[News] Yes, I Said “National Liberation”

[Anti-Imperialist News]

*http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/24/yes-i-said-national-liberation/*


  Yes, I Said “National Liberation”

by /*Robin D. G. Kelley */
February 24, 2016

    “You can’t trust a big grip and a smile
And I slang rocks
    Palestinian style”

    – “The Shipment,” /Steal This Album/ by The Coup

For the past thirty-five years, “Free Palestine” has been etched into my 
political vocabulary. In the movement circles that nurtured and trained 
me, “Free Palestine” rolled off the tongue as easily as “Free South 
Africa,” “Free the Land,” “A Luta Continua,” “Power to the People,” and 
the ubiquitous “El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido!” I was a sophomore 
in college when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, in order to drive out 
the exiled Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Two years later, as 
a first-year graduate student and chair of UCLA’s African Activists 
Association, I invited representatives of the PLO to participate in our 
fifth annual conference on imperialism. We received hate mail and death 
threats from the Jewish Defense League, and the university 
administration leaned on us to withdraw the invitation. But we 
prevailed. I completed my doctoral dissertation in 1987, the first year 
of the First Intifada, and like most of my compatriots attributed 
Israel’s willingness to participate in the Oslo negotiations to 
Palestinian resistance. Although Oslo proved to be a disaster and a 
betrayal of the PLO’s founding principles, we saw the prospect of direct 
negotiations as a small step toward an elusive national liberation. more

Yes, I said “national liberation.” Liberals wished for “Peace in the 
Middle East.” We radicals regarded the PLO as a vanguard in a global 
Third World struggle for self-determination traveling along a 
“non-capitalist road” to development. Palestine stood on the frontlines 
in a protracted battle against imperialism and “settler capitalism.” 
Palestinians weren’t victims — at least not in my political world. They 
were revolutionary combatants and, thus, models for those of us 
dedicated to Black liberation and socialism.

 From our current neoliberal perch, this claim must seem completely 
foreign, if not absurd. But in the early 1980s, we were influenced by a 
group of activists/intellectuals who believed another world was 
possible, but only through revolution. Walter Rodney, Manning Marable, 
June Jordan, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Angela Davis, Chinweizu, Cedric 
Robinson, Vincent Harding, Cornel West, Barbara Smith, Stuart Hall, not 
to mention Edward Said, Eqbal Ahmad, and Samir Amin, wrote about the 
ravages of racial capitalism, the violence of patriarchy, the futility 
of parochial politics in the face of global imperialism, and the 
absolute necessity to resist. We were living in the last decade of the 
Cold War, the era that gave rise to Reaganism and Thatcherism, new 
imperialist wars, and new revolutions in Africa, Asia, and Latin 
America, from El Salvador, Haiti, and Grenada to Nicaragua and South 
Africa. Here in the belly of the beast, capital flight, the erosion of 
the welfare state, neoliberal privatization schemes, the weakening of 
antidiscrimination laws and policies, and a wave of police and vigilante 
killings struck our communities with the force of a cluster bomb. The 
decade, in fact, opened with police killings and non-lethal acts of 
police brutality emerging as a central political issue, resulting in a 
massive urban insurrection in Liberty City, Florida, in May of 1980. 
That same year witnessed the founding of the National Black United Front 
(NBUF) and the National Black Independent Political Party (NBIPP). Black 
radicals took factory jobs to reach the working classes, demanded 
freedom for political prisoners, threw their energies behind building a 
socialist Africa, continued the long tradition of community-based 
organizing, and participated in acts of solidarity occasionally chanting 
“Free Palestine.”

