Colonialism Is The Enemy To Palestinian and Black Liberation
When we look at both battlegrounds for liberation, whether it be Palestinian or Black, there is an undeniable need to name the various enemies towards autonomy — militarism, racism, xenophobia, Manifest Destiny, and so much more. More than this, it is important to go deeper and pen language that makes tangible connections to how colonialism is the most foundational thread. Colonization is the process of taking another group’s land resources or labor for one’s benefit through social, political, and militaristic manipulations.
To comprehend contemporary struggles, we must view colonization as the common antagonist. By recognizing this shared enemy, we can construct frameworks illuminating the contradiction and commonalities at play. To name something is to begin to have the capacity to change it.
Just this past week, South Africa made a compelling and well-articulated case to condemn Israel for its genocide and systematic humanization of and against Palestinians. During the hearing senior lawyer Adila Hassim stated…
Genocides are never declared in advance, but this court has the benefit of the past 13 weeks of evidence that shows incontrovertibly a pattern of conduct and related intention that justifies as a plausible claim of genocidal acts.
On Colonization Against Black Americans
The essay and book NECROPOLITICS by Achille Mbeme opens…
This essay assumes that the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.Hence, to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes. To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power. One could summarize in the above terms what Michel Foucault meant by biopower: that domain of life over which power has taken control.
As a queer, Jamaican-American anarchist that runs a podcast (The Dugout) where I talk about politics and autonomy, I am endlessly interested in how death is both a framing for life and a tool of state and political powers. Within the context of American Blackness and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the colonizer handed out death like candy, leading to a way of life for enslaved folks, where living essentially meant a lack of autonomy or a willingness to turn away from death by any means, even if this meant one’s torture or the torture of our loved ones.
This point on lack of autonomy and willingness to survive from a Black standpoint has resonated with me deeply since a 2018 visit to Tulsa, Oklahoma for a press trip. Tulsa has a long and sordid history to the Black community following white-led race riots that leveled this thriving economic community through brutal bombings, vigilantism, and rape in 1921. Over 800 were admitted to hospital and an estimated 300 were killed. Making it one of the most egregious displays of biopower.
But the question can be asked, how does a massacre like what happened in Tulsa in 1921 connect to foundational understandings of colonialism? To start, the ongoing degradation of Black Americans is a continuation of the harms set up by British colonization and American structural racism, which both crafted and recrafted white supremacy to serve its goals.
The United States of America is a direct byproduct of a British colony, forged by the killing of Native Americans in a show of settler colonialism and then funded by the enslavement of Blacks; both backed by Manifest Destiny, eugenicist medical policies, discriminatory laws, cultural imperialism, and structural inequality. This cocktail of degradation has placed Black Americans in what many Black revolutionaries would describe as an “open-air prison”, a language that harkens to South African apartheid and the current apartheid policies applied against Palestinians.
Many American ghettos have been described as effective military zones that are overpoliced and used as testing sites for advancements in weaponry, surveillance, and predictive policing, which I wrote about notably in 2020 when I covered the use of Shotspotter for CodaStory. In this piece, I wrote…
For communities in Ohio and beyond that have installed ShotSpotter, procedural justice is an important concern — especially when police departments have a history of poor training, using excessive force or racial profiling.
Many times under colonialism and racial tyranny, what is procedural, like policing or carcerality, is embedded with countless forms of violence. Moving towards Black liberation requires that we disentangle ourselves from the ways that these oppressive systems rule our lives and the lives of others, to find ways to move the needle to improve our material conditions. To demand that Black people exist in this world as more than pawns of white supremacy, that we are not only alive to show the world that we can die.
This part of liberation is murky, tangled, and real. As real as our need to confront death to live, as both necropolitics and Huey P. Newton’s logic of revolutionary suicide explore. One of Martin Luther King’s last speeches in 1968 offers a chilling reminder…
Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
On Colonization Against Palestinians
Since the establishment of Israel in 1948, the subjugation of Palestinians has only continued, which many Black revolutionaries and organizers have noted in the past. Similar to the ontological nature of Blackness as synonymous with death, today’s political climate does similar work to equate Palestinians with terrorists or with Hamas; which combines various stages of genocide (classification, dehumanization, and polarization). In the words of Edward Said, a Palestinian-American artist and activist,
Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.
