Palestinian Engagement with the Black Freedom Movement prior to 1967

Abstract

This article examines early Palestinian engagements with multiple facets of the Black American struggle for freedom through a content analysis of influential Palestinian press outlets in Arabic prior to 1967. It argues that, since the 1930s, Palestinian intellectuals with strong anti-colonial views linked anti-Black racism in the United States to larger imperial and Cold War dynamics, and that they connected Black American mobilizations against racism to decolonization movements around the world. This article also examines Mahmoud Darwish's early analytical writings on race as a social construct in both the U.S. and Israeli contexts. Understanding these early engagements sheds light on subsequent developments in Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity and on Palestinian Afro-Arab cultural imaginaries.

Transformation or the next meal?

“…2 Since land dispossession is at the core of Indigenous experience of settler colonial capitalism, such "place-based resistance and criticism" (Coulthard, 2014(Coulthard, , p. 14, 2017 is fundamental to any shift toward just futures. Secwepemc educator-activist Dawn Morrison (2020) similarly emphasizes the political salience of local, place-based action: despite the intergenerational traumas and genocidal tactics imposed throughout colonization, "we are persisting into the 21 st century...Indigenous peoples persist in 1 Workshop participants came together in a deep tradition of South-South cooperation, as exemplified by such currents as transnational peasant movements (Nyéléni ,2007), Indigenous activism across nations (Coulthard, 2017;Simpson, 2017), Palestinian-Black engagements in struggles for freedom (Nassar, 2019), and broader post-war anticolonial alliances (Getachew, 2019). 2 "Indigenous" is used broadly here to encompass peoples displaced and dispossessed by settler colonialism, including (for our purposes) in the Indigenous Americas, South Africa, and Palestine.…”