Three decades later, in the wake of the incalculable devastation caused 
by Israel’s latest assault on Gaza, solidarity with Palestine appears 
stronger than ever. In every corner of the United States, people took to 
the streets and to social media to condemn so-called 
“Operation Protective Edge,” Israel’s latest genocidal assault on Gaza. 
Palestine solidarity activists built bridges with prison abolitionists, 
immigrant rights activists (under the banner “Stop the War on Children 
 From Gaza to the US/Mexico Border”), labor (in the Block the Boat 
demonstrations), and most spectacularly with the struggle against racist 
police violence in Ferguson/St. Louis, Missouri. What drives most of 
these acts of solidarity, however, is empathy for Palestinian suffering 
and/or recognition of common experiences of oppression. Spectacular 
violence is guaranteed to generate condemnation, which explains why 
outrage tends to ebb and flow with Israeli military incursions, rising 
precipitously during Operation Cast Lead in 2009, and again when Israeli 
airstrikes resumed under “Operation Returning Echo” in 2012. The 2014 
criminal war on Gaza has thus far produced the most casualties, the most 
material damage, and the greatest moral outrage. Images of infant 
corpses and entire families buried beneath concrete rubble generated 
feelings of anger and sympathy, while propaganda efforts to portray 
Israelis as vulnerable, terrified victims of Hamas rockets largely 
backfired.

Thanks to fearless journalism and relentless activism, spectacular 
violence in Gaza and the West Bank has swelled the ranks of the Boycott, 
Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, largely because it offers a 
tangible, ethical, nonviolent strategy to challenge occupation, the 
slaughter of civilians, and Israel’s egregious violations of 
international law. Even when the movement’s  financial impact is 
minimal, the educational effect has been enormous. Thanks to years of 
sustained, protracted debate, the public knows a lot more about the 
occupation, who profits from it, and the historical roots of 
dispossession going back to 1948. During the bloody summer of 2014, I 
encountered more and more people in the United States openly describing 
Gaza as the largest open-air prison in the world, citing the fact that 
our taxes subsidize Israel’s garrison state to the tune of 6 million 
dollars a day, criticizing the US for consistently vetoing UN 
resolutions condemning Israel’s human rights abuses while violating our 
own Arms Export Control Act prohibiting the use of US weapons and 
military aid against civilians in the occupied territories. Even a few 
American liberals no longer see the question of Palestine as an 
Arab-Israeli “conflict” rooted in some ancient, irreconcilable 
hostility, but rather as a colonial occupation and violation of 
international law and human rights, subsidized by the United States.

Then in August, as the war on Gaza rose to the top of the news cycle, so 
did the escalation of racist police violence in the US. The killings of 
Eric Garner, Ezell Ford, Kajieme Powell, John Crawford III, and most 
significantly, Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri — all unarmed, all in 
the space of a couple of months — were immediately linked to events in 
Gaza. The people of Ferguson who took to the streets to decry Brown’s 
unwarranted murder (he was on his knees with his hands up when Officer 
Darren Wilson fatally shot him) faced down riot police, rubber bullets, 
armored personnel carriers, semiautomatic weapons, and a dehumanizing 
policy designed to contain and silence. Activists readily drew 
connections between Israeli racialized state violence in the name of 
security and the US — from drone strikes abroad and the killing of Black 
men at the hands of police—and the role Israeli companies and security 
forces have played in arming and training US police departments. 
Palestinian solidarity activists issued statements about the Ferguson 
protests and the NYPD killing of Eric Garner, and Palestinian activists 
in the West Bank have put out their own solidarity statements along with 
advice on how best to deal with tear gas.

