9

Cops Here, Bombs There

Black–Palestinian Solidarity

Khury Petersen-Smith

August 2014 came during a cruel summer for Palestinians and for Black people in the United States. In Palestine, Israel followed its 2008–2009 bombardment of Gaza, which left over 1,400 Palestinians killed, with another round of punishment in 2014. Having imposed a blockade that denied residents of Gaza the most basic elements of contemporary society, like paper and medicine, and goods that people around the world enjoy each day for simple pleasures, like chocolate, Israelis directed their ingenuity at severing Gaza from the rest of the world and making life there unbearable. Hamas had won elections in Gaza in 2006, and Israeli “democracy” responded—using the control of Gaza’s borders that it shared with Egypt—by producing a situation intended to provoke Palestinians there to revolt against the party and to make them suffer in the meantime.

Then came the 2014 assault. Called the 2014 Gaza War or “Operation Protective Edge” by the Israelis, the disparity in deaths betrays the one-sidedness of the violence. More than two thousand Palestinians were killed, primarily civilians. In contrast, seventy-three Israelis were killed, sixty-seven of whom were soldiers. There are unfortunately many chapters of Israeli mercilessness in Palestinian history. But the summer of 2014 will be remembered by many as one of slaughtered Palestinian children. Israel killed more than five hundred children in the seven weeks of the assault.

That same summer opened with four New York City police officers strangling to death an unarmed Black man, Eric Garner, in the heat of a Staten Island day. Garner’s tragic final words, “I can’t breathe,” became known to Black people across the US, repeated at rallies against police violence and printed on T-shirts and protest signs. His murder was caught on cell phone video and viewed countless times—one of the earlier examples of what would become an unceasing flood of bystander footage capturing police and security guard brutality against Black people in cities across the country.

On August 9, 2014, a white police officer in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed an unarmed Black teenager named Michael Brown. “Hands up, don’t shoot” became a rallying cry in the weeks and years that followed. When Brown’s family and other Ferguson residents assembled in a pained, angry, but nonviolent gathering to remember their loved one and to denounce racist police violence, local authorities responded by deploying four police departments, including Missouri state troopers. Black residents rebelled, and the state ultimately mobilized the National Guard to quell the unrest.

For two weeks that August, the Israeli bombing of Gaza and the uprising in Ferguson were happening at the same time. People across the US could turn on the news and see plumes of smoke rising from Gaza’s neighborhoods bombed by Israeli jets, followed by clouds of tear gas fired by American police and soldiers in Ferguson. One could read as coincidence that two subject populations—Palestinians in Palestine and Black people in the US—were besieged at the same time. But when entire societies, political and legal regimes, are constructed over years to maintain the domination of a population—as is the case with these two—there is no such thing as coincidence.

Attentive activists knew this. From the early days of the protests in Ferguson, Palestinians had a visible presence in the streets, marching alongside Black rebels. Palestinians in Palestine took to social media during the Ferguson rebellion with words of encouragement and advice about how to deal with tear gas. A group of Palestinian activists in Palestine and the diaspora issued a statement of solidarity on the Electronic Intifada website, and the Palestinian BDS National Committee also wrote a statement in solidarity with the uprising. In response to the repressive violence unleashed in Ferguson, the BDS National Committee wrote, “We recognize those tactics being used in Ferguson and the mentality behind them.”1

“Michael’s death has been met with outrage and anger among the people of Palestine struggling for freedom, justice and equality,” the statement continued. “We strongly believe that the oppressed of the world must stand united in the face of racism, racial repression and injustice. Together we can prevail. Together we shall prevail.”

In the US, the time before the 2014 attack on Gaza and the Ferguson Uprising saw a small but significant group of Black public intellectuals calling attention to the oppression of Palestinians. Academics Angela Davis and Cornel West were among them. Ebony magazine, the historic Black American publication, ran articles about why Black people should stand with Palestinians.2 But the August 2014 moment—and the year that followed—constituted a breakthrough. That year saw an explosion of resistance under the banner of Black Lives Matter, a phrase coined a year earlier by activists Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza, and Patrisse Cullors in response to the murder of a thirteen-year-old Black child, Trayvon Martin, by a racist vigilante in Florida. The decisions of grand juries to not indict the officer who murdered Michael Brown or the officers who murdered Eric Garner—decisions that took place in the same week—sparked the nationwide protests, which burned for months.

