STRUGGLE AND REVOLUTION
The Black Panthers and the Guerrilla Image
ON JULY 22, 1969, in the Algerian capital of Algiers, Eldridge Cleaver publicly proclaimed that Israel was an American “puppet and pawn” and that “al-Fateh will win”—a reference to the largest and most important Palestinian guerrilla organization.1 An al-Fateh official stood by his side as Cleaver, minister of information for the Black Panther Party, spoke these words in support of the Palestinian national resistance movement. What was Cleaver doing in an Arab-majority country, and why was one of the most notable leaders of Black Power’s most visible group in the late 1960s denouncing Israel and hailing al-Fateh?
Without doubt, one of the most memorable manifestations of militant Black Power in the 1960s and early 1970s was the Black Panther Party (BPP). Much maligned and misunderstood by hostile, frightened whites, the Panthers conjured up the fear that blacks were rising up, bearing arms, and fighting back—eschewing the nonviolent resistance preached by Martin Luther King Jr. What is much less remembered is that the Black Panther Party also provided some of the sharpest and most vivid denunciations of Israel, and support for the Palestinians, of any other group in the Black Power movement. As with Malcolm X and SNCC, the reason had to do with the group’s theoretical understandings of foreign policy, of its own stance vis-à-vis the anticolonial struggles that were raging throughout the Third World, and its imaginings of itself and its revolutionary role in America.
The Black Panther Party was formed in Oakland, California, in late October of 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Newton attended Merritt College and took law courses at Oakland City College and San Francisco Law School. By the mid-1960s he was familiar with the writings of revolutionaries like Mao Zedong, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and Frantz Fanon. Seale also attended Merritt College, where he first met Newton in 1962. Two years later, Seale became an organizer with the black revolutionary organization the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM).
The Black Panthers initially focused on domestic issues like police harassment of blacks in Oakland and the BPP’s legal rights to carry firearms in public. Yet as black nationalists influenced by Malcolm X, RAM, and Marxist teachings, the BPP also quickly developed its thinking about foreign policy and the manner in which it intersected with the situation facing American blacks. In this regard the Panthers shared the deepening internationalism of SNCC and the understanding of the connection between the black freedom struggle at home and anticolonialist revolution abroad. As Eldridge Cleaver expressed it in 1968: “The link between America’s undercover support of colonialism abroad and the bondage of the Negro at home becomes increasingly clear. Those who are primarily concerned with improving the Negro’s condition recognize, as do proponents of the liquidation of America’s neo-colonial network, that their fight is one and the same. . . . It is at this point, at the juncture of foreign policy, that the Negro revolution becomes one with the world revolution.”2
THE PANTHERS’ STANCE ON PALESTINE
The international attention garnered by armed Palestinian guerrillas from groups like al-Fateh and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in the years after 1967 caught the attention of Black Power militants. Of the Third World struggles being waged in the late 1960s, the Panthers could more easily relate to Palestinians as Arabs and Muslims than to Asian freedom fighters such as those in the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) in Vietnam. The contemporary popularity of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, with its many references to “Negroes and Arabs” and descriptions of the Algerian war of independence—along with the film The Battle of Algiers and the travel to Algeria and elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East carried out by a number of black Americans—helped further the bonds of revolutionary and cultural solidarity between American blacks and Arab Muslims like those in Algeria and Palestine. Images of Palestinian fida’iyyin (Arabic: those who sacrifice themselves, i.e., guerrillas) carrying their AK-47 assault rifles fit in well with the gun-toting Black Panthers.
The Black Panthers also saw a similarity between their struggle against the structural underpinnings of white supremacy and capitalism in America and that of the Palestinians because both were fighting alone against overwhelming odds. In South Vietnam the Viet Cong struggle against the Americans had been joined by the North Vietnamese army, whereas the Palestinians did not benefit significantly from the military intervention of surrounding Arab states. Black militants in the United States pounced on the image of the brave Palestinians, waging alone what they called a people’s war against tremendous odds. This appealed to the Panthers’ own sense of fighting alone against more powerful forces. Moreover, their attempts to build a vibrant, revolutionary culture, including on an artistic level, for American blacks were strengthened by the language and visual imagery supplied by Palestinian groups, who were adept and active in their publicity/propaganda efforts.
