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Transnational Peoples of Color: Black Power in America and the Middle East

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2020

Michael R. Fischbach
Michael R. Fischbach*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Randolph-Macon College, Ashland, VA23005, e-mail: mfischba@rmc.edu
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Roundtable
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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , February 2020, pp. 167 - 172
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

The “Global 1960s” exemplified the transnational nature of decolonization, a salient example of which was the interconnectedness of freedom struggles in the Middle East and the Black Power movement in America.Footnote 1 Black Power activists who saw themselves constituting an internal black colony dominated by a white, capitalist socioeconomic and political order in the United States connected their own efforts with similar struggles being waged by faraway peoples of color, some of whom in turn were deeply affected by their American brothers and sisters. In truth, the ideology and identity politics of Black Power in both America and the Middle East became deeply intertwined with one another as militants on both sides of the world waged their own struggles and forged their respective revolutionary post-colonial identities.Footnote 2

Nowhere was this symbiosis more apparent than Black Power activists’ championing of the Palestinian Arab cause and, somewhat paradoxically, by “black” Israelis—Mizrahi/Sephardi Jews from Middle Eastern and/or North African backgrounds—who adopted wholesale the image and rhetoric of one of the leading forces of Black Power in America, the Black Panther Party.

Malcolm X and Black Power Internationalism

The major trailblazer in the 1960s for Black Power internationalism and support for the anticolonial movements in the Middle East was Malcolm X.Footnote 3 Malcolm argued forcefully that the black freedom struggle in the United States was part of a wider global anticolonial upheaval pitting the black world against a racialized system of imperialist oppression. In using the word black Malcolm said, “I mean non-white – black, brown, red or yellow people…. The dark masses of Africa and Asia and Latin America are already seething with bitterness, animosity, hostility, unrest, and impatience with the racial intolerance that they themselves have experienced at the hands of the white West.”Footnote 4 Malcolm also was clear that oppressed Americans of African descent were part of this unrest: “What happens to a black man in America today happens to the black man in Africa…. What happens to one of us today happens to all of us…. The Negro revolt [will] evolve and merge into the world-wide black revolution that has been taking place on this earth since 1945.”Footnote 5

Beyond his generalized identification with anti-colonial movements, Malcolm X took a particular interest in the Palestinian struggle against Israel, notably reflected in two trips he made to the Palestinians’ homeland. The first time was in July 1959 when he made a short visit to East Jerusalem as part of a wider Middle Eastern sojourn. The second was when he took a two-day break from a lengthy stay in Cairo to travel to Gaza in September 1964. Upon his return Malcolm met the chair of the newly created Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Ahmad Shuqayri, and published a blistering attack on Zionism in an English-language newspaper in Cairo, the Egyptian Gazette. Beyond condemning what it had done in dispossessing the Palestinians, Malcolm also accused Zionism of practicing a new form of colonialism elsewhere, in Africa, via Israeli foreign aid programs. He wrote, “[T]hese Israeli Zionists religiously believe their Jewish god has chosen them to replace the outdated European colonialism with a new form of colonialism.”Footnote 6

Malcolm X was murdered five months later yet his anticolonial internationalism and condemnation of Israel and Zionism were picked up by other militant blacks, a number of whom read Frantz Fanon's influential The Wretched of the Earth in the years after Malcolm's death, a book that described the Algerian experience in decolonization and contained an internationalist vision of “Negroes and Arabs” standing together.Footnote 7 The Black Power group that then took this internationalism and support for the Palestinians the farthest in the late 1960s was the Black Panther Party.

The Black Panther Party and the Guerrilla Image

The Black Panther Party (BPP) was formed in October 1966 as a self-defense force for the black community of Oakland, California, in its dealings with the city's police force. Yet its founders, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, also developed a revolutionary internationalist worldview that reflected the growing Black Power consensus that African Americans were waging an anticolonial struggle against the same global system of racialized oppression as were the Palestinians.Footnote 8 Newton in particular was familiar with the writings of Fanon as well as revolutionaries like Che Guevara and Mao Zedong. Starting in 1969 BPP leaders began vocally championing the Palestinians and deriding Israel as a racist ally of America.Footnote 9

