The cause of the world: Black America and our duty to Palestine

“You are not distant from the battle, not even a centimetre.”

These are the words of an unidentified organiser affiliated with the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. Although the intended audience for his message is the Palestinian diaspora, it is a call that is just as applicable to the African diaspora in the United States.

For decades, journalists, academics, and organisers have put the Black and Palestinian liberation struggles in conversation with one another, but now is an especially crucial time to move beyond passive conversations and solidarity in the abstract.

As the Palestinian liberation struggle reaches new highs and Israel reaches new genocidal lows, we, Afro-Americans, must fulfil our role. This is the time when caution becomes cowardice. This is the time for absolute support to the resistance and to the people of Palestine.

Black America is all too familiar with the tactics of censorship and policing used by white America to discourage and criminalise resistance to oppression.

"The connection between Black America and Palestine goes deeper than pretty metaphors and nostalgia for the 1960s. The oppression of Afro-Americans and Palestinians is not merely analogous, but materially linked"

For centuries, they have dictated to us what strategy to pursue, which tactics to use, which words make them uncomfortable, who our allies are, and who we should condemn. They grant the privilege of innocence to the oppressor while villainising the oppressed as savage.

These are the same people who maligned Nat Turner’s rebellion as “barbarism,” who denounced John Brown’s raid as an “act of terror,” and who labelled the Black Panthers “extreme” for practising their right to self-defence.

This attitude is alive and well in those who condemn Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the resistance operation launched on 7 October. Playing on anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia, they weaponise the language of terror in order to obfuscate the just, anti-colonial nature of the Palestinian struggle, a struggle to emancipate their people from 16 years of imprisonment in the besieged Gaza Strip, home to 2.3 million, and liberate their homeland.

Over the past month, Palestinians have had to face these attacks from both reactionaries and so-called progressives in the West as their colonisers call for their extermination.

Israel's war on Gaza has sparked a new wave of Islamophobia and reaffirmed how anti-Muslim racism and US foreign policy are intertwined, writes @ArunKundnani 👇 https://t.co/ZFipCF6WPF

— The New Arab (@The_NewArab) November 2, 2023

On 13 October, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) reservist and former fascist paramilitary, Ezra Yachin, was quoted as saying, “Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them. Erase them, their families, mothers, and children. These animals can no longer live.”

Malcolm X described this phenomenon well in his 1963 speech, Message to the Grassroots. He examined that the American ruling class violently repressed Afro-Americans, but at the same time taught them not to fight back, to “suffer peacefully” in the face of those who saw their existence in the United States as a problem.

Malcolm cited the Cambridge Movement, which took place in the state of Maryland earlier in 1963 as an example. The Cambridge Movement was a militant struggle to desegregate the city of Cambridge and secure basic social democratic rights for its Black citizens. It was denounced by white liberals because the revolutionary demonstrators refused to turn the other cheek to white supremacist violence.

Malcolm correctly compared liberal reactions to Black resistance in the United States to liberal reactions to anti-colonial resistance in Africa. On the African continent, Black and Arab people were also taught to “just suffer peacefully” rather than put an end to their suffering.

Solidarity came from Western liberals so long as they remained the protagonists in the struggle. Their solidarity was conditional on the colonised remaining weak and helpless victims.

However, when the colonised took active steps to liberate their people and their land, as was the case in Kenya and Algeria, they were met with dehumanisation and delegitimization. Today, the Palestinian resistance faces the same attacks as did SNCC in the United States, the Mau Mau in Kenya, and the FLN in Algeria.

The connection between Black America and Palestine goes deeper than pretty metaphors and nostalgia for the 1960s. The oppression of Afro-Americans and Palestinians is not merely analogous, but materially linked.

Although our struggle here in the United States is against racial capitalism, whereas the struggle in Palestine is against settler colonialism, we still share common enemies. The American ruling class that oppresses our people is the enemy of Palestinians in the sense that it funds Israel with $3.8 billion each year.

Our tax dollars, money that should be spent on jobs, housing, healthcare, and education for Black America, are unjustly spent on security for an occupying power that seeks to colonise the whole of Palestine and keep West Asia under the domination of imperialism.

This week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken appeared before Congress to request an additional $14.3 billion for Israel’s military to support its indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, which has already killed more than 9,000 Palestinians, including over 3,700 children.

On the other side of the equation, the Zionist project plays a role in our own oppression. Through so-called exchange programs, American police officers receive training from the IOF, the same security apparatus that assists Jewish supremacist settlers in carrying out lynchings against Palestinians in the West Bank and the occupied interior.

After participating in these programs, IOF-trained police go on to terrorise people in our communities. The municipalities in which Michael Brown, George Floyd, and Rayshard Brooks were martyred, for example, all had police departments with Israeli “counter-terrorism” exchange programs.

"We, Afro-Americans, are not distant from the battle for Palestine, not even a centimetre"

We, Afro-Americans, are not distant from the battle for Palestine, not even a centimetre.

The revolutionary intellectual Basil Al-Araj wrote in his posthumously published book I Have Found My Answers, “Finally, every Palestinian (in the broad sense, meaning anyone who sees Palestine as a part of their struggle, regardless of their secondary identities), every Palestinian is on the front lines of the battle for Palestine, so be careful not to fail in your duty.”

As Palestinians in the broad sense, we are obliged to commit our minds and bodies to the cause to the greatest extent possible.

This means correcting the racist lies being told by the media, combating normalisation in our language and in the language of those around us, amplifying the demands of the resistance and of the masses, and showing up to demonstrations in order to pressure our government to abandon its support to the Zionist project.

We respond to your call Palestine, for your martyrs are our martyrs, and your cause is the cause of the world.

Craig Birckhead-Morton is a Muslim American organiser based in New Haven, Connecticut. He is a History student at Yale University and a Youth Fellow with the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.

Follow him on Twitter: @craigbirckheadm

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.