The Black Liberation Movement Stands With Palestine

Oppressed people all over the world share a common struggle. This has been clear to Black revolutionaries like Malcolm X, Kwame Ture, and Fred Hampton. Today we must also clearly understand that our fight against police crimes and mass incarceration is connected to the fight of the Palestinians against genocide, apartheid, and settler colonialism. Our freedom depends on unconditional solidarity with Palestine and liberation movements worldwide.

We want Palestine to win because a victory for them is a victory for us.

The historical roots of solidarity between the Black and Palestinian liberation movements are deep. We see it from Malcolm X visiting Gaza in 1964 to James Baldwin rightfully naming Israel as a colonial power in the 1970s to Palestinians advising protesters in Ferguson on how to deal with tear gas in 2014. Palestinians were able to help because that same tear gas, made in the USA, had been used by the Israeli Occupation Forces to repress their protests.

We are fighting the same system of oppression. Our tax dollars are used to bomb Gaza while Israeli police share crowd suppression tactics with racist police departments all over the US. When Nelson Mandela said “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians” he was not speaking metaphorically. We quite literally have the same enemy: the system of western imperialism.

Western imperialism grew out of the genocide of Indigenous people in the Americas, the enslavement and dislocation of millions of Africans, and the colonization of Africa, Asia and the Americas by the ruling classes of Europe. It expanded by stealing as much as it could, and it continues to exploit land and people, but imperialism has been declining since the early 20th century.

The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 took place at a moment in history when the world, in the wake of WWII, was experiencing decolonization, i.e., a period when old empires like England and France were being shaken with insurrections and demands for self-determination. Ironically, this is also a moment when European Jews came as colonizers, as paramilitary groups to terrorize and drive from their homeland the Palestinian people.

These paramilitary operations were supported by the United States and executed under the color of a U.N. resolution that planned to partition Palestine into independent Arab and Jewish governments. They leveled entire villages, murdering thousands of Palestinian families, mostly women and children.

The Palestinians refer to this period of mass murder and forced relocation as the “Nakba” which is Arabic for “catastrophe”. 750,000 Palestinians were uprooted, losing their homes, land and communities. Today 90% of Palestinians in Palestine are locked into 40% of the West Bank, and at least 6 million Palestinians live outside of Palestine after their families were forced off their land.

So the genocidal massacre of tens of thousands of Palestinians since October 2023 is a continuation of what Israel has been doing since 1948.

1948 was also the year apartheid began in South Africa with the election of the National Party, which established a terroristic system of racial segregation to keep the white minority ruling over the Black majority. Israel and Apartheid South Africa became close allies in the 1960’s. Israel even helped its apartheid twin’s attempts to build nuclear weapons.

The USA became the leader of western imperialism after WWII, and was a benefactor for both Israel and apartheid South Africa, as well as many fascist regimes around the world. It had its own system of apartheid, Jim Crow. Jim Crow inflicted lynchings, arson, police beatings, and many more brutalities on Black people which were committed either by the state or with its permission.

The government viciously attacked Black people who fought for self determination with assassinations, imprisonment, deportation, torture, defamation and other tactics. In spite of these attacks, Jim Crow was defeated by the collective power of Black people, the same way the abolition of chattel slavery was made possible by rebellions, escapes, and other forms of mass resistance.

However, the system created by slavery still exists, so Jim Crow persists in neoliberal regimes which have endless money for police and prisons but cut budgets for housing, healthcare, education, and other public goods. We see the priorities of our government when Americans have to fend for themselves against hurricane floods while billions of their tax dollars have funded the destruction of homes, schools, hospitals, and places of worship in Gaza.

Although it is dying, the imperialist system will continue to inflict suffering on billions of people globally until it is fully dismantled. As members of the global majority of people oppressed by imperialism, we have to support each other's struggles for liberation. We understand the necessity of Nat Turner’s rebellion, the Haitian revolution, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and other historical examples of people fighting back against oppression. We know that the unified Palestinian resistance is a part of this history of global struggle against imperialism.

That’s why NAARPR stood in unconditional solidarity with the resistance movement against apartheid in South Africa from our formation in 1973 until its victory in 1991, at a time when the US government slandered anti apartheid leaders such as Nelson Mandela as “terrorists.” That's also why the Palestinian resistance materially supported South African revolutionaries, and why the current South African government is leading the charge of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

Samora Machel, leader of the Mozambican decolonization struggle, said “solidarity is not an act of charity, but mutual aid between forces fighting for the same objective.”

By joining in Palestinian led protests and direct actions on a weekly basis since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, we are not doing charity. Nor are our Palestinian siblings doing us a favor when they join demonstrations against police crimes and for community control of the police. We are locked together in centuries old chains of oppression and we have to struggle together to be free.

We will continue to stand in solidarity with Palestine until the liberation movement wins, and we call on Black people, and all oppressed and exploited people, to join us in supporting this historic international struggle.

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!

The people united, will never be defeated!