[“This isn’t about being for one group or against another.
It’s about basic human rights.” ]
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BLACK ACTIVISTS BEGAN TRAVELING TO PALESTINE IN THE 1960S. THEY NEVER
STOPPED.  
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Nia t. evans
January 15, 2024
Mother Jones
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_ “This isn’t about being for one group or against another.
It’s about basic human rights.” _

Mother Jones illustration , Getty; AP; ZUMA

 

As a teenager, Rachel Gilmer, a Black and Jewish activist, was
recruited to join Young Judaea, a Zionist nonprofit for Jewish youth.
“They were offering scholarships to go to summer camp and I’m one
of six siblings, so my mom was like, ‘Great, let’s get the kids
out of the house.’” When she reached high school, the program sent
her to Israel for the summer. “It was very politicizing,” says
Gilmer. “I was there for six weeks. We didn’t meet a single
Palestinian person the entire trip. They never explained anything
about the occupation. They had us join the Israeli army for a week and
one of the rites of passage was shooting an M16 at a cardboard cutout
shaped like a human.”

In the spring of 2016, she was in the region again. This time, she was
in her twenties and visiting Palestine with a delegation of Black and
Latinx activists who were all organizing under the banner of Black
Lives Matter. For 10 days, they traveled throughout the West Bank,
meeting with Palestinian civil society groups and advocates working on
behalf of political prisoners and LGBTQ communities. 

For Gilmer, going to Palestine exposed the depths of what she began to
see as Israeli propaganda. “It was just clear that these were
apartheid conditions,” she said. “Seeing homes being demolished,
native plants being destroyed to erase the history of Palestinians,
the way Palestinian food has been rebranded as Israeli food, it just
felt like the complete annihilation of a people.”

That exposure was part of the plan, according to Ahmad Abuznaid, who
organized six delegations to Palestine for members of the Black Lives
Matter network between 2015 and 2022. Many of the trips were free of
charge to participants thanks to funding from groups like the Hasib
Sabbagh Foundation, which promotes educational opportunities for young
people living in the West Bank and Gaza. During the first trip in
January 2015, Abuznaid and his tripmates traveled through Israel and
Palestine, visiting HAIFA, RAMALLAH, AND HEBRON. THE GROUP met with
Palestinians displaced by Israeli settlers, and leaders within the
Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which works to end
international support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine. They
stayed with families and friends whenever possible and cheap hotels
when it wasn’t. “This wasn’t one of those corporate-funded AIPAC
delegations [[link removed]]. It was a grassroots and
Palestinian-led effort.” During one stop, in East Jerusalem, they
met with Ali Jiddah [[link removed]], a 73-year-old
Afro-Palestinian who was imprisoned for his activism. Jiddah, who
planted [[link removed]]
hand grenades in Jerusalem in 1968 as a part of the Palestinian
national struggle [[link removed]]
and spent 17 years in an Israeli prison before becoming a
journalist, saw the group and wiped tears from his eyes before
jokingly introducing himself as “the Denzel Washington of
Palestine.” 

Abuznaid, who runs the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights
[[link removed]], was born in East Jerusalem and has an
Israeli-issued ID from the West Bank, where most of his family still
lives. After leaving Palestine as a child, he grew up in South
Florida. By 2012, he had co-founded Dream Defenders
[[link removed]], a grassroots racial justice
organization, where he worked with Gilmer and others in the aftermath
of the shooting of unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin to bring
attention to Florida’s gun laws. For Abuznaid, there were strong
parallels between the United States’ criminalization of Black people
and Israel’s policing of Palestinians. Israeli law enforcement, like
their US counterparts
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frequently engage
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in illegal and discriminatory policing. Black and Palestinian
organizers have responded to these parallels by actively strategizing
to change that treatment.  

“There’s a difference between reading about something and meeting
people, eating off their plates, and hearing their stories,”
Abuznaid said. 

