African Americans & the Palestine solidarity struggle

Although many people within the United States, from various nationalities and cultures, have expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people since Israeli aerial bombardment of Gaza started on Dec. 27, the bourgeoisie stills refuses to allow an open debate around the question of an independent state for this oppressed people. At the same time the ruling elites have set out to shape political opinion in favor of imperialist aims in the Middle East.

One key tactic in the ruling-class effort to build support for imperialist aims in the Middle East is to openly solicit collaboration between African-American political and religious leaders and the state of Israel. During the early phase of the bombing of Gaza by the Israeli Air Force, the Detroit City Council president, Monica Conyers, traveled to Israel to supposedly study the conflict in occupied Palestine.

Cynthia McKinney was a passenger on the Dignity vessel, carrying desperately needed medical aid which was denied entry into Gaza by the Israeli Navy. The Dignity was hit and damaged by the Israeli military forces. McKinney, in subsequent interviews, stated that she felt her life was in danger during the ordeal with the Israeli Navy. Undeterred, she maintains her support for the right of selfdetermination for the people of Palestine. Seen here, the rescued ship as it is brought into a Lebanese port.

In 2008, a well-known African-American minister, Kenneth Flowers, pastor of the Greater New Mount Moriah Baptist Church in Detroit, was invited to Israel in order to receive a “Martin Luther King” award. Flowers took a delegation of several African Americans with him on the trip to Israel, which included the president of the Detroit-Metro AFL-CIO, Saundra Williams.

Other examples of these efforts to influence African Americans to support the settler-colonial state of Israel include the public postures of other ministers such as Bishop Keith Butler of the Word of Faith Ministries, which has hosted public meetings in support of Israel. Other supporters of the state of Israel include the Christian Television Network (CTN), headed by Rev. Glenn Plummer, who openly speaks in favor of the Zionist regime and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

In two Congressional votes on a nonbinding resolution endorsing the Israeli genocidal onslaught against the Palestinian people on Jan. 8 and 9, the U.S. Senate voted unanimously in support of the Zionist military program against the Palestinians. In the House of Representatives, after Speaker Nancy Pelosi had, at the beginning of the aerial bombardments, expressed unconditional support for the state of Israel and its military assault on the Palestinian people, only five members voted against a resolution similar to the one passed by the Senate.

Among the approximately 40 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, only two voted in opposition to the resolution supporting Israel. Yet, despite these efforts to influence the elected political leadership and selected African-American religious figures, most working-class and poor Black people in the U.S. oppose the government’s hostility toward the Palestinian people.

This defiance can be traced back to the period of the rising civil rights and Black liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The most advanced political elements within these movements saw a direct relationship between the national oppression suffered by people in the U.S. and the struggles of the Palestinians and other colonized people in other parts of the Middle East and the world.

A history of solidarity from Malcolm X to Cynthia McKinney

One of the major conflicts that would shape and define the post-World War II period was the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and the resulting displacement and occupation of the Palestinian people. Interestingly enough, one African American, Ralph Bunche, a Harvard-educated political scientist, was intimately involved in the imperialist machinations that lead to the creation of the Israeli regime, despite his own misgivings about the creation of the state of Israel and how harmful he knew it would be for Palestinians.

By the 1960s, revolutionary African-American leaders such as Malcolm X, through his involvement in the Nation of Islam and the later Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), openly criticized Zionism as a political philosophy and expressed solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinians and the Arab national liberation movements throughout the region.

In an article published by Malcolm X on Sept. 17, 1964, in the Egyptian Gazette, he pointed out that the Zionist regime in Palestine served U.S. imperialist aims in the Middle East and Africa.

After the assassination of Malcolm X in February 1965, the youth elements within the civil rights movement became more radicalized. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) issued a statement in opposition to the U.S. war against Vietnam in January 1966, becoming the first major civil rights organization to openly call for the end of the war and the elimination of the draft.

In 1967, during the Arab-Israeli so-called “Six Day War” in June, SNCC took a position in support of Egypt and the other Arab states, as well as the Palestinians. The organization came under fire once again for opposing U.S. foreign policy.

