Black and Palestinian liberation – forward ever, backward never

The connections between the Black and Palestinian liberation struggles are more than empty israeli gas canisters and a handful of tweets. They lie in the centrality of the prisoners’ struggle to our movements, the heavy surveillance of our communities, the way our communities are used as testing grounds for imperialist forces; and, simultaneously, in how we have jointly worked to bring an end to imperialism, exchanged tactics, and taken inspiration and political lessons from each other. That is to say: the Black & Palestinian liberation struggles are connected materially and politically and, in many instances, our peoples have chosen, and continue to choose, solidarity.

Through the deep resonance between our struggles and our rich histories of internationalism, Black and Palestinian joint struggle has yielded a long and fruitful history of connections and work, from the North American context in the Belly of the Best to the Caribbean and the African Continent. Groups and individuals like Malcolm X, Kwame Ture, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, Angela Davis, Huey Newton, The Black Panther Party for Self Defense, Black for Palestine, and the liberation struggles of Mozambique, Angola, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Cote d’Ivoire stand as both a testament to that rich history and a connection to the present.

Invested in both learning from and contributing to this powerful legacy, the Palestinian Youth Movement has taken up joint struggle work— working with other colonized and oppressed communities towards a shared vision of liberation— as an integral part of our program since the creation of our first North American chapter in 2009. We have played a key role in historic demilitarization campaigns like Stop Urban Shield, as well as coalitions like Stop LAPD Spying, where we draw critical connections between zionism and the domestic manifestations of US imperialism.

This work has afforded us the opportunity to not just take political lessons from our Black comrades (like the South African struggle against apartheid), but to contribute to key analyses at the intersections of our struggles (like the deadly exchange– joint trainings between US police and the IOF).

Political Lessons from Africa

The Palestinian condition has been increasingly described as one of apartheid: It was the framing of the monumental Palestinian delegation to the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, which propelled the trajectory of the BDS civil society Call in 2005. Given the worldwide currency of the term, apartheid is a readily understood framework and serves as a critical entry point for many progressives and international movements into the Palestinian struggle. Much to the chagrin of israel and its zionist allies, B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic and the UN Special Rapporteur in Palestine, among others, have applied the legal definition of the term to the zionist entity and meticulously cataloged the numerous and sundry forms of anti-Palestinian discrimination within Palestine. In 2017, zionist pique at the term infamously forced the withdrawal of a UN report on israeli apartheid and the resignation of the head of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA).

Despite zionist opprobrium, the term apartheid, while describing some forms of surface-level racial discrimination and the legal prescription of two different sets of laws for two groups of people living on the same land, does not fully encapsulate the Palestinian condition nor zionism’s historic or present objectives in Palestine— something we see clearly when we realize how some liberal zionists, like Peter Beinart, have taken up the framework, arguing without recognizing the irony, for Palestinian rights within israeli law rather than the complete dismantling of zionism. Apartheid is only one layer of our condition and if we are to apply the concept of apartheid to our struggle, we must also understand and apply the full lessons South Africa learned through its own liberation struggle.

In 2019, the PYM embarked on a delegation to South Africa with Palestinian participants from 8 different countries to gain a more intimate understanding of the South African struggle, to deepen our understanding of Racial Capitalism and its application to our struggle, and to sharpen our critique of both the application of the apartheid framework to Palestine and its legacy politically and economically today in present-day South Africa. One of our conclusions from the delegation is that, despite the end of formal apartheid in 1994, a slate of Xhosa, Batswana, and Zulu presidents, and a Truth and Reconciliation process, South Africa remains one of the most under-developed nations in the world, with a wealth gap unchanged since apartheid and falling largely along racial lines. The consensus on the ground is that without serious land and wealth redistribution — putting land back under Black African sovereignty and control — the essential apparatus of apartheid will remain embedded in South Africa. We note in this important reflection that the condition of South Africa is fundamentally one of European settler-colonialism — at one point consolidated under formal apartheid. The parallels in our history, and the outlook for Palestinian liberation if we only address Palestine as a matter of apartheid, could not be more recognizable.

Additionally, the Palestinian movements’ attempts at negotiated settlement (Oslo) has not put land back in Palestinian hands, provided international recognition of Palestinian sovereignty, resulted in the return of refugees to our homeland, provided us with a representative nor empowered government, nor led to any material improvement in our condition. Rather, it has created a collaborator class of elites that serve to repress meaningful liberation struggles. 

The South African experience has taught us that the question of human and civil rights has little meaning without recognized sovereignty over a land base. Just as the legal definition of apartheid did not, by itself, challenge European settler-colonialism and European claims to African land, apartheid, too, does neither question nor criminalize zionism or its state-building project (israel). On the contrary, the legal apartheid framework can implicitly legitimize zionism and the zionist entity by positioning it as the arbiter and granter of political and civil rights; it too creates a false equivalence of liberation and self-determination to the shallow marker of gaining equal rights or legal standing to our oppressors without addressing any of the material conditions of colonial settlement and decades of entrenched systems of extraction, exploitation, and domination. Divorced from a comprehensive program for liberation, addressing only the overt aspects of apartheid is a liberal capturing of a revolutionary project. We are not struggling for equal rights with our oppressors within a settler legal structure. We are fighting for the complete liberation of Palestine — land and people — and the recognition of Palestinian sovereignty from the river to the sea.