The Gaza to Ferguson link has been revelatory in other ways. In our 
lexicon — especially post 9/11 — cops and soldiers are heroes, and what 
they do is always framed as life-saving, defensive action in the name of 
public safety. Police occupy the streets to protect and serve the 
citizenry from (Black and Brown) criminals who are seen to be out of 
control. This is why, in every instance, there is an effort to depict 
the victim as assailant – Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Darrien Hunt 
– the sidewalk is a weapon, their big bodies are weapons, they lunge, 
glare, flail their arms as evidence of threat. In Israel/Palestine, wars 
of pacification and annihilation are branded as efforts to neutralize 
the threat of terrorism. The blockade of Gaza is presented as necessary 
for Israel’s security. People who live under occupation experience the 
world as victims of perpetual war. Indeed, the police department’s 
decision to leave Mike Brown’s bullet-riddled, lifeless body on the 
street for four and a half hours, bleeding, cold, stiff from rigor 
mortis, was clearly an act of collective punishment. This is the point 
of lynching — the public display of the tortured corpse was intended to 
terrorize the entire community, to punish everyone into submission, to 
remind others of their fate if they step out of line. Collective 
punishment violates the laws of war, though in this case the Geneva 
Conventions do not apply. Collective punishment takes other forms as 
well: routine stops, fines for noise ordinance violations (e.g., playing 
loud music), fare-hopping on St. Louis’s light rail system, uncut grass 
or unkempt property, trespassing, wearing “saggy pants,” expired 
driver’s license or registration, “disturbing the peace,” among other 
things. If these fines or tickets are not paid, they turn into possible 
jail time, making bail, losing one’s car or other property, or losing 
one’s children to social services. The criminal justice system is used 
to exact punishment and tribute, a kind of racial tax, on 
poor/working-class black people. In 2013, Ferguson’s municipal court 
issued nearly 33,000 arrest warrants to a population of just over 
21,000, generating about $2.6 million dollars in income for the 
municipality. That same year, 92 percent of searches and 86 percent of 
traffic stops in Ferguson involved black people, this despite the fact 
that one in three whites was found carrying illegal weapons or drugs, 
while only one in five blacks had contraband.

How do the police and the courts get away with this? By criminalizing 
Blackness, much the same way the Israeli state criminalizes Arab-ness. 
(Of course, Blackness is also criminalized in Israel, as evidenced in 
the treatment of African asylum-seekers in Tel Aviv, just as Arab-ness 
is criminalized in the US post-9/11). In the US, decriminalized 
Blackness exists as a state of exception — i.e., by portraying the Mike 
Browns and Trayvon Martins of the world as the undeserving dead, by 
rendering them good kids, college-bound, honor students, sweet, as if 
their character is the only evidence they have of their innocence. If we 
really enjoyed color-blind justice, then even someone with a dozen 
felony convictions has a right to due process and a presumption of 
innocence until proven otherwise in a court of law.

We see these same principles at work in Palestine. Focusing on the 
killing of innocents – children, women, elderly – to the exclusion of 
able-bodied men (except for journalists and the like) plays into the 
deserving/undeserving dead binary and assumes that all men are 
combatants (i.e., justifiable targets) unless proven otherwise. At its 
core, this framing automatically excludes those defending their 
territory, in accordance with international law, from any claims to 
“human rights,” foreclosing any serious conversation about the
justifiable right to self-defense — whether in Gaza or Ferguson. Those 
deserving of human rights protections, political scientist Sedef 
Arat-Koç wryly observes, must “present themselves in, and effectively 
accept, a state of pitiful, naked humanity, a child-like innocence and 
helplessness, a non-politico-human status, and complete dependence on 
the pity and charitable recognition of outsiders.” She goes on to ask: 
“Does it mean that resistance, struggle for dignity and justice, and an 
aspiration for self-determination are inherently illegitimate and 
suspect . . . if they are exercised by Palestinians who disagree with 
the Western mainstream solutions to the Palestinian question?”

Of course, Arat-Koç is absolutely right. Western liberals are not 
pacifists: They are quick to arm “rebels,” so long as they are the right 
rebels. The innocent child, the grandmother, the widow, are the only 
Palestinians deserving of liberal sympathies, for they are ostensibly 
unburdened by political motives, even though they dream dreams of taking 
back their native land, recovering stolen property, enjoying the rights 
of citizenship and nationality, and bringing down Israel’s apartheid 
state once and for all. But what about those dreams? Palestinian dreams? 
Black liberation dreams? How did we move from a solidarity firmly rooted 
in the commonalities of resistance to one based almost entirely on the 
commonalities of oppression? From a radical vision of national 
liberation, a dream of building a post-Zionist, post-racist world, to a 
solidarity rooted in shared victimization? How did we come to pitch 
human rights against self-determination, as if it is an either/or 
proposition? Are we merely struggling for a long-term ceasefire and the 
withdrawal of settlements in the West Bank? Are we really fighting for a 
détente with an apartheid, Bantustan-style “state” ruled by the 
Palestinian Authority? Are we really fighting for more federal oversight 
of police, the “demilitarization” of local law enforcement, and a return 
to the myriad “standard” weapons cops used to kill us in the past? Is 
our political imagination limited now because the Palestinian Authority 
is the arm of Israeli state repression rather than the governing 
structure of a new society? Or is it because Black political power, from 
the White House to the courthouse, has become the arm of US state 
repression rather than the leader of an authentic post-racist society?