It comes as no surprise, then, that the BPP quickly embraced the Palestinian cause in 1967. In fact, the first expression of this support came fewer than nine months after the party was formed. In July of 1967 the party’s paper, the Black Panther, printed its first article on the Arab-Israeli conflict shortly after the war. The “article” was actually just a reprint of an English-language Chinese government denunciation of the preemptive Israeli strike in the June war and offered “firm support for the Arab people’s fight against U.S.-Israeli aggression.”3 Despite this early support for the Arabs, it would not be until October 12, 1968, that the newspaper again ran an article on the Arab-Israeli conflict, one that championed al-Fateh. The following month, the November 16 issue stated that Palestinian refugee camps run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine refugees in the Near East were “concentration camps,” and it boldly asserted that “Israel IS because Palestine’s right to be was canceled.”4
The following year the BPP dramatically increased its public and private statements and activities regarding the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict. In January of 1969 the Black Panther carried al-Fateh’s first general international communiqué to the world press. That same issue carried a Third World Press news story, datelined Damascus and based on an al-Fateh military communiqué, about al-Fateh guerrilla activities.5 Three months later, BPP field marshal Donald “DC” Cox hailed al-Fateh at a rally in San Francisco.6 From then on, a torrent of stories about the Arab-Israeli conflict came out regularly in the party’s newspaper. In fact, of the forty-three issues of the Black Panther that ran from June 1, 1969, until March 28, 1970, the party ran thirty-three articles or other items in support of the Arabs or attacking Israel.7
One reason for this sudden and dramatic increase in the BPP’s interest in Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1969 was that the BPP had begun finding out more about the conflict by that point, including through contacts with the PLO’s office in New York. Richard Earl Moore, who later changed his name to Dhoruba bin Wahad, was one of those who served as a Black Panthers liaison to the office.8 Yet the main reason for the BPP’s growing support for the Palestinians starting in 1969 was no doubt the presence of Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria in June of that year and his close contacts with Palestinian political and guerrilla figures located there.
ELDRIDGE CLEAVER IN ALGERIA
Cleaver was the Panther’s high-profile minister of information who in 1968 published the best-selling book Soul on Ice. He went underground in late 1968 to avoid prosecution for his involvement in a gun battle with police and eventually made his way to Cuba in December of 1968. After seven months there, the Cuban government arranged for him to fly surreptitiously to Algeria on a Cuban passport. Quite soon, however, Cuban officials in the country approached Cleaver and said that the Algerians had discovered he was in the country and were none too happy about the situation. Handing him a ticket to Amman, Jordan, the Cubans then said that they would help him get to an al-Fateh military camp in Jordan, where he could publicly surface and announce his exile.9 In the end Cleaver and his entourage remained under cover in Algeria.
Cleaver surfaced publicly the following month when he officially opened the Afro-American Information Center in Algiers on July 22, 1969. No doubt, one reason for choosing that time to surface was because the Pan-African Cultural Festival had opened in Algiers the day before, drawing people from all over Africa and the world for the festivities, which lasted until August 1, 1969. Accompanying Cleaver were several other Panthers, including Emory Douglas, David Hilliard, and Cleaver’s wife, Kathleen Neal Cleaver. The office was festooned with posters of Huey Newton, as well as artwork done by Douglas, the party’s artist-in-residence. The Afro-American Information Center was located near the office of al-Fateh. On that day, in fact, an al-Fateh official stood by Cleaver’s side at the new information center when he proclaimed that Israel was an American “puppet and pawn” and that “al-Fateh will win.” The al-Fateh figure probably was Mahdi Saidam, who headed the al-Fateh information office in Algiers; Cleaver also gave a speech at Saidam’s nearby office.10
The Palestinians were anxious to woo the small Black Panther delegation and the other American blacks attending the festival to their cause. One factor working in the Palestinians’ favor was the fact that they spoke English. Alongside the distinctive Algerian Arabic dialect, most Algerian officials and other revolutionary groups the Panthers had encountered in Algeria spoke French. The Palestinians’ ability to communicate with Cleaver and his entourage in their own language drew the two groups closer together than most. Kathleen Neal Cleaver also recalled that the al-Fateh cadre “had a knowledge of the United States and its devastating politics vis-à-vis their struggle,” which also helped the Panthers see the interconnectedness between their struggle and that of the Palestinians.11
Al-Fateh made a statement at the festival even though it was not an African organization, a statement that the group also printed as an English-language pamphlet titled To Our African Brothers. The statement linked the Palestinians with Africa by asserting that even though the Palestinians and their struggle were not part of “Africa the continent,” they were part of “Africa the cause.” There was a geographic map of the world and there was a political map, al-Fateh asserted, the latter of which showed the divide between racism, colonialism, and repression vs. revolution, rebellion, and freedom. Such viewpoints no doubt made an impression on Cleaver.12
Cleaver also garnered the attention of higher-ranking Palestinian officials. Yasir Arafat, head of both al-Fateh and the PLO, reportedly asked to meet him.13 Arafat got his chance later that year. From December 25 to December 28, 1969, Algiers was host to another international gathering called the Congress of Palestine Support Committees, which brought together Palestinian supporters from around the world. On December 26 a PLO official with the nom de guerre Abu Hassan spoke at the meeting, after which Arafat and a representative of the African National Congress did as well. Next up was Cleaver. Among other things, the Panther leader said, “The Party did not arrive at this position [on the Palestinians] after having read [about it]” but rather because of its own experience in America. “Black people in Babylon [America] were being blocked by forces we did not understand. We found there were certain people within the United States who wanted to define our struggle for us.” This was a not-so-subtle swipe at those in the progressive movement in America who were opposed to the BPP joining the chorus of Black Power support of the Palestinians and criticism of Israel. Cleaver probably was referring specifically to Jews, although he made sure to note that blacks were not anti-Semitic but rather were “anti-imperialism and slavery because these are the things we have suffered from.”14 The next day, December 27, Arafat publicly embraced Cleaver in a news story broadcast around the world.
