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Globalize the Intifada: Regional Resistance, International Struggle & Palestinian Liberation on the 36th Anniversary of the Great Intifada

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network

December 10, 2023

 

Amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza carried out by the Zionist regime and the heroic resistance of the Palestinian people, December 7-9 2023 marks the 36th anniversary of the launch of the great popular Palestinian Intifada of 1987, one of the longest sustained grassroots uprisings in history and an example, like today’s battle, of the leadership of the Palestinian working class and popular masses in the struggle for the liberation of Palestine against Zionism, imperialism and their reactionary partners in the region. As Palestinians fight, mourn, love and struggle in the face of an all-out U.S./Israeli assault on their lives, existence and future, they not only defend their land and people but stand with their allies in the regional resistance and around the world on the frontlines of a truly globalized Intifada.

The Great Intifada launched from Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp, often called Mukhayyam al-Thawra, the camp of revolution. Today, the people of Jabaliya camp, themselves refugees of the 1947-48 Nakba, once again resist displacement and the Israeli attempts to push them to the south of Gaza and then to Sinai in Egypt. They remain firmly rooted in the North of Gaza, living through starvation, torture, massive aerial bombing, siege and invasion in order to resist the genocide of their entire people.

On 8 December 1987, the murder of four Palestinian workers, mowed down by an Israeli occupation army truck in Jabaliya camp, led Palestinians to take the streets in massive numbers, building their movement, collectives and institutions, uniting around the messages of the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, boycotting Israel and practicing all elements of popular struggle and collective resistance. Today, as we take to the streets once again, 36 years of Intifada stretch forward to the current Palestinian revolution against a barbaric Israeli genocide.

The prisoners’ movement and the Intifada

As we commemorate this 36th anniversary of years of struggle, of the imprisonment of over 600,000 Palestinians, of Yitzhak Rabin’s “breaking bones” strategy reenacted in mass slaughter in Gaza, we are also facing attempts to render the Palestinian struggle unspeakable, even as it is clear that the Palestinian people and their resistance, along with their allies, are not defeated but are instead exacting a significant cost on the occupier, defending their land toward victory, return and liberation despite the genocide. 

Today, there are nearly 8,000 Palestinian prisoners locked behind Israeli bars. The prisoners liberated during the one-week “humanitarian pause” by the Palestinian resistance through an exchange agreement relayed the severe situation of the captives today, subject to torture, abuse, malnutrition and mistreatment. Six Palestinian prisoners have been assassinated so far behind bars. Every day, the Zionist regime publishes new propaganda photos of Palestinian civilians being stripped and abused, in an attempt to break the will of the people and their resistance.

In 1987, the Intifada was preceded by the self-liberation of Palestinian prisoners; and in 2023, the prisoners’ movement, its strikes, uprisings and ongoing liberation struggles, has clearly pointed the compass toward return and liberation. In fact, the great Intifada was in many places led by Palestinian prisoners who had been liberated by the Resistance in the great 1985 prisoner exchange; today’s resistance is also led by freed Palestinian prisoners who honed their commitment to the struggle in the “revolutionary schools” established by the prisoners themselves, particularly during the Intifada. There is a direct throughline from 1987 to today, through the prisoners’ movement and its leading role in the collective liberation struggle.

The liberation of the prisoners is so precious to the Palestinian people everywhere that the resistance is unwilling to exchange its prisoners of war for anything other than the liberation of the imprisoned heroes of the Palestinian people in Zionist jails, on the terms of the resistance, despite the genocidal bombardment.

The liberation of the prisoners – including those held in international imperialist jails, like Georges Abdallah in France; the Holy Land Foundation prisoners Shukri Abu Baker, Ghassan Elashi and Mufid Abdulqader in the United States; and Amin Abu Rashed in the Netherlands – is once again central to today’s global intifada.

The globalized Intifada

“From New York to Gaza…From Vancouver to Gaza….From Berlin to Gaza…From London to Gaza…From Cape Town to Gaza…From Sao Paulo to Gaza….From Paris to Gaza, Globalize the Intifada!”

The call rings out around the world, as hundreds of thousands – indeed, millions – march against the ongoing Zionist genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. This phrase is not only an expression of sympathy with the Palestinian people and their heroic resistance fighting by all means for the liberation of Palestine, but also a reflection of the international, Arab and Palestinian nature of the Palestinian cause.

Today, the regional resistance is on the front lines of this globalized Intifada that presents a meaningful potential for sweeping the Arab region free of U.S.-led imperialism, including its European and British partners. It is worth recalling that, prior to the 1987 launch of the Intifada, the Palestinian cause seemed at a desperate point, at risk of liquidation, after the Palestinian resistance had been forced from Lebanon under Zionist invasion, while the camps were under siege. The Intifada came to reorient the compass and set the liberation struggle once again on a clear path forward.