Whatever the reasons, our solidarity ought to be based on building a new 
world together. I am not suggesting that we abandon the struggle to hold 
Israel accountable for its continued crimes against humanity and 
violations of international law, or that we stop mourning and honoring 
the dead, or that we cease any of the immediate actions designed to 
sustain life and bring a modicum of peace. But peace is impossible 
without justice. The brilliant Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif put it best: 
“The world treated Gaza as a humanitarian case, as if what the 
Palestinians needed was aid. What Gaza needs is freedom.” And what is 
freedom for Palestine? “Free Palestine” means, at a minimum, completely 
ending the occupation; dismantling all vestiges of apartheid and 
eradicating racism; holding Israel accountable for war crimes; 
suspending the use of administrative detention, jailing of minors, and 
political repression; freeing all political prisoners; recognizing the 
fundamental rights of all Palestinian and Bedouin citizens of Israel for 
full equality and nationality; ensuring all Palestinians a right to 
return and to receive just compensation for property and lives stolen, 
destroyed, and damaged in one of the greatest colonial crimes of the 
twentieth century.

Ironically, as AIPAC-backed, right-wing Christian Zionist organizations, 
such as the Vanguard Leadership Group (VLG) and Christians United for 
Israel (CUFI), work furiously to recruit Black students, elected 
officials, and religious leaders to serve as moral shields for Israel’s 
policies of subjugation, settlement, segregation, and dispossession, it 
was precisely the Zionist promise of a new society based on the 
principles of justice, liberation, and self-determination that attracted 
such overwhelming Black support for the founding of Israel. This is a 
complicated story. Black identification with Zionism predates the 
formation of Israel as a modern state. For over two centuries, the 
biblical book of “Exodus,” the story of the flight of the Jews out of 
Egypt and the establishment of Israel, emerged as the principal 
political and moral compass for African Americans. “Exodus” provided 
Black people not only with a narrative of slavery, emancipation, and 
renewal, but with a language to critique America’s racist state since 
the biblical Israel represented a new beginning.

When Israel was founded in 1948, Black leaders and the Black press, for 
the most part, were jubilant. Few Black writers mentioned Arab 
dispossession, the Nakba, or the terror tactics of the Haganah. Instead, 
Black leaders and the Black press embraced the founding of Israel 
because they recognized European Jewry as an oppressed and homeless 
people determined to build a nation of their own. In a speech backing 
the partition plan, socialist labor leader A. Philip Randolph said that 
he could not conceive of a more “heroic and challenging struggle 
for human rights, justice, and freedom” than the creation of a Jewish 
homeland. “Because Negroes are themselves a victim of hate and 
persecution, oppression and outrage,” he argued, “they should be the 
first to be willing to stand up and be counted on . . . in this fight 
for the right of the Jews to set up a commonwealth in Palestine.” And 
yet, in defending a Jewish homeland, Black leaders and the press often 
succumbed to anti-Arab racism, depicting Arabs as the brutal, 
bloodthirsty aggressors and the Jews as the heroic defenders of the 
nation and purveyors of civilization. In March 1948, the /Atlanta Daily 
World/ ran a photo of Arab “snipers” juxtaposed to another photo of 
Jewish men standing guard under the caption, “Violence in the Holy Land.”