The Algerians did not quite know what to do with Cleaver and his comrades at first, and he was forced to cool his heels for a year, doing little besides granting interviews. A year later they decided to recognize Cleaver and the other Panthers officially and grant them formal status as a liberation organization on par with about a dozen other such groups they hosted. On September 13, 1970, Cleaver and his entourage officially opened the office of the Black Panthers’ international section in Algiers, in the two-story Villa Boumaraf, which formerly had been occupied by the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (the Viet Cong). Kathleen Cleaver put her competence in French to good use running day-to-day affairs for the office in a country where Arabic and French were the two main languages. Kathleen Cleaver was an impressive young woman. She studied at Oberlin College and Barnard College at Columbia University before dropping out in 1966 to work on the staff of SNCC in New York and Atlanta. She joined the BPP in 1967, the year she married Eldridge Cleaver, and rose to become the party’s communications secretary and the first woman on the BPP central committee.
The new office was almost immediately busy with issues relating to the Palestinians. Three days after it opened, Jordan’s King Hussein ordered his army to attack PLO guerrillas in his country in what came to be a bloody two-week conflict that Palestinians called “Black September.” The statement that the BPP international section issued in the midst of the fighting on September 18, 1970, once again stated that the Palestinian struggle and the BPP’s struggle were one and the same. It read in part: “The struggle of the Palestinian people for their freedom and liberation from US imperialism and its lackeys is also our struggle. We recognize that if the Palestinian people cannot get their freedom and liberation, neither can we.”15 It represented a sincere belief that the BPP and the Palestinians were fighting together in the same trench, for the Panthers’ conceptualization of themselves as armed freedom fighters of color seemed to demand no less.
With Kathleen Cleaver’s organizational help, the BPP international section continued to forge links with PLO cadres and supporters in Algeria and elsewhere in the Arab world. One notable example occurred in early 1971, when the BPP sent a representative to the Second International Symposium on Palestine, which was held from February 13 to February 17 in Kuwait. The al-Fateh office paid for the airline tickets. Kathleen Cleaver spent some time researching the Palestinian question and discussing it with Elaine Klein, an American who was advising the Algerian government, and then drafted a statement reflecting the BPP’s position on Israel and the Palestinians. The speech was delivered at the conference by BPP field marshal Donald “DC” Cox, who had fled into exile and arrived at the BPP international section in Algeria in March of 1970.16 It read: “The Palestinian liberation struggle stands in the vanguard of the struggle against the Zionist menace that plagues the people of the entire Arab world in general, and has usurped the national rights and freedom of the Palestinian people in particular. . . . The Black Panther Party unconditionally and firmly supports the just struggle of the Palestinian people and their war of national salvation against the lackey state of Israel and its imperialist backers.”17
“ZIONISM (KOSHER NATIONALISM) + IMPERIALISM = FASCISM”
Back in “Babylon,” as Eldridge Cleaver called the United States, Panther activists continued to raise the Palestinian cause in speeches and publications. The BPP leadership began escalating its public comments about the Arab-Israeli conflict and, like Cleaver was doing, defending the Panthers’ stance against criticism among liberal allies. Just about the time that Cleaver first arrived in Algeria in mid-1969, BPP chair Bobby Seale published an article entitled “Our Enemy’s Friends Are Also Our Enemies” in the Black Panther. He gave voice to the Panthers’ anger at those on the Left who begrudged them their embrace of the PLO: “We want to make it clear to all the S.D.S.’s [Students for a Democratic Society members] and P.Lers [Progressive Labor Party members], the pigs and the fascists, that we have a mind of our own, and yes we support Al-Fath [sic] in the struggle. And that we make our decisions and we support who we want to support, and that we’re here to make revolution.”18