Once again, today, prior to 7 October, the drive toward normalization with the Zionist regime seemed inevitable to many, while others bemoaned the disunity of the Palestinian movement; the struggle today has, once more, clarified the role of all forces in the region and the world, uniting the Palestinian people and their Arab and international allies toward liberation and return.

Palestine to Yemen to Lebanon and Beyond: Regional Resistance, Regional Revolution

In Yemen, the mobilized Yemeni people and their armed forces have shut down the Red Sea to Zionist naval traffic after seizing the “Galaxy Leader” ship owned by an Israeli businessman. They have consistently taken action to directly intervene in support of Palestine, imposing a truly material economic cost on the Zionist regime. The Yemeni people and their armed forces have brilliantly illustrated their own triumph over years of siege imposed by reactionary Arab regimes at the behest of Zionism and imperialism through this substantive form of boycott, divestment and sanctions: isolating the Zionist regime and advancing real Arab sovereignty over land, water and resources.

The people of Yemen are, of course, joined in this Intifada by the Lebanese Resistance, who through their participation in the battle of Al-Aqsa Flood, in the resistance to the genocide, have imposed significant military, economic and social costs on the Israeli regime. Over 20 years after the liberation of the South of Lebanon in May 2000 – one of the major factors in sparking the Al-Aqsa Intifada that began in 2000, often called the “Second Intifada”, the Lebanese Resistance is a full partner of the Palestinian Resistance on the field of battle and on the strategic level, enacting the unity of all fronts in order to confront the alliance between “Israel” and the imperialist forces, led by the United States alongside Germany, France, Britain, Canada and their partners. This regional alliance of resistance stretches from Palestine, Yemen and Lebanon, to Iraq, where the U.S. bases remain under ongoing fire and resistance to finally bring that occupation to an end, to Syria, Iran and beyond.

The international popular cradle of the Resistance

Everywhere around the world, the broad masses of the people, from the heart of the Global South to the center of the imperial core, are expressing a clear and thorough rejection of the ongoing genocide that has quickly accelerated to a firm revulsion to the Zionist ideology and Zionist project as a whole and to solidarity with and inspiration by the Palestinian people and their heroic resistance in all forms, particularly the armed resistance. The “red triangle” over targets featured in the resistance videos of Al-Qassam Brigades, Saraya al-Quds and other resistance forces has become an online shorthand for the triumph of the people, their determination, their love for their land and their community over the automated, technologized forces of death and destruction represented by the Merkava tanks and military bases of the US/Israeli war machine.

The “Dahiyeh doctrine” of mass destruction of civilian lives and infrastructure failed in Lebanon in 2006 because the people were a popular cradle, a source of nourishment, growth and sustenance, of the resistance, because the resistance was of, by and for the masses; today, it is failing once again in its full genocidal furor in Gaza for the same reason. This Resistance emerges from the very camps of refugees, denied their right to return home for the past 75 years, that the Zionists seek to destroy and drive into a new displacement today. Globalizing the intifada today means developing the international popular cradle of the resistance – the growing recognition that the Resistance of the Palestinian people, joined by their comrades, brothers and sisters in Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq and beyond, today represent the hope of humanity on our collective front lines.

Like the great popular Intifada of 1987, today’s Palestinian, Arab and international globalized intifada is an anti-imperialist cause. It is a movement against colonialism, imperialism, racism and oppression everywhere. The Palestinian flag is not only a symbol of Palestinian national liberation, but of a commitment to anti-colonial principles, to Indigenous sovereignty, to the fight against exploitation, to the fight to end the extraction of wealth, labour and resources by the United States and its imperialist cohort in Europe.

The anti-imperialist nature of the Palestinian cause has perhaps never been more clear than in the present day, where every imperialist power has clearly aligned itself with the Zionist regime with unparalleled fervor, sending billions of dollars in weaponry for genocidal aerial bombing of the Palestinian people in Gaza; banning demonstrations and Palestinian and Palestine solidarity organizations, including Samidoun in Germany; arresting and prosecuting demonstrators and organizers in France, the United States, Canada and elsewhere; setting up new parliamentary and congressional bodies meant to silence and suppress the growing movement and releasing a torrent of deceptive propaganda; and unleashing a wave of social terror in the academy. It is clear that the imperialist powers are doing this because they see the events of October 7 and the rising regional and global resistance as a threat to their continued domination and extraction of wealth from the region and view the Zionist regime as their mechanism to hold on to such power through genocidal violence.

The imperialist powers, led by the United States, have always viewed Zionism as a mechanism to extract wealth from the people of the region while denying the Arab nation sovereignty over its land, wealth and resources. From the Zionist colonization of Palestine, directed by Britain, through the Nakba, the 1967 occupation, the Intifada to the Zionist genocide today, the imperialist powers have always been the central enemy of the Palestinian people, and every rock, every bullet and every strike that confronts “Israel” also confronts imperialism.