There were exceptions. The iconoclastic writer George Schuyler used his 
column in the /Pittsburgh Courier/ to criticize the expulsion of the 
Arabs. “The same people who properly condemned and fought against 
German, Italian and Japanese imperialism . . . now rise to 
the vociferous defense of Zionist imperialism which makes the same 
excuse of the need for ‘living space’ and tries to secure it at the 
expense of the Arabs with military force financed and recruited from 
abroad.” Schuyler dismissed characterizations of Arabs as “‘backward,’ 
ignorant, illiterate and incapable of properly developing the land” as 
thinly veiled justifications for a Jewish state, reminding his readers 
that this was the same argument used by the Nazis to invade 
Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia, and to justify European colonialism. 
Schuyler was not only deluged with letters accusing him of anti-Semitism 
and downright lunacy, but his own paper rebuked him in an unsigned 
editorial.

These postwar Black intellectuals and activists who viewed Israel as a 
model of national liberation were not dupes, nor were they acting out of 
some obligatory commitment to a Black-Jewish alliance. Rather, with the 
exception of figures such as George S. Schuyler, they failed to see 
Israel as a colonial project founded on the subjugation of indigenous 
people. Why? First, Zionism was seen in 1948 as a nationalist movement 
forged in the cauldron of racist/ethnic/religious oppression, resisting 
the post-Ottoman colonial domination of the region by Britain and 
France, and poised to bring modernization to a so-called backward Arab 
world. The nationalist and anti-colonial character of Israel’s war of 
independence camouflaged its own colonial designs. Second, the Holocaust 
was critical, not just for the obvious reasons that the genocide 
generated global indignation and sympathy for the plight of Jews and 
justified Zionist arguments for a homeland, but because, as Aimé Césaire 
argued in /Discourse on Colonialism/ (1950), the Holocaust itself was a 
manifestation of colonial violence. Israel comes into being as a nation 
identified as victims of colonial/racist violence, through armed 
insurrection against British imperialism. It is a narrative that renders 
invisible the Nakba – the core violence of ethnic cleansing. The myth of 
Israel’s heroic war of liberation against the British convinced even the 
most anticolonial intellectuals to link Israel’s independence with 
African independence and Third World liberation. Israel’s ruling Labor 
Party pursued alliances with African nations under the guise that they, 
too, were part of the Non-Aligned Movement, and Israeli leaders publicly 
condemned racism and presented Israel as a model democracy. In 1961, 
when South Africa’s Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd tried to deflect 
international criticism of his country by describing Israel as “an 
apartheid state” (“The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs 
had lived there for a thousand years.”), Israeli leaders promptly 
denounced him. Indeed, in 1963, then Foreign Minister Golda Meir told 
the UN General Assembly that Israelis “naturally oppose policies of 
apartheid, colonialism and racial or religious discrimination wherever 
they exist.”

Meir wasn’t the first foreign minister to lie to the General Assembly, 
nor would she be the last. The Non-Aligned Movement never embraced 
Israel, which it had come to see as a colonial power. In 1956, Israel 
joined Britain and France in a joint military invasion of Egypt after 
President Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser decided to nationalize the Suez 
Canal Company. As part of the war on Egypt, Israel occupied southern 
Gaza and slaughtered Palestinian refugees and other civilians in Khan 
Yunis, Rafah, and the nearby village of Kafr Qasim. Eight years later, 
Malcolm X visited the refugee camp at Khan Yunis during his two-month 
stay in Egypt and learned of the massacres, inspiring his oft-quoted 
essay, “Zionist Logic” which appeared in the Egyptian Gazette, September 
17, 1964. Malcolm concluded that Zionism represented a “new form of 
colonialism,” disguised behind biblical claims and philanthropic 
rhetoric, but still based on the subjugation and dispossession of 
indigenous people and backed by US “dollarism.”

The 1967 Arab-Israeli War brought many more African Americans around to 
Malcolm’s position. The Black Caucus of Chicago’s New Politics 
Convention of 1967 unsuccessfully proposed a resolution condemning the 
“imperialist Zionist war,” and the Black Panther Party followed suit, 
not only denouncing Israel’s land grab, but pledging its support for the 
PLO. The event that drew the most ire from liberal Zionists, many of 
whom had been veteran supporters of the civil rights movement, was the 
publication of “Third World Round-up: The Palestine Problem: Test Your 
Knowledge,” in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) 
newsletter. It described Israel as a colonial state backed by US 
imperialism and Palestinians as victims of racial subjugation. In short, 
Black identification with Zionism as a striving for land and 
self-determination gave way to a radical critique of Zionism as a form 
of settler colonialism akin to American racism and South African apartheid.

