The Shackles That Bind: Black Power and Palestinian Liberation
Winner of the 2024 James Augustus Award on an African-American Topic
by Adeeb Chowdhury
(Note: This essay was the recipient of the 2024 James Augustus Wilson Award on an African American Topic and may appear in other publications for that purpose.)
Stand close to the police. Run against the wind. Rub Coke and milk in your eyes.
Mariam Barghouti knew a thing or two about resisting tear gas attacks. The renowned Palestinian-American journalist from the West Bank was no stranger to militarized police violence as a means to suppress mass protest. Advising Black Lives Matter activists in 2014, Barghouti was cognizant that her tweets and tips were steeped in a profound history of solidarity between Black American liberation and the Palestinian cause — a pair of movements that have found common footing in principles of anticolonialism, anti-segregation, and resistance against state-sponsored militarized violence.
In March of this year, I led a tabling event in the Angell College Center of SUNY Plattsburgh in which I aimed to raise awareness of the unfolding genocide in Gaza at the hands of a foreign occupying military. I was well aware of my own culture’s intersection with the plight of Palestine. As a Bangladeshi Muslim collaborating with the college’s Muslim Student Association, I had been raised in a world in which Palestinian liberation was inextricably enmeshed within modern Islamic thought. The widely documented occupation and brutalization of the communities of Gaza and the West Bank had inflamed Muslims worldwide for decades. In 2023, I found a renewed sense of purpose — and anger — in my advocacy for this cause, having seen images coming out of Gaza that no one should ever have to see.
During our tabling event, in which we actively approached students and faculty to distribute fliers with information regarding the ongoing violence, I knew to expect disagreement and pushback. This conflict is and has been one of the most divisive issues within the American populace, entangling geopolitics with religion, culture, and history. And debate on this topic is normal and healthy. It is not a simple matter. My support for the Palestinian people was matched by my horror at the barbarism of October 7th, which I expected would only further demonize the people of Gaza and offer an excuse for their intensified oppression, and my sympathy for my Jewish friends as they grappled with the nature of the attacks. Fortunately, the overwhelming response to the tabling event was positive, with hundreds of people on campus accepting our fliers and taking the time to hear us speak about what was occurring. I am proud to have been able to play a role, as small as it may have been, in the fight for Gaza; at least when the world looks back on the genocidal brutality it permitted during this time, my fellow aspiring activists and I can find some semblance of peace in knowing that we did not simply stand idly by.
Throughout our conversations, I discovered an intriguing and inspiring common ground with many students I spoke to — specifically, Black American students. I listened as they reflected on the emotional resonance they felt with the people of Gaza and the West Bank, drawing parallels — sometimes consciously, other times not — between the Palestinian movement and the fight for Black liberation in the United States. Colonization. Segregation. Militarization. Police brutality. Revolution. Certain themes stayed consistent and prominent in our conversations as we examined the common roots and goals of these movements. The deep-seated and profound drive for security, justice, and self-determination emerged as a defining spirit of both Black empowerment and Palestinian liberation.
Central to these struggles is the rejection of White, Western, and colonialist determinations of one’s role in the world. The concept of Black Power is predicated on the reality that Black communities can, should, and will forge their own identities in resistance to the caricatures and subordination imposed upon them by White supremacy. Palestinian liberation, too, is the jettisoning of a militarized occupation and its encircling forces to make space for the indigenous Palestinian spirit to thrive. Far too long have both worlds been largely defined, determined, and denigrated by controlling powers engineered to exploit and abuse.
In this essay, I will reflect on what I gleaned from my discussions with Black students and faculty who have shared my passion for this cause as well as my own explorations of the history of these interconnected movements. As we examine these shared struggles for freedom, it will become clear why we see murals of George Floyd in Gaza City and Palestinian keffiyehs in BLM protests in Ferguson. These fights are not distinct and disparate movements, but deeply intertwined reckonings with the realities of imperialism, militarism, and systemic injustice.
Colonialism and Common Ground
The mid-twentieth century saw the Civil Rights Movement spearheaded by some of the most formative figures in Black history, pushing for the destruction of a state-sponsored system of segregation and unchecked, deeply racist brutality. Concurrently, the emergence of the Palestinian liberation movement aimed for the empowerment and recognition of a people stripped of their land, rights, and dignity, relegated instead to militarized enclaves suffocated by blockades and surveillance.