The following year was also a watershed for solidarity between the Black struggle in the US and the fight for Palestinian freedom. While delegations of activists from around the world to Palestine had long been a way for people to learn about the Palestinian situation and show solidarity, that year saw more delegations of Black activists from the United States. Such groups included the Dream Defenders, whose first delegation was in 2015. The Dream Defenders was founded in Miami, Florida, in response to the murder of Trayvon Martin, and they organized campaigns against systematic racism. Their 2015 delegation was part of developing a focus on Palestine solidarity as a central aspect of the organization’s work. The delegation also included activists from Ferguson and members of Black Youth Project 100,³ a key organization in the Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of groups drawn together by the Black Lives Matter struggle.

That August, activists released the “2015 Black Solidarity With Palestine” statement, signed by more than a thousand Black activists, artists, and intellectuals. The statement, which was published on Ebony’s website, expressed a culmination of the previous year’s learning and activities. A year later saw another milestone with the publication of the Vision For Black Lives, drafted by activists in the Movement for Black Lives. A political platform, the Vision, also represented a culmination of thinking on a range of topics by Black activists, including the historic demand for reparations, resisting criminalization, and solidarity with Palestine. The document referred to Israel’s endless war on the Palestinians as a genocide and called for the end of US aid to Israel.4

The 2014–16 moment was a wave of Black–Palestine solidarity, but it was not the first. In visiting Palestine, writing words of solidarity, and joining Palestinians in the streets, Black activists in the twenty-first century were revisiting an historic relationship with deep roots. The Black Power era of the 1960s and ’70s was the context for the previous high-water mark of Black–Palestinian solidarity. It is not coincidental that these points of radical clarity regarding anti-Black racism and militant activity against it by Black activists produced learning and solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. The tendency for high points of Black struggle in the US has been toward internationalism. Moreover, given the central place that the Palestinian freedom struggle held in the mid-twentieth-century era of decolonization, Black Power militancy found an affinity with the Palestinian struggle in particular.

Black–Palestine solidarity in the 1960s

As Alex Lubin has noted, there are histories of affinities toward Palestine and imagined geographies of liberation among Black Americans that stretch back at least to the nineteenth century.⁵ Such longings were shaped by a combination of the political situation and social realities of Black people in the United States and Black Christian traditions’ orientations toward Palestine as a holy land.

Black Christian denominations, however, were not the only religious traditions in the Black community with a political outlook toward the Middle East. The Nation of Islam (NOI) of the 1950s and ’60s was another context for Black Americans to imagine the Middle East as a site of struggle and freedom. The political perspective of the NOI was shaped by founder Wallace Fard Muhammad’s interpretation of Islam and that of his successor, Elijah Muhammad, as well as a Black nationalist politics. The worldview involved both a religious orientation on the Middle East as the location of Mecca and a political orientation that was inspired by Arab nationalism. The NOI took particular inspiration from Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, both as a center of Arab nationalism and because of a sense of lineage connecting the ancient Egyptian civilization with the contemporary Black American population. The NOI’s publications reported on Egypt in the 1950s, and in particular on Nasser’s effort to nationalize the Suez Canal6—which Israel, France, and Britain responded to with military invasion. This was the NOI in which Malcolm X developed his international outlook and became a leader.

In 1957, Malcolm organized a meeting on decolonization with representatives from the governments of Egypt, Sudan, Ghana, Iraq, and Morocco.⁷ Activities like these, and his speeches at the time, indicate that Malcolm X took great inspiration from the 1955 Bandung Conference of representatives from newly independent states in Asia and Africa and from decolonization movements in the Arab world and Africa in particular. In his 1963 Detroit speech “Message to the Grassroots,” Malcolm says, “Once you study what happened at the Bandung Conference, and the results of the Bandung Conference, it actually serves as a model for the same procedure you and I can use to get our problems solved.” He continues, regarding the participants of the conference:

