Black-Palestinian Solidarity in Moments of Crisis and Beyond

Nashwa Bawab: We’re in a tumultuous time for our movements right now. We are now a year into the genocide facing the people of Gaza, and at the same time, we’re seeing Israel trying to escalate into a regional war with Lebanon. We’ve also just seen Marcellus Williams be killed by the state on death row. With all of this in mind, what do you see as the connections between the Palestinian and the Black struggle?

Eman Abdelhadi: I’ve been thinking a lot about Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s framework of organized abandonment. I think it’s worth noting that over the weekend, we’re seeing American cities underwater, we’re seeing police guarding grocery stores while people drown in their homes and are unable to access electricity or clean water or food. And at the same time, we’re facing a climate emergency here in the United States — a climate emergency that we know affects indigenous communities and Black communities and poor communities more than any other communities. The National Guard is being deployed to the Middle East to bolster this war that Israel has started and is continuing to escalate and that the United States is fully funding and supporting. 

So I come back to this idea of organized abandonment — this way the global world order of racial capitalism has decided that certain lives are important and worthy of the utmost protection while other people are disposable and are either to be abandoned or to be actively exterminated. So what we’re seeing is the organized abandonment of the working class and communities of color in the United States. And there is an active attempt to exterminate Arab communities in our native homelands that are seen as standing in the way of Israel’s settler colonial project, which is a pet project of the United States’ broader insistence on empire, on being a sort of global hegemon. These things are deeply interlocking and interrelated.

The same system that killed our brother Imam Khalifah Williams in St. Louis is the same system leaving people to drown in their homes and prioritizing arming grocery stores. It’s the same system sending the National Guard to kill Lebanese and Palestinians and Yemenis and Iraqis and Syrians. But despite this current moment, what gives me hope is that the more this system leans into its contradictions, the more we all see the facade of the Western order of humanitarianism. To a certain extent, it’s never existed, but the veil is thinner than ever where it does exist.

Calvin John Smiley: As someone who started doing organizing work at 18 in college, particularly around anti-death penalty frameworks, it was always interesting to me that the three flags that I always saw consistently at different rallies or movements and stuff were the RBG flag — the red, black and green Black nationalist flag — the Cuban flag and the Palestinian flag. People saw those interconnected histories and the ways empire and the state have used all three of these areas as places of social experiment — of warfare.

Thinking about the recent death of Imam Williams in St. Louis, one of the things that I always find really interesting is how they attempt to distribute violence in what they call a ​“humane” way, right? So the fact is that he was put to death through lethal injection, and so that’s the humane way to do it. It’s in the same framework that we hear Israel on the news saying that they’re limiting the amount of civilian casualties. What does that mean when we’re seeing entire neighborhoods, entire cities, being carpet bombed? This violence is not only destroying individuals but also whole communities and nations of people. So there’s certainly that interconnectedness that folks — particularly folks who’ve organized and been at the other end of a cop’s nightstick or find themselves inside of a jail cell — really understand. I think about George Jackson talking about, South African apartheid and Mumia Abu Jamal talking about Palestinian liberation. And so we see how these folks, who have been inside the belly of the beast, can make these international connections to the things they’re experiencing here at home in the United States.

Sandra Tamari: In our movement, we understand that there’s no distinction between the imperialism happening outside of our borders and what’s happening within our police departments with the war on terror and war on drugs. You know, all of these systems are intricately connected. As soon as the United States completed its settler colonial project here on this continent, it immediately looked beyond the borders. Imperialism is very profitable: We have a system that creates profit from death. There’s no interest in life-affirming policies. What do you get out of saving Appalachia at this point? There’s no profit motive for the weapons companies to stop the genocide in Gaza. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon is going to continue to add to these companies’ profits. And so here we are in this terrible logic that our oppressors have, and they will continue to benefit from our death. It’s our job to challenge those frameworks and stop these capitalists that exploit our communities.

James Burch: What Eman said earlier about the contradiction being laid bare has really stuck with me. There’s the neoliberal strategy of telling us that the violence we’re seeing somehow is not what we see. So it’s not the Palestinians who are the victims; it is the Israelis who are the victims and we’re mistaken. Or it’s actually the police officer who was the victim, and it’s, ​“Israel feared for its life. The police officer feared for their life.” The language overlaps at this point.

