There is an African proverb that says: “Until the lions have
their own historians the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” I was
galled and annoyed (to put it mildly) witnessing the September 30th
interview on CBS Mornings between acclaimed author Ta-Nehisi
Coates and Tony Dokoupil. Dokoupil’s
unprofessional questions and biased comments attempting to discredit Coates’
scholarship, CBS later acknowledged “fell short of editorial standards.”
The truth of the matter is that the conclusions that Coates emphasized
in his new book, The Message, and the assertions that many others have
made about the Israeli and Palestinian perpetual war is far from slipshod,
naïve, or parochial. All one must do is to examine past critical analyses and deconstructions
of the Israeli and Palestinian conflict and they will find that Coates’
assessment is not an anomaly. In fact, public criticism by Black academicians,
sociopolitical observers and activists calling out the Israeli government (not
its people) for acting as an imperialist hegemon date back to the 1950s. In
the 1960s and 70s famous Black activists like Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm
X, Jesse Jackson, and Muhammed Ali issued public pronouncements on the Arab
Israeli conflict. In 1966, SNCC expanded its publicly denouncement of the
Vietnam War to the Israeli attacks against the Palestinian people, which drew
widespread condemnation and accusations of anti-Semitism. In 1967, SNCC used a
summer issue of its newsletter to offer a searing indictment of Isreal’s violent
Zionist conquest.
Black people in general have often viewed the Jews in Israel
and the Palestinians in Gaza as special and unique cases with histories similar
to our own in America. Many draw parallels of the violence inflicted upon
innocent Palestinian people today to the
attempts to extinguish the Native Americans, the abhorrent acts of police brutality
against Blacks, and the manifold forms of structural inequity and racism that
have kept African Americans (in the collective) chained to its origin in America
as second-class citizens. Many Black
defenders of the Palestinians’ right to exist under a two-state solution in
Gaza did not come to that conclusion without first supporting and empathizing
with the plight of the Jews. For many, their affinity for Isreal changed after the
1967 war when Israel defeated its Arab neighbors--Egypt, Jordan, and Syria to
occupy the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza, and the West Bank, as well as the Golan
Heights. It was then that many Black people would begin to question Isreal as a
sympathetic and empathetic friend of Arab and African people and begin to see
the Israeli political class as a byproduct of fascist and imperialists
compulsions.
Russell Rickford wrote in his article “To Build a New World”
(2019):
Israel itself was a product of
Western imperialism, having sprung from the British Mandate for Palestine.
Seeing Israel as a liberatory enterprise meant accepting the erasure of
displaced Palestinians while reifying settler-colonial myths about the cultivation
of a modern civilization on a barren frontier. Yet in the aftermath of
the Holocaust, few Western observers heeded or even grasped these realities.
African Americans largely identify as Christian. It is the Christian belief that the
Israelites are God’s “chosen people” combined with recognizing that as descendants
of slaves brought to and who built America that we know all too well what it
feels like to be treated inhumanely and
perceived as the “other” in the only land we know. We view the Jewish
holocaust experience and the genocide that is happening now to the Palestinian
people at the hands of Isreal through the lens of America’s holocaust –slavery.
However, it has been the tyrannical and inhumane decisions made by the elite
political class in Isreal (not the Jewish people in the collective) with
support of course of the American political elite, which have caused many Black
people to side with the Palestinians and condemn Isreal.
From the past to the present, it is a shared anti-imperialist
imperative that bind Black/African American to Palestine. The tie that binds us
is a simple and larger world view shared by many comrades in the struggle
against hegemonic sociopolitical systems built and sustained by race and class
hierarchies, white and European supremacy, and colonizer ways of thinking,
believing, acting, and being. It is not about hating Jewish people or being antisemitic
like so many spinmeisters cleverly and deceitfully propagate. It is about doing
what the sacred scriptures in both the Torah and Bible demand: “to do justice
and love mercy” and to know that God has no respect of cultures or people. Our
destinies and our histories are intricately intertwined. In the words of Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr., “We are all caught in an inescapable network of
mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one
directly, affects all indirectly.”
