Lessons From Decades of Black and Palestinian Organizing
Solidarity with Palestine wasn’t always an obvious commitment for advocates of racial empowerment or for Black radicals. Well into the 1960s, many leading Black political organizations, churches, and other influential groups identified the plight of European Jews and the founding of the state of Israel as a spiritual allegory and visionary political program for Black liberation. Black Christian Zionism drew on the Old Testament’s narrative of Exodus, promising spiritual and material rewards if Black congregations blessed Israel, cast as the nation of God’s chosen people. Not just iconic Negro spirituals such as “Go Down, Moses,” “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho,” and “Wade in the Water” but even reggae music used the biblical story of the Jews as a central metaphor. Israeli institutions actively encouraged and strategically nurtured these views. In 1962, Israel’s consul in Atlanta sent a letter to the foreign ministry addressing Israeli policy toward African Americans: “Our first goal must be, in my opinion, filling the gap in [their] knowledge and clarifying the eternal connection between the Jewish people and their country.” The consul made it clear that Black college students would be an especially important target for this project while recognizing that Israeli officials would face accusations of “discrimination” for reaching out to them on integrated college campuses. He noted that the concentration and isolation of Black college students in southern HBCUs allowed Israel “special access” to this sector, however.
Civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. were high-profile and influential signifiers of Black empowerment and thus attractive targets for Israeli public relations. Many Israelis were anxious to bring King to their country to strengthen “connections to black leadership,” though the Atlanta consul recommended in a 1962 memo to the Israeli embassy in D.C. that the matter of an invitation was best shelved for the moment, as he represented "the militant wing of the civil rights movement.” King’s perspectives on Israel were complex and constantly evolving, but even without visiting Israel he insisted on its right to exist on several occasions.
For more radical Black nationalists, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Paul Robeson, and in the emerging Black Power movement, there were other reasons to support Zionism. It was a compelling example of a diasporic political consciousness, and some idealized the collective tradition of the kibbutz as a model for anti-capitalist socialist nation building. On top of this, by the 1960s Israel had made significant progress in a strategy to counter Arab influence on the African continent by providing humanitarian aid and development infrastructure in exchange for legitimacy. With the cooperation of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana was meant to be a showcase of Israel’s aid to Africa, and by 1963 there were 22 Israeli embassies across the continent. But across the Atlantic the tide was slowly turning. In 1964, Malcolm X traveled from Egypt to Gaza and met and prayed with Palestinian religious leaders. Several days later, he published a scathing critique of Zionism that identified it as a colonial threat to the entire Third World.
One person paying attention to these developments was Ethel Minor, who worked as a secretary and office manager at Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity. Earlier in the 1960s, Minor had connected with Palestinian students while studying at the University of Illinois at Urbana, and while in Colombia she met with Palestinians who had fled there to escape Israel’s occupation of Palestine after the Nakba in 1948. In Colombia, Minor had worked as a journalist, organizer, and translator, and by the explosive summer of 1967, she had taken over as communications director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a role she used to push a number of leaders toward a profound shift in their analysis of Israel.
In the wake of Malcolm X’s assassination, she convened a reading group, whose members included Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael) and Jamil Al-Amin (formerly known as H. Rap Brown). They read a book a month — by Zionist authors such as Herzl and Ben-Gurion, Arab authors who supported Palestinian liberation, and Jewish authors critiquing the Zionist and militaristic expansion of Israel based on Jewish spiritual principles — and then met for discussion. Roughly two years into the reading group, Israel launched an airstrike in Egypt, leading to the Six-Day War, a conflict between Israel and a coalition of Arab states over Egypt’s closing of the Straits of Tiran. Israel exploited the alliance among Jordan, Syria, and Egypt to support its narrative of being vulnerable and surrounded by enemies. The death tolls told a different story: fewer than 1,000 Israelis were killed in the war, compared with more than 15,000 Arabs. The body count rose as Israel used the Six-Day War to expand its occupation of Palestine’s West Bank, Golan Heights, and Gaza Strip, resulting in the forced or pressured expulsion of around 300,000 Palestinians.
Minor already supported Latin American anticolonial struggles and was deeply committed to an internationalist view of Black liberation. But the reading she and the rest of the group did solidified their sense that their analysis of settler colonialism and their definition of racial empowerment had been insufficient. Racial empowerment must not stop at national boundaries or the limits of racial liberalism. They joined Palestinians, anti-Zionist Jews, and anticolonial revolutionaries across the globe in their critique of Israel’s policies, culminating in publication of “The Palestine Problem,” a two-page primer critical of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and Zionism, in the SNCC newsletter’s June–July 1967 issue.