Today’s international popular cradle of the resistance, this globalized intifada, stretches from Gaza, Sanaa, Beirut, Baghdad and Damascus to the streets of Havana, Caracas, Sao Paulo and Johannesburg to the heart of the imperial core, raising a collective voice and developing an international struggle against imperialism and its murderous wars, sanctions and siege, with Palestine at the center.

The working class and the masses lead the struggle

Also like the great Intifada of 1987, we are in a clear era of unity of the Palestinian cause despite the lingering near-afterlife of the collaborationist Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. The Palestinian people throughout occupied Palestine and everywhere in exile and diaspora are united to bring an end to the genocide, unified behind the Resistance, forming a global resistance front that also embraces popular mobilization, arts, culture, political engagement and grassroots organizing as central to the liberation struggle. On this 36th anniversary, we recall that the siege of the camps in Lebanon was finally broken by the eruption of the Intifada inside occupied Palestine in 1987. Today, we look forward to breaking the siege on Gaza, not only through the strength and resilience of the Palestinian people in Gaza, but through the uprising elsewhere and everywhere.

The popular leadership of the working class, based in the unions and organizations of Palestinian workers, farmers, peasants, women, students, fishers, teachers and other social sectors, was central to the development of the Intifada of 1987, a highly organized movement that governed its activities through committees, strong political representation, and central statements that nonetheless provided for widespread popular participation and meaningful engagement in the revolutionary cause.

The Palestinian masses have risen up time and again in revolutionary struggle; even between 1987 and today, we see the second Intifada and upsurge after upsurge, confronting the ongoing home demolitions, land confiscations, mass imprisonment, colonial settlement, killings, denial of the right to return, uniting Palestinians inside and outside occupied Palestine.

Today’s Resistance is a highly organized movement, today led by the Islamic resistance movements in direct alliance with the revolutionary left and Palestinian national forces. It involves the participation of not only the Palestinian people in Gaza and throughout occupied Palestine, but everywhere in exile and diaspora, fighting, organizing, speaking and revolting for liberation and return. Its base is once again deeply rooted in the working class and popular masses of Palestine, as it always has been, from the 1936 revolution to the post-October 7 Palestinian revolutionary struggle. It has always been the workers, peasants and refugees of Palestine who have led the movement, who have given thousands upon thousands of martyrs, who have spent years upon years in prison, and who have raised young strugglers to fight generation after generation until total liberation.

The war on the Intifada

From members of U.S. Congress, to university officials, to German security services, to British police, to the French interior ministry, imperialist forces are attempting to criminalize, suppress and silence clear speech for Palestine. They seek to turn reality inside out, whereby “intifada” – the term reflecting resistance to genocide and oppression – is redefined as itself “genocidal.” These propaganda campaigns aim to empty the term “genocide” of meaning and legal weight and to attempt to reclaim control over the discussion of the Palestinian cause, a control that has been swept away by decades of struggle, and has been rendered unrecoverable after October 7. They also seek to target the growing role and organization of Palestinians in exile and diaspora, reclaiming their role in their national liberation movement stripped from them through the years of the Oslo liquidation process.

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. Long live the Intifada. Victory to the Palestinian Resistance. Stand with the Palestinian armed struggle. Zionism is racism. Imperialism will be defeated. These slogans are ringing out everywhere around the world, and now is the time to declare them, more loudly and clearly than ever. There are no slogans or statements that will satisfy Zionism and imperialism – on the contrary, they wish to strip our movement of our most effective advocacy and our most unifying vision, the vision and promise that enables people to continue to fight, to resist, and to move toward victory in the most extreme conditions of genocide and deprivation.

The great popular Intifada that began in 1987, the great sacrifices and accomplishments of the Palestinian people, were confiscated by U.S. imperialism and Arab reactionary regimes in alliance with a sector of the Palestinian ruling class. This came first through the Madrid conference of 1991 and then by the notorious Oslo accords signed in Washington, D.C., in 1993, a liquidationist attempt to transform the revolutionary aspirations of the Palestinian people into a mere self-rule project adjacent to Zionist colonialism. It developed amid dangerous international conditions – from the fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc states, the threat of US imperialism dominating a unipolar world, and the first Iraq War and the attack on Arab self-determination.

Today, as the U.S. casts its veto in the United Nations against a ceasefire in Gaza, voting for ongoing genocide, it declared that the bombing must continue because Hamas, and thus the Palestinian Resistance, “does not accept a two-state solution.” Indeed, the strugglers of today have learned the bitter lessons of the past diversion of their cause and reliance on the primacy of imperialism, with the U.S. as a “broker.”

Today’s Intifada, on all levels, the Arab, regional, and international Intifada, against a genocidal enemy fully revealed in its atrocities before the world, has only one path forward: no cooptation, no normalization and no concessions, but the defeat of Zionism and the liberation of all of Palestine, the central key for the liberation of the entire Arab nation and the broader region from U.S.-led imperialism and its agents.

