Jew World Order

What are the overlaps and distinctions between Zionism, racism and white supremacy? How can we—and why should we—think of the Palestinian fight for liberation as a battle against racist repression as well as grounded in anti-racist principles? 

As a transformational education program that inspires and trains participants to be accountable lifelong social justice advocates in the Palestine solidarity movement, these are questions that Eyewitness Palestine has sought to answer for ourselves. And questions that we believe the entire movement should be asking as well. While we always conduct racial justice and equity trainings with participants on our delegations to Palestine to give them a more critical lens for assessing Israeli violence, dehumanization and oppression of Palestinians, as well as the rightfulness of the Palestinian struggle, the COVID-19 moment provided us with a new set of challenges and opportunities that ultimately saw us assessing how we could build on this work to offer something to the broader Palestine solidarity movement—even when not traveling in Palestine. 

On Wednesday, August 4th, we at Eyewitness Palestine held a one-hour long conversation on Instagram Live dedicated to the question of why Palestine is a racial justice issue. The speakers were Ahmad Abuznaid, Executive Director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, activist and filmmaker Rebecca Pierce, and Maurice Cook, the Executive Director of Serve Your City. The conversation was part of the launch of our recently-debuted Racial Justice and Equity Training geared towards local Palestine solidarity groups. These trainings reflect our organization’s ongoing commitment to centering the Palestinian struggle in an accountability and justice-focused lens that draws attention to the overlap between Palestine and all other liberation-focused struggles around the world. Of course, these trainings are also a response to the broader cultural reckoning with white supremacy that we have seen taking shape following the brutal police murder of George Floyd. 

It should go without saying that this is far from the first time such questions have been posed. Indeed, scores of activists and liberation icons, Palestinian and non-Palestinian alike, have expressed the idea that the Palestinian struggle bears crucial resonance to other anti-racist causes. An EP delegate and former Black Panther Party captain maintains that “The Black Panther Party always had solidarity with the Palestinian movement because we recognize that they were dealing with many of the same problems that we are dealing with here.” Palestinian writers Mahmoud Darwish and Mu’in Bseiso drew links between Israeli dispossession of Palestinians and Indigenous struggles against settler-colonialism in Turtle Island (the Indigenous name for the land referred to by settlers as North America). On the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People in 1997, Nelson Mandela famously remarked that the freedom of Black South Africans “is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” The rich history of Indigenous activist solidarity with Palestine included American Indian Movement (AIM) delegations to Beirut in the ‘70s and their reception in Palestinian political offices. Writers, organizers and intellectuals have documented these histories of collaborative resistance and called attention to the unique racial dimensions of Israeli oppression of Palestinians for decades. 

So what we are doing does not exist in a vacuum. But there are important present concerns that these trainings are responding to. As Loubna Qutami writes, “Many of us Palestinians also know that we owe a great deal of debt and gratitude to Black revolutionaries who have continued to wage revolutionary struggle under conditions of extreme duress. It is their tenacity in the US that has made possible a new moment of racial reckoning, one that is finally allowing for a different and more honest appraisal of the Palestinian struggle.” While Palestinians have relentlessly documented and named our oppression, it is the broader opening about the nuances as well as the overall nature of white supremacy that have allowed for increased contemporary opportunities for us to continue to call out the specific attributes of Zionist supremacy and Palestinian racialization. 

During the IG Live conversation, Rebecca Pierce discussed how even though Zionism is not the direct focus of her organizing, she often encounters it in responses to her attempts to ensure that community spaces remain accountable to Jews of color. Pierce called attention to the racially exclusive idea of Jewishness that the ethno-nationalist colonial foundations of Zionism promote and how this marginalizes Jews of color in addition to perpetuating racism against Palestinians: 

“Even the work I do within the Jewish community about trying to get better treatment for Jews of color, trying to address the internalized white supremacy that our community has unfortunately adopted as part of assimilating and trying to survive in America, you end up butting heads with organizations that are historically and currently organized around defending Zionism. When I try to talk about anti-Blackness in the Jewish community, people always want to bring up my Palestine work. For me, they are related: I’m a Black internationalist, and I definitely see the struggle against racism as tied to Palestine. But even in just talking about [treating] Black Jews a little bit better, maybe let’s not do profiling, let’s reduce militarized police presence in our communities… what ends up getting brought up a lot of the time is Zionism, and that’s because in aligning so much of our community with this ethno-nationalist movement, you end up aligning our identity unfortunately with it… before we even get to a conversation about Palestine— which I’m always talking about and always bringing into the space— let’s talk about how the people of color in the space are being treated, and for some reason, ‘Oh, she’s pro-Palestinian’ is what people throw at me to delegitimize that whole conversation.”  

