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LESSONS FROM DECADES OF BLACK AND PALESTINIAN ORGANIZING  
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Chenjerai Kumanyika, Demetrius Noble
October 31, 2024
Hammer & Hope
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_ How activists are building solidarity in battleground states and
beyond. _

Black supporters of Palestine stand in solidarity with Palestinians
in calling for a cease-fire and a free Palestine, Washington, D.C.,
Nov. 4, 2023., Photograph by André Chung for Hammer & Hope

 

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
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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 [[link removed]] 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
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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
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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) [[link removed]], founded in 1981 by a group of
women employed in the low-wage retail sector. BWFJ calls on
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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 [[link removed]].

The Southern Workers Assembly [[link removed]], 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
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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
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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
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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._

_We are inspired by the courageous Black Communists in Alabama whose
lives and struggles to organize against capitalism and white
supremacist terror in the 1930s and 1940s are memorialized in Robin D.
G. Kelley’s book Hammer and Hoe, from which we take our name.
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_We will envision collectively what a better future might look like
and the strategies that could get us there. Such an undertaking
compels us to deepen our knowledge of history, politics, culture, and
our own movements._

_Our aim is to build a project whose politics and aesthetics reflect
the electric spirit of the protesters who flooded the streets in 2020,
a project that breathes life into the transformative ideas pointing us
toward the world we deserve._

_Come join us. We have a world to win._

_HAMMER & HOPE is free to read. Sign up
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* Genocide
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* Cease Fire
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