For example, David Hilliard wrote, “We want to make it very clear that we support all those who are actively engaged in the struggle against U.S. Imperialism and Zionism, which means to us racial supremacy.”Footnote 10 Raymond “Masai” Hewitt stated much the same thing when he said, “We recognize that our oppression takes different forms—Zionism in Palestine and fascism here in America—but the cause is the same: it's U.S. imperialism.”Footnote 11 Finally, the BPP's international section in Algeria, headed by Eldridge Cleaver, cogently connected the Panthers’ struggle with of the Palestinians: “The struggle of the Palestinian people for their freedom and liberation from US imperialism and its lackeys is also our struggle. We recognize that if the Palestinian people cannot get their freedom and liberation, neither can we.”Footnote 12

The BPP was particularly adept at broadcasting its support for the Palestinians to black communities through its famed newspaper, The Black Panther. Indeed, the publication featured thirty-three articles on the Arab–Israeli conflict in the forty-three issues that came out between 1 June 1969 and 28 March 1970, alone.Footnote 13 Beyond strident articles, The Black Panther also featured evocative cartoons drawn by Emory Douglas. An issue in March 1970 carried two of these. The first depicted the United States as a large-breasted female pig nursing two piglets, one labeled West Germany and the other Israel. The other featured two drooling pigs standing nose-to-nose; one was labeled “U.S. Imperialism” while the other pig, replete with an eye patch like that worn by Israeli general Moshe Dayan, clearly represented Israel.Footnote 14

The Panthers were drawn to the Palestinians not merely because of their theoretical internationalism but also because association with armed Palestinians symbiotically reinforced the guerrilla image the party was trying to cultivate and express. When asked about who inspired the BPP, Newton once said, “I think that not only Fidel and Che, Ho Chi Minh and Mao and Kim Il Sung, but also all the guerrilla bands that have been operating in Mozambique and Angola, and the Palestinian guerrillas who are fighting for a socialist world.”Footnote 15 The Panthers pounced on the image of armed Palestinian fighters because this appealed to their own sense of fighting heroically against powerful forces. Their attempts to build a vibrant, revolutionary, post-colonial culture for blacks were thereby strengthened by identification with the language and visual imagery of Palestinian fighters found in posters produced for export by Palestinian groups like al-Fateh and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. These and other Palestinian groups were active in their publicity/propaganda efforts, which included printing and distributing posters worldwide that were replete with heroic imagery that caught the idea of various black and white American radicals.Footnote 16

Despite the passionate support for the Palestinians expressed by the Black Panthers, Palestinian fighters by and large did not latch onto the black freedom struggle in America. Al-Fateh did to a certain extent: Yasir Arafat, head of both al-Fateh and the PLO, met Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers in December 1969 and later greeted a delegation of blacks who attended an August 1970 meeting of the Palestine National Council in Amman, Jordan.Footnote 17 Some Palestinian guerrillas even used Black Power code names like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Black Panther.Footnote 18 Yet overall, it seems that the Palestinian resistance movement was little influenced by the black freedom struggle.Footnote 19 Perhaps ironically, the Middle Eastern people of color who did follow the exploits of the Black Panthers and internalized their Black Power message were those on the other side of the Arab–Israeli divide: Mizrahi/Sephardi Jews in Israel.

The Israeli Black Panthers and Jewish Decolonization

The Israeli activists who coalesced around the name the Israeli Black Panthers in early 1971 stemmed from similar circumstances as their American namesakes. Even though Zionist ideology proclaimed that Jews constituted a single people, there were stark differences among Israelis from various cultural backgrounds. Zionism had been a movement of Ashkenazi Jewish colonists arriving in Palestine from Europe who eventually created a European-style state and economy ruled along European lines. The many Mizrahi/Sephardi Jews who later immigrated from Arab and Islamic countries often found it hard to adjust to their new secular, European-oriented lifestyle especially given that many came from poorer, less educated, and more religious backgrounds than Ashkenazi Jews. The result was that they were disproportionately well represented in the lower socio-economic and political strata.

