BLACK STANFORD UNIVERSITY STUDENT Kristian Davis Bailey was shocked to discover when he visited the West Bank in the summer of 2013 that Palestinians there had painted a tribute to Trayvon Martin—the black American youth shot and killed in Sanford, Florida, in February of 2012 under controversial circumstances—on the large separation wall built around the West Bank by Israeli occupation forces. Then, in August of 2014, Palestinians issued a statement of solidarity with the family of Michael Brown, a young black man shot and killed by a white police officer that month in Ferguson, Missouri. Other Palestinians began sending tweets to black protestors confronting police in Ferguson, advising them how to combat the effects of police tear gas and other practical lessons they themselves had learned from clashes with the Israeli army and border police. Like some of the black protestors in America, they were noticing the parallels between their experience with security forces and that of faraway African Americans. One young man in the West Bank village of Bil‘in sent a photo showing him holding a sign reading, “The Palestinian people know what it means to be shot while unarmed because of your ethnicity.”1
Palestinian students visited Ferguson a few months later, in November of 2014, and returned to organize events explaining the struggle of Black Americans. A delegation of American activists associated with groups like Black Lives Matter and Dream Defenders visited the West Bank in turn in January of 2015. Kristian Davis Bailey then joined with another young black activist, Khury Petersen-Smith, in drafting a statement in November of 2015 titled “2015 Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine,” which was signed by more than one thousand noted black activists, scholars, and others—including Black Lives Matter cofounder Patrisse Cullors, as well as three persons who had signed Paul Boutelle’s 1970 COBATAME statement in the New York Times forty-five years earlier titled “An Appeal by Black Americans Against United States Support of the Zionist Government of Israel.”
Bailey and Petersen-Smith were clear about the links between the African American and Palestinian experiences when they wrote the statement. “The foundation of the Israeli state came through the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians,” noted Petersen-Smith. “While there are differences between Israel and the U.S., we see parallels with a country that was founded on the enslavement of black people and where anti-black racism remains at the heart of U.S. society centuries later.” Baily concurred and directly referenced the example set by the 1960s black freedom struggle: “Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Panther Party taught us that internationalism is a central part of our liberation here. This statement seeks to honor the legacy of black internationalism and the historic solidarity between black and Palestinian struggles as our movements enter a new chapter.”2
Present-day black support for the Palestinians has not been restricted to the political; it also is being seen on a cultural level. Various black rap/hip hop musicians, for example, are drawing comparisons between their own liberation struggle and that of the Palestinians. Jasiri X produced a song and video titled “Checkpoint” after he witnessed Israeli checkpoints during his January 2014 trip to the West Bank. They reminded him of how he and other blacks had to deal with the New York City Police Department’s controversial “stop and frisk” policy back in the United States: “In Hebron it was very reminiscent of being a young black man in the inner city. Here you’re a person of color so I’m just going to assume you are a criminal, stop you, frisk you, and assume you are doing criminal activity. It was really the same treatment I saw with Palestinians and African refugees. Automatically, if you are Palestinian I am just going to assume you are a criminal and treat you as such, especially from what I saw at checkpoints.”3
Rappers Boots Riley and Talib Kweli are two other black artists who have come out strongly on the side of the Palestinians. At a September 2012 concert, for example, Kweli and the other half of the duo known as Black Star, Mos Def, held their fists in the air and shouted, “Let’s get free just like the Palestinians.” The two had been writing songs referencing the Palestinian struggle as far back as 1998. Even before that, Method Man released the song “P.L.O. Style” in November of 1994. When asked years later to explain the reference to the PLO, he stated, “They’re freedom fighters and we felt like we were fighting for our freedom every day, too, where we lived at.”4 The phrase “P.L.O. Style” has even crept into urban slang as a term for an unorthodox, wild-and-crazy way of doing things.
All of these twenty-first-century examples of African Americans expressing support for the Palestinians and basing their own identity and political programs on a global anti-imperialist discourse of liberation illustrate the lasting power of the notion first articulated in the 1960s and 1970s: for blacks, Palestine was a kindred country of color struggling to be free from occupation. This conceptualization implies that if African Americans and Palestinians are “of color,” then their oppressors conversely are “white.” Does this contemporary conjuring up of 1960s-era expressions of a global racial divide by black activists still work today?
Aside from what these activists of color themselves may think, white American supporters of tough immigration policy, “Blue Lives Matter,” and border walls might suggest that the idea of a color divide is still very much with us indeed. Whether coded or not, their present-day discourse also is racialized: whites vs. others, people of color who must be kept at bay. Some Israelis also agree. Menachem Shalev, a press officer at the Israeli consulate in New York, told an American journalist in 1986 that when dealing with American journalists, he always stressed that “we are just like you, an essentially white, European people.”5 Complaining about the influx of Muslim African migrants into Israel many years later, Interior Minister Eli Yishai stated something similar in June of 2012 when he opined that “Muslims that arrive here do not even believe that this country belongs to us, to the white man.”6 The color divide prophesied in the twentieth century by W. E. B. Du Bois and Malcolm X seems as relevant as ever, and some African Americans feel they are on the same side of that divide as the Palestinians five decades after Black Power first championed their cause in the 1960s.
