Black/Palestinian feminist solidarity timeline
The purpose of this timeline is to visually organize the rich history of solidarity among and between Black Palestinian, African, African-American, Non-Black Palestinians and Black-Arab solidarity around Palestine.
This is part of a project, West End 2 West Bank, which you read more about here.
This timeline was prepared by dr. banah ghadbian. Special thanks to: Weyam Ghadbian, Leena Odeh, Camelia Odeh, Layla Feghali, Rabab Abdulhadi, Salome Ayuak, maytha alhassen.
Afro Palestinian girls in Gaza, portrait by Motaz Aziza, April 2021.
Palestinian feminists and African feminists at the World Conference of Women in 1987.
15 May 1948
Nigerian-born commander Muhammad Tariq el-Afriqi leads Palestinian fighters against Israeli ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem
19 December 1951
The Sudanese Welfare Club is founded in Jerusalem
The club, made of African immigrants to Jerusalem, remains active until 1967, the year Israel occupied Jerusalem. It later becomes the African Community Society of Jerusalem in 1983. Many African immigrants came from Chad, Sudan, and Nigeria to fight for Palestinian liberation.
The African Community Society of Jerusalem meets, year unknown. Photo source from the African Society of Jerusalem Archives here.
19 December 1957
Gamel Abdel Naser holds the Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference, in late December of 1957 in Cairo.
Soon after, in 1968, Gamel Abdel Nasser holds an Afro-Asian Youth Conference and delivers a speech on Egypt and Syria’s unification as a fight against Zionist violence.
Read more about Gamel Abdel Nasser's Afro-Asian solidarity conferences here.
11 March 1959
Malcolm X Visits the Arab World
Gamel Abdel Nasser formally invites Malcolm X to the Arab World. Malcolm X visits East Jerusalem, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. He wrote, “The people of Arabia are just like our people in America. . . . None are white. It is safe to say that 99 per cent of them would be jim-crowed in the United States of America.” And then he writes, “Israel is just an International poor house which is maintained by money sucked from the poor suckers in America."
In "To Tell the Eye What it Beholds," Maytha al Hassen writes about Malcolm X's friendship with Arab activists such as Lebanese American woman Aliya Al-Ogdie Hassen and Egyptian immigrant Mahmoud Youssef Shawarbi's writing on Black-Arab relations in the U.S. Shawarbi planned in Malcolm X’s travels in 1964, and was especially instrumental in facilitating his hajj trip in April 1964.
Source: Black Power and Palestine by Michael Fischbasch.
11 March 1959
Martin Luther King Jr. visits Palestine
Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King traveled to Lebanon, then Palestine, where they visited Jerusalem, Betheleham, Al-Khalil, Nablus, and Jericho in March 1959. King got sick on his trip and received treatment from an Armenian-Palestinian doctor, Vahan Kalbian. King asked Kalbian for the “Arab viewpoint on the Israeli conflict.” Kalbian told King about the Arab side of the occupation and invited him to dinner with Ruhi al-Khatib, the mayor of East Jerusalem; Musa Nasir, a Palestinian academic; Anton Atallah, a Palestinian judge; Raja al-Isa, a journalist; and Anwar Nusseibeh, a Palestinian politician.
Over the course of the next 8 years, King was invited to visit Palestine by the Israeli government and multiple Zionist organizations. On every occasion he accepted the offer, and then canceled. This took place in 1963, 1964, twice in 1965, in 1966 and again in 1967. When King canceled a pilgrimage to Israel in 1967 after Israel captured the West Bank, he shared on a phone with his advisers, he said, “I just think that if I go, the Arab world, and of course Africa and Asia for that matter, would interpret this as endorsing everything that Israel has done, and I do have questions of doubt.”
Supporters of Israel often try to claim Martin Luther King Jr. as a Zionist, claiming he wrote “Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend” in an August 1967 edition of Saturday Review. In this article they claim he wrote the following sentences:
You declare, my friend; that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely ‘anti-Zionist’. . . . And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God’s green earth: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews. . . . Anti-Semitism, the hatred of the Jewish people, has been and remains a blot on the soul of mankind. In this we are in full agreement. So know also this: anti-Zionist is inherently anti-Semitic, and ever will be so.
But researchers have found no letters from Dr King in any of the four August 1967 editions. Some have claimed that the letter was also published in a book by Dr King entitled, This I Believe: Selections from the Writings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But according to Electronic Intifada, “no such book was listed in the bibliography provided by the King Center in Atlanta, nor in the catalogs of several large public and university libraries.” A recent search of all electronic databases confirms this.
Additionally, King was pressured to sign an ad in the New York Times in support of Israel, but said to his advisors:
"Did you see the ad in the New York Times Sunday [June 4]? Tis was the ad they got me to sign with [John C.] Bennett, etc. I really hadn’t seen the statement. I felt after seeing it, it was a little unbalanced and it is pro-Israel. It put us in the position almost of setting the turning-hawks on the Middle East while being doves in Vietnam and I wouldn’t have given a statement like that at all."
None of King’s advisers asked him how his name wound up on a statement he “really hadn’t seen,” but they instead looked ahead. His advisor, Levison urged King to “to keep the Arab friendship and the Israeli friendship at the same time.” On June 8, 1967, King told his advisers he had come under growing pressure to make his own statement on the Middle East. He said:
"The statement I signed in the N.Y. Times as you know was agreed with by a lot of people in the Jewish community. But there was those in the negro community [who] have been disappointed. SNCC for one has been very critical. The problem was that the N.Y. Times played it up as a total endorsement of Israel. What they printed up wasn’t the complete text, even the introduction wasn’t the text. I can’t back up on the statement now, my problem is whether I should make another statement, or maybe I could just avoid making a statement. I don’t want to make a statement that backs up on me, that wouldn’t be good. Well, what do you think?"
Historian Robin D.G. Kelley wrote if King had the opportunity to study the current situation in the same way he had studied [the war in] Vietnam, “his unequivocal opposition to violence, colonialism, racism, and militarism would have made him an incisive critic of Israel’s current policies.”