Connie Matthews, who was the BPP’s international coordinator by 1970, also attacked whites—in this case, Jews—who turned against the Panthers after the party publicly came down on the side of the Palestinians. Matthews, born Connie Smith in Jamaica, was one of the few top Panther leaders who was not American. She published an article in the Black Panther that railed at flagging Jewish support for the BPP: “The White Left in the U.S.A. is comprised of a large percentage of the Jewish population. Before the Black Panther Party took its stand on the Palestinian people’s struggle there were problems but the support of the White Left for the Black Panther Party was concrete. However, since our stand the White Left started floundering and became undecided. This leaves us to believe that a large portion of these people are Zionists and are therefore racists.”19 The Panthers took pains to stress the commonality of the struggle they waged alongside the Palestinians. The Palestinians felt the same way. The Black Panther quoted PLO chairman Yasir Arafat in December of 1969: “The Palestinian Liberation Movement considers itself a part of the people’s struggle against international imperialism. We are fighting the same enemy. The mask may differ, but the face remains the same.”20
BPP minister of education Raymond “Masai” Hewitt stated much the same thing earlier in August 1969 when he said, “We recognize that our oppression takes different forms—Zionism in Palestine and fascism here in America—but the cause is the same: it’s U.S. imperialism.”21 Hewitt and the PLO may have shared more than just ideology; they may have been in direct contact. Hewitt later spoke at a March 11, 1970, Mobilization for Palestine teach-in in Montreal organized by the Québecois Palestine Solidarity Committee and various Arab student groups. According to the diary kept by Robert L. Bay, a top Panther lieutenant who accompanied Hewitt on the trip, Hewitt was in Montreal because the BPP central committee wanted him to “speak with PLO representatives.”22
Kathleen Neal Cleaver agreed with Matthews, Hewitt, and other Panthers that this commonality of enemies drew the Panthers together with the Palestinians. She noted that this connection drew her and other Panthers in Algeria close to the PLO’s representatives there: “The lack of any language barrier between the Black Panthers and the representatives of the liberation movements from South Africa and Zimbabwe made associations between them, in personal terms, the closest, but in political terms the Panthers found their strongest support among those directly harmed by the United States’ policies: the Palestinians, the Vietnamese, and the North Koreans.”23
In 1970 the Black Panthers went on an all-out public relations offensive against Israel and in defense of the Palestinians. When an interviewer asked him what had been the greatest inspiration for the BPP, Huey Newton replied, “I think that not only Fidel [Castro] and Che [Guevara], Ho Chi Minh and Mao [Zedong] and Kim Il Sung, but also all the guerrilla bands that have been operating in Mozambique and Angola, and the Palestinian guerrillas who are fighting for a socialist world.”24 During this period, when party cofounders Newton and Seale were in jail or on trial, BPP chief of staff David Hilliard essentially assumed leadership of the party in the United States. As a high-profile Panther, he, too, began speaking out on the Arab-Israeli conflict. The February 17, 1970, issue of the Black Panther quoted him: “We want to make it very clear that we support all those who are actively engaged in the struggle against U.S. Imperialism and Zionism, which means to us racial supremacy.”
The Black Panther became a major source of BPP commentary on the Middle East in 1970. In January it published an article titled “Zionism (Kosher Nationalism) + Imperialism = Fascism.” It was rife with revolutionary rhetoric: “Victory to the people’s struggle of Palestine! Victory to Al-Fat’h! Victory to Al-Assifa [Fateh’s military wing]!” It claimed that the Zionists were replicating what the Nazis had done, and it repeated the belief that Israel was a mere tool of Western imperialism. “The Zionist fascist state of Israel,” the article proclaimed, “is a puppet and lackey of the imperialists and must be smashed.”25
As it had done for SNCC, artwork became an important medium for explaining ideology to Black Panther members. To a much greater extent, however, the BPP made its revolutionary art one of the cornerstones not only for spreading its ideas to a constituency unaccustomed to reading heavy theoretical writings but also for creating a new black revolutionary culture. The Panthers made extensive use of the art of the BPP’s minister of culture, Emory Douglas, who had studied art at San Francisco City College prior to joining the BPP in early 1967. Soon he was put in charge of the Black Panther, but he is most remembered for his cartoons and other vivid political artwork.