They began to recognize who their enemy was. The same man that was colonizing our people in Kenya was colonizing our people in the Congo. The same one in the Congo was colonizing our people in South Africa, and in Southern Rhodesia, and in Burma, and in India, and in Afghanistan, and in Pakistan. They realized all over the world where the dark man was being oppressed, he was being oppressed by the white man; where the dark man was being exploited, he was being exploited by the white man. So they got together on this basis—that they had a common enemy.⁸

It was with this perspective that Malcolm X came to learn about Palestine. He visited Palestine—briefly traveling to East Jerusalem—on a 1959 trip to the Middle East, between the beginning of his journey in Egypt, meeting with officials from Nasser’s government, and the end in Saudi Arabia. He made another brief visit to Palestine in 1964, again stopping between other parts of his journey, this time to Gaza.

Palestine gets an incidental mention in Malcolm X’s autobiography. In a passage whose main focus is on the dangers of assimilation for marginalized groups, he writes somewhat tangentially that the British helped “wrest Palestine away from the Arabs, the rightful owners.”⁹

But Malcolm wrote more directly about Israel elsewhere. In his 1964 article “Zionist Logic,” in Cairo’s Egyptian Gazette, he writes, “the ever-scheming European imperialists wisely placed Israel where she could geographically divide the Arab world, infiltrate and sow the seed of dissension among African leaders and also divide the Africans against the Asians.”10

Malcolm X’s perception of the Israeli colonization of Palestine was likely informed by his understanding of race relations involving Black people and Jews in the United States.¹¹ These included fraught power relationships of Jewish landlords and business owners exploiting Black people. Some of his commentary on Jews and Israel sees Jews as monolithic and has hints of antisemitic tropes regarding Jews, money, and power.¹² The predominant perspective that framed Malcolm X’s outlook on Palestine, however, was one of anticolonialism and Third World nationalism.

The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the legendary organization that grew out of the 1960 wave of sit-ins against Jim Crow segregation in the US South, also confronted Israel and US support for it. In August 1967, SNCC issued a paper titled “The Middle East Crisis,” which opens with an acknowledgement of the Jewish Holocaust as “one of the worst crimes against humanity,” and then presents a history of the British and Israeli colonization. Published just two months after the 1967 War, the paper contains nuance for its two-page brevity. It acknowledges, for example, not only the dispossession and siege of Palestinians but also racist discrimination against Arab Jews by Israel.¹³ It also points to the silencing of Jewish critics of Israel. The paper unfortunately refers to the European Rothschilds, attributing outsized credit to the family in the establishment of Israel and repeating an allusion to common antisemitic conspiracy theories in the process. But the overall framing of Israel and the struggle for Palestine in the context of colonization and the Third World revolt against it is evident in the conclusion:

In the Middle East, America has worked with 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 the Middle East and Africa!¹⁴

It makes sense that Black radicals in the United States came to solidarity with Palestine in the context of decolonization throughout Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Many saw the Black freedom struggle in the US in relationship to that context. In the same year that SNCC issued its statement on Palestine, members of the organization participated in the International Seminar on Apartheid, Racial Discrimination, and Colonialism in Southern Africa, which took place in Lusaka, Zambia. At the gathering, SNCC issued a position paper declaring that “Afro-Americans have watched with sympathy and concern the struggle against apartheid and white settler domination in eastern and southern Africa over the past twenty years.” They continued, emphasizing the centrality of an internationalist outlook to their struggle: “As the vanguard of the struggle against racism in America, SNCC is not unfamiliar with the problems of southern Africa.”15

SNCC activists wrote these words a year after formally coming out against the US war in Vietnam. SNCC may have been the vanguard of the Black freedom struggle, but they were not singular or unique in their understanding of that struggle in a global context. Rather, SNCC’s internationalism was expressive of a wider sentiment within the Black freedom struggle. While many Americans learn at least some of the words of civil rights leader Martin Luther King’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered at the 1963 March on Washington, less attention goes to his powerful “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which was published in the same year. In it, King sees the fight against Jim Crow and the centuries-long oppression of Black people in the US in a global context, and contrasts the progress of anticolonial efforts around the world with the obstinate defense of the racist status quo by the American power structure. He writes with frustration, “We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our God-given and constitutional rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.”¹⁶ Indeed, King not only took inspiration from Third World decolonization at a distance. He joined Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah and other anti-colonial leaders at the inauguration of the independence of the African nation in its capital Accra on March 6, 1957.¹⁷ Black leaders like King and Malcolm X—and countless others alongside them—saw the Black freedom struggle in the United States as part of a transnational struggle of people resisting racism and colonialism.