Sources:
Paulmbio, David Liu. "What MLK Actually Thought About Israel-Palestine." Jacobin.
Alexander, Michelle. "Time to Break the Silence on Palestine." The New York Times.
Lubin, Alex. Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Imaginary.
Kramer, Martin, "In the Words of Martin Luther King Jr."
4 September 1964
Malcolm X Visits the Arab World Again
In May 1964, Malcolm X visits American University of Beirut and Saudi Arabia-- he meets important Palestinian leaders: al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, a Palestinian political and religious leader from the 1920s through the 1950s.
In 1964, the Summit on the Organization of African Unity is held in Cairo, Egypt. During a speech he gave to the summit, Malcolm X hailed the fact that many African leaders had for the first time denounced Israel and “supported the right of the Arab refugees to return to their Palestine homeland.”
Malcolm X meeting with members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, 1964
In September 4, 1964 Malcolm X Visits Gaza. He then visited several Palestinian refugee camps, a hospital, ate dinner with Palestinians and heard their stories. A few days later September 15, 1964, Malcolm meets with Ahmad Shuqayri, chair of the newly founded Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
On September 17, 1964, after his trip to Palestine, Malcolm X publishes an article on anti-Zionism titled, “On Zionist Logic” for the Egyptian Gazette.
31 May 1967
Black students from SNCC and Arab students from OAS protest Israel in front of White House
Black students from SNCC and Arab students from OAS, the Organization of Arab Students hold a Palestine demonistration on May 31 in front of the White House in Washington D.C. OAS vice president Ali M. Baghdadi was quoted as saying: “As a civil rights organization they [SNCC] are being true to their principles when they condemn those who regard territorial integrity and freedom from terrorism as rights to be enjoyed by Western nationals, but not by African or Asian nations.”
SNCC in their Atlanta office in 1963. Pictured: L-R: Mike Sayer, MacArthur Cotton, James Forman, Rick Manning, Marion Barry, Lester McKinnie, Mike Thelwell, Lawrence Guyot, Eric Jones, John Lewis (behind Jones), Julian Bond (far right rear with cigarette), Judy Richardson, Jean Wheeler. [Photo: Danny Lyon]
17 August 1967
SNCC publishes article in support of Palestine and is accused of anti-semitism
Ethel Minor, SNCC’s communications director in Atlanta of SNCC writes an article in support of Palestine in the SNCC newsletter called “The Palestine Problem: Test Your Knowledge.” It consisted of thirty-two statements about Israel and the Palestinians that were answers to the question “Do you know?” All were strongly critical of Zionism and Israel, which it called an “illegal” state.
Stokeley Carmichael, Ethel Minors, and Kwame Nkrumah
Minors grew up in Chicago but moved to Colombia and spoke fluent Spanish. She returned to the U.S. when the sit-in movements started and became Malcolm X's secretary and office manager in his newly-formed Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). After his assassination in 1965, she became involved with SNCC. Minor began working in SNCC’s communications office and became its director. As editor of the SNCC newsletter in the summer of 1967, she assumed the great responsibility of balancing various viewpoints within the organization and had a large say in which internal debates became public. She was also a public representative of the group, fielding questions from the press at a time when SNCC’s every move was scrutinized by the feds. As SNCC increasingly linked the Black Freedom Struggle in the United States to anticolonial struggles abroad, the newsletter put more focus on international issues.
She wrote:
“[Do you know] THAT Zionism, which is a worldwide nationalistic Jewish movement,
organized, planned and created the “State of Isreal [sic]” by sending Jewish immigrants
from Europe into Palestine (the heart of the Arab world) to take over land and homes
belonging to the Arabs?"
(the article was dated June-July 1967 but was actually published in mid-August.)
Ethel’s article was based on"Do You Know? Twenty Basic Questions About the Palestine Problem" by Fayez Sayegh, a leading Palestinian-Syrian scholar and member of the PLO executive committee.
August 14, 1967: Irving Shulman, the southeastern director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith, publicly accuses SNCC of anti-semitism for Ethel Minor’s article. The same day, Staff members from the Atlanta office of SNCC called a press conference to defend their position on Palestinian and defend against the anti-Semitism claims. Ethel Minor joined Program Director Ralph Featherstone and Executive
Secretary Stanley Wise in explaining the article. Featherstone had participated in Minor’s Arab-Israeli
conflict reading group in the mid-1960s.
The New York Times quoted Featherstone as saying at the press conference that SNCC sought a “third world alliance of oppressed people all over the world— Africa, Asia and Latin America,” adding that Arabs were oppressed, too. The New York Times claimed that Featherstone linked Israeli oppression of Palestinians to Jews’ oppression of Black people in the United States by saying that SNCC was not against Jews as a whole but “only Jewish oppressors” in Israel and “those Jews in the little Jew shops in the [American] ghettos.” Featherstone’s comment at the press conference cause a huge controversy.
Late summer and fall of 1967 SNCC continued to fight against a huge controversy in which Featherestone’s comments were accused of being anti-Semitic and SNCC continue to state their uncompromisingly support for Palestine.
26 August 1967
Organization of Arab Students meets and publically supports SNCC while they receive backlash for being anti-semitic
The Organization of Arab Students held its sixteenth annual convention at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from August 28 to September 2, 1967, a few weeks after SNCC published its newsletter in support of Palestine. The Organization of Arab Students came out strongly in support of SNCC after the infamous newsletter controversy.
Poster by the Organization of Arab Students. View their collection here.
19 September 1967
Stokeley Carmichael visits Palestinian refugees in Syria
Early September of 1967, while he was chariman of SNCC, Stokeley Carmichael sent a letter from Moscow to an unnamed SNCC colleague in which he noted that he was traveling onward to the Arab world: “So SNCC can get ready for the anti-semitic Blast. You know I’m going to denounce the Jews as a pocket of U.S. Imperialism and compare the aggression [the 1967 war] to that of the U.S. in Vietnam. So bro get ready to go DEEP, DEEP into the Black Community.”
