What Can the Black Freedom Struggle and Palestinian Liberation Teach Each Other?

Part of the Series

Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation

“I see promise in the connections between the 2020 protests against anti-Blackness and the 2023-2024 protests against Palestinian genocide,” Palestinian American scholar Zahi Zalloua told me this summer. “I’m very invested in the reignited Black-Palestinian solidarity movement; it points to the vibrancy of an anti-racist, anti-colonial Left.”

In the face of the terrifying devastation inflicted by Israel in Gaza, I also treasure the spark of hope about the Black-Palestinian solidarity movement expressed by Zalloua, who is the author of many books, including his most recent work, The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment (2024), as well as works such as Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality.

It is my own commitment to this reignited Black-Palestinian solidarity movement that compels me to continue speaking out against the horrible violence that Israel is committing against Palestinians, despite my fear of those who insist on weaponizing antisemitism as a way of silencing legitimate critique of Israel’s dispossession and genocide of Palestinians.

I am compelled to speak out. I must speak out. I do so partly because I am Black, and I know what it means to be treated as the wretched of the earth. I’m also compelled because I am deeply haunted by the mass death of Palestinians.

To grapple with the horror of this ongoing genocide, I conducted this exclusive interview for Truthout with Zalloua, who is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and a professor of Indigeneity, ace, and ethnicity studies at Whitman College, as well as editor of The Comparatist. In this interview, Zalloua argues with clarity and conceptual rigor that, as he says, “Arguing for Palestinian life is not antisemitic.” We also discuss the precarity of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation, the importance of pessimism and the theme of solidarity.

George Yancy: How do you understand the dynamics regarding the shielding of Israel from critique? It is as if those who are victims can never be victimizers. But, this cannot be true, especially as over 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli State.

Zahi Zalloua: The charge of antisemitism takes an immensely important problem and instrumentalizes it to silence a principled critique of Israel. It is world-canceling in this way. To avoid being labeled antisemitic you must endorse, explicitly or implicitly, a Zionist/settler-colonial framework, the conflation of Jewish life with a Jewish ethnonationalist state. You, I, we refuse this forced choice: Either you are for Israel and Jewish safety, or you are for Jewish destruction.

This false binary still enjoys wide support among Western politicians and corporate media. But it is starting to lose credibility with a newer generation of students and activists, including Jewish students. We can be — must be — for Jewish life and support the cause of Palestinian liberation as well. Despite the incredible new McCarthyism pervading U.S. life and distorting definitions of antisemitism (let’s be clear: Chanting “Free Palestine” is not an antisemitic act), Palestinian voices and perspectives are reaching the white Global North (through the efforts as well of internally colonized Black and Indigenous communities, who have reiterated their support for Palestinian liberation).

As academics we have a duty to speak truth to power, to contest the smooth operation of a violent social order. This cannot take place without blocking our (neo)colonial interpellation “to join in the ranks marching against one or another approved enemy,” as Edward Said put it in the 2003 preface to Orientalism. For decades Palestinians have been deemed terrorists, the enemy of the West. To defend the Palestinian cause puts you in harm’s way. But for many of us, writing about the occupation and Palestinian liberation is a kind of compulsion. I feel hyper-alert whenever I hear folks defend the status quo (which, as we know, has been deadly). Pundits and politicians endlessly talk about Israel’s right to self-defense, ignoring the inconvenient truth that the occupier’s right to self-defense is not enshrined in international law. Moreover, self-defense can never mean the right to annihilate, subjugate and torture.

Both CRT and BDS trouble a collective psychic investment in the existing nationalist and racist order of things. This is why we see right-wing furor over it.

Arguing for Palestinian life is not antisemitic. Here you might win over some liberals who are appalled by Israel’s genocidal campaign. But when you start talking about ending the occupation, the right to counterviolence, or settler colonialism, when you shift from Palestinian abjection to Palestinian liberation, when you shift the discussion from one oriented by humanitarian reason to one informed by anti-colonial reason, this is when liberal commitment to Palestinians starts to waver, for it points to the need to be open to major change, to go beyond lip service.

Staying with this theme of the massive death of Palestinians, what must be done to get the State of Israel to take seriously the Palestinian question? In your book, Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question: Beyond the Jew and the Greek, you argue that after Auschwitz the Jewish question became a central metaphilosophical and ethical motif in Continental thought. In that text you ask, “What is at stake in thinking the other exclusively as Jew?” Part of what is at stake is that the Jewish question trumps any other question that lays bare the suffering, in this case, of Palestinians.

On this score, Palestinian lives are refused recognition as precarious, as existentially endangered, as the other. This refusal of recognition is, I think, fundamentally linked to a certain political (perhaps even theological) understanding of what it means to be a Zionist Jew who is unconditionally loyal to the State of Israel. James Baldwin was aware that white people had to face the ways in which they had created the “monstrous Black body” to psychically underwrite their own (white) humanity. This raises so many questions about the phantasmatic need of human beings to create fictions to maintain power, violence against the other and narrative hegemony. Without facing the reality that they create anti-Black phantasms, white Americans can flee, in bad faith, the ways in which their whiteness is the problem.