Black Power and Palestine has shown that the Arab-Israeli conflict was intimately connected with how the black freedom struggle played itself out in America during the 1960s and 1970s inasmuch as black groups’ stances toward that conflict reflected and deepened their own respective attitudes toward race, politics, identity, and foreign policy in America. For blacks, what position to adopt on Israel and the Palestinians at that time signified much more than just an ideological stance on a faraway foreign policy issue. It also signified how they viewed themselves and their place in America. They accordingly reacted to the Arab-Israeli conflict with a fervor that reflected a deep sensitivity to these questions.
The 1960s marked the first time that Americans heard serious anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian viewpoints in public. The impact of this development was significant beyond questions of race in America, both in the short and long terms. The short-term impacts included deepening the connections between Black Power advocates in America and the wider anti-imperialist movements of the Global 1960s overseas. Black activists traveled to the Middle East and in return obtained the blessings and support of the PLO. Support for the Palestinians also contributed to formulation of a domestic black revolutionary culture by which blacks could portray themselves and subvert the dominant white American cultural hegemony.7
Black Power’s pro-Palestinianism also helped heighten the friction between young black militants and their elders in the civil rights movement, whose success depended on their ability to generate mainstream liberal support, both moral and financial, for a domestic agenda that did not include dismantling the American system. Black-Jewish relations also were strained by the vocal attacks on Israel made by activists in SNCC, the Black Panther Party, and at the 1967 National Conference for New Politics in Chicago, not to mention the renewed friction that resulted from the Andrew Young Affair in 1979, which led to further intercommunal recrimination and suspicion from which black-Jewish relations have never quite recovered.
Another short-term impact was that the Palestinian Problem achieved greater visibility with the American body politic after it was first discussed publicly by Black Power advocates in the late 1960s. It quickly rose to become a marker of the revolutionary Left as opposed to liberal reformers during that tumultuous decade: those committed to what they viewed as real revolutionary change both at home and abroad saw supporting the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel and Zionism as a litmus test of true radicalism. It marked entrance into the Global 1960s by linking the domestic Left with one of the most notable Third World struggles of the time.
Longer term, African Americans’ embrace of the Palestinian discourse of national liberation led to permanent changes in American political culture. By the time of the Andrew Young Affair in 1979, expressing support for the Palestinians and meeting with the PLO had become the realm of mainstream black groups like congressional officials and Christian ministers. Nor was this normalization of the Palestinian discourse of liberation restricted to blacks: white human rights activists, peace groups, and religious denominations increasingly asserted pro-Palestinian viewpoints beginning in the 1970s. Indeed, although uttering pro-Palestinian sentiments may still be controversial in the twenty-first century, the act is hardly seen as revolutionary. The fact that the Palestinian problem has remained on America’s political radar in the fifty years since it was first placed there by Black Power in the 1960s stands as a testament to the staying power of this phenomenon.
Another longer-term impact has been the ongoing political backlash against this discourse of Palestinian liberation. The visceral anger first focused on Black Power positions on Israel by blacks like Bayard Rustin and by Jews of various political persuasions has never subsided. Highly organized pro-Zionist campaigns seeking to bolster Israel and its reputation in the United States emerged almost immediately in the late 1960s and continue to this day. Such efforts have included, inter alia, “monitoring” groups, academics, and activities deemed pro-Palestinian and redefining anti-Zionism as a new form of anti-Semitism. These efforts also dovetailed with the neoconservative movement that emerged in the 1970s, for which Israel has held a special place in its pantheon of virtuous states. Palestine solidarity has never been stronger in America than it is today, but the same also can be said of pro-Israeli sentiment and political activity.
The understandings of the conflict recently expressed by modern-day black Americans like Kristian Davis Bailey, Khury Petersen-Smith, Talib Kweli, and Jasiri X stem from the sentiments first articulated in the 1960s. Wyatt Tee Walker, Martin Luther King Jr.’s confidant in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said in 1979, “All you have to do is visit a refugee camp one time and you will know that the Palestinians are the niggers of the Middle East.”8 The fact that more than one thousand people signed the “2015 Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine” suggests that Walker’s racialized understanding of the Palestinian problem is still relevant for black American activists today. Palestine solidarity is indeed still alive among peoples of color in America who identify viscerally with the Palestinians’ struggle. Palestine remains for them, as first expressed in the 1960s and 1970s, a country of color.