September 19, 1967: Stokeley Carmicael (Kwame Ture) travels to Syria where he visited Palestinian refugee camps and pledged that Black Americans would provide military support to the Palestinian struggle. He was hosted in Syria by Randa Khalidi al-Fattal, a thirty-two-year-old Palestinian-Lebanese scholar and writer who worked with the Arab League’s Arab Information Office in New York.
Pictured here: Stokeley Carmichael, one of the original SNCC freedom riders of 1961 under Diane Nash's leadership. He was mentored by Ella Baker and Bob Moses before leaving SNCC in 1968 and joining the Black Panthers.
He later said, in December of 1968, “The so-called State of Israel was set up by white people who took it from the Arabs.”
In February 17, 1968, At a Black Panther Party rally in Oakland, California, Stokeley Carmichael delivered a speech that included a long section on Palestine. He noted: “We must declare on whose side we stand! We can be for no one but the Arabs. There can be no doubt in our mind! No doubt in our mind! No doubt in our mind! We can be for no one but the Arabs because Israel belonged to the Arabs in 1917. The British gave it to a group of Zionists, who went to Israel, ran . . . the Palestinian Arabs out with terrorist groups. . . . That country belongs to the Palestinians.”
August of 1968 Stokely Carmichael gave a speech titled “The Black American and Palestinian Revolutions” at the Organization of Arab Students convention in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
19 October 1967
Fatima Bernawi is arrested, becoming the first Palestinian woman prisoner of the Palestinian contemporary revolution
An image taken in 1967 in occupation courts. Upon hearing she was sentenced to life in prison, Bernawi made this face at the occupation judge.
18 January 1969
Khartoum Conference in support of Southern Africa and the Peoples of Portugese Colonies
From January 18-20, 1969, the Conference in Support of the Peoples of the Portuguese Colonies and Southern Africa was held in Khartoum.
In this conference, Sudan showed itself to be essential to liberation efforts across the continent.
The conference delineated between legitimate and illegitimate countries. Illegitimate included: Great Britain, France, Italy, West Germany, Japan, US, and Israel.
Attendees shamed countries on the continent who maintained relationships with these pariah governments.
Following the conference in 1973, a wave of African countries severed ties with the Israeli government on account of the Palestinian cause. Sudan was also one of the first African countries to close its air and seaports to Israel.
Read more here: https://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/archive-files3/SeMar69.pdf
20 June 1969
SNCC members publishes Palestinian poetry in Drum and Spear Press
In June 1969, former SNCC activists Charles Cobb Jr. and Courtland Cox, and several others establish The Drum and Spear Bookstore in Washington, DC, and Drum and Spear Press, which published a series titled Poets of Liberation. The first book in this series was Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance and contained poems from noted Palestinian poets such as Samih al-Qasim and Tawfiq Zayyad.
“The Unknown Continent,” By Palestinian poet Samih Qasim, which speaks to Black people’s struggles in the U.S. and global imperialism
Courtland Cox said “We saw that the Palestinian struggle was part of our struggle against what was characterized as an imperialist nature of the United States and other countries.”
Black poet Samuel W. Allen wrote on the overlaps between Palestinian and Black American poetry in
the book’s preface: “it is striking that the powerful title piece of this volume, ‘Enemy of the Sun’ by Sameeh Al-Qassem seems to correspond to an earlier period in the Black American poetic experience.”
George Jackson, a Black revolutionary writer, was incarcerated in California for more than a decade, until he was killed in 1971 by prison guards. Among the ninety-nine books Jackson had in his cell at the time of his death, one was "Enemy of the Sun," a collection of Palestinian resistance poetry.
Angela Davis enters prison in 1970 after being arrested by the FBI in connection to George Jackson and while in prison, receives letters of support from Palestinian prisoners.
22 July 1969
The Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers, Algeria
On July 21-22, 1969, in Algiers at the Pan-African Cultural Festival, the Black Panther party meets with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Eldridge Cleaver writes that Israel was an American “puppet and pawn” and that “al-Fateh will win.”
Eldridge Cleaver & David Hilliard of the Black Panther Party holding a press conference w/ the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Algiers, Algeria at the Pan-African Cultural Festival.
At the same festival, Al-Fateh made an English-language pamphlet titled To Our African Brothers. The statement linked the Palestinians with Africa by asserting that even though the Palestinians and argued their struggle were not part of “Africa the continent,” they were part of “Africa the cause.” There was a geographic map of the world and there was a political map, al-Fateh shared, the latter of which showed the divide between racism, colonialism, and repression vs. revolution, rebellion, and freedom.
Image from the Black Panther newspaper about the Pan African Cultural Festival covering Fatah's message.
26 July 1969
Black Panthers champion Palestinian women's resistance
In January of 1969 the Black Panther, the Black Panther’s newspaper, carried al-Fateh’s first general international communiqué to the world press. That same issue carried a Third World Press news story, datelined Damascus and based on an al-Fateh military communiqué, about al-Fateh guerrilla activities.
In July of 1969, they also ran an article championing Palestinian women in resistance.
(Of the forty-three issues of The Black Panther that ran from June 1, 1969, until March 28, 1970, the party ran thirty-three articles or other items in support of Palestine and condemning Israel)
Image from the Black Panther, the newspaper of the Black Panther Party, 1969.
On October 12, 1968: The Black Panther Party’s paper, The Black Panther, ran an article that championed al-Fateh.
November 16, 1968: Black Panther newspaper stated that Palestinian refugee camps run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine refugees in the Near East were “concentration camps,” and it boldly asserted that “Israel IS because Palestine’s right to be was canceled.”
25 December 1969
Yasser Arafat meets with the Black Panthers in Algeria
From December 25 - 28 1969, Algiers hosts the Congress of Palestine Support Committees. At this time Yasir Arafat, head of both al-Fateh and the PLO, asked to meet the Black Panther Party.
