anti-capitalist and racial justice groups.
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