In addition to being founded on racism against Palestinians, Zionism also enacts racism against Jews of color, minimizing their struggles and even existence in furtherance of an agenda rooted in defending settler-colonialism. The perpetuation of an anti-Palestinian agenda achieved through colonial and racist logics means that the exclusion, erasure and dispossession supported and practiced by Zionist institutions harms Jews and Palestinians alike. This stark reality undermines Zionism’s claims to serve as a liberation movement for all Jews and defangs its relentless practice to demonize Palestine work as the ultimate embodiment of antisemitism (and, by extension, any and all outspoken Palestinians as arch-antisemities). Indeed, the meaningful coalitions that have been and continue to be forged in the name of freedom for all people reveal that ethno-supremacy is the embodiment of racism, and that joint struggle is the only antidote. Israel is not an outlier, but another perfect example of how state-sanctioned supremacy equals and compounds racism rather than challenging it. 

But Qutami’s quote also reminds us that solidarity and joint-struggle are not merely states of mind; they are active and dynamic commitments to and with one another, requiring ongoing collaboration and genuine, mutual support. During the conversation, Maurice Cook stated that intersectional Palestine work in Washington, DC necessitates confronting the social divisions of race and class that are created within a racially segregated area such as DC. A true commitment to internationalism has to mean adopting principles that inform how we as organizers navigate our local spaces as well as international focus. It’s not enough to rhetorically base our fight for Palestinian liberation in the spirit of justice for all oppressed peoples if we can’t navigate the conditions of racial and class oppression that inform our local spaces in a serious and intentional manner. But when I asked Maurice why, given all of the important work that remains to be done for local Black communal uplift and support, he felt it was a priority to continue to push Let’s Get Free, a delegation done in partnership with Eyewitness Palestine to bring young Black organizers from DC to Palestine, he said the following: 

“I want to make sure in my lifetime that Palestinains who are experiencing the colonialism, the imperialism, the violence, understand that they’re not alone in the struggle. And that they are a part of something much greater. That strength has created our path to survival in these oppressive systems, and it’s creating the path for our young people to thrive as well. And so we can do this. But we have to sing together, we have to dance together, we have to be in joy together to make sure that the world knows that they are dealing with a level of godly power that the state could never, ever squash.”     

Seeing the local and the international as bound together thus means prioritizing both commitments simultaneously in attitude and practice, particularly the practices that determine when and how we show up for one another in an authentic manner. 

At that moment, Ahmad Abuznaid mentioned how delegations to Palesitne offer an opportunity for “tangible practices to be adopted and learned” that build upon the moment when Palestinian oppression is recognized as an evocative example of racist state violence. Abuznaid mentioned the 2017 Dream Defenders delegation to Palestine that included rapper Vic Mensa. Abuznaid spoke about one session led by the group BuildPalestine that focused on emergency medical response. Because Israeli occupation forces routinely block roads and prevent medical access to wounded Palestinans, new tactics that could allow for medical relief needed to be implemented by organizers. Mensa was so moved by this session that he adopted  these insights when doing community organizing work in the South Side of Chicago. “There were probably similar programs in the US already in different communities,” Abuznaid acknowledged, “but that’s not where Vic Mensa connected to it. Vic connected to it when we were in Palestine and his mind was blown at the different types of resistance he was seeing these occupied people engage in. He didn’t need to go all the way to Palestine to learn that type of community intervention, but he did, and there’s real value in that as we continue to exchange modes of resistance.”

Far from a luxury or trendy political tourism, delegations thus emerge as an important strategy in bringing resisters together to forge new strategies to fight for freedom and challenge interlocking systems of oppression collectively.  This has always been the spirit in which we’ve led our own delegations to Palestine, and it’s precisely the sentiment we want to drive home now as we reveal our racial justice trainings to the movement at large.

Because, as the conversation so powerfully highlighted, that is what it really means to think of Palestine as a racial justice issue. Far more than a basic index of different components of a larger system of racism, we’re talking about what it means—and requires—to fight for collective liberation.

These trainings are only the latest embodiment of how we are committed to these principles as an organization, as well as individuals and a convergence of communities fighting for the end of all oppressive systems and structures.

We hope you will join us. 

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