The reading group also discussed Israel’s enduring relationship with South Africa’s apartheid regime. Israel had been supplying weapons to apartheid South Africa since the 1960s. Alon Liel, a former Israeli ambassador based in Pretoria, said, “We created the South African arms industry.” Israel also provided arms to the U.S.-supported oppressive regimes in Nicaragua, Argentina, and Honduras, among other countries. Ture explained in his memoir, “Discovering that the government of Israel was maintaining such a long, cozy, and warm relationship with the worst enemies of black people came as a real shock.”
What Ture and his comrades recognized are the common mechanisms of oppression among Palestinians, South Africans, Black Americans, and Jews. Activists in SNCC and the Black Panthers eventually came to understand how movements that seem spatially distant and politically distinct are in fact structurally and materially linked, and they understood how these shared fates could be the basis of a transnational, more effective solidarity launched against the root causes of their mutual oppression.
Today this kind of transnational solidarity is once again on the rise. The Black antiwar left and racial justice advocates see the horrors of Israeli occupation and genocide and recognize the racism, apartheid, and juridical, military, and rhetorical structure of all settler-colonial projects. The endless pulse of state-sponsored murder, the savage enforcement of displacement and segregation, the denial of the right to resist oppression, and the gleefully dehumanizing racist tropes our opponents wield create a savage clarity that cuts across regional specificity and historical differences in Black and Palestinian struggles. Early expressions of this kind of solidarity were visible during and after the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Mo., with Palestinian and Black organizers supporting each other across continents. Cori Bush, who participated in those efforts, said that communications between racial justice activists in the U.S. and organizers for Palestinian liberation informed how she approached these issues as a representative in Congress.
Black supporters of Palestine at a rally in Washington, D.C., Nov. 4, 2023. Photograph by André Chung for Hammer & Hope.
The sort of solidarity Bush describes is not simply about moral indignation at state-sponsored violence, nor is it a kind of transactional expression of mutual support. Instead it reflects the insights of SNCC organizers from decades ago. It is rooted in the recognition of shared material conditions of oppression, including connections direct and plain to the naked eye. Three years before the Ferguson uprising, St. Louis County police chief Tim Fitch was part of a delegation of law enforcement officials that participated in a weeklong training in Israel in 2011. During the Ferguson protests in August 2014, Palestinian American journalist Mariam Barghouti pointed out that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shot tear-gas canisters produced by the U.S. company Combined Systems Inc. at Palestinians a few days before the same tear gas was used on protesters in the United States. Ferguson helped demonstrate to activists at home and abroad that racism, white supremacy, and Zionist occupation are not isolated threats faced by distinct groups. They are inseparable components of a broader imperial structure — one that profits from violence across the world, whether it’s selling weapons to the Israeli military or to the U.S. police departments that dominate poor and Black neighborhoods.
Across the United States today, organizers are translating these connections between struggles at home and around the world into radical and practical programs for action. In Georgia, activists fighting for housing justice, against genocide and occupation, and for the protection of green spaces in Atlanta all find themselves facing transnational networks of police power and the funneling of tax dollars into so-called cop cities, an increasingly popular infrastructure of counterinsurgency. The Atlanta Housing Justice League sees how both the mass displacement of Black and brown communities in Atlanta (there were 144,000 eviction filings in Metro Atlanta in 2023) that it is organizing against and the displacement of Palestinians by the Israeli occupation rely on state-backed racist violence. The league notes that eviction enforcement often relies on “escalation tactics intended for war zones,” and the Atlanta Police Department learned several such tactics from the Israeli police through the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange. Its demands are clear: “We must divest from Cop City, divest from corporate landlords, and divest from Israeli apartheid.”
The financial firm BNY Mellon has offices in Atlanta and is one of the corporate landlords that are opponents of the Atlanta Housing Justice League. BNY Mellon directly profits from the genocide in Palestine through its investments in Elbit Systems and manages the Friends of Israel Defense Forces Donor Advised Fund. Elbit, Israel’s largest weapons company, produces drones, bullets, technology, and white phosphorus for Israel.
BNY is also one of the most prominent investors in Atlanta’s residential housing market. Taking advantage of the Covid-19 economic crisis, BNY and other large corporate landlords steadily bought more and more residential housing stock throughout the pandemic until they accounted for 53 percent of buyers of single-family rental properties by mid-2021. This increase in purchasing occurred predominantly in Black neighborhoods, where rent prices climbed. As rent increased, so did evictions. Displacement by eviction is a common feature of the financialization of rental housing and an outcome corporate investors in this sector anticipate; it is a key step in gentrification’s racial transition. As properties get more expensive, neighborhoods get whiter, and corporate landlords get richer, affordable housing becomes scarcer. The core counties of Metro Atlanta — Dekalb, Fulton, Clayton, Cobb, and Gwinnett — eliminated 130,000 units priced under $1,000 a month in the past five years, largely due to gentrification. Shared mechanisms of oppression dovetail as BNY Mellon profits from displacing working-class Black families and the mass killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians.
