Perspective: What support for Ilhan Omar tells us about the left
Rep. Ilhan Omar , one of the first two Muslim-American women to serve in the U.S. House, attends an event to introduce the Equality Act on Capitol Hill on March 13. By Maha Nassar Maha Nassar is an associate professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona and a 2018 Public Voices fellow with the OpEd Project. She is author of"Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World.
Malcolm’s life was cut short before he could fulfill his promise but interest in the Palestinian cause grew among black internationalists over the following years. In the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab states, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee , led by proponents of the black power movement, published an article condemning Israel’s occupation of Arab lands and expressing support for the Palestinians as part of their larger anti-imperialist stance.
This letter summed up the core belief of early black-Palestinian solidarity: that the fight for full democracy at home required ending American imperialism abroad. Since groups like the Black Panthers saw black Americans as an internal colony, they framed their movement as an anti-colonial struggle. Palestinians, who saw themselves as living under Israeli settler-colonial rule, identified deeply with this framework.
Black-Palestinian solidarity grew further as Israel’s increasingly close relationship to the apartheid regime of South Africa in the 1980s led more mainstream black leaders to question America’s alliance with the Jewish state. Although they still clearly recognized Israel’s right to exist, their cooperation with Arab- and Palestinian-American activists on a boycott of the South African regime led them to become more familiar with — and sympathetic to — the Palestinian cause.
Despite these growing points of connection, black-Palestinian solidarity continues to be largely overlooked. Many black Americans believe that their struggle for full equality in this country should not be intertwined with a foreign policy issue. Others worry that they’ll be accused of anti-Semitism if they speak out too forcefully about Palestinian rights, as civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander admitted in a recent New York Times op-ed.
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