Believing, like Huey Newton did, that the black community in the inner cities did not possess a culture of reading, Douglas worked hard to make his graphics tell a visual story to match what the articles in the paper were saying. His evocative images became classics of revolutionary art in 1960s–1970s America. Douglas described this new revolutionary culture in this way: “Just as the liberation struggle brings about new politics, it also brings about a new culture, a revolutionary culture. . . . Also out of the struggle for liberation comes a new literature and art. Based on the people’s struggle, this revolutionary art takes on new form. The revolutionary artist begins to arm his talent with steel, as well as learning the art of self-defense, becoming one with the people by going into their midst, not standing aloof, and going into the very thick of practical struggle.”26
The Black Panther ran two of Douglas’s evocative cartoons about the Arab-Israeli conflict in March of 1970. Their purpose was to translate Panther ideology about Israel and the Palestinians into a simple graphic form that linked Israel with the ever-present “pig” so often denounced by the Panthers in the 1960s and 1970s. Pig was often used as a negative epithet referring to a police officer, although it also had a broader connotation of those in control, those in authority. As early as an article titled “Palestine Guerrillas vs Israeli Pigs,” which ran in a January 1969 issue of the Black Panther, the BPP sometimes referred to the Israelis as pigs.
Douglas used the image of the pig in the cartoons he drew for the March 21, 1970, issue. An article titled “Al Fath [sic] Does Not Intend to Push the Jews into the Sea” was accompanied by cartoons featuring America and Israel as pigs. The first cartoon depicted the United States as a large-breasted female pig sitting atop an American flag, nursing two piglets, one labeled West Germany and the other Israel. Other piglets, bearing the names of American allies like France and Japan but also Rhodesia and South Africa, clamored to suck as well. The other illustration featured two drooling pigs standing nose-to-nose. One was labeled “U.S. Imperialism” and wore a Statue of Liberty–type crown; it held an American flag under one arm while the other arm raised a torch like the Statue of Liberty. Its nose read “Nixon.” The second pig wore an eye patch and carried an Israeli flag tucked under one arm that clutched an automatic rifle while the other hand raised a scepter bearing the Star of David. Its nose read “Moshe Dayan.”27
Douglas’s cartoons symbolized one of the important functions that the Palestinian cause served for the BPP and the wider Black Power movement in the late 1960s. It afforded them the chance to deepen their own attempts to create a revolutionary black culture of resistance at home by linking it to the Palestinians’ culture of resistance, which was becoming increasingly popular throughout the global Left, particularly in terms of visual culture. Palestinian groups like al-Fateh and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine already were adept at producing posters and other publicity/propaganda vehicles that were replete with images of steely, armed guerrillas—both men and women—to enhance their written narrative. Indeed, Palestinian poster production was among the largest in the world in the 1960s and found audiences in many countries.28 Like the BPP, the Palestinians were reaching out both at home and abroad to audiences that often responded better to images than to the written word.
The BPP used Palestinian-themed art and sloganeering not only to generate support for the Palestinians but, equally important, to bolster the domestic revolutionary image they were creating for themselves as armed revolutionaries.29 As Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton noted in 1967, self-definition through culture and other means was an essential part of Black Power: “Black people must redefine themselves, and only they can do that. Throughout this country, vast segments of the black communities are beginning to recognize the need to assert their own definitions, to reclaim their history, their culture.”30 Black Power’s stance alongside the Palestinians was therefore more than just another chapter in its storied history in the 1960s; it was part and parcel of the very revolutionary identity it sought to create.
Of the various Palestinian guerrilla/political groups, al-Fateh received the lion’s share of the Black Panther Party’s attention. The Black Panther carried a number of articles about al-Fateh, as well as al-Fateh communiqués, photos, and statements of its leader, Yasir Arafat. The reason no doubt was because Cleaver became close with al-Fateh officials in Algeria and because al-Fateh, the best funded of the Palestinian groups, had a good public relations apparatus both in the Middle East and in the United States. It published numerous statements and periodicals in English that were available in the United States. This was an interesting alliance given that al-Fateh was basically a conservative nationalist movement that eschewed the kind of socioeconomic revolutionary talk emanating from the BPP.
