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Transnational Peoples of Color: Black Power in America and the Middle East

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2020

Michael R. Fischbach
Michael R. Fischbach*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Randolph-Macon College, Ashland, VA23005, e-mail: [email protected]
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Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 167 - 172
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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References

1 For a fuller treatment of this topic, see Fischbach, Michael R., Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018)Google Scholar. Black activists long had followed decolonization in Africa and elsewhere even before the 1960s. See, among others, Von Eschen, Penny, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Young, Cynthia, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a Third World Left (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Slate, Nico, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Plummer, Brenda, In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013)Google Scholar; and Munro, John, The Anticolonial Front: The African American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonization, 1945–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 In the 1960s, Black Power advocates already were writing about the transnational nature of their movement. For example, see Neal, Lawrence P., “Black Power in the International Context,” in Black Power Revolt: A Collection of Essays, ed. Barbour, Floyd B. (Boston: Porter Sargent Publishers, 1968)Google Scholar. One of several contemporary explorations is Slate, Nico, ed., Black Power Beyond Borders: The Global Dimensions of the Black Power Movement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Much has been written about Malcolm X and his Black Power internationalism, including in the definitive biography of him by Marable, Manning, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011)Google Scholar. Yet in many ways the best writings on this subject are those of Malcolm himself. See, inter alia, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, with the assistance of Alex Haley, introduction by M.S. Handler, epilogue by Alex Haley (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1966), and Breitman, George, ed., Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (New York: Grove Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

4 Breitman, ed., Malcolm X Speaks, 47, 50.

5 Ibid, 48, 49–50.

6 Malcolm X, “Zionist Logic,” Egyptian Gazette, 17 September 1964.

7 Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Farrington, Constance. Preface by Sartre, Jean-Paul (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1968)Google Scholar.

8 Good treatments of Black Panther internationalism can be found in Clemons, Michael L. and Jones, Charles E., “Global Solidarity: The Black Panther Party in the International Arena,” New Political Science 21, no. 2 (1999): 177–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Bloom, Joshua and Martin, Waldo E. Jr., Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

9 By 1969 the Palestinian guerrilla movement was a major topic in the world's press, and in that year the BPP opened an office in Algiers, Algeria, where it maintained almost daily contact with Palestinians from the al-Fateh movement.

10 The Black Panther, 17 February 1970.

11 Berkeley Barb, 15-21 August 1969.

12 “Black Panther Party Statement on Palestine” (18 September 1970), Eldridge Cleaver Papers (BANC MSS91/213/C), carton 5, folder 9, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.

13 As counted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “The Fedayeen Impact – Middle East and United States” (United States, Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, June 1970), 39. Online document at: https://www.governmentattic.org/2docs/FBI_Monograph_Fedayeen-Impact_1970.pdf.

14 The Black Panther, 21 March 1970.

15 Newton, Huey P., To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton, introduction by Schurmann, Franz (New York: Random House, 1972), 201Google Scholar. For a comparative look at how Asian revolutionaries and “Yellow Power” affected the self-image of black revolutionaries like those in the Black Panther Party, see Watkins, Rychetta, Black Power, Yellow Power, and the Making of Revolutionary Identities (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Palestinian poster production was among the largest in the world in the 1960s. Yanker, Gary, Prop Art: Over 1000 Contemporary Political Posters (New York: Darien House, Inc., 1972), 76Google Scholar.

17 For details, see Fischbach, Black Power and Palestine, 115–16, 141, 147.

18 Fujino, Diane C., Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 160Google Scholar.

19 For example, when asked years later whether or not she was aware of the widespread left-wing American adoration of her in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the noted Palestinian aircraft hijacker from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Leila Khaled, sniffed, “I was too busy with the revolution to notice.” Leila Khaled, telephone interview by the author, 5 September 2012.

20 For more about the Israeli Black Panthers and their connections to their American comrades, see Chetrit, Sami Shalom, Intra-Jewish Conflict in Israel: White Jews, Black Jews (London: Routledge, 2010)Google Scholar, and Frankel, Oz, “The Black Panthers of Israel and the Politics of the Radical Analogy,” in Black Power Beyond Borders, ed. Slate, Nico, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan), 83–106Google Scholar.

21 `Al ha-Mishmar, 13 January 1971, cited in Frankel, “The Black Panthers of Israel and the Politics of the Radical Analogy,” 81.

22 Israleft 6, 20 November 1972, reprinted in Shalom Cohen and Kokhavi Shemesh, “The Origin and Development of the Israeli Black Panther Movement,” Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) No. 49 (July 1976): 21.

23 Yosef Waksman, “The Panthers Dream to Fight Together with the Arabs against the Establishment,” Ma`ariv, 11 April 1972, reprinted in Documents from Israel 1967–1973: Readings for a Critique of Zionism, eds. Uri Davis and Norton Mezvinsky (London: Ithaca Press, 1975), 120.

24 I am grateful to the insights of Yoav Di-Capua about the situation in Israel after the 1973 Arab–Israeli War. I should point out that after 1971 some in Eldridge Cleaver's faction of the BPP did continue the policy of armed confrontation with the police for a few years, with some of his followers metamorphosizing into something called the Black Liberation Army. Fischbach, Black Power and Palestine, 159.

25 Little has been written on the theoretical level about how underground revolutionaries elsewhere, notably in the United States, understood changes in the Palestinian struggle starting in the 1970s. I briefly explored this in The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019).

26 Explorations could build on the earlier work of, inter alia, Varon, Jeremy, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

27 Follow up work could be done on writings such as Suri's, Jeremy “The Cold War, Decolonization, and Global Social Awakenings: Historical Intersections,” Cold War History 6, no. 3 (August 2006): 353–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Max Elbaum is among those who have explored how China's changing global position in particular affected the above-ground American Left in the 1970s. See his Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (London: Verso, 2002). More work can be done on how the Palestinians and the underground Left in the West were affected by these developments.