Forever Reminder: Our Liberation is Collective

 
 

By sTACY LEE KONG

A Palestinian child at the site of an Israeli airstrike on Az-Zawaida camp on August 17, 2024. Image: Shutterstock

 
 

Content warning: This newsletter contains descriptions of torture, death, violence and genocide. Context links may contain graphic images and/or video. 

A note on language: As I’ve mentioned in every newsletter I’ve written about Gaza since Oct. 7, it’s super important that we take care with our language when discussing Israel and Palestine, because the way we talk about this situation has real consequences for real people. So to be clear, when I critique the Israeli government and military, I am not critiquing all Israelis, much less all Jewish people. I also think it’s important to push back on attempts to characterize critique of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as antisemitic. Furthermore, it is disingenuous and actually dangerous to conflate Zionism with Judaism, as this list of prominent Jewish writers has argued. Lastly, when I use the words colonization, genocide, apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing to describe Israel’s actions, that’s based on the analysis of organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, the International Federation for Human Rights, the United Nations, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace as well as academics who study genocide and South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice to bring genocide charges against Israel. It is also based on the language Israeli officials and public figures have used themselves, 500+ instances of which have already been collected by Law for Palestine.

This week, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about two videos: the first shows a man holding a toddler’s body. The back of this baby’s head is just… gone, his skull empty. It’s only 30 seconds long but I haven’t been able to make it through the whole video because it’s too gruesome and unsettling. People’s bodies aren’t supposed to move like that, because this kind of violence isn’t supposed to happen, and especially not to children. In fact, I find myself hoping that it’s not real, that it’s AI or something, even though I know every instance of misinformation jeopardizes support for a liberated Palestine. But logically, and horrifyingly, it probably is authentic, because this isn’t even the first time I’ve seen the inside of a Palestinian child’s skull over the past ten months.

The second video is disturbing in a different way. This one was shot in Chicago, as attendees of the 2024 Democratic National Convention passed by protesters who were reading the names of Palestinian children and youth who have been killed by Israeli military action in Gaza. A white woman in a light pink pantsuit plugs her ears and appears to be saying “la, la, la, la” to block out the noise, or maybe so she doesn’t have to admit any complicity, even to herself. A young Black man mockingly repeats the protester’s anguished words, laughing as if he’s delivering a scathing joke. A white man in a mismatched suit and Democrat-blue tie walks by, fingers plugging his ears, rolling his eyes at the camera. There’s something stunning about their behaviour—not surprising, obviously, but still somehow shocking, that they could respond with such childish cruelty to the simple acknowledgement that thousands upon thousands of children have been maimed and murdered thanks to American support, funding and literal weaponry. 

There is a lot to say about the decisions the Harris-Walz ticket and Harris’ stans, the KHive, are making right now, particularly the way they are underestimating the possible electoral consequences of being ghoulishly, heartlessly anti-Palestine, but I want to zero in on that young Black man. To be clear, that’s not because his behaviour is in any way ‘worse’ than anyone else’s in that video, but rather because he represents a point of tension that I’ve been seeing more and more over the past few weeks: an online discourse that pits Black liberation against Palestinian liberation, which is now moving off social media and into mainstream media and political events like the DNC. This doesn’t feel unrelated to what I’ve previously written about politicians and fandom, but I don’t think it’s just about identity and representation. So this week, I’m thinking through why this is happening—and why it should not be.

Where are the critiques of Black and Palestinian solidarity even coming from?

There’s definitely an element of fan behaviour at play here; at its heart, fandom—and its unhinged cousin, standom—is an alchemical mix of seeing yourself in and feeling seen by a public figure, whether that’s a pop star or a politician. Just as the savviest celebrities leverage the identities, values and beliefs they share with their admirers to attract (and more importantly) maintain a monetizable audience, successful officials know how to cultivate a sense of connection with their constituents and followers, and in return, those fans (or stans) become evangelists for their fave. In a July article about the KHive, which emerged organically in 2017 during Harris’ first term as a senator and was “reinvigorated” when U.S. President Joe Biden announced he wouldn’t be seeking reelection earlier this summer, the New York Times broke down the KHive’s various factions and attempted to explain her appeal.

For OG fans, who are largely, but not exclusively, elder millennial and Gen X women, many of them Black or otherwise racialized, it’s a mix of admiration and aspiration. These fans love that she “grilled the likes of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Brett M. Kavanaugh in Senate committee hearings” and passionately defend her against misogynoir (sometimes overzealously). Meanwhile, a younger wave of admirers consists of people “considerably to the left of her 2020 platform,” according to writer Kelly Weill, who believes “this new wave of support draws on a combination of irony and sincerity that’s native to the internet, and it often embraces Ms. Harris’s less scripted moments… ‘I think these people are rallying for Kamala Harris because she’s offering hope and even a little bit of fun in a presidential election that was previously completely devoid of it,’” she told the paper.

