What Black Americans and Palestinians share – The Register-Guard

Posted By on May 27, 2021

M. Reza Behnam| Register-Guard

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

James Baldwin

No system of power maintains itself forever and the fight for freedom knows no borders. Such ideas are uniting Black Americans and Palestinians. Admittedly, their experiences are distinct, but the similarities are unmistakable.

African American solidarity with Palestinians is rooted in the realization that the state violence they experience is directly tied to the violence Palestinians face daily in Palestine/Israel.

The struggle for control of already inhabited lands is glaring in the histories of the United States and Israel.

European Zionists poured into already well populated Palestine, as did British colonists onto indigenous lands in America. The ideology of domination produced a sense of entitlement and superiority among the Jewish population and among whites in America.

Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has been trying to fulfill the 1969 claim of its fourth prime minister, Ukrainian-born Golda Meir, that There was no such thing as a Palestinian; they never existed.

In America, the objective was to profit from the free labor of African Americans, while dominating every aspect of their lives. Racist stereotypes and caricatures were contrived to render Black Americans invisible and to deprive them of their humanity.

While Americans are beginning to awaken to the legacy of the countrys settler-colonial and racist past; in Israel, violence against Palestinians and theft of their land continues unabated.

In 2021, Human Rights Watch and BTselem, an Israeli human rights organization, concluded that Israels laws and practices meant to cement the supremacy of Jews over Palestinians is apartheid.

Unlike Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and Gaza, Black Americans have citizenship and the vote. Institutionalized racism, however, is explicit in the criminalization of Black Americans. Unequal treatment based on race persists at all levels of the criminal justice system from misdemeanors to executions.

African Americans have been imprisoned and equal numbers have been disenfranchised because they have been denied due process under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The Israeli governments widespread, arbitrary imprisonment of Palestinians evokes the mass incarceration of Black Americans. BTselem reports that Palestinians have languished in Israeli prisons without charges; and that each year, more than 500 Palestinian children are detained and prosecuted in Israeli military courts. The most common charge is stone throwing, which carries a sentence of up to 20 years.

Decades of U.S.-Israeli policies have trapped Black Americans and Palestinians in segregated, poorly resourced and tightly policed communities, with little hope of escaping poverty.

To dominate all of Palestine, Israel has forced Palestinians onto two small parcels the West Bank and Gaza 22% of historic Palestine, over which they have no real authority.

From 1967 to 2020, Israel demolished an estimated 5,350 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem. Recent attempts in 2021 to evict Palestinians from their homes in the Al-Bustan and Sheik Jarrah neighborhoods of East Jerusalem to make way for Jewish settlers and to build a biblical theme park ignited the current catastrophe.

In the 1960s, many Black communities nationwide were demolished to build highways and other urban renewal projects that largely benefitted the cities white citizens. Linnentown in Georgia is a case in point. The city of Athens and the University of Georgia, under the guise of urban renewal, forced 50 Black families from Linnentown to build three campus dormitories.

The police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown during the summer of 2014, and Israels seven-week bombing assault on Gaza, further forged a bond of solidarity between Black and Palestinian activists. During the Ferguson protests after Browns death, demonstrators held up signs declaring solidarity with the people of Palestine, with one Black marcher waving a flag that said, this is our Intifada.

African American-Palestinian solidarity has historic roots. In his 1964 essay, Zionist Logic, Malcolm X called for the liberation of Palestine, writing, The ever-scheming European imperialists wisely placed Israel where she could geographically divide the Arab world.

In 1966, Black Panther Party founders stated the partys opposition to all forms of racism, Zionism, colonialism and imperialism and called for the decolonization of Palestine.

The Black lives movement has articulated a vision of liberation in solidarity with communities across the globe who are facing state oppression and violence. It comes with recognition that the fight for racial justice is universal and cannot be fought in isolation.

M. Reza Behnam, Ph.D., is a political scientist specializing in the history, politics and governments of the Middle East. He lives in Eugene.

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What Black Americans and Palestinians share - The Register-Guard

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