The anticolonial struggles and newly independent, formerly colonized nations that so inspired Malcolm X in their gathering at Bandung and in their pursuit of new, nationalist governments and programs, stood as part of a global backdrop to the Black freedom struggle in the US. Decolonization around the world inspired and set the bar for Black rebels in the United States to reach.

An internationalist consciousness then, for many Black militants, was part and parcel of a radical Black consciousness. Black Panther Assata Shakur in her narration of her own radicalization in her memoir Assata, writes that “any community seriously concerned with its own freedom has to be concerned with other peoples’ freedom as well. The victory of oppressed people anywhere in the world is a victory for Black people. Each time one of imperialism’s tentacles is cut off we are closer to liberation.”

This understanding not only led Black revolutionaries to internationalism, it also led them to convince others of its importance. Emory Douglas, the artist, Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the designer of its newspaper, The Black Panther, spoke in a 2016 interview about the mission of the paper. When asked why The Black Panther had an international section and why it highlighted the struggles of Indigenous peoples, Chicanx and Latinx people in the US, and people resisting colonization around the world, Douglas responded, “They were oppressed, just like we were here. That’s the essence of it. And we were a resistance movement. So in that context, you’re always in solidarity with those who are like you.”18

The Palestinian liberation struggle occupied a special place in the Third World revolt unfolding and inspiring Black radicals in the US. A statement published by the Committee of Black Americans for Truth in the Middle-East in the New York Times on November 1, 1970, highlights that role: “WE STATE that the Palestinian Revolution is the vanguard of the Arab Revolution and is part of the anti-colonial revolution which is going on in places such as Vietnam, Mozambique, Angola, Brazil, Laos, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.”¹⁹ The statement, titled “An Appeal by Black Americans Against United States Support of the Zionist Government of Israel,” communicates not only a broad framing of the Palestinian struggle as part of the broader fight for Third World freedom but also a rich understanding of the condition and resistance of Palestinians, informed by detailed knowledge of the Palestinian resistance movement and close observation of it and responses to it. The statement refers to the 1967 War between Israel, the Palestinians, and neighboring Arab states—a pivotal moment that impacted many of the Black radicals who came to solidarity with Palestine. But its more immediate inspiration came from the siege by the Jordanian military of Palestinians within that country, known as Black September. The writers of the statement also draw parallels between US and Israeli societies, finding resonance in the condition of Black and colonized peoples in the US, and both Palestinians and Arab Jews under Israeli rule, writing: “WE STATE that the exploitation experienced by Afro-Americans, Native Americans (Indians), Puerto Ricans, and Chicanos (Mexican-Americans) is similar to the exploitation of Palestinian Arabs and Oriental Jews by the Zionist State of Israel.”

The Black Panther Party of Assata Shakur and Emory Douglas is perhaps the organization of its era best known regarding solidarity between the Black and Palestinian struggles. The Panthers proclaimed in their 1970 statement regarding Palestine, “We support the Palestinians’ 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.”

The Panthers’ relationship with the Palestinian struggle was not oneway. The Black liberation struggle in the US had a powerful impact, inspiring movements from the Irish civil rights struggle to Okinawan rebels against US militarization and Japanese colonialism in their Pacific home.20 Indigenous peoples of Australia formed an organization in 1971 called the Black Panthers, which was affiliated with the BPP in the US. Such was also the case with the Polynesian Panthers in Aoteroa (the indigenous Maori name for the islands also known as New Zealand), the Dalit Panthers of India, and indeed, the Israeli Black Panthers, whose membership were Arab Jews facing discrimination in a state where white nationalism and European colonialism had served as models since its origins.