Unsurprisingly, the prospect of Harris becoming the first Black woman president of the United States feels deeply meaningful for many people—which is why the vehement critique she has been receiving from progressives over her stance on Palestine has inspired ardent, and sometimes angry, defense. This is further compounded and complicated by the fact that some pro-Palestine accounts on social media have been racist and anti-Black in their criticism of her policies.

I’m neither Black nor Palestinian, so I can’t really tell people who are directly impacted by this type of prejudice, racism or dehumanization how they should react. That being said, I do think it’s important to acknowledge that the schism that seemed so profound on my X/Twitter feed last week might not be, well, real. I mean… Elon Musk has made it harder to distinguish between trolls, bots and actual users, so it’s definitely suspicious that the main account I saw sharing examples of Palestinian anti-Blackness was created in October 2023, tweets hundreds of times a day and loudly proclaims there’s no genocide or apartheid happening in Gaza. Yes, that account has a photo of a Black person as its avatar, but we all know that doesn’t mean it’s run by an actual Black person—or a person at all. After all, there are lots of interest groups that would benefit from a breakdown in solidarity… and which have a demonstrated history of sowing dissent through propaganda and counterintelligence. Namely, COINTELPRO, the FBI program that ran from 1956 to 1971, which started as a way to sniff out communist sympathizers but eventually evolved to target all groups the government deemed subversive, particularly those focused on Black liberation. As journalist and organizer Danny Schecter explained to NPR in 2006, “COINTELPRO was not just surveillance, it was active disruption. It was putting agents into the movement to incite rivalries, a jealousy, to try to get people fighting against each other and not trusting each other.” The goal was literally to “discredit, disrupt and destroy” and according to the Berkeley Library at the University of California, those same tactics are still being used against Black rights organizations, which the FBI has characterized as “priority domestic terrorism target[s]” in several leaked reports.

There’s also Israeli hasbara, a public relations campaign that seeks to shape global public opinion about the State of Israel. Practitioners of hasbara are very responsive—in January 2022, more than 20 acts pulled out of that year’s Sydney festival in protest of a sponsorship deal with the Israeli embassy. That March, right-wing, pro-Israeli advocacy org StandWithUs announced it would be launching an Australian chapter. And pro-Palestine activists say there’s a particular sensitivity to examples of solidarity between Black and Palestinian people. In fact, as academic Mark Owen Jones explained back in February, he has found “hundreds of sock puppets promoting Israeli propaganda on X, Threads, FB & Insta [which are] spreading anti-UNRWA #disinformation, & trying to undermine solidarity between Palestinians & Black people.”

This is also extremely online. As Devyn Springer, an Atlanta-based writer and organizer, pointed out on Twitter over the weekend, “these ‘Black vs Palestinian’ debates, rifts, clashes do NOT take place in real life. having attended hundreds and myself organized dozens of Black-Palestinian solidarity events over the years, these convo are not representative of anything happening in actual organizing, AT ALL. these conversations are being led by people who do not organize, are in no organizations or collectives, whose activism doesn't extend beyond the keyboard, and who are so far detached from the real life movement, they think a vote and a tiktok video are the solutions to our ills.”

… And you know, it makes a lot of sense that an online discourse that was instigated and encouraged by state representatives, at least in part, wouldn’t resonate outside of social media, and especially among actual organizers. Because Springer is totally correct: solidarity and cooperative organizing between Black and Palestinian people has a decades-long history.

The thing is, it’s not staying online

But that doesn’t mean it can’t move beyond social media. And in fact, it has. Earlier this week, TheGrio’s Michael Harriot published a column that picked up on this discourse in all the worst ways. The cornerstone of his argument was what would usually be an understandable (if unwieldy) question: “Why do Black people have to care about everyone while expecting everyone to not care about anyone but themselves?” But the piece itself conflated two groups—‘actual activists and organizers pushing Harris and the larger Democratic Party to change their policy on unequivocally supporting, funding and arming the Israeli army’ and ‘randoms on the internet who are trying to tell Black people how to vote.’ It also did not acknowledge the possibility that bad actors, whether people or organizations, could be trying to stoke dissent. Worst of all, it tried to quantify the respective ‘value’ of Black people versus Palestinians.

In one passage, Harriot cites statistics demonstrating the ways Black Americans are disenfranchised, from food insecurity to maternal health, implies that the relative numbers of Black people versus Palestinians means the former is more important and says, seriously, that “asking Black Americans to sacrifice the lives and futures of the people in their community for the sake of a community that has not demonstrated reciprocal support is like asking Selmans to sacrifice their skulls so virtue-signaling visitors can participate in a realistic civil rights fantasy camp” (emphasis mine).

We’re going to come back to the idea of reciprocal support and transactional solidarity, but first, let’s talk about calculus. I’m not sure if Harriot meant to argue that solidarity or support should be proportional, but that does seem to be what he’s saying here—not only that each group should reserve the bulk of their energy for themselves, but also that some groups just deserve freedom more than others, by virtue of population size. I find this… distasteful and irresponsible. And I’m not the only one. As theoretical physicist and Black feminist theorist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein wrote in response to Harriot’s piece, “We are told, you have to choose: to cry out for Palestine is to not love your own people enough. Another calculation: someone sat down and wrote there are more Black Americans than Palestinians, so Black Americans simply matter more. 