We know that, wherever we find ourselves as Palestinians in exile, we are on the frontlines of the struggle against zionism. When we find ourselves on those frontlines, we must hold fast to our political principles and proud history of internationalism and apply the same vigor and commitment to the struggles of other peoples against calculated oppression and colonial violence.

Stop Cop City & Defend the Weelaunee Forest

Atlanta Georgia, which has historically been majority Black and holds a rich history and pride in its Black culture, is colloquially known as a “Black City.” It has also become a testing ground for new methods of occupation and militarized control, and is right now a hub of anti-imperialist struggle with the fight to Stop Cop City.

There are many Black conditions in the so-called US but, regardless of their diversity, they are all punctuated by the system of racist policing, economic extraction, state-backed white vigilante groups, lynching, the rabid machine of incarceration for profit — all intersected within the reality of living in a settler-colonial nation whose wealth is largely built from the stolen labor of enslaved Black people, interspersed with current reality of ghettoized Black neighborhoods and communities. This constellation of oppression is multi-generational and deeply entrenched within the American political and economic establishment: it is built into the foundation of the state itself. As James Baldwin said in 1980, “what we are dealing with really is that for Black people in this country there is no legal code at all. We’re still governed, if that is the word I want, by the slave code.” Slavery is an ever-present specter in the US, persisting in effect, if not in name, after the official end of legal slavery through the economic indenture of Black people (share-cropping) and convict leasing. Its legacy lives on through the pillaged labor of Black people through the modern prison system.

The socioeconomic conditions of being born Black in the United States cannot be separated from either being Black or being poor because of the racialization of wealth in the US. State-sponsored violence and police murder gets to the core of the inheritance of Black people in the Americas. This has therefore been among the major factors that produced the Black Power Movement, including the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, and the We Charge Genocide petition to the United Nations for Relief From a Crime of The United States Government Against the Negro People (1951).

This legacy is critical in understanding the current popular movement arising in Atlanta Georgia, underscored by repression tactics and lawfare that are making precedent in civil law in the United States, and enhancements of charges for all those arrested, such as applied felony charges of domestic terrorism under the justification of Domestic Violent Extremism. This includes two protestors who are facing 20 years in prison for posting flyers that identify the cop they claim is linked to the killing of forest defender Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán in the Atlanta forest while organizing to stop the $90 million dollar, corporate-funded, police and fire training complex that peoples’ movements have named “Cop City.”

Announced in 2017, Cop City is born out of the upward trend of militarizing civilian police forces in the so-called United States and throughout the world. The Atlanta Police Foundation (APF) has its gaze set on 85 acres of a 1,000-acre stretch of woodland, named the Weelaunee Forest (Mvskoke/Muskogee Homelands) or Atlanta Forest, in order to build a training complex for local police and fire departments, national law enforcement, and international militaries to exchange tactics and technologies. Atlanta is already home to the infamous Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program, located on Georgia State University campus. It is a focal point for the Deadly-Exchange Program between 100s of national law enforcement units, including the police and border patrol, and the israeli military.

A few states away, Durham, North Carolina became the first US city to ban police training with the israeli military in 2018, through a city council resolution driven by a coalition of local organizers under the umbrella of Demilitarize from Durham2Palestine. In their analysis, they note that the similarities between israeli treatment, brutality, and terror against Palestinians and Durham police’s treatment of Black people and other minorities are not just shared in likeness: They will be concretely and materially expanded through the exchange of skills, tactics, and technologies between on the one hand, genocidal settler zionist forces and on the other, a US police force originating in Indigenous extermination campaigns and slave patrols. We already know what the conclusion of this collusion will be. As we have seen across North America, more policing means more surveillance, death, and incarceration. It does not mean safety.

In the case of Cop City, we can surmise the trainings that will be offered will be informed by the trends we see across the United States: “predictive policing”; counterterrorism modules found in GILEE and other police/military exchange programs, such as the now-defunct Urban Shield which also boasted exchanges between the israeli military and a horde of police departments; and surveillance exchange centers between federal, state and local law enforcement known as “fusion centers” found across many cities in the so-called US. These fusion centers formally link surveillance collaboration between police, ICE, DHS, among other agencies. As such, they represent the nexus of multiple struggles — Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, Black, Latino, Indigenous, migrant — as the War on Terror framework is expanded and used as a pretext to further entrench large-scale surveillance of other racialized communities.

The state of Georgia has used this moment as an opportunity to flex its new domestic terrorism statute. Over the last decades, terrorism charges have been used against activists in the Palestinian struggle, with a devastating effect on our community in exile. Most infamously, five members of the Holy Land Foundation, an Islamic charity that provided aid to Palestinians across Southwest Asia/North Africa, were convicted of material support for terrorism based on secret testimony by an israeli agent. Such charges have also been used against Palestinians like Sami al Arian, who was deported to Turkey in 2015.