The Israeli Black Panther leaders were young, mostly Moroccan immigrants who spoke of themselves as “black” and who used confrontational tactics and clever messaging to confront a “white” Ashkenazi power structure in the same militant fashion as the BPP was doing. They clearly and intentionally borrowed the name, image, and attitude of the BPP,Footnote 20 and when they proclaimed in January 1971, “We will be the Black Panthers of the State of Israel,” they seemed to revel in the ominous connections that the name evoked among their Ashkenazi compatriots.Footnote 21 One of them, Iraqi-born Kokhavi Shemesh, said, “We hunted around for a name which would attract attention, which would help to get our problem into the headlines. Since a black group with the same name had arisen in the United States, and since Israel's propaganda had claimed that its members were the enemies of Israel and since most of Israel's foreign capital comes from the United States, we chose the name ‘Black Panthers’ in order to give a jolt to Jews both here and abroad.”Footnote 22

Besides protests and drawing attention to internal Jewish cultural colonialism, the Panthers in Israel were also frightening to many Israelis because they proposed crossing the psychic border and allying themselves with Palestinians to create a new egalitarian society of peoples of color. Shemesh noted, “We intend to initiate in this country a social revolution, build a new society of which there is still no example anywhere in the world…. We must reach a situation in which we shall fight together with the ‘fucking’ Arabs against the establishment. We are the only one who can constitute a bridge of peace with the Arabs in context of a struggle against the establishment.”Footnote 23

Conclusion

Both the BPP and the Israeli Black Panthers were gone as revolutionary forces by the mid-1970s. Unlike guerrillas fighting in the world's mountains and jungles, surrounded by bases in supportive countries, the BPP found that continued armed confrontation with the police was no longer an option in the urban settings the Panthers inhabited; the power of the state was simply overwhelming. Moreover, both the United States and Israel were undergoing tremendous psychological and political changes in the early 1970s, and the Panthers in both parts of the world therefore largely turned away from confrontation and toward establishment politics.Footnote 24 Yet the transnationalism of Black Power ideology and symbolism stands as a testament to the degree to which the age of anticolonial movements bridged disparate cultures and societies during the Global 1960s.

The experiences of Black Power across borders decades ago surely can contribute to new understandings of the forms that decolonization took in the Middle East. The lessons learned by the Panthers on both sides of the world are useful starting points for further research. Why did movements like the BPP, not to mention armed white underground radicals that emerged in Europe and the U.S. in the 1970s, fail to realize sooner that Third World models for revolution and decolonization were not applicable, grosso modo, to Western societies?Footnote 25 How did armed underground Western groups explain their failures theoretically?Footnote 26 Another area ready for renewed scholarly attention are the impacts of US–Soviet détente and US–China rapprochement on the Palestinian struggle in the 1970s.Footnote 27 Future detailed comparative study of decolonization can shed light on these and other important questions about the transnational nature of decolonization in the second half of the 20th century.

Footnotes

1 For a fuller treatment of this topic, see Fischbach, Michael R., Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018). Black activists long had followed decolonization in Africa and elsewhere even before the 1960s. See, among others, Von Eschen, Penny, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Young, Cynthia, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a Third World Left (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Slate, Nico, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Plummer, Brenda, In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Munro, John, The Anticolonial Front: The African American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonization, 1945–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

2 In the 1960s, Black Power advocates already were writing about the transnational nature of their movement. For example, see Neal, Lawrence P., “Black Power in the International Context,” in Black Power Revolt: A Collection of Essays, ed. Barbour, Floyd B. (Boston: Porter Sargent Publishers, 1968). One of several contemporary explorations is Slate, Nico, ed., Black Power Beyond Borders: The Global Dimensions of the Black Power Movement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

3 Much has been written about Malcolm X and his Black Power internationalism, including in the definitive biography of him by Marable, Manning, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011). Yet in many ways the best writings on this subject are those of Malcolm himself. See, inter alia, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, with the assistance of Alex Haley, introduction by M.S. Handler, epilogue by Alex Haley (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1966), and Breitman, George, ed., Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (New York: Grove Press, 1990).

4 Breitman, ed., Malcolm X Speaks, 47, 50.

5 Footnote Ibid, 48, 49–50.

6 Malcolm X, “Zionist Logic,” Egyptian Gazette, 17 September 1964.

7 Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Farrington, Constance. Preface by Sartre, Jean-Paul (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1968).