On the 36th anniversary of the continuing Intifada, amid today’s global Intifada against genocide, Zionism and imperialism, in honour of all those who sacrificed and fought for freedom, in salute to the over 17,000 martyrs of Gaza, Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network pledges to continue the struggle – until return, until liberation, from the river to the sea.

 

 

 

Israel Is A Terrorist State: All Lost, Total Failure Achieved

Dialogue Works

November 18, 2023

 

“Support the Steadfastness of Gaza” (1970). “Coloring the Gaza Strip in red on a black map, the artist, Ghassan Kanafani, not only refers to the sun – the symbol of liberty at the top of the poster – but symbolically refers to the sacrifice needed for victory.”

 

“It’s time for everybody to get angry. This is not about anti-Semitism. The Netanyahu regime is a war criminal regime. This is not a Jewish problem. This is about political Zionism. Eretz Israel is finished. It’s time for Israel to be terminated as a political Zionist state because until it is, these crimes will continue. The lives of Palestinians mean nothing to them. Nothing happens in Gaza unless the Israelis deem it fit to happen. That is the definition of occupation. How is Palestine going to get their independence? Who is going to give it to them? No one. The Palestinian people had been forgotten. Only Hamas was speaking up for them. The Likud Party invented “from the river to the sea.” If Israel is politically controlled by people who say that Palestine can’t exist then the only solution is that Israel can’t exist and Israel must be eliminated. One way or another, the political Zionists will either learn how to peacefully live with their Palestinian neighbors or be driven into the sea.”  — Scott Ritter

 

Scott Ritter is a former Marine intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union, implementing arms control agreements, and on the staff of General Norman Schwartzkopf during the Gulf War, where he played a critical role in the hunt for Iraqi SCUD missiles. From 1991 until 1998, Mr. Ritter served as a Chief Inspector for the United Nations in Iraq, leading the search for Iraq’s proscribed weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Ritter was a vocal critic of the American decision to go to war with Iraq. His new book, Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union, is his ninth. [Full bio]

 

WATCH: ‘They Call Us Terrorists’: Inside the Palestinian Resistance Forces of Jenin, West Bank

The Real News Network

Nov 13, 2023

 

Why are so many Westerners reluctant to support armed resistance to defeat Zionism?
Answers on a postcard
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–November 13, 2023, NoDealForNature, Twitter/X, ? #StopGreenColonialism #StopGenocide ? [Int’l campaign opposing a genocidal land grab (#NewDealforNature / #NaturePositive / #30×30) marketed as a $olution to “protecting and restoring nature”]

“The resistance will never be crushed… Any people under occupation have the right to resist. This is the case for all colonized people.”

“People in the West think we have no ambition. It’s not true. I was studying computer engineering and I had an invention. All Palestinians have been subjected to the injustice of occupation. We grew up with ambition. We grew up playing in the street. Children around the world may play ordinary games, like PlayStation. Here we are forced to play with stones. There are no conditions for life here. No life… We had ambitions to become scientists, doctors, and engineers, but the occupation opted for violence.”

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Israel continues to unleash hell upon the 22-by-5-mile concentrated area of Gaza, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, with relentless airstrikes and indiscriminate bombings of hospitals, residential buildings, schools, and other civilian sites. As besieged Palestinians shelter and flee and die within the walls of their cage in Gaza, Resistance forces are mobilizing to rise up against an Occupation that has presided over lives for 75 years.

Where there is occupation, there is resistance, and numerous Palestinian resistance groups exist across the Occupied Territories. These groups consist of occupied subjects turned freedom fighters—those who have been directly targeted by Israel, who have witnessed their friends and families die at the hands of occupying forces, and who have been labeled “terrorists” for resisting their slow extermination. In Jenin, a 1km square ghetto-like refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, and the target of numerous Israeli incursions, there are many who have chosen the path of armed resistance, and many who felt they had no other choice.

For those who suffer under the direct oppression and daily practices of apartheid—including the suspension of human and civil rights, military-imposed blockades and checkpoints restricting people’s movements, the demolition of homes and killing of family members—there comes a breaking point. Generations of Palestinians, born into Occupation and violence, do not live a life of dignity. As they describe, under these conditions, they have nothing to live for and nothing to lose, and they have everything to fight for.

In July of this year, before the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks and Israel’s genocidal retaliatory offensive in Gaza, The Real News Network spoke to members of the community in Jenin refugee camp about their lives under Occupation, the role of the Resistance there, and the fight for freedom.

Produced and edited by Ross Domoney. Filming by Ahmad Al Bazz . Writing, narration, and research by Nadia Péridot.

 

Zionism: An Arm of US Imperialism

October 28, 2023

By Hiroyuki Hamada

 

Lift the blockade. End Israeli apartheid. Support the struggle for liberation. 