Arafat and a representative of the African National Congress met with Cleaver. Eldridge Cleaver said “The Party did not arrive at this position [on the Palestinians] after having read [about it]” but rather because of its own experience in America…Black people in Babylon [America] were being blocked by forces we did not understand.”
Image from Arafat meeting with Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Beirut Lebanon, 1970- see August 1970 on the timeline.
17 February 1970
James Baldwin declares solidarity with Palestine
In, 1970 James Baldwin told his interviewer that he was “not anti-Semitic at all, but I am anti-Zionist.” He said, “I don’t believe they [Zionists] had the right, after 3,000 years, to reclaim the land with Western bombs and guns on biblical injunction. When I was in Israel it was as though I was in the middle of The Fire Next Time.”
Read more on Baldwin's stance on Palestine here:
https://socialistworker.org/2014/07/23/how-baldwin-saw-palestine
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/open-letter-born-again/
17 February 1970
SNCC and CORE member Omar abu Ahmed writes a report about Black-Palestinian connections
At the third National Conference on Black Power, held in Philadelphia from Omar Abu Ahmed, a CORE activist from the Bronx in New York submitted a minority report describing Zionism as a threat to African Americans. Ahmed had been a Freedom Rider in 1963 and a member of Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity
Image source: http://harlemcore.com/omeka/items/show/175.
19 June 1970
Bayard Rustin and others publishes New York Times ad in support of Israel
In June 1970 Roy Wilkins, Bayard Rustin, and other prominent Civil Rights Leaders declare their support for Israel in a $10,000 New York Times and Washington Post Ad they create called “An Appeal by Black Americans for United States Support to Israel.”
July 28, 1970: The director of the Washington office of the American Committee on Africa (ACOA), Charles Hightower, wrote an angry letter to some of those who had signed Bayard Rustin’s pro-Israeli advertisement in the New York Times expressing his “profound opposition and outrage” at what they had done.
August 1970 At a conference at Howard University, Jomo Logan of the New York–based African Americans for Friendship and Retainment of Our Image, Culture and Arts (A.F.R.I.C.A.) offered a resolution entitled “A Resolution by African americans [sic] Condemning the Appeal by So-called Black Leaders Calling for United States Support to Israel,” which criticized Rustin and his supporters, “it is pathetic that in this day and time these so-called elite Blacks are unsympathetic to the implications of their endorsement of Israel and to the negative meaning it has for all people of African descent.” It, too, accused Rustin of “uncle tomming to appease Jewish interests [and] must be considered an act of ABSOLUTE TREASON against the BLACK RACE." The conference adopted Logan’s resolution unanimously.
James Lawson and his Harlem Council for Economic Development denounced Rustin and the statement. Lawson established the United African Nationalist Union in 1948 and was a leading activist in labor and Black nationalist causes. He said, “no Black man is rich enough to afford a quarter [of a dollar] for the Zionists! “Furthermore, how can those who pretend to be of African extraction advocate war machines to a predominantly white nation (Israel) to destroy their own kind? Many Arabs are Black and African! It is ironical, and tragic, that a group of ‘Negroes’ would take this course against their own kind..”
James Lawson, once called the "mind of the movement," and "the leading strategist of nonviolence in the world" by Martin Luther King Jr. who led lunch counter sit-ins, freedom rides and worker strikes including the historic 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike during the civil rights movement.
18 August 1970
Randa al Fattal takes SCLC and Paul Boutelle to Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon
August of 1970: Randa Khalidi al-Fattal of the Arab Information Center takes Paul Boutelle and ten other men and women to Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. With al-Fattal as a guide, the group visited Palestinians in their homes, refugee camps, and guerrilla training camps.
In Amman, Jordan, the group attended the meeting of the Palestine National Council, the PLO’s highest decisionmaking body, which took place August 27–29, 1970. While at the meeting the group met with Yasser Arafat; a picture of Boutelle and the others shaking hands with a Arafat was on the cover of al-Fateh, the official newspaper of Arafat’s al-Fateh Organization.
Randa al Khalidi-Fattal, who you can read more about in Michael Fischbash's work here.
18 August 1970
The South End Newspaper Controversy
The South End Newspaper Controversy: Black power activist John Watson was the editor in chief of Wayne State’s University student newspaper, the South End. The newspaper came out with a front page article in support of al-Fateh. The alumna of Wayne State and President Keast pressured John Watson to step down as editor and charged that “the South End was anti-semitic and reminiscent of Nazi Germany” (Keast’s words). City, state, and union officials, and television stations accused Watson’s newspaper of anti-semitism.
Feb 3, 1969: An arson attempt tries to blow up South End Newspaper as it was being attacked for being anti-semitic. Black Power activist John Watson holds his ground and maintains his pro-Palestine stance. The Jewish members of the newspaper staff unanimously supported his political criticism of Israel. The state legislature threatened to cut of $100,000 in aid to if Watson did not step down as editor. Watson wondered why the state legislature did not go after actual anti-semites such as Donald Lobsinger, a city employee who organized openly racist anti-semitic groups. Watson pointed out that the Detroit area and nearby Toledo had the largest speaking Arabic communities in North and South America and that the South End Newspaper was a voice for them as much it was anyone else.
The South End Newspaper, source here.
1 November 1970
An Appeal by Black Americans Against United States Support of the Zionist Government of Israel
November 1, 1970 “An Appeal by Black Americans Against United States Support of the Zionist Government of Israel,” is a full-page advertisement in the New York Times in response to Rustin that read “We, the Black American signatories of this advertisement, are in complete solidarity with our Palestinian brothers and sisters, who, like us, are struggling for self-determination and an end to racist oppression. . .”
It was written by a group of activists called the Committee of Black Americans for Truth About the Middle East, which had been formed by Paul B. Boutelle of New York, a member of Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and a founder of Afro- Americans Against the War in Vietnam. He also served as secretary of the Black United Action Front and was the SWP’s vice presidential candidate in the 1968 national elections.