HUEY NEWTON’S EVENTUAL ABOUT-FACE
Attacks on the Panthers’ stance on the Middle East eventually prompted Huey Newton to speak out publicly about their embrace of the Palestinian cause and attacks against Israel. Shortly after his release from two years in jail, he held a press conference on August 26, 1970, at which he spoke at length about the BPP’s stance on the Arab-Israeli conflict and on anti-Semitism. While solidly supportive of the Palestinians, Newton’s statement nonetheless revealed his own shifting view of the conflict. Instead of simply attacking Israel in the strident revolutionary prose familiar to readers of the Black Panther, Newton spoke of Arab-Jewish coexistence and was careful to distinguish between the Israeli government and the Jewish citizens of Israel. Newton was beginning to change his overall vision of what the BPP needed to be doing in America, and this extended to his views on the Middle East. It is instructive to quote from his statement at length.
Newton spoke of Jewish-Arab “harmony,” and pointed out the difference between criticizing Jews and criticizing the Israeli government, even noting that some Israelis were against Zionism:
We have respect for all people, and we have respect for the right of any people to exist. So we want the Palestinian people and the Jewish people to live in harmony together. We support the Palestinians’ just struggle for liberation one hundred percent. . . . As far as the Israeli people are concerned we are not against the Jewish people. We are against that government that will persecute the Palestinian people. . . . Our view is that the people led by the Palestinian people should be led into a struggle, a revolutionary struggle in order to transform the Middle East into truly a people’s republic.31
He also broke with the previous BPP consensus by conceding that while the Zionist case for a separate, ethnoreligious state exclusively for Jews might not be acceptable “politically” or “strategically,” he perhaps could accept it “morally”:
Israel was created by Western imperialism and maintained by Western fire power. The Jewish people have a right to exist as long as they solely exist to down the reactionary expansionist Israeli Government. Our situation is similar in so many ways; we say, that morally perhaps, the Jewish people can make a case for separatism and a Zionist state based upon their religion for self-defense. We say, morally, perhaps we could accept this, but politically and strategically we know that it is incorrect.32
Gone was the talk of smashing the “Zionist fascist state of Israel.”
A few months later, the Black Panther Party began to change significantly, which pushed Newton further down the road of rethinking the BPP’s stance on the Middle East. First, the party began disintegrating owing to factionalism and misinformation calculated to inflame this factionalism that was fed to party activists by the secret COINTELPRO program run by the FBI.33 The most high-profile split within the party occurred in early 1971 between Cleaver, still in Algeria with the BPP international section, and Newton in the United States. One of these contentious issues pertained to whether the BPP should continue to work for revolution and armed confrontation with the powers of the state or move toward becoming a more aboveground, community service–oriented group. Cleaver still favored the former, Newton the latter. Each man ended up expelling the other from the BPP shortly thereafter, but the Newton faction ended up retaining control over the bulk of the party’s operations and publications in Oakland, including the Black Panther. The Cleaver faction, based in New York while Cleaver himself remained in Algeria, debuted a new publication titled Right On! in April of 1971.
Thirty-one-year-old Newton ally Elaine Brown became BPP chair three years later in 1974 after Newton fled into exile in Cuba. She recalled that after the Cleaver-Newton split rent the party, Newton and the main party apparatus adopted a “new stance.” The party stopped being what she called a “revolutionary cult” working for systemic revolutionary change through armed struggle and decided to work instead on what the party called “survival programs” to serve black communities. The Black Panthers even ran candidates in local elections: in 1972 Bobby Seale ran for mayor of Oakland, California, and Brown ran for city council.34
The Newton faction’s changing strategies also corresponded to a different theoretical and practical approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The fact that the Palestinian armed resistance movement had been severely mauled by the Jordanian army in September of 1970 and again in July of 1971, and was less and less on the radar screens of the Black Power movement by 1974, also contributed to this new approach. BPP activist Austin Allen was witness to some of Newton’s changing thoughts about the matter.