 

 

Among the dissident communities, there is a deep seated belief that the root of all issues should be traced back to a theory which roughly amounts to “Jews conspiring to dominate the world”.  This sort of ideology comes in many forms and manifests in many ways. Traditionally it is closely associated with various fascist ideologies. Zionism has merged with the US imperialism. But it should be clearly noted that the Zionist Israel can’t survive without financial and military support of the US empire.

Ultimately, the theory obscures the fact that the capitalist social formation structurally locks people into caste-like social order in which people are deprived of their social relations based on their interests, while being conditioned to follow the imperatives of the ruling class. The idea prevents actual revolutionary momentums (the struggle against the class system and theft of collective powers by the minority) to take effects by negating implementations of actual measures aimed at overcoming the current social formation.  It reduces the problem into a vague abstract concept which can’t be tackled in reality.  Those who embrace this sort of ideology often laughs at people’s struggles saying that you are just pawns of the larger scheme by the evil whatever.

I see this dynamic in the light of recent development in Palestine.  The difficulty of overcoming the social formation resides in the fact that the social relations are manipulated and controlled for the interests of the ruling class. In Palestine this manifests in blatant abuse of humanity and extreme violence.  Routine kidnapping of children, illegal detention with tortures, destruction of houses/farmland, no freedom of movement, routine assassinations, routine military assaults, and embargoes. For people who lives in the society, this presents real life and death issues. They are cornered into impossible situations to break free. Half the population of Gaza are children. They grow up in the prison cage without any hope, seeing their houses destroyed and family members killed. Would it be a surprise to see an armed struggle?  What is the role of those westerners who desire a better social formation?  It can’t be laughing at those who struggle saying that you are just pawns of the empire, is it?  Or allowing only acceptable form of non- violent dissent—how can the west which demonized and killed MLK as soon as he spoke about imperialism decide how to struggle? Palestinians need determined support in obtaining their undeniable rights to be. The westerners aren’t in positions to dictate how they struggle, but westerners can stop the imperial domination.

 

This certainly doesn’t mean that we should engage in corporate backed identity politics. The problem should be seen as a structural one backed by capitalist social institutions. The aim is to change the structure and to allow people to dictate social institutions. The aim must not be an isolated tokenism within the imperial structure at the expense of the other oppressed people.  In the case of Palestine, it is clear that the Palestinians are under severe repression, but it is also clear that the people in Israel are forced to play a monster under Zionist/imperialist rule. The support they get from the US would stop immediately if it tries to peacefully coexist with neighboring countries while allowing all people to prioritize their own interests in harmony with the land. The imperial manipulations must stop.

It is crucial to see the presence of the imperial formation, however, it is also crucial to see the actual dynamics and struggles which take impossible measures, limited resources and long term plans in overcoming the situation. We don’t live in a blue print of an ideology. We live in a material reality which has been distorted to fit the imperial framework. Without seeing reality for what it is, we can not go forward with actual results.

In Palestine, how could we expect constructive results when we are among dissidents who believe Jews are dominating the world?  That surely encourage anti-semitism—a driving force of Israel.  It narrowly defines the issue as Israel vs, Palestinians. It allows the US to come in as a neutral mediator of some sort in constructing a “solution” which do not benefit the people in the region, or it continues to allow Israel to do what the US desires while the actual situation hidden in the false premise.

Zionism must be denounced wholeheartedly, and it must be done within the context of the anti-imperial struggle in which Muslims, Jews and the rest of the people can unite.

 

The Black Panther Party On Palestine

The Hampton Institute 

May 19, 2021

By Greg Thomas

The following article by Greg Thomas, the curator of “George Jackson in the Sun of Palestine,” was published in Ittijah, a new Arabic-language publication by Palestinian youth issued by Nabd, the Palestinian Youth Forum.  Dr. Greg Thomas is Associate Professor of Black Studies & English Literature at Tufts University, who crafted the exhibition, displayed first at the Abu Jihad Museum in occupied Palestine and then in Oakland and in several other US locations. The exhibition “includes drawings, woodcuts, political posters and other art tied to Jackson’s life and the Palestinian and U.S. prisoners’ movements, letters of solidarity between Palestinian and American prisoners, letters from Jackson and coverage of his life and death, photos of Palestinian art from the Apartheid Wall, and other artifacts tying the movements together.” It is named for Black Panther and Soledad Brother George Jackson, murdered in 1971 in a claimed “escape attempt;” poetry by the Palestinian leader and poet, Samih al-Qasim, including “Enemy of the Sun” and “I Defy,” was found in his cell after his death. (Handwritten copies of the poems where originally misattributed to Jackson, in what Thomas refers to as a “magical mistake” born of “radical kinship” between liberation movements.)

Download the original Arabic issue of Ittijah here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1Wg2eU7ijQhQnR1anBvNmUtdkk/view

The leader of the Black Panther Party (BPP), Huey P. Newton once wrote, “Israel was created by Western imperialism and is maintained by Western firepower.”  He likewise said that ‘America’ must die so that the world can live.  Neither Zionism nor “Americanism” would escape the wrath of these anti-colonialist/anti-racist/anti-imperialist Black Panthers, an organization founded in 1966 as the “Black Panther Party for Self-Defense” in Oakland, California.