As with so many other peoples in revolt at the time, the relationship of Palestinians to Black Power activists, and the Panthers in particular, was a mutual one. Those relations were not just from a distance; they were cemented at particular sites. One was the BPP’s Foreign Office in Algiers. The North African capital served as a hub for revolutionary representatives from decolonizing movements around the world. As Bouchra Khalili notes, the various foreign offices of revolutionary organizations and embassies of postcolonial governments constituted an “archipelago” of bureaus in which militants from the Third World and oppressed populations in the West moved between “islands” of radical spaces and conversations.²¹ Revolutionaries from Angola, Guinea, Cape Verde, Portugal, and Palestine elsewhere conferred and mingled. In this setting, the BPP had extensive contact with Palestinian revolutionaries. BPP chairman Huey Newton and other Panthers also visited Palestinians, both in Palestine and in refugee camps in the region.

The League of Revolutionary Black Workers, an organization of Black labor militants whose project fused the politics of the Black Power movement with the socialist vision of seizing the means of production, also held a commitment to Palestinian freedom. As with the Panthers and other contemporaries, League members’ solidarity with Palestine was rooted in a broader internationalist outlook. The League emerged from the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), an organization of revolutionary Black auto workers in Detroit who sought to spark a workers’ revolution by organizing in what was then the linchpin of US capitalism: Michigan’s auto industry. Formed by longtime, seasoned revolutionaries, DRUM recognized the industrial intersection that auto manufacturing represented—with the steel, rubber, and other industries connected to it. They also seized upon the location of Black workers within the production process, as they were super-exploited on the assembly line, subject to racist harassment and discrimination in the factories, but possessing an outsized power relative to their numbers. As an issue of the South End, Wayne State University’s newspaper—which was effectively taken over by DRUM and turned into a revolutionary publication—argued, “DRUM’s scope is not limited to the oppressive situation at Chrysler, nor all the plants for that matter. Although most organizing activity will be in the plants, DRUM sees its long-range goal as the complete and total social transformation of society. This will take the effort of the whole Black community as well as other progressive sectors of society.”

The outlook of the leaders of DRUM was as internationalist as it was strategic. In Finally Got the News, a documentary film featuring members of DRUM, founding member and leader Ken Cockrel describes the capitalist enemy that the workers in Detroit face, someone whose labor is parasitic rather than productive and whose reach extends well beyond the borders of the United States. “He owns and controls and therefore receives the benefit from,” Cockrel says. “That’s what they call profit. He’s fucking with shit in Bolivia, he’s fucking with shit in Chile, he’s Anaconda, he’s United Fruit, he’s in mining. He ain’t never in his life produced shit!” DRUM also devoted an issue of the South End to the Greek revolt unfolding against that country’s military junta in the late 1960s and 70s.22

As a center of Black foment in the Black Power era, and the home to a large population of Arab Americans—also shaped, inspired, and intimately related with the Third World revolt—Detroit was a site of learning about Arab anticolonial revolt in particular. In 1968, DRUM collaborated with Arab and other activists to organize a screening of The Battle of Algiers, the anticolonial classic film about the Algerian Revolution. The organizers sold six hundred tickets, packing the theater—which erupted in applause whenever the Arab rebels struck a blow against the French colonizers.23

DRUM and the League then took up the cause of Palestinian freedom both informed by their anti-imperialist consciousness and their proximity to Arab militants with whom they sought solidarity. The organization used the South End to educate its readership and agitate in support of the Palestinian struggle. Between 1967 and ’69, the newspaper ran several letters to the editor and articles by members of the Organization of Arab Students (OAS) about Palestine and the Third World revolt.²⁴ While DRUM faced repression throughout its short history, it was the decision of the South End to editorialize in support of Palestinian rights that led to the administration of Wayne State University to try to expel the organization from the campus and take away its control of the newspaper. Following an editorial sympathetic to the Palestinian resistance organization Fateh, university president William Keast accused the paper of antisemitism “reminiscent of Hitler’s Germany.”²⁵ While members of DRUM made it clear that they were not antisemitic, the newspaper continued to publish pro-Palestine articles.