In June 1967, the lands of Gaza and the West Bank came under Israeli occupation following a pre-emptive strike on Egypt and Jordanian forces. This, combined with the American government’s support for the annexation, awakened many Black Americans to the displacement and disenfranchisement of Palestinians. According to Politico Magazine, “this conflict captured Black activists’ attention at a time when the Vietnam War was already prompting them to condemn what they saw as U.S. imperialism abroad . . . Many in the Black freedom movement saw Israel’s conquest of Palestinian lands, like the U.S. war in Vietnam, as an imperial parallel to the racialized violence African-Americans experienced at home”. (In an interesting parallel, the fiery resurgence of student activism in 2023 and 2024 in response to the attacks on Gaza have been widely compared to the similar intensity seen in protest of the Vietnam War during this time.) Although he personally vocalized his support for the Israeli state as a refuge for Jewish refugees and victims of the Holocaust, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s criticism of the U.S.’s invasion of Vietnam helped spur the sentiment and rage that propelled the movement against imperialism: “The U.S. government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” he proclaimed at Riverside Church in 1967. American support for the Israeli annexation was seen as an extension of this state-sponsored violence.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the most prominent channel for student activism within the Civil Rights Movement, issued a statement in 1967 decrying the brutality faced by Palestine. The statement described the occupation as an “imperial project upheld by the ‘white western colonial governments’ of the United States and Europe” and also criticized the suppression of American Jewish voices that opposed Zionism. The Black Panther Party emerged as a leading voice in support of Palestine, welcoming the resistance fighters of Gaza and the West Bank as engaging in a “joint struggle” for liberation with the Panthers. Describing Black Americans as “internally colonized”, the Panthers found common ground with resistance organizations such as the Palestinian Liberation Organization, whom they developed close ties with. In 1970, 56 Black activists published “An Appeal by Black Americans Against United States Support for the Zionist Government of Israel” in The New York Times, proclaiming “complete solidarity with our Palestinian brothers and sisters, who like us, are struggling for self-determination and an end to racist oppression.”
Echoes of the occupation faced by Palestinians were seen and heard in the Jim Crow-era segregation that Black Americans were subjected to. Black activist and professor Angela Davis touched on this in a 2013 speech, observing that “in the United States when we have described the segregation in occupied Palestine that so clearly mirrors the historical apartheid of racism in the southern United States of America — and especially before Black audiences — the response often is: ‘Why hasn’t anyone told us about this before? Why hasn’t anyone told us about the segregated highways leading from one settlement to another, about pedestrian segregation regulated by signs in Hebron — not entirely dissimilar from the signs associated with the Jim Crow South?’”
Malcolm X emerged as among the sharpest and clearest voices against Palestinian occupation during this time. After separating from the more radical Nation of Islam, he embarked on a mission of meeting with leaders and organizers worldwide, having renewed a sense of global solidarity following his life-changing pilgrimage to Hajj in 1964. “I, for one, would like to impress . . . the importance in realizing the direct connection between the struggle of the Afro-American in this country and the struggle of our people all over the world,” he declared in December of that year after a series of formative meetings with postcolonial leaders such as Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and Ghanian Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah. This sense of international solidarity included a deep empathy for the plight of Palestine. In September 1964, Malcolm X visited the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza, where he spent time in a local hospital and with religious leaders. The acclaimed Palestinian poet Harun Hashem Rashid recounted to Malcolm his narrow escape from Khan Younis massacre of 1956, in which “Israeli forces went house-to-house executing a total of 275 Palestinians (the majority of whom were civilians) in southern Gaza”, as described by Middle East Eye. Malcolm copied down Rashid’s poem about returning to his home in Gaza in his notebook. Writing later in the Cairo-based Egyptian Gazette, he would compose an influential essay in which he lambasted the Israeli state’s “present occupation of Arab Palestine [which has] has no intelligent or legal basis in history.”
This era saw growing solidarity between Arab and African Americans. The Organization of Arab Students invited Black activist Stokely Carmichael to deliver an address at their national convention in 1968, where he spoke fiercely for Black support of the Palestinian revolution and proclaimed that “the Palestinians have a right to Palestine.” Revolutionaries such as Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture), Palestinian resistance “evoked a sense of internationalism, the idea that people of the Third World could form solidarity and fight their oppression collectively, from Harlem to Johannesburg”, according to The New York Times. The Association of Arab-American University Graduates drew attention to the military and economic ties between Israel and apartheid South Africa, calling for broad boycotts and divestments. The Arab Workers’ Caucus successfully advocated for a divestment from Israeli state bonds within their local union. Although this burgeoning movement’s influence on national policy was limited, it helped raise broad awareness especially among Black Americans.
In the 1980s, Reverend Jesse Jackson emerged as one of the most vigorous Black voices for Palestine. He advocated for the federal government to negotiate with the Palestinian Liberation Organization on working towards a two-state solution, invoking the Black liberation struggle in much of his rhetoric: “We understand the cycle of terror, the cycle of pain . . . and yet if America is free to talk, perhaps it can seek reconciliation.” Jackson worked closely with the Arab American Institute to pass resolutions supporting a two-state solution at over ten state Democratic Party conventions and fought to initiate discourse on the topic at the national convention as well. Jackson’s steadfast commitment to the movement paved the way for what historian Nikhil Pal Singh has described as “the first significant U.S. public debate on the idea of a two-state solution in the Middle East.”
The 20th century had seen a revolution in the status and rights of Black Americans, fought for in a movement that encompassed broad resistance against colonialism, imperialism, and occupation. These same touchstones would help predicate the movement’s solidarity with liberation struggles worldwide, especially that of Palestine. As we shall see, this closeness did not erode with time, but instead took on new dimensions in the 21st century with renewed reckoning of the American military-industrial complex, police brutality, and state-sponsored violence worldwide.
