Imagine this: It’s October 2002 and 10,000 supporters of the Christian Coalition are gathered at a pro-Israel rally in Washington, D.C. They cheer and wave tiny blue and white Israeli flags as Benny Elon takes the stage. Rabbi Elon is a member of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) and represents the far-right Moledet Party, which advocates continued ethnic cleansing through the “transfer” of Palestinians to bordering Arab nation-states. Now Elon is addressing an audience of American Protestant fundamentalist Christians, so he speaks their language: “Let’s turn to the Bible, which says very clearly…we have to resettle them, to relocate them, and to have a Jewish state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.”¹ Once more the old colonial formula emerges: a Biblical justification for ethnic cleansing.

Frederick Douglass in a famous address asked, "What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?" He answered, "a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim." Shouts of liberty and equality, denunciations of tyrants, prayers and thanksgivings by overlords are to the slave and the colonized nothing but fraud, bombast, deception, impiety and hypocrisy. Douglass believed such "a thin veil covers up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages." [1]

For the last two and a half years, the stories and struggles of the Palestinian people have been brought to the people of Atlanta by individuals whose consciences would not allow them to sit idly by as the horrors of the Israeli occupation continued. With intentions of embracing the movement motto of thinking globally yet acting locally, Atlanta Palestine Solidarity was born.

The toddler divestment campaign, desperately trying to take its first steps, has found itself unable to muster the motor skills needed to make mom and dad proud. In its despair the divestment campaign has thrown a costly temper-tantrum over the last six months. Some reflection is required into why this movement has had such difficulties over the years. This paper only covers a sliver of the problems, specifically the ones that I have experienced, and the ones that seem the most important to address at this time in history.

James Forman was the Executive Secretary and Director of International Affairs of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Later, he would be a leader of the Black Manifesto movement, a call for Black reparations from major U.S. religious institutions, and the Black Workers Congress, an organization which emerged from the Detroit based League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

A laurel-draped member of the local religious (interfaith) activism scene once invited me to a Martin Luther King “interfaith dialogue” that claimed to draw out the “lost” radical tradition of King’s theology, expounded near the end of his life. Their coalition planned to “explore” King’s thought from the perspective of radical interfaith organizing. I was hoping to find a good history lesson and perhaps some practical advice. Instead, all I found was the same old romantic confusion that is an all-too common phenomenon among the wilting remnants of the religious left.

Much attention in recent years has been paid to the efforts at university campuses for divestment from Israel, and even more recently, to the struggles within city government (as in Somerville, Massachusetts) and religious communities (as in the Presbyterian Church). Ironically enough, less attention has been paid to a prolific source of support for Israel: U.S. labor organizations.

There are contradictory ideas and instincts in American society when it comes to Palestine/Israel. On one hand there is a racist idea of Israel as the embodiment of so-called Western values in an ahistorical violent and/or often victim-filled Middle East, whose inhabitants suffer from their own passivity, and who fundamentally lay outside modernity. They are beyond self-governance. On the other hand, there is awareness, however depoliticized, of struggles against racism in the United States and around the world in the form of protest and revolutionary movements at home, and anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements abroad. Even though specific knowledge about these struggles in the Middle East is limited among the vast majority of Americans, the general principles involved are part of American historical experience and not unknown. They are not immune to the matrix of oppression they live in. These contradictions must be considered separately from official society: politicians, university administrations, corporations and the state bureaucracy.

I remember talking to an Arab student at my university, Wayne State. He was an older activist, now turned into a mere spectator of the Palestinian Solidarity Movement. He was giving me advice on how our group should go about raising awareness and reaching out to Americans. One of his suggestions was revealing: “You guys need to have American flags with you as well…”

The Israel on Campus Coalition’s (ICC) document “Countering Divestment and Encouraging Investment in Israel” is a Zionist effort to justify the existence of the state of Israel and its actions at a time when student activists all over the U.S. are taking up divestment campaigns as a result of the situation in Israel/Palestine.

"We Are Against the Government that Will Persecute the Palestinian People": Clarifying the Position of the Black Panther Party in Huey Newton’s To Die For The People

Huey Newton, with Bobby Seale, was cofounder of the Black Panther Party (BPP). According to the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), a campaign by the state to disrupt domestic radical political organizations, the BPP was said to be one of the major threats to American national security in the twentieth century. In their battles against white supremacy and empire, the BPP throughout its history (1966-1982), was more accurately a profound threat to the American ruling class.

Palestine solidarity activists face intimidation. If we are talented at what we do, organizing and educating about the nature of Israel’s white supremacy and colonialism, it is a real risk that we may lose our jobs or get thrown out of school. That the media, the twin managers of corporate capital and trade union bureaucracy, and even so-called defenders of intellectual freedom are liable to turn against us is an occupational hazard. John Watson, member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and student editor of the South End, the campus newspaper of Wayne State University in Detroit, confronted these obstacles in 1968.The paper published an article/editorial favorable toward Palestinian guerrilla operations against Israel. The reaction far outstripped anything before thrown at the South End and set off a series of events that would lead to Watson being pushed out as editor.

In the 1920s, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) created perhaps the largest movement of black people in the U.S. An important aspect of the Garveyite movement was the idea of emigrating back to Africa. One of the places considered for emigration was Liberia. Liberia was an independent nation in West Africa created by former American slaves. However, not only did these former slaves constitute a new Creole ruling class, but the ironic existence of slavery in Liberia undermined the legitimacy of this project in freedom. Attempting to discredit Garvey, the U.S. government highlighted the existence of slavery in Liberia, declaring the hypocrisy of the movement to dare to stand for freedom. The fact that the U.S. government presided over racial terror and segregation in its own country and imperialism abroad seemed to be beside the point. Nevertheless, Garvey's Back-to-Africa-Movement was undermined partially by its own failings to ask sufficient questions about the meaning of slavery in that country.¹

"...[We are losing the media war,"] said Colonel Daniel Reisner, head of the international law branch of the IDF Legal Division, in an interview in the Fall 2002 Harvard Israel Review. "...It takes a long time to explain Israeli settlements to the uninitiated..."