A rather gloomy note, am within a stone’s – or hand grenade’s – throw from the Gaza Strip. One is never very far from a border here, all the borders are hostile.
James Baldwin, note to Mary Painter, 7 October 1961Footnote 1
In her 1982 poem “Moving towards Home,” written in response to the mass slaughter of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon, June Jordan famously described her recognition of the shared histories of Black and Palestinian liberation struggles with an image of rebirth. “I was born a Black woman,” Jordan wrote, “and now I am become a Palestinian.”Footnote 2 Especially since Israel’s genocide in Gaza began in October 2023,Footnote 3 legions of readers have returned to Jordan’s poem as a means of asking, what is the role of the oppressed in response to Palestinian death? In so doing, they have bumped sometimes accidentally into James Baldwin.Footnote 4
Perhaps the least noted aspect – and one of the most acute aspects – of Baldwin’s legacy for our historical moment is his transformation, or one might say transmutation, on the question of Blackness, Israel, and Palestine. Baldwin was driven into exile from America in 1948, the year of the creation of the state of Israel, and he left the US with Israel on his mind. At wit’s end about American racism, his own poverty, and the unfinished business of his sexuality, Baldwin pondered moving to Israel before choosing Paris. This leaning was consistent with his deep acquaintance with Jewish fraternity in his youth and early writing career, a fierce opposition to anti-Semitism shaped in part by the Holocaust, and a curiosity regarding the project of Jewish statehood as – perhaps – a bellwether for African American self-determination. Yet his decision to choose Paris over Israel was ultimately informed, as he later put it, by an understanding that Israel’s foundation was built on sands of colonial appropriation. “If I had fled to Israel,” he wrote in 1972, “a state created for the purpose of protecting Western interests, I would have been in a tighter bind: on which side of Jerusalem would I have decided to live?”Footnote 5
Baldwin’s comprehension of the partition of historic Palestine as a version of Jim Crow in the Middle East would travel with him and inform a lifelong evolution towards what might be called Afro-Palestinian solidarity. This solidarity had more than a few coordinates. For example, within a year of arriving in Paris, Baldwin was arrested and charged by police with stealing a hotel bedsheet. In a French jail, he was quick to note that nearly all the other prisoners looked like him: dark-skinned North Africans. Their attitude towards arrest, Baldwin was surprised to observe, is that it was “simply another unlucky happening in a very dirty world” – the world of intractable French colonial rule.Footnote 6 Baldwin thus took note in 1961 – the year he traveled to Israel as an invited guest of that state, and wrote the foreboding note of witness to Mary Painter – when more than 120 Algerians were killed by Parisian police: “Algerians were being murdered in the streets, and corralled into prisons, and being dropped into the Seine like flies.”Footnote 7 Also on that 1961 trip to Israel, Baldwin carried in his briefcase a manuscript draft of his epoch-making The Fire Next Time. The book’s landmark analysis of American racism, Christianity, and the emergence of Islam as a political force in the US haunted Baldwin as he confronted what he called the “Arab” question in Israel. Everywhere he went in Israel, he was reminded of the racial segregation at home. This is in many ways predictable: Baldwin went to Israel directly from reporting on the battle to integrate schools in the American South. America’s own apartheid would thus shadow Baldwin as he moved through the partitioned space of Israel. The “fire” burning at the troubled borders of the exclusionary Israeli state was connected, Baldwin felt, to the heat of racial segregation at home. Thus, he wrote, “When I was in Israel, it was as though I was in the middle of The Fire Next Time.”Footnote 8
Baldwin’s perceptions of Israel’s partition were thus shaped and informed by his serving as “witness” to the treatment of the nonwhite world in the US, France, and the Middle East. Baldwin thus emerged from his experience as witness to French colonial rule a man born Black, but becoming something else:
The Arabs were together in Paris, but the American blacks were alone … I will not say that I envied them, for I didn’t, and the directness of their hunger, or hungers, intimidated me; but I respected them, and as I began to discern what their history had made of them, I began to suspect, somewhat painfully, what my history had made of me.Footnote 9
What did Baldwin mean? We should recall that in of his most famous formulations of his “outsider” status Baldwin once described himself as a “bastard of the West.” In his famous 1955 essay “Stranger in the Village,” Baldwin pronounced that his encounter with the artifacts of European civilization merely reminded him that that civilization depended for its existence – and affluence – on colonialism and the slave trade. Africa, and the African diaspora, was for Baldwin both the root and the source of alienation from a world he described in The Fire Next Time as built on white nationalism, Christianity, and the bedevilment of the non-Western world, including Islam.