In Pennsylvania, the Philly Palestine Coalition has fought against two major weapons manufacturers based in the state. One is Ghost Robotics, whose flagship product is the Vision 60, an unmanned quadrupedal vehicle commonly known as a “robot dog” that has been deployed in Gaza, where its sensors can collect targeting data for weapons systems. Ghost Robotics is housed at the University of Pennsylvania’s Pennovation Center, and it’s one of several companies that received significant tax breaks as part of a Keystone Innovation Zone, touted as a program to foster business development in underserved areas. But the tax credits that benefit Ghost Robotics and other companies would otherwise have gone into the city’s budget and could have helped to fund abandoned public schools and other resource-starved public infrastructure and social programs. This extraction from the city’s budget is just a fraction of the enormous tax breaks that Penn already receives as one of the largest real estate holders in the city.
Similar links are being exposed by North Carolina Black Workers for Justice (BWFJ), founded in 1981 by a group of women employed in the low-wage retail sector. BWFJ calls on “all African Americans to recognize and examine the connection between the Black struggle for self-determination here in America and that of the Palestinian people” and urges all workers to join the National Labor Network for a Ceasefire.
The Southern Workers Assembly, a network of labor organizations that includes BWFJ, facilitated a series of online political education workshops, panels, and in-person worker schools hosted in Charlotte, N.C., to heighten class consciousness and build rank-and-file power to fight fascism and empire. This education initiative centers the nine-point Southern Worker Power Program and aims to foster cadre development among non-union workers, who account for 90 percent of wage and salary workers in the U.S. This education equips those workers with the analysis and tools to forge solidarities across workplaces, employers, and borders to fight corporations, the austerity unleashed by Republicans and Democrats alike, and the American ruling class’s stalwart commitments to expanding theaters of war.
Nearly 60 years after Ethel Minor pushed SNCC to think differently about Palestine and 10 years after Ferguson erupted in Black Lives Matter chants, solidarity with Palestine has become one of the most militant and popular expressions of leftist politics across the globe. Black and Palestinian organizers and racial justice advocates continue the vital tradition of fighting together across borders.
But the conditions have changed over the past decades in ways that make this work both more urgent and more complicated. In the 1960s, the liberal and conservative wings of the ruling class agreed that the best way to counter the upsurge in Black militancy crystallized by the fiery waves of urban rebellions as well as the revolutionary internationalist impulses growing among the Black left would be to supplant these tendencies with the concomitant programs of Black capitalism and Black electoral representation. Scholar and activist Robert L. Allen contended in Black Awakening in Capitalist America that the consistent recourse to riots as an articulation of Black protest forced the ruling class to concede that “Blacks must be brought into the mainstream of the economy if they no longer would remain docile while confined outside of it.”
Over time, Democrats and Republicans have continued to mask their paltry programs for Black liberation with high-profile Black politicians, entertainers, businesspeople, and other figures who stand in as examples of successful racial uplift and progress. This year’s DNC stage featured a parade of Black leaders. But their presence, and the jingoistic praise of American democracy in many of their speeches, amplified a neoliberal form of Black empowerment that drowned out the Uncommitted delegates chanting “Cease-fire now!”
Campaign strategists for Kamala Harris would have us think that the most viable model for solidarity is the Democrats’ much-touted big tent to save democracy. This tenuous coalition is an exercise in political expediency and aims to suspend irreconcilable ideological and political differences in order to forge a united front with disaffected Republicans, conservative lawmakers, and right-leaning independents and save American democracy from Donald Trump. Accepting this flawed political calculus casts solidarity with Palestine as a single-issue distraction that places American democracy at risk by clearing the runway for right-wing authoritarianism. It also ignores the possibility that there may be a better and more reliable path to the White House, one that runs through the solidarity-building organizing efforts and communities discussed above, which are forging real power in critical battleground states. Polling data certainly suggests this is the case as an overwhelming majority of the voting electorate — Democratic, Republican, and Independent — support a permanent cease-fire.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians and their supporters march to the White House to protest U.S. funding of Israel’s war on Gaza, Washington, D.C., Nov. 4, 2023. Photograph by André Chung for Hammer & Hope.
Advocates who continue to push Democrats on the Palestinian question, however, are told that they are advancing a naïve and politically costly moral position with potentially disastrous consequences for the fight against white supremacy and fascism. Put simply, Trump and the Republican extremists create the sense that the stakes are too high for solidarity. Razor-thin polling margins in this election have allowed Democrats to supercharge the identity politics shell game of elite Black empowerment and shut down critics with a new ultimatum: Black folks must choose a Black female candidate over her openly fascist conservative opponent as the most strategic means of advancing antiracist politics.