But movements are coming together. We’re all beginning to speak the same language and really grow our movement’s ability to show international solidarity — not just showing up for each other but being educated in the particulars of our struggles. We’ve now had hours of conversation about the corporations causing violence to Black and Palestinian communities: the surveillance companies and all of the U.S. police departments that have trained and [exchanged technological resources with] Israel. This is becoming common knowledge, which gives us power and gives us strength. I don’t want to pretend this is the first time that we’ve reached this point, though. The Black Panthers had a lot of conversations about international solidarity and support for Palestine. And a lot of our elders, especially in years past, have told us at APTP that we need to return to a time where we understand the interconnectedness of our struggles. And it’s at this moment, due to some of the most incredible organizing I’ve witnessed from our Palestinian comrades, that we’re really in that moment right now.

Bawab: Definitely. I really want us to expand on this concept of internationalism: How should we view this concept in the context of the Black and Palestinian struggles, and in what ways can global movements for justice learn from each other? Historically, which ways have we learned from each other? Does that have the power to strengthen our movements now, and how?

Smiley: Historically, we’ve seen it through the writings and teachings of different groups. I always teach my classes that — when we look at the Civil Rights Movement or the Black Power movement or any of those movements of the mid-1960s — movements don’t happen in a vacuum. There were also uprisings across Central and South America and Africa. That was all either in direct conversation with folks like Malcolm X — who went on his Hajj and met with Middle Eastern and North African leaders — or in indirect communication through reading each other’s writings. In my book Defund: Conversations Toward Abolition, I talk to Dan Berger, who discusses how incarcerated activists, like Laura Whitehorn and others who were part of the Weather Underground, had prison pen pal letter-writing campaigns with folks locked up abroad. But more contemporarily, we’ve seen the double-edged sword of social media. On one hand, things like Twitter are going down the hellhole of what Elon Musk has created. On the other hand, we see organizing happening through social media. It’s one of the reasons why Black Lives Matter and Defund and Arab Spring came about in the way that they did. Social media created the ability to communicate with folks across the globe and see how things were unfolding in real time. Marc Lamont Hill talks about how during the Ferguson uprisings, Palestinian activists were literally tweeting out to Black and brown activists in Ferguson about how to protect their eyes from tear gas, because it was the same chemical used against people in the West Bank and in Gaza for years. So I always try to hold on to hope. As Mariame Kaba says, ​“Hope is a discipline.”

Tamari: This summer marked the 10-year anniversary of Mike Brown’s killing in St. Louis, where I’m from. Several months before the anniversary, a student encampment was raised at Washington University. We thought we had made some progress here in St. Louis. They thought the police had maybe backed down a little bit here, but then they saw the response to the student encampment at WashU, where students were beaten up and arrested. We’re in the same place we were 10 years ago. The police have not learned their lesson. And I think we need to keep remembering this beast is huge, and reform is not going to get us to the place that we want to get to.

Abdelhadi: We have to balance an internationalist framework and analysis with a local set of strategies and tactics that understand our unique position here in the heart of the empire. Within our communities, we have different positions to play. Different communities have different strategic advantages and disadvantages. That logic needs to filter down all the way to the individual level. Like, what are my strategic advantages and disadvantages? That’s something many of us who have been doing Palestinian solidarity work have struggled with over the last year, because everything feels so urgent and there are so many ways to act.Ask yourself ​“What is it that I uniquely can do” or ​“Where am I best suited to contribute.” On the one hand, we have so many more sources of information that are alternatives to legacy media and traditional media that feed us the same narratives to manufacture our consent for empire and war. But at the same time, the analysis of where we fit in starts to get kind of hazy, and it becomes kind of unclear what different people’s roles should be.

Burch: I’ve seen our movement grow in the tactics we’re using, especially in on-the-ground resistance. Over the last several decades in the United States, we had a couple opportunities for people to engage in direct action for the first time. And so, since 2016 and then 2020 and now again, many people have had experience in the streets. And I think what we’re doing — I hope what we’re doing — is learning how to do a better job of gathering the energy and making sure that it doesn’t all filter out. I know people are exhausted right now, but how do we make sure that the folks who are coming into the streets now and learning about Black-Palestinian solidarity aren’t just doing it in moments of crisis? That we continue to build upon this, year in and year out?

Bawab: Can we expand on something that Eman said about our role here and how that relates to the upcoming election? The Biden Administration, which Harris is a part of, is the perpetuators of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza right now and Harris hasn’t even made fealty towards correcting this. So what is our role here in November and beyond that?