Read it in full here: https://www.blackforpalestine.com/1970-black-nyt-statement.html.
26 January 1972
Shirley Chilsolm criticizes U.S. government treatment of Palestine
Shirley Chislolm writes a policy paper while she is running for president on the Democratic Party ticket in which she criticized the Nixon administration for failing to address the Palestinian refugee problem.
She argued there needed to be “full representation for the Palestinians in all negotiations concerning the return or compensation for Palestinian Arab property; and immediate consideration of the problem of the lack of status of the several hundred thousand people who left Israeli held territory in 1948 and 1967.”
24 February 1972
Operation Boulder
President Nixon launched Operation Boulder, a United States government surveillance program that was a large-scale federal investigation of both Arab immigrants to the U.S. and Arab-Americans. Millions of dollars were poured into surveilling these communities.
Art from a podcast about Operation Boulder you can listen to here: https://kerningcultures.com/operation-boulder/
Read more:
Available at: https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/gssr/vol2/iss2/5.
20 July 1973
The Wildcat Strikes in Detroit
Black auto workers shut down three Chrysler plants in Detroit, Michigan. The first walkout occurred at Jefferson Assembly, where 90% of auto workers were Black. Black auto workers climbed onto the electrical power control cage and pushed the button to stop the assembly line at 6:00AM, bypassing working through the union hierarchy. The Black auto workers demanded their racist supervisor Tom Woolsey step down. Arab workers brought food to the Black strikers and came from other departments to demonstrate their support. Thirteen hours later, Chrysler gave in to their demands.
Read: Detroit I Do Mind Dying.
17 August 1973
Nagi Daifullah, an Arab farm worker is killed by police during United Farm Workers strike
The first farm worker killed by police in the decade-long struggle to unionize farm workers in the U.S. was an Arab immigrant named Nagi Daifullah.
From the Arab American National Museum:
| When thousands of grape workers went on strike for fair wages and better working conditions in the summer of 1973, Nagi was among them. During these strikes, local sheriffs arrested more than 3,500 workers and their families, and hundreds were beaten. On August 15, 1973 Nagi Daifullah was beaten to death by a Deputy Sheriff at the age of 24. Today, thousands of farm workers commemorate and honor the Arab American leader, Nagi Daifullah. |
10,000 people marched in California in a memorial service for Nagi Daifullah and Juan de La Cruz (killed one day later). Thousands of Arabs working in California fields lived in company camps lacking sanitation and striked with Latino workers in United Farm Workers. Ceasar Chavez called for a three day fast in honor of the men. In Dearborn and Detroit, the Arab community held two marches in honor of Daifullah. United Farm Workers leaders met with Black Panther Party members a few months later in March 1973.
Image source: https://arabamerican.pastperfectonline.com/archive/5CCD2D37-FDE0-47B4-BD30-071194713149.
https://reuther.wayne.edu/node/294
29 October 1973
Arab Auto Workers Strike to protest UAW's support of Israel
The Arab Workers Caucus of United Auto Workers lead a strike of 3,000 Detroit auto workers, demanding that the leadership of their union (UAW), divest from Israel.
Read more here.
UAW Local 600, which represented workers at Ford Rouge, had purchased over $300,000 in State of Israel bonds with union dues money. The investments could be used by Israel for any purpose, including war and occupation. The UAW International owned nearly $1 million in Israeli bonds, part of its pension portfolio.
On October 13, some 3,000 Arab Americans marched in Dearborn to the Local 600 office, demanding the bonds be liquidated. They held signs reading “Stop US-Israeli Terror Against Arab People” and raised over $20,000 in donations for war relief. Soon after this action, seventy delegates from nearly every auto factory in the area gathered to found a new Arab Workers Caucus, following the example of their Black coworkers.
In Detroit, Leonard Woodcock, the president of UAW, was set to receive a humanitarian honor from a Zionist organization, B’nai B’rith International.
14 March 1974
Muhammad Ali visits Palestinian Refugee Camps
Muhammad Ali gave a press conference in Beirut, Lebanon, at which he said, “America is the headquarters of Zionism and imperialism.” He visited two Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon.
Muhammad Ali in a Palestinian refugee camp in Southern Lebanon, 1974.
26 July 1979
The Andrew Young Affair
“The Andrew Young Affair,”--Civil Rights Leader Andrew Young is the first Black American to serve as United States delegate to the United Nations. He is pressured to step down after secretly meeting with a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. James Baldwin and others write letters of support to Young.
21 December 1979
Palestinian Human Rights Campaign invites Black leaders to visit in Lebanon
The Palestine Human Rights Campaign (PHRC) convention featured two prominent leaders of MLKJ’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The leaders from SCLC earlier visited Lebanon where they had met Yasser Arafat, who was protesting against America’s “no talk” policy with the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The convention also featured Jesse Jackson, who then visited with Yasser Arafat.
Jesse Jackson with Yasser Arafat during this visit in 1979.
13 April 1980
Palestinian Liberation Organization invites instructors from the Black Panther's Intercommunal Youth Institute to visit refugee camps
Huey Newton visits social service centers run by the PLO in Beirut: A Palestine Red Crescent hospital, a SAMED (Palestine Martys Works Scoety) workshop, and a school. While in Beirut, he met Yasir Arafat.
Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton with Palestinian resistance fighters outside a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, 1980.
According to his lawyer, Fred J. Hiestand, the PLO invited Newton to visit the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Newton agreed but asked to visit Israel as well. The Israeli government refused his entrance into the country.
Newton traveled to south Lebanon, where he visited Palestinian refugees at the al-Rashidiyya refugee camp and observed fragments of U.S. bombs dropped by Israeli jets.
The PLO paid for Newton and six other people to visit, including Newton’s lawyer Fred Hiestand and two instructors from the Intercommunal Youth Institute that the BPP had established in 1971.