Relatedly, by 1967, when the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began to transform itself from a liberal civil rights organization into a radical Black nationalist organization that would rename itself the Student National Coordinating Committee, it also took a bold position in support of Palestine.  The text of SNCC’s statement was co-drafted by Stokely Carmichael, who would go on to make history as a revolutionary icon of “Black Power” and Pan-African movements for liberation.  But SNCC paid for this position dearly.  Its economic patronage by white liberalism in general and white ‘Jewish’ liberalism in particular came to a screeching halt.  Historically, like all Black people who refuse to support “Jewish” Euro-imperialism, it would be represented as a band of ungrateful savages – “anti-Semitic” and “racist in reverse,” in other words – insofar as it would refused to put white and “Jewish” interests before its own Black nationalist and internationalist interests in North America and the world at large.

Nonetheless, it was a number of ex-SNCC radicals who published Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance in 1970 — after they had formed Drum & Spear Press in Washington D.C., and after that book project co-edited by Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeb had been rejected by a dozen other publishing houses.  This was the same collection of poems seized from the cell of George Jackson (Black Panther Field Marshal), after his assassination by San Quentin prison guards on August 21, 1971: “Enemy of the Sun” by Samih al-Qasim was even mysteriously published in the Black Panther newspaper under “Comrade George’s” name in a magical “mistake” that would cement a certain Black/Palestinian connection for decades to come.

Condemning Zionist imperialism and white colonial liberalism led to no crisis for the Black Panther Party, for it was revolutionary rather than a reformist organization from its inception.  The party issued at least three official statements on Palestine and the “Middle East” in 1970, 1974, and 1980, besides anonymous Black Panther articles promoting Palestinian liberation as well as assorted PLO editorials in The Black Panther Intercommunal New Service, a periodical with a global circulation of several hundred thousand copies weekly in its run from April 25, 1967 to September 1980.

The first official BPP statement in 1970 by proclaimed, “We support the Palestinian’s just struggle for liberation one hundred percent.  We will go on doing this, and we would like for all of the progressive people of the world to join in our ranks in order to make a world in which all people can live.”  The Panthers made a point to mention that they were “in daily contact with the PLO,” provocatively, via the office that they had opened in Algiers as an “international section” of the party.  This statement was made at a press conference in 1970 and republished in 1972 as a part of To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton.

What’s more, the BPP Minister of Defense put a sharp spin on the Zionist rhetoric of “the right to exist,” mocking its arrogance with a Black revolutionary flair:  “The Jewish people have a right to exist so long as they solely exist to down the reactionary expansionist Israeli government.”

A second statement was issued by Newton in 1974.  It would not budge from the BPP’s automatic support for Palestine.  Yet the push here was now for an Israeli retreat to 1967 borders, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, for a pan-Arab populism that would move toward a “people’s republic of the Middle East.”  This was mostly a rhetorical critique of U.S. puppet regimes in the Arab world, which is to say, their comprador betrayal of Palestine:  Elaine Brown reports that the masses of the party favored a position of complete Palestinian decolonization in any and every case.

A third official BPP statement followed Huey Newton’s trip to Lebanon in 1980.  It is a virtual conversational profile of Yasser Arafat as well.  The PLO Chairman vilified in the West was presented as an icon of peace with anti-imperialist justice in strict contrast to Menachem Begin.  In minute detail, the Panther newspaper recalls Newton’s visit to a Palestinian school, the Red Crescent Society Hospital, and the Palestine Martyrs Works Society (SAMED), suggesting a significant parallel between these PLO programs in Beirut and the “survival pending revolution” programs of the Black Panther Party in North America.  This written portrait of two revolutionary leaders and organizations in contact again conjures up some striking images found elsewhere:  Huey greeting Arafat ecstatically in an airport somewhere and Huey smiling in front of a refugee camp in Lebanon with his arms around two armed Palestinian youth.

The afterlife of the Black Panther Party is noteworthy to be sure.  Elaine Brown would proudly recap its history of Palestinian solidarity in 2015, while Kathleen Cleaver remembered in the same year that Fateh helped them construct their office (or “embassy-without-a-state”) in Algeria.  Safiya Bukhari would continue to recite Palestinian poetry in tribute to “fallen comrades,” long after George Jackson became Samih al-Qasim and Samih al-Qasim became George Jackson thanks to the party’s newspaper.  Lastly, Dhoruba Bin Wahad would be denied entry into Palestine in 2009 and briefly detained by the Israelis in Jordan.  He was en route to a conference on political prisoners and representing the “Jericho Movement to Free Political Prisoners in the U.S.”   And it is difficult to find a more radical or brilliant critic of Zionism, Negrophobia and Islamophobia in the Western Hemisphere today.