As a result of SNCC’s article, “responsible” Black leaders were called 
on to denounce the statement as anti-Semitic and to pledge their fealty 
to Israel. It was in this atmosphere that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 
made his oft-quoted statement: “We must stand with all of our might to 
protect [Israel’s] right to exist, its territorial integrity. I see 
Israel, and never mind saying it, as one of the great outposts of 
democracy in the world.” Pick up most literature from AIPAC or Stand 
With Us or CUFI and you will likely see this quote emblazoned in bold 
letters but bereft of any context. King’s words come from a long, public 
interview conducted by Rabbi Everett Gendler at the 68th annual 
convention of the Rabbinical Society on March 25, 1968 — ten days before 
his assassination and ten months after the War. Revisiting it is highly 
instructive. First, Gendler tried to cajole him into denouncing 
“anti-Semitic and anti-Israel Negroes.” But King pushed back. Dismissing 
the claim that anti-Semitism was rampant in the Black movement, he 
argued instead that Black-Jewish tensions stem primarily from economic 
inequality and exploitation. He implored the audience “to condemn 
injustice wherever it exists. We found injustices in the black community 
. . . And we condemn them. I think when we find examples of 
exploitation, it must be admitted. That must be done in the Jewish 
community too.” In other words, King not only insisted on condemning all 
forms of injustice but he refused to allow the charge of anti-Semitism 
to silence legitimate criticism — of Jews or of Israel.

His remarks about Israel and the Middle East are even more striking. 
Short of condemning war altogether, he called for “peace” above all 
else. For Israel “peace . . . means security,” though he never specified 
what security meant in this context. He also addressed what he thought 
peace meant for the Arabs. “Peace for the Arabs means the kind of 
economic security that they so desperately need. These nations, as you 
know, are part of that third world of hunger, of disease, of illiteracy. 
I think that as long as these conditions exist there will be tensions, 
there will be the endless quest to find scapegoats.” On the one hand, 
the statement belies a surprising ignorance of the history as well as 
the consequences of the 1967 war. King repeats the mantra that 
Palestinians suffer from hunger, disease, and illiteracy because they 
are poor, not because they were dispossessed of their land and property 
and subjected to a security state that limits their mobility, 
employment, housing, and general welfare. King’s solution?: “a Marshall 
Plan for the Middle East.” On the other hand, by situating Palestine in 
the “Third World,” he placed it squarely within what he identified as 
the whirlwind of global revolution sweeping aside the old economic 
structures based on capitalism and colonial domination. “These are 
revolutionary times,” he announced in his legendary speech on Vietnam a 
year earlier. “All over the globe men are revolting against old systems 
of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, 
new systems of justice and equality are being born . . . We in the West 
must support these revolutions.”

We can only speculate on how King’s position may have changed had he 
lived, but given the opportunity to study the situation in the same way 
he had studied Vietnam, he would have been less sanguine about Israel’s 
democratic promise or the prospect of international aid as a strategy to 
dislodge a colonial relationship. To be sure, his unequivocal opposition 
to violence, colonialism, racism, and militarism would have made him an 
incisive critic of Israel’s current policies. He certainly would have 
stood in opposition to the VLG, CUFI, and the litany of lobbyists who 
invoke King as they do Israel’s bidding. And let’s be clear: King 
preached revolution. Distributing humanitarian aid and ending 
hostilities were never the endgame. The point of civil disobedience was 
not to keep the status quo intact, to make the regime slightly more just 
or fairer. The point was to overturn it. More than a regime change, King 
called for a revolution in values, a rejection of militarism, racism, 
and materialism, and the making of a new society based on community, 
mutuality, and love.