Allen became active with the party at the time of the Newton-Cleaver split and eventually grew close to Newton and his faction. According to Allen, Newton’s attitudes toward the Arab-Israeli conflict began changing because he believed that the Arab world, which had plenty of power, was not really serious about defeating Israel on behalf of the Palestinians. Newton therefore thought that the only possibility was a two-state solution: Israel and a Palestinian State. Newton said, in Allen’s words, “There had to be two states, and the Arabs ain’t coming clean.” As Allen noted in an interview, Newton argued that “the Palestinians served the other purpose within the structure of the Arab world. . . . You’re saying you want to get something you’re not going to get because you don’t want to get it in the first place. So let’s really talk reality and it’s going to have to be two separate nations which was quite different. Most people expected us as an organization to say it’s got to be the Palestinian state period.”35
Newton’s evolving attitude toward Israel and the Palestinians was already evident at his August 26, 1970, press conference. It became, in fact, one of several issues that contributed to the nasty split between Newton and Cleaver that broke out in the winter of 1971. In a famous February 26, 1971, overseas telephone call between the two men that Cleaver taped, the latter questioned Newton about his new thinking about the coexistence of a Palestinian state along with Israel.36
In the wake of both the BPP split and the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Newton’s new thinking led him to issue a dramatically different, formal BPP policy statement on the Arab-Israeli conflict in May of 1974. David Horowitz, a radical journalist who worked with the Panthers in the early to mid-1970s, claims that it was he who actually wrote this new policy statement.37 After reading a piece in the Black Panther that ran after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and lambasted Israel as a “racist” state, Horowitz questioned Newton about the BPP’s position. After hearing him out, Horowitz said Newton asked him to draft a new policy statement for the Panthers.38 Newton then showed a draft of a new BPP policy to David Du Bois, the new editor of the Black Panther. The son of the author and activist Shirley Graham Du Bois and the stepson of the famous activist W. E. B. Du Bois, David Graham Du Bois was familiar with the Arab-Israeli conflict from his experience living in Egypt in the 1960s, working as an announcer for Egyptian radio, and writing for the English-language newspaper the Egyptian Gazette.39
Du Bois was very enthusiastic about the new policy document Newton showed to him. “This is, in my opinion, a brilliant position paper on the Middle East Conflict,” he wrote to Newton on May 2, 1974. “It’s [sic] basic humanism devastates arguments against its proposals from both sides. The only forces it exposes for attack are U.S. imperialism, Zionism and Arab reaction.” He also made a few suggestions.40 It is unclear whether the draft that Du Bois read was the one that Horowitz had been asked to write, or was a document drawn up by Newton, or was something else altogether. In any event the final wording was Newton’s decision, given his position as “chief theoretician” of the party.
The BPP’s new position paper on the Middle East was published in the May 25, 1974, issue of the Black Panther and marked a major shift away from a stridently pro-Palestinian stance toward one that emphasized justice and human rights for all peoples in the Middle East. An accompanying editorial noted the purpose of the new policy: “It is to contribute to ending the suffering and dying in the Middle East that the Black Panther Party has drawn up and distributed its Position Paper on the Middle East Conflict. The Black Panther Party’s overriding concern is securing the human rights of all the people in the Middle East, Jew and Arab alike; and first, the right to life.”41 No longer was the BPP’s mission to support the Palestinians as fellow revolutionaries of color fighting American-backed imperialism in the form of the State of Israel. The new BPP policy was titled “The Issue Is Not Territory, but Human Rights” and stated: “We can no longer accept an unprincipled posture, in the interest of misguided subjective notions. We can no longer allow our posture to be characterized as simply ‘pro-Arab,’ for we support the right of all human beings to freedom and human dignity.”42 The approach emphasized human rights and human understanding for all parties in the conflict. Its vision for the Middle East was bold:
We believe that the real issues are internal to each territory: the fact of the existence of the State of Israel will prove no real hardship to the Arab peoples, if the Jews and their 400,000 Arab comrades living in Israel will throw off their mutual yoke of oppression, and build a people’s government serving the human interests of all. In like fashion, the peoples of the Arab nations need only turn their attention and energies away from the so-called Holy War over what is now called Israel to their own oil-rich countries, and throw off the yoke of their oppressive regimes, claiming for themselves, the wealth beneath their own national soils.
Even though the new Panther policy statement recognized that “the issue is not territory,” it conceded that national statehood was a necessary “transitional stage of development” for Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East. The policy therefore upheld the legitimacy of Israel and called for creation of a truncated Palestinian political state—something that the PLO itself had not yet officially accepted. The statement claimed that ultimate justice and security would come for the Jews and Arabs of the Middle East when a global revolution overthrew capitalism and imperialism and when both peoples recognized the humanity and claims of the other side.
However broadminded and balanced this sentiment may have appeared, the document actually seemed to favor the Israelis over the Palestinians in terms of humanistic concessions. It was careful to ask Israelis merely to recognize the Palestinians’ claim to “independent national institutions”—the words independent state were not mentioned in this passage—while asking Palestinians and the Arab states to recognize Israel both as a state and as the expression of global Jewish sovereignty. Stemming from this, the new policy called on Arabs and Jews worldwide to change their thinking. It urged Jews to show compassion for Arab and Palestinian suffering, and called upon progressive Jews in the United States in particular to give up their “uncritical support to the Israeli government in power” and apply toward Israel the same standards and expectations that they apply toward other countries.