James Forman, who in 1967 served as the international affairs director for SNCC, wrote in his political autobiography, “We were too radical then, for not supporting domestic policies of the administration, and we were too radical now—for opposing American foreign policy, for seeing Israel as an imperialist power in the service of, and serving, that policy.” (“The Making of Black Revolutionaries,” Forman, p. 496)

Another SNCC leader, Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture), delivered a major address at the Organization of Arab Students conference held at the University of Michigan in August 1968. In this speech, Carmichael reiterated the organization’s position in support of the Palestinian struggle and also discussed the role of Zionist ideology inside the U.S.

Carmichael said, “What makes the forces of Zionism so effective in their propaganda is that the Zionists have something else: not only do they assert theirs as a fact, and anyone who questions it they put on the defensive by calling him anti-Semitic, but the Zionists hook up the killing of six million Jews as a justification for the so-called state of Israel.

“They say, ‘Six million Jews were murdered by Hitler; we have a right to Israel.’ And that is a very dangerous thing. It is a fact that six million Jews were slaughtered by Hitler, but that six million Jews were murdered by Hitler does not give the Zionists the right to take Arab land.” (Stokely Speaks, 1971, 2007, p. 137)

This position in support of the Palestinian struggle was also adopted by other revolutionary organizations such as the Black Panther Party and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. By the late 1970s, even more centrist African-American leaders sought to intervene in resolving the Palestinian question.

Even the former United Nations ambassador for the U.S. under the Carter administration, Andrew Young, who was a former civil rights leader who worked alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), was removed from his position in the Carter administration in large part because of his efforts to open up dialogue with representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) at the U.N.

In the aftermath of the removal of Andrew Young in 1979, another civil rights leader who had also worked with Dr. King, Rev. Jesse Jackson, took a trip to the region and developed a position calling for dialogue with the Palestinians.

With the advent of Barack Obama’s candidacy for president in 2008, the senator from Illinois went to great lengths not only to express his support for the pro-Israeli position, as reflected in his major address at the American-Israeli Political Action Committee conference in early 2008, but also to stay clear of any substantive discussion involving the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and statehood. Obama has surrounded himself with pro-Israeli aides, including his secretary of state, former Sen. Hillary Clinton, and his chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, who, according to news reports, served in the Israeli military.

In contrast, former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, who ran for president on the Green Party ticket in 2008, supported the Palestinian people as part of a solidarity delegation which sought to deliver aid to the people of Gaza, who had been under a blockade for months.

McKinney was a passenger on the Dignity vessel, which was denied entry into Gaza by the Israeli Navy. The Dignity was hit and damaged by the Israeli military forces. McKinney, in subsequent interviews, stated that she felt her life was in danger during the ordeal with the Israeli Navy. Undeterred, she maintains her support for the right of self-determination for the people of Palestine.

Solidarity with Palestine continues to grow

During the latest assault on Gaza, there has been a groundswell of support and sympathy in the U.S. for the Palestinian people, especially among African Americans and other oppressed national groups.

The Blacks Against Genocide Coalition issued a statement that read in part: “We, Black people in the United States, condemn the criminal Israeli attacks on the people of Gaza. These war crimes are being conducted with the overt material and unapologetic political backing of the U.S. government.

This statement continues by pointing out that “Most importantly, we have learned the lessons of four centuries of racist oppression in the Western hemisphere: that the liberation struggles of the oppressed must not be divided by language, geography, gender, religion or race; that if they come for Gaza in the morning, they will most certainly come for Harlem at night.”

African Americans and other oppressed sectors of the working class in the U.S. recognize that the deepening economic crisis is, at least in large part, a direct result of the militarism of U.S. imperialism. The ongoing wars of occupation in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Haiti have strengthened the repressive apparatus of the U.S.

Consequently, the liberation of African Americans and other oppressed peoples can only be won when imperialism is challenged and defeated in other parts of the world. Therefore, the defeat of imperialism in the so-called developing or third world countries will inevitably advance the struggle for the total liberation of the oppressed and working people inside the imperialist states.