8 Good treatments of Black Panther internationalism can be found in Clemons, Michael L. and Jones, Charles E., “Global Solidarity: The Black Panther Party in the International Arena,” New Political Science 21, no. 2 (1999): 177–203, and Bloom, Joshua and Martin, Waldo E. Jr., Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013).

9 By 1969 the Palestinian guerrilla movement was a major topic in the world's press, and in that year the BPP opened an office in Algiers, Algeria, where it maintained almost daily contact with Palestinians from the al-Fateh movement.

10 The Black Panther, 17 February 1970.

11 Berkeley Barb, 15-21 August 1969.

12 “Black Panther Party Statement on Palestine” (18 September 1970), Eldridge Cleaver Papers (BANC MSS91/213/C), carton 5, folder 9, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.

13 As counted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “The Fedayeen Impact – Middle East and United States” (United States, Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, June 1970), 39. Online document at: https://www.governmentattic.org/2docs/FBI_Monograph_Fedayeen-Impact_1970.pdf.

14 The Black Panther, 21 March 1970.

15 Newton, Huey P., To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton, introduction by Schurmann, Franz (New York: Random House, 1972), 201. For a comparative look at how Asian revolutionaries and “Yellow Power” affected the self-image of black revolutionaries like those in the Black Panther Party, see Watkins, Rychetta, Black Power, Yellow Power, and the Making of Revolutionary Identities (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2012).

16 Palestinian poster production was among the largest in the world in the 1960s. Yanker, Gary, Prop Art: Over 1000 Contemporary Political Posters (New York: Darien House, Inc., 1972), 76.

17 For details, see Fischbach, Black Power and Palestine, 115–16, 141, 147.

18 Fujino, Diane C., Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 160.

19 For example, when asked years later whether or not she was aware of the widespread left-wing American adoration of her in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the noted Palestinian aircraft hijacker from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Leila Khaled, sniffed, “I was too busy with the revolution to notice.” Leila Khaled, telephone interview by the author, 5 September 2012.

20 For more about the Israeli Black Panthers and their connections to their American comrades, see Chetrit, Sami Shalom, Intra-Jewish Conflict in Israel: White Jews, Black Jews (London: Routledge, 2010), and Frankel, Oz, “The Black Panthers of Israel and the Politics of the Radical Analogy,” in Black Power Beyond Borders, ed. Slate, Nico, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan), 83–106.

21 `Al ha-Mishmar, 13 January 1971, cited in Frankel, “The Black Panthers of Israel and the Politics of the Radical Analogy,” 81.

22 Israleft 6, 20 November 1972, reprinted in Shalom Cohen and Kokhavi Shemesh, “The Origin and Development of the Israeli Black Panther Movement,” Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) No. 49 (July 1976): 21.

23 Yosef Waksman, “The Panthers Dream to Fight Together with the Arabs against the Establishment,” Ma`ariv, 11 April 1972, reprinted in Documents from Israel 1967–1973: Readings for a Critique of Zionism, eds. Uri Davis and Norton Mezvinsky (London: Ithaca Press, 1975), 120.

24 I am grateful to the insights of Yoav Di-Capua about the situation in Israel after the 1973 Arab–Israeli War. I should point out that after 1971 some in Eldridge Cleaver's faction of the BPP did continue the policy of armed confrontation with the police for a few years, with some of his followers metamorphosizing into something called the Black Liberation Army. Fischbach, Black Power and Palestine, 159.

25 Little has been written on the theoretical level about how underground revolutionaries elsewhere, notably in the United States, understood changes in the Palestinian struggle starting in the 1970s. I briefly explored this in The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019).

26 Explorations could build on the earlier work of, inter alia, Varon, Jeremy, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).

27 Follow up work could be done on writings such as Suri's, Jeremy “The Cold War, Decolonization, and Global Social Awakenings: Historical Intersections,” Cold War History 6, no. 3 (August 2006): 353–63. Max Elbaum is among those who have explored how China's changing global position in particular affected the above-ground American Left in the 1970s. See his Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (London: Verso, 2002). More work can be done on how the Palestinians and the underground Left in the West were affected by these developments.

Ibid