Abuznaid is just one of a constellation of political activists who
have long seen in Palestine one of the world’s most pressing
examples of US-backed oppression. Since the 1960s, Black leaders have
traveled to the region to see the occupation up close and build
relationships with people resisting it. These trips, which some
activists have called solidarity delegations,
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up over the decades, all part of an ecosystem of activists and
scholars who see freedom for Black people as inherently linked to the
struggles of oppressed people around the world. A new generation of
Americans are challenging longstanding US support for Israel and its
war on Gaza. The _New York Times_ found
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that 46 percent of young voters sympathize with Palestine, while 63
percent of older voters identify with Israel. Some activists credit
these numbers to the work of Black and Palestinian resistance
movements. 
“The entire left owes a debt of gratitude to Black and Palestinian
leaders.” says Stefanie Fox, executive director of Jewish Voice for
Peace [[link removed]], a grassroots Jewish
anti-Zionist group leading
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anti-war demonstrations around the country. “The power of what is
happening in the streets is a testament to their alliance.”

In the aftermath of World War II, many Black leaders supported the
creation of a Jewish state, seeing the pursuit of a Jewish homeland as
analogous to their desire to establish a homeland for the African
diaspora. (Malcolm X, one early exception, visited
[[link removed]] Gaza with
the help of the Egyptian government in 1964). But the summer of 1967
challenged Black Americans’ support. The Six-Day War killed
[[link removed]] an estimated
20,000 Arabs and 800 Israelis, while Israel radically expanded
[[link removed]] its borders.
Less than a month later, Harlem went up
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in flames as Black communities rebelled against the murder of a Black
teenager at the hands of the New York Police Department. The summer of
‘67 went on to be known as the “long hot summer
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as hundreds of cities erupted over the deadly effects of police
violence and segregation. 

As the National Guard descended on American cities, some Black
scholars and activists saw
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reflections of their unequal society in Palestine, scenes of which
were flooding the news at the time. Some went to see the occupation
and meet its resistors for themselves. Black Panther Party leaders
Eldridge Cleaver and Huey P. Newton traveled to Lebanon and Algeria to
meet
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the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1969 and 1980. Muhammad
Ali
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June Jordan
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Jesse Jackson
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Angela Davis
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and Alice Walker
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followed their example, traveling to the West Bank and Lebanon to meet
with Palestinians living under occupation and in exile.

Nearly 50 years later, the summer of 2014 would unite a new generation
of Black and Palestinian activists. In July of that year, Israel laid
siege
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to Gaza in a war that would kill more than 2,000 people. The next
month, the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri erupted in protests
after an unarmed Black teenager named Mike Brown was killed by police.
Officers left
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his body in the street for hours. 

“It was a summer of mass atrocities,” says Kristian Bailey Davis,
founder of Black for Palestine [[link removed]], a
national network of more than 6,000 activists established in the
aftermath of the Ferguson uprisings. “Between the war on Gaza and
the flagrant disrespect for the life and body of Mike Brown
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it wasn’t hard to draw material and metaphorical connections between
our experiences.” 

Palestinians sent advice to Black protesters battling military-grade
weapons in Ferguson. “Always make sure to run against the wind /to
keep calm when you’re teargassed,” wrote
[[link removed]] West
Bank journalist Mariam Barghouti on Twitter, “don’t rub your eyes!
#Ferguson Solidarity.”

Always make sure to run against the wind /to keep calm when you're
teargassed, the pain will pass, don't rub your eyes! #Ferguson
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Solidarity

— Mariam Barghouti مريم البرغوثي (@MariamBarghouti)
August 14, 2014
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dream hampton [[link removed]], filmmaker and executive
producer of the documentary series _Surviving R. Kelly,_ traveled to
Palestine in 2014. For hampton, the trip was a natural progression in
her political identity. She grew up in Detroit, next to a suburb with
the largest Arab population outside of the Middle East, and has been a
Muslim for most of her life. Early in her career, hampton worked as a
hip-hop writer for _The Source _and _Village Voice_ while organizing
with a racial justice group called the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
[[link removed]], becoming a defining voice for her
generation on how institutions use power to dominate marginalized
people. Bill Fletcher Jr., a prominent labor activist, invited her on
a delegation to Palestine organized by the Carter Center. On the
ground in the West Bank, she saw examples of state violence and abuse
everywhere. 