Writing from members of OAS in the South End was one example of the collaborations between Arab radicals and the League in Detroit. The South End promoted and cosponsored protests against Israeli leaders Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin when they made appearances in Detroit. OAS members sometimes gave talks at League meetings and brought Palestinian leaders, such as members of Fateh, to meet League members when they visited from the Middle East. And OAS members occasionally joined the League in their own work, as when leader Nabeel Abraham distributed DRUM pamphlets with the organization outside of the Dodge Main Plant.²⁶

Conclusion: The hopeful present

The wave of Black–Palestine solidarity that rose in 2014 continues to build at the end of the decade. Activists in cities across the country are organizing campaigns to call attention to the consistent parallels between the oppression and resistance of Black Americans and Palestinians in Palestine. These include efforts to expose and disrupt US local police departments’ collaborations with Israeli security forces, such as Jewish Voice for Peace’s Deadly Exchange campaign. In April 2018, such organizing led the city council of Durham, North Carolina, to vote unanimously to ban the city’s law enforcement from working with Israel. Similarly, activists in the United States work to connect crises facing predominantly Black residents, such as the struggle to access drinkable water in cities like Michigan’s Flint and Detroit, with Israel’s denial of water to Palestinians in Gaza, and Palestinians in Palestine do the same.27

Moreover, Black public intellectuals continue to call attention to Palestinian oppression and draw parallels with Black oppression in the US in high-profile ways. On November 28, 2018, Black academic Marc Lamont Hill spoke at the annual commemoration of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People at the United Nations. The day after Hill’s speech, in which he called for solidarity with the struggle to free Palestine “from the river to the sea,” CNN fired Hill from his position as a commentator on the news network. CNN’s reaction drew more attention to Hill’s speech and gave him a larger platform to discuss its content. “There’s no way that Black folk can be free if there’s folk on the continent who are unfree, in Latin America who are unfree, or in Palestine who are unfree, because we’re all oppressed by the same system,” Hill explained on the popular hip-hop morning show The Breakfast Club, which invited him to talk about the speech and his firing.²⁸

This dynamic, in which a prominent Black public intellectual took a highly visible stand in solidarity with Palestine, paid a price for it, and the subsequent Zionist reaction opened more space to discuss Palestine solidarity, was repeated. In January 2019, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute announced that it was rescinding the Fred Shuttlesworth Award that it had been scheduled to honor Angela Davis with the following month. The news organization Al.com found through investigation that the Civil Rights Institute’s decision came after pressure from the Birmingham Holocaust Center, pointing to Davis’s Palestine solidarity activism.²⁹

Instead of casting a shadow on Davis, however, the Civil Rights Institute’s decision led to public condemnation of the organization itself. Birmingham’s city council unanimously adopted a resolution “recognizing the life work of Angela Davis” in response to the rescinding, and the chair, vice chair, and secretary of the institute’s board all resigned in protest of the decision. Davis reaffirmed her solidarity with Palestine in interviews with media following the incident, and Birmingham activists organized a celebration of her work to take place instead of the derailed awards ceremony.

In the same month, antiracist legal scholar and author of the book The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander, took the opportunity on Martin Luther King Day to argue that she was inspired by King’s controversial decision to denounce the US war in Vietnam to declare her solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. In a column Alexander published in the New York Times entitled “Time to Break the Silence on Palestine,” she said that the same commitment to moral and political integrity that led King to take his 1967 stand compelled her to advocate for the rights of Palestinians, despite the costs that come with doing so. “I aim to speak with great courage and conviction” about the cause of Palestine, she writes, because “my conscience leaves me no choice.”30

Perhaps the most visible face of Black solidarity with Palestine, however, is progressive Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who, in the first session of her first term in office, repeatedly called attention to Israeli abuses, US support for them, and the power of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington. Zionists, led by President Trump, have responded with vitriolic attacks on Omar, smearing her as antisemitic and drawing on Islamophobic tropes that portray antisemitism as intrinsic to the Muslim community. Even the leadership of Omar’s own Democratic Party has condemned her comments as antisemitic, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer drafting a resolution condemning antisemitism, which was directed at Omar. That effort failed, though, because of public support for Omar, and the language of the resolution was broadened to include other forms of bigotry.³¹

Despite the hostile responses, Omar has persisted and turned the attacks on her for her solidarity with Palestine into opportunities to speak further on the subject. After Israel, at President Trump’s suggestion, denied Omar and her colleague Palestinian American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib access to Palestine for a congressional delegation, Omar shared the would-be itinerary of their trip on Twitter.³² The post highlighted recent Israeli abuses as well as solidarity efforts by Palestinian and Israeli activists.