Likewise, Baldwin’s encounter with colonial policing in France recalled his own trial by fire at the hands of America’s policing apparatus. A shaping traumatic experience in his childhood was being knocked to the ground and mocked by New York City police officers in Harlem. Baldwin later compared the massive repression and violence by police of southern civil rights protests in the 1950s to the violence practiced against anticolonial protesters in Africa and the Middle East. This was a subtext to his famous quip about American Jim Crow in global context: “All of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.”Footnote 10 In 1966, Baldwin would most famously devise a description of police in Harlem as an “occupying” force meant to conjure comparison between repression, violence, and surveillance of the domestic Black population with both the US military then rampaging in Vietnam and colonial forces holding onto power in places of the world like Angola.Footnote 11 It was in conjunction with this insight that Baldwin famously wrote this passage in No Name in the Street situating the US squarely within a tradition of empires that had ensnared the “Darker Nations” of the world, including his own:
any real commitment to black freedom in this country would have the effect of reordering all of our priorities, and altering all our commitments, so that, for horrendous example, we would be supporting black freedom fighters in South Africa and Angola, and would not be allied with Portugal, would be closer to Cuba than we are to Spain, would be supporting the Arab nations instead of Israel, and would never have felt compelled to follow the French into Southeast Asia.Footnote 12
Indeed, repeatedly in his writings Baldwin demonstrated how the wider process of decolonization deeply influenced his evolving views on Israel and Palestine and his place as a Black dissident to the West. In 1956, Israel would join Britain and France in attempting to seize the recently nationalized Suez Canal from Nasser’s Egypt, an event that turned W. E. B. Du Bois – an ardent advocate for the creation of the state of Israel – into its disillusioned critic. As Algerian bodies piled up in the national liberation war against the French, and African, Arab, and Asian colonies fell into the dustbin of history, Baldwin took the temperature of a world that he had already declared was “no longer white” and leaped with both feet into the fray of Israel–Palestine.Footnote 13
Israel’s annexation of Gaza, the Golan Heights and the West Bank after its so-called “Six Day War” with Egypt, Syria, and Jordan became, for Baldwin, both a culmination of its place in the long twentieth century of Western imperialism, and a prophetic anticipation of bloodshed to come. The war elicited fierce condemnation from two groups with whom Baldwin was now closely sympathetic – the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party. Both argued that Israel’s annexation had revealed “Zionism” to be a colonial project supported by – and in line with – Western interests. These, Baldwin believed, were political taboos that required naming. In the spring of 1970, Baldwin visited New York to record a conversation with anthropologist Margaret Mead. He used it as a platform to talk about Palestine. The creation of the state of Israel, Baldwin told Mead, “was one of the most cynical achievements – really murderous, merciless, ugliest and cynical achievements on the part of the Western nations.”Footnote 14 Baldwin also gave an interview to the Black Scholar offering his most extensive public comment to date on his shifting sympathies towards Palestinians:
There is level at which one can say that the guilty conscience of the Christian Western nations helped to create the state of Israel … In a certain sense, the state of Israel was created to keep the Arab in his place … it is not acceptable to me that the people who have been in refugee camps for the last twenty-five or thirty years have no equal rights to the land of Palestine, where Jews and Arabs have been together for so long.Footnote 15
The climactic moment in Baldwin’s “becoming” Palestinian might be considered his 1979 Nation essay “Open Letter to the Born Again.” The occasion for the letter was the resignation of United Nations ambassador Andrew Young after Young met privately with Zehdi Labib Terzi, the observer at the United Nations for the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The meeting brought Young under fire – including from President Jimmy Carter – because the US had promised Israel it would not meet with the PLO. Young was a veteran of the civil rights movement and a former adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. Baldwin was apoplectic about Young’s resignation, seeing it as a double betrayal of Black and Palestinian struggles for something like civil rights at the global level. In the Nation essay, Baldwin describes Young’s departure as another consequence of US and Western gerrymandering of Middle East politics. Baldwin places Zionism squarely in a tradition of Western imperialism:
The Zionists – as distinguished from the people known as Jews – using, as someone put it, the “available political machinery,” i.e. colonialism, e.g. the British Empire – promised the British that, if the territory were given to them, the British Empire would be safe forever. The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of “divide and rule” and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.”
