‘When I see them, I see us’
A short video from 2015 linked African Americans and Palestinians from the occupied territories, reviving an empathy dormant for decades, which began when Palestine became part of the struggle against colonial dominance and land rights.
by Sylvie Laurent
FEBRUARY 2019
Before the fall: President Jimmy Carter and First Lady Rosalynn Carter congratulate Andrew Young on becoming UN Ambassador in 1977. Credit Bettmann · Getty Images
‘When I see them, I see us’ is a short video that shows in quick succession faces of people united by the messages they hold up to the camera: ‘We are not collateral damage, we have names and faces’. There is footage from Ferguson, Missouri, and shots of Palestinians in the occupied territories with placards reading ‘Black Lives Matter’ while African Americans protest against the racist oppression of Palestinians. There is a single target, the US firm Combined Systems Inc, which supplies products such as tear gas both to the Ferguson police and to the Israeli forces in Gaza and the West Bank.
The three-minute video, produced in 2015, was immediately picked up by social networks. Besides unknown protestors, black activist Angela Davis, who recently published a collection of essays (1), philosopher Cornel West, actor Danny Glover (who once played Nelson Mandela), singer Lauryn Hill and writer Alice Walker all appear. Noura Erakat, the human rights lawyer who came up with the idea, was well aware of their impact. The film is a declaration of solidarity between African American activists and Palestinians (2), who were both suffering from state violence at the time although their relationship goes much further back.
The year 1967, with the Six Day war and Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, was also crucial for the American civil rights movement, marking the turning point from the non-violent stance of its Christian base to radical demands for justice. The Black Power movement reverted to the third world internationalism and anticolonialism of earlier black activists, whether communist, like Paul Robeson, or nationalist, like Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, who visited Jerusalem in 1957 and Gaza in 1964, ahead of a transnational and cosmopolitan liberation struggle. In his 1964 essay Zionist Logic, he denounced the ‘camouflage’ of Israeli ‘colonialism’, disguising violence as benevolence with the strategic support of the US. He called it ‘dollarism’.
Right to land and freedom
The most important radical groups, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers, also condemned Israel and the US. Young Black Liberation activists moved away from African American sympathy for Israel as the Holy Land and a refuge for a people once enslaved and persecuted. African Americans had cherished the biblical metaphors of Exodus since the 17th century, and the establishment of a Jewish state had seemed providential. James Baldwin wrote in 1948: ‘The more devout Negro considers that he is a Jew, in bondage to a hard taskmaster and waiting for Moses to lead him out of Egypt’ (3). No one could better understand the Jews’ search for a land of freedom than an African American. Equally, when in exile he visited Palestine in 1961, Baldwin expressed empathy for any people seeking a homeland, and understood the meaning of dispossession and forced displacement.
We are not anti-Jewish and we are not antisemites. Only we do not believe the leaders of Israel have a right to this land H Rap Brown
Israel’s 1967 occupation of more Palestinian land ended Zionist feelings among activist African Americans. Having once identified themselves with the Jews in their servitude, they now felt closer to the Arabs. While Martin Luther King had spontaneously hailed the founding of Israel, his mentors, Mahatma Gandhi and Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s revolutionary leader, had publicly condemned Zionism in the name of their anticolonial struggles. In 1977 SNCC activists, King’s rebellious heirs, published a call for solidarity with the Palestinians.
The anti-imperialism of the new black activists expressed solidarity with non-whites in the third world. This generation saw themselves as prisoners in a domestic colony, and the more nationalistic demanded a bi-national solution within the US. This produced what the historian Alex Lubin called ‘an Afro-Arab political imaginary’. The Black Panthers contacted the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which saw the link between Palestine and the anticolonial, antiracist and anticapitalist struggle, as legitimate.
Both the Black Panthers and the SNCC were immediately accused of antisemitism. Spokespeople for both organisations, aware of some antisemitic trends among activists, clarified their position; SNCC chairman H Rap Brown declared in 1967, ‘We are not anti-Jewish and we are not antisemites. Only we do not believe that the leaders of Israel have a right to this land’ (4). In 1970 the Black Panther leader Huey Newton also denounced extremist remarks by activists and defended revolutionary internationalism, hostile to white supremacy, but not to Jews. He reasserted the right to self-determination of all peoples oppressed by militarism and Israeli-American ‘reactionary nationalism’ (5).
‘Thinking our emancipation for us’
The coalition between African Americans and Jews, which had played a determining role during the civil rights period (1954-68), was endangered. This was an important turning point. From the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching alongside Martin Luther King, the progressive Jewish elite had played a major role in the Black Liberation struggle. The majority of students who took part in the Freedom Summer of 1964, a voter registration drive in Mississippi to encourage African Americans to sign up to vote, were Jewish.
That relationship had been strained, notably by accusations of paternalism by educated Jews. But the Palestinian issue marked the break in relations. In 1967 the African American writer Harold Cruse challenged the premise of an alliance between the equally oppressed. In The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), Cruse argued that Jews held power and used it, including for ‘thinking our emancipation for us’. Where was that empathy when it came to denouncing the Israeli occupation of Palestine? What was the Jewish position on Zionism in the rightwing review Commentary? Cruse said African Americans in search of justice should think about the wisdom of their partnership with American Jews.