2 December 1982
June Jordan writes "Moving Toward Home"
Black, bisexual feminist activist and poet June Jordan writes “Moving Towards Home,” about the massacres of Sabra and Shatlia. She writes,
“I was born a Black woman
and now
I am become a Palestinian
against the relentless laughter of evil
there is less and less living room
and where are my loved ones?”
June Jordan art by Danya Zituni.
21 December 1982
Black and Arab communities in the Southside of Chicago unite against police chief Jon Burge
“At the electoral level in the 1980’s, there was significant work happening between African Americans and Arabs. In Chicago, there was a big effort from Palestinians--we were one of the first communities to work in coalition with the Black community around police torture. There were over 100 people who were tortured and incriminated without being guilty and given life sentences or death penalty.”
-Camelia Odeh
“Jon Burge, a police chief, tortured hundreds of Black and Palestinian men in Chicago. It took a lot of community organizing with the Black and Arab community to get rid of Burge. We used to host their celebrations like we do for the prisoners from Palestinians to be released. My uncle who was a prisoner in Palestine for 18 years came to one of those celebrations, welcoming home Black men who had been falsely accused and incarcerated and my mother and father organized these celebrations. There were so many people who died in death row and in prisons along the way. The political language and framing of prison abolition in the U.S. is a huge part of our work--it’s a political system and the idea of “free them all,” is integral to the work we do.”
--Leena Odeh, Palestinian activist from the Southside of Chicago
Image source: https://truthout.org/articles/chicago-passed-police-torture-reparations-5-years-ago-were-they-implemented/
Read more here: https://www.chicagotorturejustice.org/history
20 July 1983
The African Community Society, ACS is founded in Palestine
The African Community Society, ACS, a Palestinian non-governmental non-profit organization (once called the Sudanese Welfare Cllub), is founded by the Afro-Palestinian community in Jerusalem.
Archival images from their website, afropalestinians.org. Find more here: https://www.afropalestinians.org/_files/ugd/0b7ddc_42ae547d56404c4fbef29c75c98fbc88.pdf
21 December 1983
Ntozhake Shange writes a poem that connects Palestine, South Africa, Puerto Rico, and the Black U.S. experience
Ntozhake Shange publishes
“there is no edge
no end to the new world
cuz I have a daughter/ trinidad
I have a son/ san juan
our twins
capetown & palestine/ cannot speak the same
language/ but we fight the same old men
the same men who thought the earth waz flat
go on over the edge/ go on over the edge old men
you’ll see us in luanda, or the rest of us
in chicago
rounding out the morning/
we are feeding our children the sun”
— NTOZAKE SHANGE, BOCAS: A DAUGHTER'S GEOGRAPHY (1983)
21 May 1985
Ali and Mahmoud Jiddah, two Black Palestinian freedom fighters, released from prison
Ali Jiddah above, Mahmoud Jiddah below
From "The hidden resistance of African-Palestinians" by Sarah Hassan:
"Jiddah decided to join the resistance against the Israeli occupation, in an attempt to return to the life he had once known. He was arrested on September 5, 1968, and was subsequently sentenced to 25 years in prison. Israel has Jiddah and his cousin Ali listed as terrorists. The two of them planned attacks against Israeli forces that had taken over their towns. The Jiddahs called it their right to resist.
After serving 17 of those years, he was released early through the Jibril Exchange prisoner swap in 1985. A couple of years later, he was arrested again after joining in the First Intifada, spending another year in prison for what Israel called “renewed activity”.
16 July 1985
Nairobi Conference on Women
The Third World Women’s Conference happens in Nairobi, Kenya and the Women's Action Committees, affiliated with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, meet with various South African and Central African feminists. According to Rabab Abdulhadi, one Palestinian feminist organizer noted that "the dialectical linking of feminist and national agendas in Third World women's discourses, particularly those engaged in national liberation struggles, resonated with our own experiences and reinforced our determination.”
From "Bringing Home the Spirit of Nairobi" by Jamila Rodgers:
"Under pressure from pro-Zionists, the Kenyan censorship board bans showing of “Leila and the Wolves,” a film about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The Arab Solidarity Women’s Group organizes a protest meeting. A pro- Zionist U.S. delegate lunges to physically attack an Arab speaker. The crowd restrains her as women shout, “Zionism raises its head again!’"
Salwa Abu Khadra at the Nairobi Women's Conference.
Image source: https://palarchive.org/index.php/Detail/objects/21960/lang/en_US
Read Rabab Abdulhadi's documentation of this conference and the Palestinian feminists there:
“The Palestinian Women’s Autonomous Movement: Emergence, Dynamics, and Challenges.” Gender and Society, vol. 12, no. 6, 1998, pp. 649–73. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/190511.
16 July 1985
Fourth Conference of the General Conference of Palestinian Women
The Fourth Conference of the General Federation of Palestinian Women meets in Tunisia and invites African feminist delegations to collaborate with them.
Image sources: General Union for Palestinian Women Collection at the Palestine Museum. https://palarchive.org/index.php/Detail/collections/77/lang/en_US
20 September 1985
June Jordan publishes on linkages between South Africa and Palestine
June Jordan writes “The Blood Shall Be a Sign Unto You,” and “Moving beyond the Enemy Israel and South Africa,” comparing the apartheid in Israel to South African apartheid.
29 May 1989
Audre Lorde delivers commencement address and shares support of Palestine
Black lesbian feminist and poet Audre Lorde gives commencement speech at Oberlin in which she says:
“Our federal taxes contribute $3 billion yearly in military and economic aid to Israel. Over $200 million of that money is spent fighting the uprising of Palestinian people who are trying to end the military occupation of their homeland. Israeli solders fire tear gas canisters made in america into Palestinian homes and hospitals, killing babies, the sick, and the elderly...Encouraging yourcongresspeople to press for a peaceful solution in the Middle East, and for recognition of the rights of the Palestinian people, is not altruism, it is survival. ”
Read the speech at https://queerhistory.com/radical-graduation
21 December 1991
Camelia Odeh founds Southwest Youth Collaborative in Chicago
The Southwest Youth Collaborative forms in Chicago, a youth organizing institute for Black, Arab, and Latino youth in the Southside of Chicago founded by Camelia Odeh. It focused on ending juvenile detention centers and ending the school to prison pipeline.