There is, Baldwin writes, “no hope” for Middle East peace without “dealing with the Palestinians.”Footnote 16
Baldwin ended the essay by reminding readers that Israel was a staunch ally – and major trading partner – of South Africa. Thanks to the anti-apartheid movement, this perennial touchstone of Black liberation struggle had by 1979 become a cognate for US empire – the Palestine of American racial capitalism, and a state founded (as Baldwin well knew) the year he left America in 1948 and began his peregrinations as a “bastard of the west.” Ultimately the question of Israel’s creation and partition, and of Palestinian “statelessness,” came to be crucial to Baldwin’s understanding his own plight as a Black man and “bastard of the West.”
Reading James Baldwin through what might be called an Afro-Palestinian lens divulges several new aspects of Baldwin’s career as a Black American radical thinker. First, it reorients our understanding of Baldwin’s exile from a hostile “West” that demonstrated its colonial aspirations to him largely through the portal of the Middle East. Indeed Baldwin’s ten-year period in and out of Turkey – a Muslim-majority country – coincided with his sympathetic turn to Arab liberation struggles in the 1950s and 1960s. Moving to Turkey was a de facto way of showing his understanding that the gradual demise of the “white world” was coming at the hands of Arab and Palestinian struggle. As he memorably put it in relation to the US war against Vietnam, “The Arabs were not a part of Indo-China, but they were part of an empire visibly and swiftly crumbling, and part of a history which was achieving, in the most literal and frightening sense, its denouement.”Footnote 17 Second, Baldwin’s clairvoyant attention to Palestine as an analogue to South Africa anticipates many dimensions of what has become a crucial form of critique and solidarity. The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement initiated in 2004 by Palestinian civil society was itself closely modeled on the South African BDS campaign launched in the 1960s. Prominent South African anti-apartheid organizers like Archbishop Desmond Tutu would come to compare the state of Israel to apartheid South Africa. Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress were stalwart allies of the Palestinian struggle after the end of formal apartheid in South Africa. More recently, South Africa’s charge of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice drew heavily on the moral framework of anti-apartheid engineered during the high point of the struggle for Black South African self-determination. It is more than plausible to read James Baldwin’s “becoming Palestinian” narrative as one of his many so-called prophetic encounters with histories of oppression in his own time.
Finally, Baldwin’s forward-looking apprehension of the global impact of the Palestine question shows us another way in which James Baldwin was ahead of his time. Just as many scholars and activists have recorded Baldwin as a prophet of the Black Lives Matter movement, we can see in his own process of “becoming Palestinian” the currents of Black solidarity which pulsate across much of the Western world today. We can thus add to Baldwin’s many legacies his rich internationalist consciousness, his capacity for radical transnational solidarities, and his ability to open wide doors of perception for those of us who follow him.
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