Today in Atlanta, more than 42 people now face domestic terrorism charges, which carries a sentence of up to 35 years in prison. It marks a vicious escalation in the repression of peoples’ liberation movements in North America.

But the stronger the repression, the stronger the resistance. Many of these law enforcement exchange programs have fallen before a united community front. Hopefully, Cop City will meet the same fate. The protests against the complex’s construction, which began with land defenders inhabiting the forest in November 2021 and growing into a full-fledged movement by the beginning of Fall 2022, have escalated to national news coverage with the murder of forest defender Tortuguita Terán in January and a rallying cry for supporters across the continent to come to the site to hold the line. The APF’s mega-facility (Cop City) is facing a coordinated resistance built from the foundations of multiple movements for justice: the Black Lives Matter Movement, ending deadly-exchange, justice for those murdered by police impunity, and land defense work. This is why the coalition of community organizations entering the struggle runs the gamut from LANDBACK, a popular movement on Turtle Island to bring land back under Indigenous sovereignty, to racial justice to environmental justice. This powerful coalition includes the Community Movement Builders, who co-hosted a panel with PYM on Black Palestinian Struggle – quoting Malcolm X that this project will be stopped “by any means necessary.”

Right now, the Atlanta Police Department, Georgia State Police, Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Georgia State Troopers, and the National Guard are all enforcing this illegal land swap. The concerted police presence and state-backed legal repression marking this current fight is only a shadow of things to come if Cop City is built– domestic terrorism, racketeering, enhanced charges, and police-sanctioned murder. The introductory demand, as it stands, is for Mayor Andre Dickens and the City Council to Stop Cop City, Save the Atlanta Forest, and cancel the lease to the Atlanta Police Foundation. At the press conference, faith leaders were enjoined: this is happening in Atlanta, and so why are the majority of people engaging in this coming from other states or even from other countries? Reverend Keyanna Jones swiftly responded, “the reality is that the ones who are engaging in violence are the police and they’re from right here in Atlanta, Georgia.”

Supporting Black Liberation on Turtle Island

Today, the imperialist cudgel is the label of ‘terrorism,’ which, as illustrated by Stop Cop City, is applied alike to Palestinian and Black liberation movements. While this designation has been most recently informed by the “Global War on Terror”, it has a deeper history, one that impacts our mass movements in the so-called United States today.

In April 1968, the FBI noted some of the key objectives of COINTELPRO, including “1. Prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups” and “4. Prevent […] growth of militant Black nationalist organizations, especially among youth.” It is a testament to the importance of revolutionary Black organizing in the United States that the FBI considered these groups so dangerous to its imperialist agenda that it took up the majority of its concerted surveillance. Like Kanafani and other far-seeing revolutionaries of their time, Black organizers of this period were killed or imprisoned, not for what they had done but for what they had the potential to do. The state moved to tear apart a powerful movement for change inside the imperial core. Today they continue to lock up Black people at some of the highest rates in the country and the world, with increased surveillance, mass policing, and new legal designations, such as “Black identity extremism.”

The indivisibility of justice requires that we materially support the Black liberation struggle with the same fierce determination as we do our own. And, while we recognize the similarities and deep resonance between our movements, we must also push beyond in order to achieve freedom. We must recognize that the Black struggle is fundamentally at odds with imperialism: it was in the service of imperialism that Europeans abducted Africans for shipment to the Western hemisphere, and it is in the service of imperialism today that Black communities are deliberately under-developed and routinely have their labor exploited in a multitude of ways, from prisons to the poverty draft. Imperialism must be fought wherever it is found, and it is clear the United States is as much at war domestically as it is internationally.

Internationalism must live not only in sentiment but in deed. Nor can it be taken for granted. If we are to stay true to the internationalist principles that are core to the character and history of the Palestinian liberation movement, we must understand that our liberation is integrally intertwined with the liberation of Africa and her diaspora. We must create a united front against our shared oppressors and we must support and strategize with our Black comrades as they battle the injustice of the state, law enforcement, and an economic system designed to exploit them. We must be out on the streets shoulder to shoulder with our Black comrades fighting for the full self-determination of Black communities, the freedom of Black political prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the end of policing, prisons, militarism, and economic subjugation.

The Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) is a popular, independent, transnational movement working towards the full liberation of Palestine, land and people, from zionism. A version of this article was published in Arabic in Al-Akhbar on June 3, 2023.

Nadya Tannous
Nadya Tannous is a passionate community organizer, born and raised in the Bay Area (Ohlone Territory), with a focus on political education, movement relationship building, and returning land to the people and people returning to the land. Nadya is a member of the Palestinian Youth Movement. Nadya holds an MSc in Forced Migration and Refugee Studies from the University of Oxford and a BA in Anthropology and Sociology from UC Santa Cruz.

Lenna Zahran Nasr
Lenna Zahran Nasr is a community organizer and member of the Palestinian Youth Movement, born and raised on occupied Tickanwa-tic and Coahuiltecan land (Central Texas).