In Hebron, her trip mate, the Palestinian-American poet Remi Kanazi,
wasmade to get off the bus and go through separate checkpoints than
the rest of the group. “It wasn’t a Black versus white issue like
we’re used to in America,” hampton says. “It was _if you’re
Palestinian_, and they are trained to know Palestinian last names,
even if you have a US passport, you’re separated from the group and
forced to go through a checkpoint.” 
In solidarity with Kanazi, her group would leave the bus and go with
him through every checkpoint. The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) waved
them all through, but for dream the situation hit close to home.
“That’s the kind of thing that resonates with Black people,” she
told me. “We know what that humiliation feels like.” 

Gilmer, who today co-leads Dream Defenders and sits on the board of
Jewish Voice for Peace’s political action arm, was one of dozens of
Black activists who traveled to Palestine on trips organized by
Abuznaid in the aftermath of the Ferguson uprising. After visiting
Palestine in 2016, she returned with the Dream Defenders in 2018 and
2019. Like Abuznaid, she looked to the history of Black radicals
visiting Palestine for inspiration. “Learning that Angela Davis
isn’t just a prison abolitionist, she’s also an internationalist,
and realizing that was true for Malcolm X and SNCC and all these other
organizations, that laid a really strong foundation for the Movement
for Black Lives. We have a rich legacy of solidarity.” 

The delegations not only opened her eyes to Israel’s treatment of
Palestinians, but also influenced how she approached organizing at
home. “It made me realize that when we’re fighting for our
liberation in the US, it has implications for oppressed people all
around the world,” she told me. “If we are able to transform this
country, it’s going to transform the rest of the world.” In the
summer of 2016, after she had returned to the US, she joined a
national coalition of Black activists who made Palestinian liberation
a key part of the Movement for Black Lives’ (M4BL) first-ever policy
platform
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The platform, which described Israel as an apartheid state guilty of
committing genocide, drew criticism from the right
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as well as prominent Jewish leaders
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but became instructive for many who are now publicly challenging US
support for Israel’s invasion of Gaza in the face of intense
backlash. 

“I don’t think any of us were expecting the level of backlash that
we received,“ says Gilmer. “Funders pulled resources, fundraisers
were canceled because people didn’t want to host us, we were
publicly called anti-Semitic. It was a scary moment for all of
us.” 
When things got bad, she thought back to her time in Palestine. “We
just had to remember what we saw and know that this isn’t about
being for one group or against another. It’s about basic human
rights.”

As the death toll from Israel’s assault on Gaza surpasses
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23,000 and global support for Palestine grows
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louder, Gilmer sees the impact of M4BL’s platform. “Solidarity is
the antidote to violence,” she told me. “That was the vision
behind the M4BL statement and we’re seeing that message in protests
around the world.” 

Many Jewish Americans, she says, are now embracing a vision of safety
and solidarity that Black Americans have been advocating for decades.
“Seeing Jewish people of all ages saying that Israel and Zionism
doesn’t reflect their Judaism, that both are a failed project around
Jewish safety, gives me a lot of hope.” 

One reason for that hope was on display at an event in Harlem last
November. Inside a spacious community hall in the Malcolm X and Dr.
Betty Shabazz Center, around 175 people gathered to write letters to
Palestinians living under Israeli bombardment. Surrounded by painted
murals depicting Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and scenes from
civil rights marches and the Harlem jazz scene, a diverse crowd of
attendees greeted one another like old friends. Older men and women
with walkers kissed their younger comrades on the cheek and everyone
helped themselves to a hefty buffet of Middle Eastern food.

After a warm welcome by our MCs for the evening, the participants were
given 20 minutes to get to know their neighbors. When the time came to
write the letters, which would be distributed through human rights
partners to Palestinians living in Gaza, we were reminded of the
history that brought us to this point. But when the sound of a crying
baby cut through the room, the hosts became emotional. Beaming, they
thanked the mother for bringing her child to the event. It’s
important, they said, to be reminded that the future is worth fighting
for.

_Top image: Mother Jones illustration; Abid Katib/Getty; Movie Star
News/ZUMA; Charles Gorry/AP; Ley/Mirrorpix/Newscom via ZUMA; Cal
Ford/ZUMA; Jimin Kim/SOPA Images via ZUMA; Tayfun Salci/ZUMA; Probal
Rashid/ZUMA_

 

* Black Activists and Palestine; Black Lives Matter; Palestinian
Rights;
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