From Ferguson to Gaza
The emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the mid-2010s thrust upon America a conversation about and a confrontation with the realities of modern-day racial injustice and the lingering legacy of segregation, alongside the tackling of police brutality and the militarized state. Such themes resonated deeply with the Palestinian liberation movement, which took on a new shape following the 2014 War on Gaza.
“The rubber bullets and tear gas shot into crowds, the pummeling of heads into cement and asphalt, the arrests, and the expulsions . . . Palestinians know in their bones what state violence, militarized policing, and occupation of communities look like,” said acclaimed civil rights journalist Gabrielle Gurly in Prospect Magazine. But the proximity of this violence to the United States is not simply in appearance. The American government has actively funded and sponsored the weapons development, facial recognition systems, and construction of oppressive infrastructure that has defined life in occupied Gaza and illegally annexed West Bank settlements. Take, for example, this photograph in USA Today of a Palestinian child presenting an American-manufactured tear gas pellet outside a refugee camp in Bethlehem:
The U.S. government and military’s role in this brutalization is direct and profoundly consequential. Concurrent with this rise in violence in Palestine has been the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has taken similar aim at the military-industrial infrastructure that has been violently employed to suppress Black and minority voices as well as export American imperialism abroad.
This parallel between the fights in the U.S. and Palestine have not gone unnoticed. On the contrary, many Black activists have recognized and embraced this shared struggle. BLM delegations have even traveled to Gaza and met with grassroots organizations in Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Haifa to build a deeper understanding of these parallels.
Take, for example, the summer of 2014. Following the murder of of Michael Brown at the hands of White officer Darren Wilson, “civil unrest and police brutality in Ferguson reached a crescendo,” according to USA Today. Images of riot gear, tear gas, arrested protesters, and violently enforced curfews have defined the activism that emerged during this time. The American Civil Liberties Union declared that “the predominately white local and county police responded to the largely peaceful protests in the overwhelmingly African-American community with a show of force that left Americans wondering whether they were watching events unfold on the streets of suburban St. Louis or on the streets of an authoritarian country.”
In that same summer, Gazans were subjected to Operation Protective Edge, in which Israel launched attacks on the Gaza Strip in response to resistance fighters. Homes, businesses, and schools were decimated, and thousands of lives were lost. Gaza’s familiarity with brutal police tactics and militaristic suppression of mass protests gave them the know-how to advise BLM activists during this time. On Twitter, which emerged as a global public forum for conversations on these ongoing conflicts, Palestinians shared tips on how to resist tear gas attacks, break through police formations, and more.As Palestinian doctor and activist Rajai Abukhalil tweeted: “It is always the oppressed caring for the oppressed no matter where in the world. #Palestine stands with #Ferguson.”
This sense of shared oppression and resistance has endured. Amid the decade-defining protests across America in response to the murder of George Floyd, a Palestinian artist painted his face on the wall that separates the occupied West Bank from Israel. “George Floyd was killed because they practically strangled him, and cut off his breathing,” Palestinian Taqi Spateen told Mondoweiss, an Israel-Palestine news site, “and every day, this wall strangles us and makes it hard for us to breathe.” The slogan #ICantBreathe became a prominent element in social media posts by Palestinians activists during the 2021 bombardment of Gaza. Likewise, “Free Palestine” has become a common refrain heard at civil rights rallies in the United States.
“Injustice Somewhere . . .”
Understanding the solidarity between Black Americans and the people of Palestine has been among the most valuable elements in my journey in advocating for Gaza. It is truly inspiring to connect these struggles for self-determination and liberation and explore the shared histories, ideas, and goals of each.
Starting in 2023, the bombardment of Gaza has produced some of the most horrific and atrocious images of violence many of us have ever seen — and they are occurring right now, as I write this. There is no possible excuse for the innumerable charred bodies, orphaned children, or decimated communities we are seeing in this city; nor is there any justification for artificially constructing a famine by restricting aid, forcing women to give birth on filthy hospital floors in puddles of someone else’s blood, or blocking UN resolutions to enforce some semblance of accountability for these war crimes. The outrage provoked by these horrors is more than understandable. It is absolutely essential. The fact that countless people of all backgrounds have assembled worldwide in protest of these attacks is evidence of the shared humanity that provokes us to decry these crimes. As Mariam Barghouti has written, “The solidarity between the African American community and Palestinians acts as a unified front against the selectivity and exclusivity of human rights. Oppression is perpetuated by the divide-and-conquer strategy, so the … union between the African American community and the Palestinian struggle breaks this sinister endeavor and brings us closer to justice.”
A fight for freedom is a fight for everyone’s freedom. There are no separate movements for equality and liberation — there is only one global struggle, built on solidarity and humanity, against the forces of brutality, oppression, and denial of basic human dignity.
Further Reading
https://prospect.org/world/black-lives-matter-palestinian-resistance-and-the-ties-that-bind/
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/when-malcolm-x-visited-gaza-september-1964
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/05/30/black-lives-matter-palestine-history-491234
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/6/24/black-lives-matter-and-lessons-from-palestine
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/06/us/african-americans-palestinian.html
https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2023/11/06/roots-of-black-palestinian-solidarity