These high-profile exchanges, in which Black public figures declare and promote solidarity with Palestine, are adding to the context in which growing numbers of people question US and Israeli dominant perspectives and find affinity with the Palestinian struggle. While there is a longstanding set of conversations regarding the connections between Black and Palestinian perspectives in particular, the Black–Palestine solidarity nexus is increasingly becoming a point of reference for activists—Black, Palestinian, and of other backgrounds.

Like the waves of Black revolt before it, the 2020 Black-led uprisings in US cities, sparked by the strangulation of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, opened a new chapter both in the Black freedom struggle and in Black–Palestine solidarity. That wave has been impactful in its own right, as it has called greater attention to the plight of Black women—such as Breonna Taylor, who was murdered in Louisville weeks prior to Floyd’s murder—and launched a mainstream conversation about the defunding and abolishing of the police while also reviving a conversation about slavery and historic racism. These uprisings were also truly transnational, with protesters across Europe defacing and toppling statues of men involved in colonialism and the slave trade, and activists from France to Australia marching to demand justice for Floyd and Taylor, as well as local victims of racist police violence.

In Palestine, activists made connections between the murder of Floyd and that of Iyad Halek, a Palestinian man with autism whom Israeli police had killed in Jerusalem just days before. Beyond the straightforward parallels, even deeper conversations unfolded. The fact that the convenience store that called the police on Floyd was owned by Palestinians sparked an interrogation within Palestinian–American communities of their location in US society and relationship to the Black population. More than anything, the rebellions reoriented Palestinian activists as it refocused all politics in the US. Palestinians and solidarity activists renewed their commitments to supporting the Black freedom struggle, both because Black liberation in its own right deserves solidarity and because of the implications of Black resistance for other oppressed people the world over. As Kristian Davis Bailey wrote, “The greatest internal threat to the US empire is that of a Black revolution.”33

The Black radical tradition calls attention to the anti-Black racism essential to US society and casts doubt on the compatibility of Black freedom and the United States project. After all, the Black presence in what is now called the United States, beginning with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, spans nearly five hundred years. And yet the Black American population has yet to experience civil equality in US society. Instead, it remains bound by deep and systemic racism, described by Ruth Wilson Gilmore as the “fatal couplings of power and difference.”34

Similarly, the prospect of Palestinian freedom explodes the notion of Israeli democracy, showing over the course of the Zionist project that the most basic rights for Palestinians—such as that to return to the homes from which they were expelled—are incompatible with it. The Black–Palestinian intersection then is a powerful one, pointing necessarily to deep critiques of US and Israeli societies and politics, and the transnational systems of power in which they are embedded, leading those who engage with it to revolutionary conclusions regarding both countries and beyond. That intersection is generative and is serving a powerful role in the education and radicalization of a new generation of revolutionaries, as it has in the past.

Previous waves of Black–Palestine solidarity pointed to broader, liberatory, socialist projects. The Black American radicals and organizations referenced in this chapter had a range of political perspectives. But they shared outlooks that framed their actions in the Black freedom movement in the US in the context of decolonizing struggles targeting American capitalism and Western imperialism. Similarly, Palestine and its region in the 1960s and ’70s saw the flourishing of the Palestinian socialist movement. And in the Third World revolt of that time—with sites of socialist experimentation all over the world—the struggle for Palestinian liberation and the Black freedom struggle in the US had special places as especially incendiary and inspiring revolts against nakedly racist and colonial projects.

The central places of the Israeli state and of US empire in global capitalism and imperialism have only matured and become more entrenched since that time. As we see the reemergence of Black–Palestine solidarity, drawing on powerful histories and generating new understandings and outlooks, the challenge of developing revolutionary visions of liberation for Palestine, Black America, and all oppressed people remains critical.