Smiley: You know, it’s so disheartening, right? Because it’s really not a progressive versus a reactionary — or even, as I’ve been hearing some people say, fascism versus fascism light — it’s just fascism versus fascism. And what we’re continuing to see with Kamala Harris’ campaign is the continued move to the right: taking anti-death penalty off of the National Democratic agenda, promoting that she’s going to have the strictest border control, or even now, this new war on fentanyl that she’s promoting. 

I’ve had a lot of debates with older folks. There seems to be this, I hate to say it, but this generation of particularly baby boomers, where genocide is kind of on the table for them, because of what they believe Kamala is going to protect at home versus what she’s actively doing abroad. The conversation always gets reduced to, ​“Well, Project 2025” or ​“Look what happens to women in this part of the world.” And by this part of the world, I mean in the Arab world, and this whole racist trope about how women there are treated particularly unfairly. But the truth is, everything being described in Project 2025 is already happening here: the rolling back of reproductive justice, the rolling back on environmental justice, the rolling back on taxing.

Then there’s the people who say, ​“This is the most important election of our lifetime.” And I ask them, ​“Well, which presidential election in your lifetime was not the most important one?” Because the very first presidential election I was able to vote in was in 2004, and that was George Bush versus John Kerry. That was the most important election at that time. And then in 2008, it was electing the first Black president, and that was the most important. And then it was in 2012, you know, Obama again. And then in 2016 against Trump. I mean, there’s never been an election where people are like, ​”Oh, this is the throwaway one where we can kind of think about a third party.” So it’s not until we actively move toward some other party, or show, en masse, that we’re not going to be complicit in genocide and environmental injustice and all these other forms of social stratifications that both parties are very much step-in-line with, that things aren’t going to change, aren’t going to move.

Abdelhadi: There was a lot of discourse online after Harris was officially nominated about the idea of a break between Black and Palestinian communities. That this is what’s going to break Black solidarity with Palestine. And we saw all these fights, a couple of horrendous op-eds and many beautiful responses to them. 

It’s important to remember that our solidarity isn’t just theoretical and online. It’s happening on the ground, in terms of actual organizations that have relationships with each other. For In These Times, I wrote an article about Michigan progressive organizing. I talked to Arab and Black organizers for the story, and they were pointing to these decades-long relationships that took so much work to build and that are still a work in progress. They still have ways to go and they have challenges, and, certainly, the Arab community needs to continue to address very real anti-Blackness within it., But these things don’t just evaporate because Twitter decides that we don’t like each other anymore, right? And so I think this discourse was a reminder to keep my feet on the ground and remember that, while our social media discourses are an important tool for the movement, that’s not actually where the work happens. I feel like every time I’m on a panel or giving an interview, I come back to this: We can’t treat our friends who we disagree with, or who have questions or concerns, the way we treat our enemies. That’s not thinking like an organizer. That’s not good politics. That’s not how our movement grows. I’ve come to see that we’re not in a place right now to affect the top of the Democratic party structure, or the top of the national election structure right now. But what’s really going to matter — the most important thing about this election — is the way we talk about and organize around the election, that’s going to shape our movement, potentially for decades to come. And that’s what I care about more than whether we get 10,000 people, or 100,000 people, or a couple million people to vote this way or that way, because we don’t have the numbers, frankly, for that to be the end goal.

Tamari: We all watched how Uncommitted played the game at the DNC. Critiques and disagreements aside, what they did manage to accomplish is to prove to an elite class of older Black activists in the party that Palestinians have a very, very important [grievance] with this party. They were shocked, frankly, when a Palestinian was not allowed on the stage. It really made them question the commitment to this big tent idea, which is the rhetoric coming out of the Democratic Party. These kinds of moves are really important to illustrate to our Black comrades, who maybe are not part of our movement, although they are sympathetic. They are people who want to be in alignment but don’t know quite how to do it. Some of the clergy, some of the older Black activists, were like, ​”Wait, this is a very reasonable request. What do you mean that you’re saying no?” So I think we are building that knowledge base among sort of an elite class, which is helpful.

It’s not everything, obviously; we don’t know what the outcome of this election will be. What I do know is that genocide is happening now, under this administration. I do know that organizations like mine and across our movement are being investigated and targeted for all kinds of inquiries, under this administration. And what I do know is that our students are being beaten up on campuses, under this administration. This idea that fascism is coming is really laughable. We’re experiencing it. We know that the repression can get worse. We know things can get worse, but we are living it at the moment. We shouldn’t be voting out of fear, and we shouldn’t be doing our work out of fear. We really need to be grounded in the politics that we’re facing now.