What impact did this dramatic volte-face have on Panthers and their supporters? Elaine Brown recalled that Newton’s new policy toward Israel and the Palestinians “sent everything into a state of confusion” and “befuddled his troops.” It also was one of several factors that drove some Newton loyalists to begin to question the reformist direction in which Newton was taking the party. Brown claimed that Newton believed that the reason the BPP needed to change its policy was because what occurred in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war “was a fait accompli. The resultant State of Israel had to be reckoned with, therefore. Life, like revolution, he said, looked forward, not backward.”43
Even more astonishing, Brown claimed that “Huey found a certain private delight in taking that position.” According to her, several days before Newton announced the party’s new position on the Middle East, he confided in her that his father, Walter, was half-Jewish. He claimed that Walter’s own father was a Jew named Simon. Huey somehow connected his father’s subsequent self-hatred and bitterness toward whites, as well as the bitterness that lay deep in the hearts of many American blacks, with the bitterness felt by Arabs and Jews in the Middle East. In neither case did Newton believe that focusing on the past was worthwhile. Rather, people needed to focus on the future. “There was, therefore,” she wrote, “something poetically proper, healing, even, he thought, for the black son of the bastard son of a Jew to take that position.”44
Newton visited the Middle East six years later, in 1980. According to his lawyer, Fred J. Hiestand, the PLO invited Newton to visit the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Newton agreed but insisted on visiting Israel and Lebanon as well. The PLO paid for Newton and six other people, including Hiestand and two instructors from the Intercommunal Youth Institute that the BPP had established in 1971.45 Newton traveled to Beirut on April 21, 1980, where he visited several social service centers run by the PLO: a Palestine Red Crescent hospital, a SAMED (Palestine Martyrs Works Society) workshop, and a school. While in the city, he met Yasir Arafat. Newton also traveled to south Lebanon, where he visited Palestinian refugees at the al-Rashidiyya refugee camp and observed fragments, bearing American markings, of bombs dropped by Israeli jets. The Israeli government dashed Newton’s plans to visit Israel, however, by refusing his entrance into the country.46
The Black Panther detailed Newton’s visit and published a cover photo of him shaking hands with Arafat. An article stated, “Huey believes that the only viable solution will be the creation of a separate entity for the Palestinians.” Voicing support for a “separate entity” was something significantly different from supporting a “separate state,” something formally called for by the PLO in March of 1977.47 That linguistic technicality indicated just how far the Black Panther Party had come since its days of total support for the Palestinians’ guerrilla struggle against the Israeli “pigs” for the purpose of destroying the “fascist Zionist state of Israel.”
The Panthers were the force within the Black Power movement that did the most in the final years of the 1960s and first years of the 1970s to place the Palestinian cause squarely on the political map in the United States through constant reiteration of their supportive position on the Palestinian struggle. The BPP picked up on the internationalism, Third World identity, and pro-Palestinian sentiments first expressed by Malcom X in the late 1950s and early 1960s and first articulated in a dramatic and public fashion by SNCC in 1967, and institutionalized them. Especially given Eldridge Cleaver’s exile in Algeria and frequent contact with Palestinians from al-Fateh there, solidarity with the Palestinians and what they called their revolution became part of the Panthers’ own activism during the period 1967–73. This included its theoretical understandings of American-backed imperialism, its self-proclaimed identity as a revolutionary organization, and its daily organizational efforts. Solidarity with the Palestinians also became more than just part of the BPP’s ideology. It became part of the group’s communications and publicity/propaganda efforts, as well as its attempts to create a visual revolutionary image and culture for the blacks it was mobilizing and organizing on the street corners of urban America.
As was the case for SNCC, the fact that the Panthers viewed the American government as the enemy both of their movement and of the Palestinians helped solidify their ties with the Palestinians perhaps more than any other revolutionaries outside of the Vietnamese. BPP member Mumia Abu-Jamal recalled decades later: “To the average Panther, even though he worked daily in the ghetto communities of North America, his thoughts were usually on something larger than himself. It meant being part of a worldwide movement against US imperialism, white supremacy, colonialism, and corrupting capitalism. We felt as if we were part of the peasant armies of Vietnam, the degraded Black miners of South Africa, the Fedayeen in Palestine.”48
By the time the BPP adopted Newton’s new, less-radical position on the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1974, both it and the wider revolutionary Black Power movement were in decline. Gone were the visions of guns and revolution. Newton by that time envisioned a party that would work within the system for incremental change. The new BPP stance toward the Arab-Israeli conflict clearly reflected this new understanding of the party’s new vision of itself, black identity, and political activism and was reflected in its stance vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict. In a way this symbolized something deeper: black support for the Palestinians was outlasting the heyday of Black Power and becoming more mainstream.