Not surprisingly, I found this revolutionary commitment to build a new 
society in Palestine. Yes, I confronted the apartheid Wall, witnessed 
the harassment of Palestinians passing through checkpoints, wept over 
piles of rubble where Palestinian homes had been demolished and their 
olive trees uprooted by the IDF, walked through the souk in Hebron 
littered with bricks and garbage and human feces dumped on Palestinian 
merchants by settlers, negotiated the narrow, muddy pathways separating 
overcrowded multistoried shacks in the refugee camps erected in the 
shadows of fortress-like West Bank settlements, and was overwhelmed by 
the level of violence, repression, and dehumanization Palestinians had 
to endure. But what impressed me most were the activists, the 
intellectuals, the youth, who spoke confidently about a liberated 
country, who saw the old guard leadership and the Palestinian Authority 
as impediments, who envisioned and debated a dozen different paths to a 
democratic and decolonized future. They gathered at Muwatin: the 
Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy in Ramallah; at Mada 
al-Carmel: the Arab Center for Applied Social Research in Haifa; and in 
the refugee camps in Balata, Jenin, and Bethlehem.

Bethlehem’s Aida Refugee Camp is home to the Alrowwad Cultural and 
Theatre Society, a genuine community center and youth theater founded by 
director, poet, playwright, and educator Dr. Abdelfattah Abusrour, who 
believes theater is a “nonviolent way of saying we are human beings, we 
are not born with genes of hatred and violence.” Having grown up in the 
camp, Abusrour gave up a promising career in science to devote his life 
to creating a “beautiful theater of resistance” aimed at releasing the 
creative capacity of young people to turn their stories into 
transformative experiences. Abusrour’s play, /We Are Children of the 
Camp/, is something of a collaborative venture, incorporating the kids’ 
own stories into a sweeping narrative about Palestine since 1948. The 
children speak from personal experience about Israeli soldiers invading 
the camps, shooting their parents, and then denying them access to 
hospitals on the other side of the wall. They long for human rights, a 
clean environment, freedom, a right to return to their land, and the 
right to know and own their history. Condensing nearly seventy years of 
history in the play’s title song, they sing of being made refugees in 
their own land, of colonies built, and villages demolished. “They put us 
in labyrinths,” they sing, “They planted hatred in us / They considered 
us as insects.” And yet, the children onstage, like their brothers and 
sisters and friends whom I met laughing, riding their battered bikes 
along the narrow camp streets, kicking around a scraped-up soccer ball, 
or peppering me with questions about America, refused to become insects 
to be stamped out, or cauldrons of hatred. “We may have a spring,” the 
song continues,

Sun may rise again in our sky

We look to Jerusalem

Singing for freedom in our hearts.

Palestinian lives matter. Black lives matter. All lives matter. This 
should be self-evident. The children at the Aida Camp remind us that 
what matters most is struggle. Here I am not speaking only about 
self-defense. To struggle is to overturn the logics of a racial regime 
that uses security to justify dispossession, military rule, and the 
denial of the most basic rights. To struggle is to begin building the 
future in the present, to prefigure a post-apartheid/post-Zionist 
society. As one song from Children of the Camp put it: “Occupation never 
lasts . . . The government of injustice, vanishes with revolution.”

The same vision of revolution is evident among the young activists in 
Ferguson, Missouri. They, too, remind us that Black struggle matters. It 
matters because we are still grappling with the consequences of settler 
colonialism, racial capitalism, and patriarchy in the US. It mattered in 
post-Katrina New Orleans, a key battleground in neoliberalism’s 
unrelenting war on mostly Black, Latino, Vietnamese, and Indigenous 
working people, where Black organizers lead multiracial coalitions to 
resist the privatization of schools, hospitals, public transit, public 
housing, and the dismantling of public sector unions. The young people 
of Ferguson struggle relentlessly, not just to win justice for Mike 
Brown or to end police misconduct but to dismantle racism once and for 
all, to bring down the Empire, and to ultimately end War. As they reach 
out to Palestine, and Palestine reaches back to Ferguson, the potential 
for a new basis for solidarity is being born — one rooted in revolution.

/This essay is excerpted from Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to 
War and Occupation 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1784780677/counterpunchmaga>./

-- 
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863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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