One of SWYC’s initiatives was the University of Hip Hop (Healthy Independent People Helping Other People) Program founded by SWYC member Lavie Raven that implemented afterschool programs using rap music, break dancing and graffiti, and mural to teach about art, history, and geography. SWYC’s Generation Y program led by Jeremy Gaspar-Lahoud built a city-wide network called “Kids Not Criminals,” to fight Chicago’s zero-tolerance policies for students. Generation Y gathered coalitions of Chicago orgs including the Community Justice Initiative to pilot some of the city’s early peer jury programs and other restorative justice practices. SWYC youth members engaged in direct action against Chicago Public School administrators and engineered multimodal grassroots research projects, including community surveys, interviews, so they could tell policy makers they confronted “you can’t tell us this [carceral punishment] isn’t happening!” SWYC’s vision was for liberatory education for all.
21 December 1992
Rodney King Riots
Rodney King riots happen in LA. after a jury acquitted four officers of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) charged with using excessive force in the arrest and beating of Rodney King.
According to Leena Odeh, a coalition of Black, Asian, and Arab community members came together in Chicago develop programmatic work in the areas where Arabs had corner stores in the Black community. Karen Gunn, a Black woman, was a lead activist in this program.
Karen Gunn
21 December 1996
Suheir Hammad publishes Born Black, Born Palestinian
Suheir Hammad, Palestinian American poet writes Born Black / Born Palestinian, in conversation with June Jordan’s famous poem “Moving Toward Home,” in which she describes the intersections of Black and Palestinian struggle.
14 February 1997
Nelson Mandela gives a speech on South African Palestinian Solidarity
Nelson Mandela, on International Day of Solidarity with Palestine declared "1997, while still president of South Africa, he said the ANC’s struggle was ongoing. “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
27 December 2001
M. Bahati Kuumba publishes Gender and Social Movements
Black feminist scholar M. Bahati Kuumba publishes Gender and Social Movements, a comparative analysis of Palestinian, African American, and South African women's resistance.
Illustration of M. Bahati Kuumba, professor at Spelman College.
30 September 2002
Osama Jiddeh is the first martyr of the Second Intifada
Israeli Occupation forces stormed masjid al Aqsa and wounded dozens of Palestinians, leading to mass demonstrations. Palestinians made calls for donating blood at Maqasid Hospital. Osama Jiddeh, a 23 year old Afro-Palestinian man, headed to at-Tur neighborhood to donate blood and was gunned down by the Israeli army. Osama passed away shortly after. His mother said, "Osama went to donate blood to the injured, but ended up donating his blood to the land of Al-Quds." Osama Jiddah, an Afro-Palestinian, became the first martyr of the second intifada, which claimed the lives of up to 5000 Palestinians over the years 2000-2004/5.
21 December 2004
The film African Palestian is made
Andrew Courtney made the film African Palestinian: Ali Jiddah documenting the experiences of Afro-Palestinians in Jerusalem.
Read Andrew Courtney's portrait series on the Afro-Palestinian community here.
21 December 2007
U.S Social Forum
During the Atlanta U.S. Social Forum, Malcolm X Grassroots movement stood in solidarity with Arab organizers against Zionist panelists. Source: Layla Feghali.
29 January 2008
Slingshot Hiphop Premieres
Slingshot Hip Hop premieres, the first documentary to explore the history of the relationship between Palestinian hip hop and Black American hip hop.
20 March 2009
Alice Walker Visits Gaza
Pulitzer Prize winning womanist author Alice Walker visits Gaza with the organization Code Pink.
In April 2010, Alice Walker publishes Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horrors in Rwanda, Eastern Congo, and Israel/Palestine, in which she describes the interconnected struggles of Black people and Palestinians suffering under imperialist regimes.
Alice Walker speaking to Palestinian women in Beit Hanoun, Gaza. Image source.
29 May 2011
Hip Hop is Bigger than the Occupation
Hip Hop is Bigger than the Occupation premieres- a film about thirteen hiphop artists, including some from the the University of Hip Hop and the Southwest Youth Collaborative who visit Balata Refugee Camp near Nablus, Palestine.
Image source: https://www.palestineposterproject.org/posters/hip-hop-bigger-occupation
29 June 2011
Black and indigenous feminists visit Palestine
A delegation of Black and indigenous scholars from the U.S. including Barbara Ranbsy, Beverly Guy Sheftall, Angela Davis, and others visit Palestine with the guide and direction of Rabab Abdulhadi and the Odehs. They write A Call to Action by Black and Indigenous Feminists.
Beverly Guy Sheftall writes,
“Having grown up in the Jim Crow, apartheid South of Memphis, Tennessee, in the 50s, and having attended Spelman College in the Civil Rights mecca of Atlanta, Georgia, in the 60s, I was aware of the commonalities among oppressed people globally, as was the case with my sister travelers. But, “we wanted to see for ourselves the conditions under which Palestinian people live and struggle against what we can now confidently name as the Israeli project of apartheid...”
21 December 2013
Stop Urban Shield Campaign, Oakland
Stop Urban Shield, a coalition in Oakland worked for five years (2013-2018) to end the Israeli Occupation Forces trainings of Oakland Police Department.
Read more here: http://stopurbanshield.org/
15 August 2014
Palestinians write letter and tweets of solidarity to Mike Brown
Palestinians issued a statement of solidarity with the family of Michael Brown, a young Black man shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Palestinians offer tweets to Black protestors on how to navigate tear gas.
Palestinian students visited Ferguson a few months later, in November of 2014, and returned to organize events explaining the struggle of Black Americans.