The mention of Commentary highlights the gradual shift in views of leftwing American Jewish intellectuals, including Norman Podhoretz, from the end of the 1960s. They ended all national support for African Americans, and unconditionally supported Israel internationally. Trying to reconcile this, they claimed that the US social, liberal and universalist model, which had enabled Jews to become Americanised, was threatened by those who wanted to destroy racism and domination in both countries.
This made UN General Assembly resolution 3379, adopted in 1975 and condemning Zionism as ‘racism and racial discrimination’, controversial in the US. The US ambassador to the UN, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was outraged, although he was aware of the mechanisms of state discrimination. In 1965, as an academic close to Lyndon Johnson, he had produced the Moynihan Report calling for ambitious social policies favouring African Americans excluded from social structures. He eventually became a neoconservative and an ardent defender of Israel.
To understand why the Palestinian question resonates with African Americans, we need to look at the balance of power within the US after the civil rights movement, when the protagonists reviewed issues rooted in history: foremost were the imperial nature of the American republic and the exclusion of minorities of colour from citizenship. Declaring support for Palestine proclaimed the right to dissent from US power, which, after confiscating land and rights from African Americans, Mexicans and Native Americans, replicated that domination in the Middle East. From 1968 American Jews and Arabs, aware of that similarity with US history, committed to their own movements for political assertion inspired by the American civil rights movement. Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defence League in 1968 and future leader of Israel’s far right, raised the idea of ‘Jewish power’.
‘Israeli apartheid’
The apartheid regime in South Africa led to mobilisation on US campuses and in black working-class neighbourhoods. South Africa, already a symbol of colonial domination, bought weapons from the US and Israel, pushing Israel further towards the oppressors. There was talk of ‘Israeli apartheid’ (6), and Palestinians became members of a diaspora of the dispossessed. As in South Africa, Palestinian activists demanded boycotts, condemnation and an end to investment by all US institutions, from local universities to the State Department.
In 1979 President Jimmy Carter forced civil rights activist Andrew Young to stand down as US ambassador to the UN for having met PLO leaders. Irritated by Young’s hostility to his pro-Israel policies, Carter made African American leaders angry. James Baldwin wrote in The Nation on 29 September 1979: ‘The state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of Western interests ... The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of divide and rule and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.’ Since this was more a domestic matter than geopolitical, many African Americans — including the Reverend Jesse Jackson, another civil rights veteran and a rising figure in the Democratic Party — brought up the role of American Jews in Young’s forced resignation. Accusations of antisemitism resurfaced, and Jackson’s comments about New York’s Jews (as Israel-fixated and dominant in ‘Hymietown’) did nothing to help. Jackson, a strong advocate of a broad pan-minority coalition, struggled to heal this divide, and failed. When Louis Farrakhan, the black leader of the Nation of Islam, whose antisemitism had been well known since the 1970s, lent his support, African Americans’ anti-Zionist stance was fatally discredited.
In the 1990s the radical African American movement lost power, and its relationship with the Palestinians ran out of steam. The leaders’ focus on democratic self-restraint, the breakup of the remaining Black Panthers, and hopes for peace in the Middle East after the 1993 Oslo accords ended the criticisms of imperialism that had marked the US liberation movement.
Solidarity with Palestinians only resurfaced after the 2015-16 Ferguson riots, when there was anger over police crimes against unarmed young black men. The Black Lives Matter movement took up the SNCC’s torch and linked racial issues with the logic of world domination. Social media helped revive solidarity: one Facebook group is called Blacks for Palestine (B4P). In 2017 the anti-racism group Dream Defenders organised a trip for black artists to the occupied territories. There have been conferences on US university campuses, where calls to boycott Israel have triggered controversy (7).
Such actions involve only a few, but a new generation links both groups’ struggles. Vic Mensa, a rapper from Chicago, travelled to the occupied territories in 2017 and wrote about it in Time (8). He described the mirror effect of seeing a young Palestinian frisked by an Israeli soldier; his relief at not being the suspect was followed by the realisation that ‘for once in my life I didn’t feel like the nigger.’
Sylvie Laurent
Sylvie Laurent is a research associate at Harvard and Stanford, a lecturer at Sciences Po Paris and the author of King and the Other America: The Poor People’s Campaign and the Quest for Economic Equality, University of California Press, Oakland, 2019.
Translated by Krystyna Horko
Angela Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2016.
(2) ‘When I see them, I see us’, Black Palestinian Solidarity.
(3) James Baldwin, ‘The Harlem Ghetto’, V Commentary 165, 169 (1948).
(4) Quoted in Douglas Robinson, ‘New Carmichael Trip’, The New York Times, 19 August 1967.
(5) Huey P Newton, ‘On the Middle East’, in To Die for the People, Random House, New York, 1972.
(6) See Alain Gresh, ‘Palestine: the view from South Africa’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, August 2009.
(7) See Alain Gresh, ‘The truths that won’t be heard’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, September 2018.
(8) Vic Mensa, ‘What Palestine taught me about American racism’, Time, New York, 12 January 2018
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