![Palestine is featured in the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service in 1977. [source]](https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/0a87a11b-e9db-4c77-ab4f-25458dd64885/Untitled.png)
There are countless intersections and opportunities for solidarity between the fight for Palestinian liberation and other social movements from around the world. The social and environmental justice work you already care about is deeply linked to pro-Palestinian activism.
Both Israeli Zionism and white supremacy rely on exclusion and erasure. The connections between the two are clearly revealed when prominent Israeli politicians and academics openly express Islamophobic or anti-Arab views without significant repercussions. A prime example is the prominent Israeli historian Benny Morris, who said in a 2004 interview that, "There is a deep problem in Islam. It's a world whose values are different. A world in which human life doesn't have the same value as it does in the West, in which freedom, democracy, openness and creativity are alien... Something like a cage has to be built for them. I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another.” Morris later served as a Visiting Israeli Professor in Georgetown University's Department of Government from 2015-2018.
There is a long history of Black and Palestinian solidarity in the fight against colonialism, especially between the Black Panthers and Palestinian activists. More currently, UCLA professor Robin D.G. Kelley has written extensively on connections between the struggles for Black and Palestinian liberation. Describing a trip he took to Palestine in 2012, Kelley said, “We went to Hebron, and visited and talked to Palestinian merchants, and witnessed a level of racist violence that I hadn’t even seen growing up as a black person here in the States, I have to say, and I’ve been beat by the cops.”
Palestine is featured in the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service in 1977. [source]
South African communities that experienced apartheid policies firsthand under a white supremacist regime have consistently stood in solidarity with Palestinians and have defined Israeli policy as nothing short of apartheid. The legal codification of land expropriation, racial classification and violent repression under former South African law exists in nearly identical ways in Israel today. Nelson Mandela recognized these parallels in a 1997 speech when he stated, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
Israeli settler colonialism is a continuation of the same practices imposed by European settlers (and later enshrined in U.S. policy) who arrived in the Americas hundreds of years ago. In order to forcibly remove indigenous inhabitants, both colonizers relied heavily on military power, crafting supremacist narratives of a “civilized” vs. “uncivilized” population and developing racist laws to rationalize theft, the destruction of resources and the violent displacement of communities.
In particular, there has been a unique reliance upon divine decree to justify the erasure of peoples. Whereas Americans utilized “Manifest Destiny” to claim it was god that intended for them own and settle on the land, Zionist rely upon scripture to affirm their right to seize land from established inhabitants.
Thus, as Elias Sanbar, the founder of the Journal for Palestine Studies, stated in a 1982 interview*,* “We are also the American Indians of the Jewish settlers in Palestine. In their eyes our one and only role consisted in disappearing. In this it is certain that the history of the establishment of Israel reproduces the process which gave birth to the United States of America.”
Solidarity and support for liberation between indigenous Americans and Palestinians has consistently remained strong. In recent years, Palestinians stood with the Standing Rock Sioux tribe in resisting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline and indigenous communities actively denounced the forced dispossession of Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah.
[The ethnic cleansing of indigenous populations in America and Palestine via forced dispossession of land. [source]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/6OAnUdVxGvwV6BeeRqBJYset6mtREF796hphZoOhnDl16mRDVOIi2JLDNPeGjyKwfgpBSaJWcJ0wyJmkyegAs2UWCM1w5pRwuSq3aQvRrOV8J5yug5xHCatDUQ8lvr6by-Ofo0HGllgtgW-g8ga80WE)
The ethnic cleansing of indigenous populations in America and Palestine via forced dispossession of land. [source]
Since the early 2000s, Israel has hosted exchange programs for thousands of US police officers, sheriffs, border patrol agents, ICE officers, and FBI agents to come to Israel and learn tactics and strategy from Israeli police and military officers. As summarized by Jewish Voice for Peace, this is a **“deadly exchange”** that “hold[s] up Israel’s use of military technology, lethal force, mass surveillance and racial profiling as a global gold standard” and “serves to legitimize, reinforce and deepen Israeli Occupation and apartheid.”
As reported by the Guardian in 2022: “Bill Ayub, sheriff of Ventura county in California, who went to Israel for an ADL training in 2017, said he had been impressed by the ‘Hollywood-esque’ surveillance systems of Israeli law enforcement… Ayub also said he had been shocked to learn how Israeli officers used force during arrests: ‘We’d be in jail if we did something like that here,’ he said.”
As Ethnic Studies classes are under attack in the United States in an effort to erase the history and struggles of people of color in the US, Palestinian schools are similarly forbidden from teaching Palestinian history, with students constantly being illegaly targeted and criminalized for advocacy on Palestine. In East Jerusalem, Israel conditions its millions of dollars in funding towards Palestinian schools by requiring a curriculum that normalizes the ongoing illegal occupation, rejects Palestinian history and [erases the term “Palestinians”](https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/education-under-occupation-east-jerusalem-an-interview-with-zakaria-odeh/#:~:text=When Israel occupied and annexed,the schools and the community.), instead using the term “other minorities.” This is done to create a sense of fragmentation.
As researcher and activist Ayman Agbaria shares, “[Palestinians] are referred to as Druze, Christians, Moslems, Bedouins of the north or Bedouins of the south in an attempt to impose the mentality and consciousness of being divided. The idea of being Palestinian is being shattered through textbooks and educational practices.”