One of the clearest, recent examples of this is Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu’s post on Twitter following the heavily criticized Israeli bombing of a Palestinian hospital…
What is chilling about extreme Zionism today is that it replicates many of the stages of genocide utilized by the Nazis against Jews, to also commit genocide against the Palestinians — forced displacement, restriction of movement, imposing ghettos, military occupation, propaganda, unlawful arrest, collective punishments, and much more. What does it mean that these two areas of thought have utilized many of the strategies deployed by colonizers and supremacists? Furthermore, these tools of colonization and degradation by the Nazis were importantly borrowed from American ideals of racism.
This notion is explored throughout The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism, a 1984 book by Palestinian Mahmoud Abbas, the head of Fatah, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), and the Palestinian Authority (PA). This topic was also recently explored in an Aljazeera piece, Zionism, anti-Semitism and Colonialism by Joseph Massad…
That Arthur Balfour was a well-known Protestant anti-Semite who in 1905 sponsored a bill (The Aliens Act) to prevent East European Jews fleeing pogroms from immigrating to England was not incidental to the fact that the Zionists rushed to court him, let alone to his own support of the Zionist project through the “Balfour Declaration”, which would reroute Jews away from England… This transformation placed Zionism in a quandary. Zionism could only proceed with more colonisation of Palestinian land, yet, recognising the increasing hostility to colonialism, it began to present its colonial project as anti-colonial struggle. As its British sponsors had to retreat and limit their support for the Zionist project since the beginning of World War II, right-wing Zionists turned against them.
The piece is an engaging read about the shifting interpretations of anti-semitism and Zionism before, during, and after the establishment of Israel, all of which are thoughts that relate to the ongoing atrocities today.
Similar to how we must understand the specifics of colonization to expose and overcome it, we must also understand how the definitions of these terms have shifted over time to meet the political goals of those in power. Just as Black Americans can oscillate from slave to criminal to caretaker to entertainer on a socio-political level deemed by the oppressor with resources, weaponry, and propaganda, Palestinians can be synonymous with Hamas, anti-semitism, savages, and brutes.
When these associations with groups of people endure for decades or centuries, the work to free ourselves is messy, complicated, and necessary. The malleability of definitions, whether applied to Black Americans or Palestinians, underscores the weaponization of language in perpetuating oppression. As Black people the ongoing forms of carcerality and anti-Blackness, Palestinians grapple with how a Zionist state continues to survey, arrest, carpet bomb, and steal from them. The echoes of these narratives persist over decades and centuries, complicating the liberation struggle. Just as the specificity of colonization must be comprehended to dismantle its grip, evolving definitions of identity and subjugation lay the groundwork for a profound understanding of the shared struggle against a common enemy.
A Shared Understanding of a Way Forward
In a stirring op-ed late Palestinian activist, Bassem Masri, expressed similar sentiments, “When Mike Brown was murdered in Ferguson my people in Gaza were being slaughtered by Israel in Operation Protective Edge. The timing of the two events woke up a lot of people. When Mike was killed, much of the media started demonizing him and the protestors, often the same sources that blamed Palestinians for their own deaths in Gaza. People naturally saw the connections.”
In 2018, Masri passed away, added to the list of Ferguson activists who have passed since the 2014 uprising out of Ferguson, Missouri.
What is sinister and communalizing for the conditions facing Palestinians and Black people today is how colonization relegates us to death and makes the possibility of death something that we must confront from birth. Unlike how supremacy and colonization demand legacy, surviving the terror of colonialism demands that we live now, learn now, and resist now. This is not to romanticize death or mass suffering but rather to acknowledge that it compels us to act with righteousness and say what must be said.
To learn more on Black and Palestinian liberation, here are some more resources…
- Black-Palestine Solidarity Tool Kit by ColoredGirlsBikeToo
- Resources for Teaching Palestine
- Free Palestine: A Verso Reading List
- Let’s Talk Palestine (podcast)