This utilitarianism is an interesting game for a group that will never be more than 12% of the US population to play. If the argument that the concerns of the bigger group come first, where does that leave us?

We actually know the answer to this question because the white supremacists have been answering it for centuries. They answer it daily with their military grade weapons, which IDF has taught them to wield. It is the premise of the other guy’s campaign, that our needs are a thorn in the side of the people who have to come first. We know of mathematics black life. The spirits of Zong! cry out to us: we are not numbers.”

To his credit, Harriot responded to the widespread critique his piece sparked with a Twitter thread that attempts to clarify his argument. He copped to “conflating the Uncommitted movement with people who attack Black voters just because they don't have a Palestinian flag in their social media profile” and went on to say that actually, he thinks “we don't have to choose between stopping a genocide and a Trump presidency. We can do both. It's not a binary choice. AND I understand why people think they have to choose. It's hard to imagine America or the Democratic party not throwing SOMEONE under a bus to gain power.” Which is not what his piece actually says, but I appreciate the attempt, I guess?

True story: our liberation is still linked

My bigger concern is that he, and maybe more people that I realized, don’t seem to grasp that true liberation is impossible without solidarity. I mean that in an existential way—none of us are free unless all of us are free, etc. etc.—but also a deeply practical one.

At least some of the specific tactics of police brutality used against Black and brown people in the U.S. can be directly traced to Israel. According to a 2020 article originally published in Public Interest Law Reporter, “Over 1,000 senior U.S. law enforcement officials have been to the state of Israel for counterterrorism training, roughly representing the leadership of the 18,000 U.S. police departments. Additionally, thousands more have participated in conferences and trainings held in [the] United States by Israeli security officials… The argument of this article is that U.S. departments training and collaborating with Israel's military and police forces results in illegal and unconstitutional policing practices and tactics in America and Israel. Israeli security trainings provide training for U.S. police departments to make their current tactics more sophisticated and provide inspiration for new ones, which exacerbates the issues of surveillance, racial profiling, and police brutality in the U.S. As has been true throughout American history, Black and brown communities, social justice movements, and activists experience the most severe legal and constitutional consequences.”

And it’s not just the U.S. According to an Independent Jewish Voices report, in 2005, more than 70 Canadian police chiefs visited Israel, presumably to receive training or at least insight into policing tactics, which have been gleaned from the oppression of Palestinian people. In 2019, the Times of Israel reported that the IDF was providing military training to government forces in Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, South Africa, Angola, Nigeria, Cameroon, Togo, Ivory Coast and Ghana; when the paper asked how the IDF was ensuring it wasn’t training soldiers to oppress their own citizens or carry out atrocities, Israel’s military attaché to Africa “noted that they were mostly being trained in krav maga, shooting skills and hostage rescue situations.”

Meanwhile, according to journalist Antony Loewenstein, whose forthcoming book delves into this topic, the Israeli government uses Palestine as a “testing ground” for weaponry and surveillance technology, which it then exports to other countries. According to the book’s synopsis, this includes “the Pegasus software that hacked Jeff Bezos' and Jamal Khashoggi’s phones, the weapons sold to the Myanmar army that has murdered thousands of Rohingyas and drones used by the European Union to monitor refugees in the Mediterranean who are left to drown. Israel has become a global leader in spying technology and defence hardware that fuels the globe’s most brutal conflicts.” All of which is to say, Israel’s continued oppression of Palestinian people is directly linked to ways racialized and otherwise marginalized people are oppressed here and around the world. (Also: when protests erupted in Ferguson after police officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown, Palestinians took to social media to share messages of support and solutions for dealing with tear gas, so… the idea that Palestinians haven’t shown reciprocal support is also factually incorrect.)

I’m not saying any of this to downplay racism or anti-Blackness. But I do want us to understand that the oppression faced by every marginalized group is connected, philosophically, economically and practically. And sometimes literally! Black people and Palestinian people are not separate groups; the existence of Afro-Palestinians means we are sometimes talking about the exact same people.

Which means yes, we do still have more in common with one another than with any member of the political elite, regardless of their identity. And, even if solidarity requires difficult conversations and courageous moments of accountability, it’s still our only way forward.

And Did You Hear About…

This really smart reflection on the Chappell Roan, fandom and the changing nature of fame.

The movie critic who went full MAGA.

Writer and cartoonist Gabrielle Drolet’s Spotify playlist of songs that were huge in Canada—and literally nowhere else.

Toronto Life’s *very* readable investigation into Toronto’s kind of cult-y wellness scene.

This round-up of life advice (some of which is cheesy, most of which is genuinely good!).

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PoliticsStacy Lee KongPalestine, Gaza Strip, Israel, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Tim Walz, Elon Musk, Michael Harriot, Chappell Roan