Read more here: https://www.vox.com/world/2021/5/26/22452967/palestine-gaza-protests-black-lives-matter-blm-solidarity-israel
21 August 2014
Black for Palestine is Founded
#Black4Palestine was founded by Kristian Davis Bailey as a result of the cross-movement solidarity between Palestinian activists and participants in the Ferguson uprisings.
Read more at https://www.blackforpalestine.com/.
24 September 2014
Students for Justice in Palestine is founded at Spelman in the Women's Research and Resource Center
Students for Justice in Palestine Atlanta University Consortium chapter is founded at Spelman College under the Women’s Resource and Research Center, the first ever SJP at a Historically Black College/University, after Spelman student Banah Ghadbian visited Palestine in the summer of 2014 during Ferguson Uprisings and siege on Gaza, under the call of Che Gossett, the mentorship of M. Bahati Kuumba, Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, and after visits with Alice Walker and Angela Davis to Spelman. It also came out of the organizing Spelman students did for Syria between 2012-2013 with the Social Justice Fellows Program.
Pictured above is Amoni Thompson, a core SJP member during the Syria protests in 2012.
Spelman’s SJP hosts “From Ferguson to Palestine: Existence is Resistance, On the Intersections Between the Black and Palestinian Struggle,” and hosts two Palestinian students from Birzeit University to speak at the Historically Black College/University about their experiences as students under Israeli apartheid.
Spelman SJP- later Morehouse, Clark, and Spelman AUC SJP during the Right to Education Tour.
21 December 2014
Al Helm film about Black American choir in Palestine is released
Al Helm: Martin Luther in Palestine comes out, a documentary about a pro-Israel Black American choir that becomes transformed and supports the Palestinian cause upon touring the West Bank and witnessing life under occupation
21 January 2015
Dream Defenders visit Palestine
Dream Defenders, a coalition of Black and Palestinian activists and artists representing Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100) visit the West Bank.
They visit again in 2017.
22 August 2015
Angela Davis publishes Freedom is a Constant Struggle
Angela Davis publishes Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement.
“If we say we abolish the prison-industrial complex, as we do, we should also say abolish apartheid, and end the occupation of Palestine!”
21 November 2015
Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine
One thousand Black activists, scholars, including three people who signed “An Appeal by Black Americans Against United States Support of the Zionist Government of Israel,” statement in the New York Times in 1970 sign “2015 Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine.”
Kristian Davis Bailey of Black 4 Palestine with Maytha Al Hassan of the Dream Defenders.
21 December 2016
There is a Field, Black-Palestinian play premieres at Morehouse
There is a Field, a play directed by Jen Marlowe that explores murder of a Palestinian by the Israeli Occupation Forces premieres at Morehouse College and the discussions between Black and Palestinian audience members along with the play are later turned into a documentary film.
2 January 2017
Aja Monet publishes My Mothers was a Freedom Fighter
Aja Monet publishes My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter in which she writes odes to Black and Palestinian liberation.
in "the giving tree" she wrote a tribute to Palestinian freedom after her trip with the Dream Defenders to Palestine.
Excerpt of "the giving tree":
"at the core of suffering, there is always a door, a wall.
the knob shouting, they came in violently. before
the sun rose, there was an Israeli flag
posted outside. Beit Hanina, Silwan, Sheikh Jarrah. They came in
violently, for her home, her dignity or both, veins on
a grandmother's wrist pleading over a stove that fed
the faces around it, rusted faucet cleansing tired hands
and rinsing cauliflower, potatoes, carrots. picture frames
of memories smiling back to her, knocked down."
18 November 2018
Ferguson activist Bassem Masri is found dead
Bassem Masri, a Palestinian activist who organized in the Ferguson Uprisings dies suddenly at the age of 31. He is the fourth Ferguson activist to die suddenly. He joined Ferguson activists Danye Jones, Darren Seals, Edward Crawford, three prominent Black Lives Matter organizers who suddenly died; foulplay was suspected.
In October 2017, Ferguson activist Danye Jones is found hanging from a tree at the age of 24. His mother suspects foulplay--the police rule it was a “suicide.”
Bassam Masri
Danye Jones
Darren Seals
Edward Crawford
2 April 2019
Palestinian Youth Movement takes delegations to South Africa
"From April 1 to April 11, 2019, the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), in partnership with the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC), hosted a delegation of 20 Palestinian youth organizers in Johannesburg, South Africa. The delegation was driven by three goals: first, to deepen relations of joint-struggle between Palestinians and South Africans; second, to study how we, as Palestinians, can learn from the historic achievements of the South African struggle; and third, to strengthen working relationships among a new generation of Palestinian youths from various geographic and ideological backgrounds toward a unified national liberation project. The intensive study program featured lectures, seminar discussions, visits to landmark sites of historic struggle, and meetings with South African political figures, community leaders and youth activists."
From: https://palestinianyouthmovement.com/southafrica
3 June 2020
Arabs for Black Lives Collective
The Arabs for Black Lives Collective forms in response to the brutal murder of George Floyd by a white police officer. They create a petition calling for many action items, including that non-Black Arabs work to dismantle anti-Blackness within Arab communities.
15 May 2023
Black Studies Palestinian Studies conference
Dr. Saed Atshan hosts and organizes the Black Studies Palestinian Studies solidarity conference at Emory University.
Read more at https://blackstudiespalestinianstudies.com/ and https://maryhazboun.com/events/black-studies-palestinian-studies-conferenc
24 October 2023
Black Jerusalem: Inner City Muslim Network takes a delegation of Black activists from Chicago to Palestine
The Inner City Muslim Network takes a delegation of Black activists from Chicago’s South Side on the Black Jerusalem tour.
13 February 2024
Lama Jamous is the youngest journalist in Gaza
A young Black Palestinian journalist Lama Jamous is the youngest journalist in the world, reporting on the daily realities of children and adults under siege in Rafah, Gaza, after the Zionist occupation forced 1.6 million Gazans to flee to the southern border.