The Bow, the Arrow, and the Crescent: Black and Palestinian Solidarity in the Past, Present, and Future

In April 2024, two occupations were imminent. On the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, Israeli Defense Forces prepared for a full ground-invasion of Rafah, on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip’s border with Israel. Meanwhile, students at my university campus poured into the center of campus, bringing tents, sleeping bags, and bullhorns, determined to establish an encampment to force the university’s administration to reckon with their demands to divest from Israel and take a stand against racism on campus. In making divestment and racial justice demands related to Palestine, these student activists – many of whom were people of color – engaged with a long-standing Black radical tradition of solidarity with Palestine.

Prior to the second world war, Black activists almost universally saw the Zionist project as a positive model for how African Americans could find their own refuge from white supremacy. But World War II changed that. The Third World solidarities engendered at the end of the war shifted Black perceptions. By the early 1960s, theorists like Malcolm X were already questioning the legitimacy of the state of Israel. In 1967, however, after Israel seized the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank during the Six Day War, Black public opinion shifted. It was then that Black activists fighting for racial liberation in the United States identified what they believed were the shared global mechanisms that resulted in Black and Palestinian oppression. Beginning in 1964 with Malcolm’s consideration of the Palestine question, this paper will trace the existence of long-standing Black and Palestinian solidarities and intellectual community. In doing so, I will demonstrate how activists in the present day, like the students on my university campus, engage the past to imagine – and affect – better futures.