Moreover, before Stokely Carmichael moved back to Guinea and changed his name to become Kwame Ture, he was for a time affiliated with the Black Panthers as its “honorary prime minster.”  Despite their subsequent differences, he arguably became the greatest Black giant of anti-Zionism himself.  He described Palestine as “the tip of Africa” and said that he had “two dreams” (which were revolutionary, anti-Apartheid dreams in fact):  “I dream, number one, of having coffee with my wife in South Africa;  and number two, of having mint tea in Palestine.”  This means that the legacy of his as well as SNCC’s historic solidarity with Palestine can be seen as intertwined with the legacy of the Black Panthers, not to mention Malcolm X.

Indeed, when Huey P. Newton referred to the Black Panther Party as the “heirs of Malcolm X,” he could have been talking about their shared anti-Zionist stance against white racism empire.  In 1964, Malcolm made his Hajj and epic political tour of the Afro-Arab world.  He spent two days in Gaza (5-6 September), where he prayed at a local mosque, gave a press conference at the parliament building, met Harun Hashim Rashad (as May Alhassen informs us), and visited several Palestinian refugee camps.  Soon he met the first Chairman of the PLO Chairman, Ahmed Shukeiri, in Cairo – after the second Arab League Summit in Alexandria — and published his blistering polemic against “Zionist Logic” in The Egyptian Gazette (17 September 1964):  “The modern 20th century weapon of neo-imperialism is “dollarism,” he wrote:  “The Zionists have mastered the science of dollarism….  The ever-scheming European imperialists wisely placed Israel where she could geographically divide the Arab world, infiltrate and sow the seed of dissension among African leaders and also divide the Africans against the Asians.”  Here Malcolm (or, now, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz) prefigures Fayez Sayegh’s powerful booklet, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965);  and he eerily portends Benjamin Netanyahu’s wretched tour of Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and Ethiopia in 2016.  The 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party (for Self-Defense) is thus a great time to remember the whole genealogy of a Black revolutionary tradition of opposition to Zionism and all forms of Western racism, colonialism and imperialism, perhaps especially in this special place that produced Black Panther/Fahd al-Aswad formations of own.

Links

 

[Dr. Greg Thomas is Associate Professor of Black Studies & English Literature at Tufts University.]

Against the Inclusion of Zionist Organizations In The People’s Climate March

Sept 19, 2014

by kat yang-stevens with contributions from Jonathan Sidney


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The People’s Climate March, preemptively billed as “the biggest climate march in history”, will take place in NYC on Sunday, September 21st and will precede a UN Summit on Climate Change by two whole days. The march was called for by some of the most recognized names in North American mainstream environmentalism, Avaaz and 350.org. Both organizations along with others involved in promoting and coordinating the event such as The Sierra Club, Energy Action Coalition, and Greenpeace (to name a few) are a part of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC). The NPIC has been defined by activist, author, and professor Dylan Rodriguez as: “a set of symbiotic relationships that link political and financial technologies of state and owning class control with surveillance over public political ideology, including and especially emergent progressive and leftist social movements.”Put another way, The NPIC is how state and corporate interests use colonial and exploitative practices (branded as social movements) to manipulate and control the ways that dissent from the public manifests and operates. In her essay, “In The Shadow Of The Shadow State”  – which details the relationship between state and non-profits as well as names the NPIC as the corollary to the Prison Industrial Complex– scholar, activist, prison abolitionist and co-founder of Critical Resistance, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, states: “…when it comes to building social movements, organizations are only as good as the united fronts they bring into being.” With this in mind consider that the People’s Climate March lists The Green Zionist Alliance as one of the organizations that is part of a coalition of partners organizing the event.

A wide variety of smaller grassroots organizations are involved in the organizing of this march, many from frontline communities. Their energy and efforts towards building power – both in their communities and for the march – should be valued and respected. The position of power the NPIC possesses through controlling resources and visibility for traditionally marginalized and underrepresented communities should also be considered. Many individual organizations and organizers participating in the event have publicly spoken out against the inclusion of Zionist organizations yet still the Green Zionist Alliance remains a partner in the People’s Climate March.

While this may be perceived by some as a reflection of “tolerance” or “diversity” towards the creation of a broad movement to confront climate change, this “inclusion” has the effect of greenwashing the violence committed in the name of Zionism. Never mind the fact the Israeli army’s recent escalation in genocidal violence is in part fueled by a move towards further exploitation of fossil fuels in Gaza. In any case, given the Palestinian call for a campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) targeting the Israeli occupation, it is particularly politically irresponsible to cross an internationally recognized picket line by collaborating with organizations supportive of the Israeli state.