On the surface, it appears they have a point. Another Trump term promises to be a boon to far-right racist, xenophobic, and heterosexist extremism. Yet the administration currently facilitating Palestinian destruction presents itself as Palestinians’ best hope, a paradoxical alternative that reflects how impoverished a choice we face. So we must remember that all history is the history of class struggle. It does not simply encompass the succession of presidents and the oscillation from Democrats to Republicans and vice versa, but rather how we confront and clash with either side of this oppressive duopoly on various interlocking fronts.
The pain, fear, and conviction that we are feeling can make it hard to tolerate the disagreements and different views about how much and what kind of solidarity matches this moment. But building powerful, effective coalitions requires that we find the patience and commitment to do precisely that. Justified concerns have been voiced by Black queer and trans activists working with the National Trans Visibility March, Center on Halsted, and other organizations who are rightly concerned about Trump’s plans to cut federal funding for inclusive schools, roll back Title IX protections, and pass legislation establishing binary genders assigned at birth as the only genders recognized by the U.S. government. Black immigrant justice groups such as Haitians for Harris have voiced similar concerns. Immigration organizers already busy combating the horrors of Democratic immigration policy are even more fearful of a Republican administration that explicitly promises to incarcerate and deport millions more immigrants. Some Black activists point to the reality of anti-Black racism from some Muslim and Arab people and are unclear about how their solidarity with faraway Palestine helps Black folks in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and back home in America. Unfortunately, Black folks are not immune to the lure of xenophobic nationalist solidarity.
The most instructive ways to address these concerns can be found in the turbulent and generative cauldron of struggle. As the examples of organizing in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina illustrate, core constituents of the Democratic base already recognize the concrete material linkages between their lives and those of Palestinians surviving and resisting Israeli occupation. They understand that this assault and occupation is not a single issue but a widening multitude of terrors. And whether our resistance begins as outrage at the bombing of hospitals and the bottomless heartbreak from tens of thousands of children maimed and murdered or as the frustration of people in hurricane-torn areas who wonder why there is money for bombs but not to rebuild their lives, the connections between oppressed people and places cry out for acknowledgment. Our anger and despair are the subatomic particles of revolutionary commitment.
These nascent political and ethical instincts must be nurtured into bonds of real solidarity. We can’t let a short-sighted electoral calculus seduce us into abandoning the struggle against the common mechanisms of Black and Palestinian oppression. Our shared liberation depends on it, and we cannot risk fracturing into smaller and less powerful factions over the moral and tactical wisdom of voting or not voting. Neither the current administration nor either of the potential incoming presidents will support Black or Palestinian liberation unless they are forced to.
Focusing on the power that we must build to effectively pressure any incoming administration will position us to build a long-term electoral strategy that can reinforce the coalitions and mass movements we organize to fight for the world we want. Rather than getting sidetracked by tactical differences and risk having our movements collapse under the weight of sectarian purity, we must productively harness varying perspectives and orientations toward struggle within the throes of organizing to forge stronger, sharper coalitions. Just as Arab American auto workers in Detroit walked arm in arm with Black workers from the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement in 1973 to pressure the UAW to divest from Israeli bonds, we can build campaigns to put pressure on national organizations with the power to withhold labor and votes on a massive scale that no governing institutions, war machine, or incoming regime can ignore.
Advocates of racial justice may feel forced to place the genocide of Palestinians on a scale, weighing the necessity of fighting for and preserving Palestinian life against the risk of intensifying right-wing fascism on Black life in the United States. Put even more crudely, it’s us or them. But to accept this way of seeing things is to accept false choices between Black and Palestinian liberation or between fighting antisemitism and criticizing Israel. It also means ignoring contradictory realities, particularly the many anti-Zionist Jews who fight in solidarity with Blacks and Palestinians and include Israel in their critical perspectives about settler colonialism and genocide. A clear-eyed and historically informed analysis is needed now more than ever to lay such depraved binaries to waste.
Chenjerai Kumanyika is an assistant professor at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, a founding member of NYU’s Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, and an at-large council member for the American Association of University Professors. He is the creator and host of Empire City, a podcast that explores the untold origin story of the NYPD. He is also the co-creator, co-executive producer, and co-host of Uncivil, Gimlet Media’s Peabody Award–winning podcast on the Civil War.
Demetrius Noble is a radical cultural worker and a member of Greensboro Revolutionary Socialists. He serves as an adjunct professor in African American and diaspora studies at UNC Greensboro. His work has been published in The African American Review, The Journal of Pan African Studies, The Journal of Black Masculinity, Socialism & Democracy, Works and Days, Cultural Logic, Rampant Magazine, and other leftist publications.
Hammer & Hope is a new magazine of Black politics and culture. It is a project rooted in the power of solidarity, the spirit of struggle, and the generative power of debate, all of which are vital parts of our movement toward freedom.
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