The Green Zionist Alliance is a North American based 501 (c) 3 nonprofit organization operating primarily out of New York City. The Green Zionist Alliance’s website openly quotes and praises Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism. Zionism advocates the theft of indigenous Palestinians’ lands for the purpose of constructing Israeli settlements and establishing and maintaining Israel as a settler colonial state. The Green Zionist Alliance is a member of the American Zionist Movement who, according to their mission statement “Acts on behalf of Israel… and defends Israel’s cause with vigor and confidence”. The American Zionist Movement is a federation of Zionist groups affiliated with the World Zionist Organization which was founded by Theodor Herzl. In the book Der Judenstaat, which translates to “The Jewish State” Herzl wrote: “Supposing, for example, we were obliged to clear a country of wild beasts … we would organize a large and active hunting party, drive the animals together, and throw a gelignite bomb in their midst,”

2014 marks the 47th year of Israeli colonial occupation of indigenous Palestinians’ lands. For 50 days over the summer of 2014 Israeli forces seized the Palestinian city of Gaza bombing, kidnapping, sexually assaulting, maiming, shooting, and otherwise torturing Palestinians who were trapped in what was repeatedly described by Palestinians as an open air prison. Over 2,100 people, a large percentage children, were murdered. According to the Department of Culture and Information in the Palestinian Liberation Organization, more than 99% of “Area C” in the West Bank is now under control of the Israeli government for the purpose of expansion of Israeli settlements following this most recent round of vicious acts against humanity in Palestine. Palestinian civilians were deliberately targeted and systematically killed; acts of genocide were committed. The buildings of Gaza now lie in massive mountains of rubble, four million tons of rubble and debris contaminating water, food supplies, and air, four millions tons of Palestinians’ homes, schools, places of worship and gathering.

When we construct an idea of what “the environment” actually is beyond the basic popular mainstream conception of the environment as simply consisting of vast wilderness and pristine nature we can come to the more realistic conclusion that the environment is in fact the land and earth that sustains plant, animal, and human life. For Palestinians, the thousands murdered and the tens of thousands displaced, Gaza was their environment. For those who survived the most recent relentless assaults on life, Gaza is their environment. The concept of environmental justice defines the environment to include public and human health concerns. Surely genocide is a public and human health concern.

Acts of genocide and structures of colonization that the indigenous peoples of Palestine are being forced to endure are similarly a part of the very construction and foundations of the settler colonial nation states of the so-called United States and Canada. Given that the Green Zionist Alliance has not only been included in the coalition of organizers for the march but also defended by PCM organizers and supporters/attendees it should come as no surprise that there is no mention on any of the promotional materials for the event that the Manhattan borough, in what is now known as New York City, sits upon stolen and occupied indigenous land. Buried underneath the concrete that 100,000 plus people will march upon are the ancestral homelands of the Lenni-Lenape. Ironically The People’s Climate March will begin at Columbus Circle.

Ultimately the People’s Climate March is being controlled by the Big Greens. Make no mistake, the green branch of the non-profit industrial complex is at the helm, making top down decisions to include Zionist organizations and manipulating, controlling, and dictating what they have repeatedly referred to as “the movement of movements”. As part of the NPIC, the Big Greens funding and facilitating logistics of the main event CAN NOT incorporate intersectional and anti-colonial analyses necessary for collective liberation.

Instead these Big Greens contribute to the maintenance of structural social inequalities and work to quell effective, meaningful alliance building and resistance. This includes working closely with the world’s seventh largest standing military, also known as the NYPD, as stated on the PCM’s website. The NYPD is well known for stalking, harassing, and inciting psychological fear in Muslim communities through widespread surveillance programs. These unconscionable tactics never returned any proof that Muslim communities in NYC constitute any threat to their fellow community members and neighbors whatsoever. The NYPD are also notoriously racist and anti-Black. They specifically target Black and Brown people through a form of legalized racial profiling and harassment called Stop & Frisk.  Through the program the NYPD terrorize these communities and work to funnel people of color into the Prison Industrial Complex (remember Ruth Wilson Gilmore named the NPIC as the natural corollary to the PIC).

Environmental justice does not look like Big Greens controlling resource distribution to grassroots organizations or using their political and social capital to push false solutions and narratives that conveniently exclude connections between environmental and social justice issues. People’s Climate March organizers who insist that “solving the climate crisis” looks like working with the NYPD or Zionist organizations supporting genocide and colonization in Palestine are not only dangerous but reveal an alarming level of ignorance regarding the concept of justice itself.

Refusal (whether active or passive) to acknowledge that large forces and structures work together to ensure  increased attacks on the lives and sovereignty of indigenous peoples worldwide – as well as the continued commodification of the earth for the purposes of industrial capitalism – is really nothing other than a refusal to work for any kind of justice, climate or otherwise. There can be no climate justice without justice for Palestine. There can be no environmental justice without a serious understanding of the ways that settler colonialism, white supremacy, anti-Black racism, border imperialism, cis-hetero-patriarchy, militarism, orientalism, and other systems/structures collectively inform, facilitate, and sustain environmental degradation and resource extraction and create and contribute to climate change.

In Solidarity For A Free Palestine & With Indigenous Peoples Worldwide For The Abolition of Colonialism


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