To see Palestinians as other, as the degraded other, what must necessarily be faced by Zionist Jews who are unconditionally loyal to the State of Israel and its totalizing colonial fixation? What must change for the Palestinian grieving and suffering face to appear as an ethical demand not to kill, not to murder, not to subject to genocide? I’m thinking here about philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s understanding of the face as that which calls us to responsibility.

What we are seeing in occupied Palestine stems from the essentialization of Jewish identity and victimhood. A guilty West has come to accept the notion that for Jewish lives to matter, Palestinians lives must un-matter, that Jewish people must have a land of their own (repeating 19th-century European ethnonationalist logics), and that Palestinian people do not exist. Under a racial matrix of the human, Palestinians, Blacks, and other racialized bodies have been rendered other, faceless. To be deemed human is to not be Black. This is the powerful insight of Afropessimism, which I “stretch” in Fanonian fashion to deal with the colonial situation. The racial antagonism at work here is between the human and the faceless other. In Palestine-Israel, the Palestinians are that other, the other of the other, struggling against a supremacist state that claims to speak for and protect Jewish lives.

Like many, I have been tempted to respond by arguing that Palestinians do have a face, in the Levinasian sense. Isn’t the Palestinian the other of the Israeli Jew? But I have grown dissatisfied with this approach. I think the problem must be reconceptualized. On the one hand, humanizing Palestinians is necessary. (It is a direct response to the dehumanization of Palestinians, deemed “human animals” by the Israeli state and then treated as such.) On the other, the act of humanizing lacks a political vision.

In my recent work, I’ve been turning to the figure of the neighbor as articulated by Slavoj Žižek. The real neighbor (the “real” understood here in its Lacanian register) lacks a face. To perceive the neighbor’s face (a precondition for Levinasian ethics) is already to have domesticated the neighbor. When one invests in the face — the human — one does so at the expense of the real neighbor, the one who has lost any semblance of humanity. Žižek turns instead to Primo Levi’s account of the Muselmann, the desubjectified, living-dead of Auschwitz. Politics cannot rely on empathy, on making the neighbor recognizable to us as our kin, as someone like us — it is too finicky and cruel when it fails to manifest. Many people are outraged by the horrors visited on Palestinians, for example. We’re watching a genocide streamed live. What is happening in Palestine — the indiscriminate killing of civilians, the humiliation and torture of suspects, the caging of people, state violence masquerading as law, abandonment and neglect — is also happening in Sudan, Syria, Burkina Faso and DR Congo, to name only a few examples. But recognition and empathy have not produced political solutions.

I see promise in the connections between the 2020 protests against anti-Blackness and the 2023-2024 protests against Palestinian genocide.

What if politics began by reckoning with the real neighbor? What if Palestinian and Black suffering did not occasion (only) guilt, but a rethinking of the human as such? Fanon’s powerful calls for a “new humanism” and a “new human” cannot be accommodated by the current configurations of the human. The human must be dislocated and reinvented, and I don’t think that there will be any Palestinian liberation — or Black liberation — without such an ontological upheaval. Importantly, this kind of upheaval must unfold through politics, through the frictions and pressures of community. It does not happen through self-reflection alone; we cannot expect the Israeli state to simply reform itself. This is why solidarity movements across national and identitarian boundaries are crucial to spurring and sustaining reinvention.

Much of my thinking about anti-Black violence has led me to a place where hope feels like a form of deception. I have come to question the ideals of liberalism and its framework to liberate Black people from gratuitous violence. I know in my gut that the murder of another Black person by the state is not a question of if, but of when. This means that anti-Black racism is not a marginal and occasional phenomenon, but a necessary feature that feeds the fears and privileges of whiteness. The death of George Floyd or the recent tragic death of Sonya Massey (to name only two among so many other Black deaths at the hands of the state) are not enough to satiate the belly of the American empire, which continues to demonize Black bodies. What I’m communicating here is my own sense of affective dread when imagining what Black freedom looks like, what it means to be free of social death and the violence of white libidinal needs. Of course, the paradox is that I continue to resist. As a Palestinian American, how do you avoid a deep sense of pessimism regarding the existential horror of Palestinians in Gaza?

It’s hard and infuriating. The Western response to Israel’s genocide has been abysmal. Pessimism is fully justified and needed; it’s a survival strategy. For racialized communities, believing that the moral arc of history bends toward justice, that the state is looking out for your interest, that the global community will promote justice and peace, can get you killed. Pessimism helps to reorient the discussion; it jams the narrative of progress and allows us to talk about the afterlives of slavery and colonialism. Pessimism can, of course, also overwhelm resistance, draining its vitality. The system is rigged; gratuitous violence is my destiny. But pessimism and resistance can coexist. Pessimism’s negativity can be harnessed. Pessimism keeps me sharp and skeptical. It compels me to question what liberals propose as the “peaceful” solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In the current context, optimism often means compromising on the desire for Palestinian liberation. The right of return of refugees, which is enshrined in international law, will likely be the first right sacrificed at the altar of the two-state solution.

Pessimistically speaking, we should insist that there can be no return to October 6, to the type of “peace” occupiers and fascists dream of. Occupiers and fascists prefer peace as submission, as the absence of struggle; Israel and its allies prefer a peace secured at the expense of Palestinian liberation.

As I was thinking about my last question, your work on solidarity came to mind, Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality. As a way of providing a counter-pessimistic framing of anti-Blackness and the decimation of Palestinian people taking place, what, for you, generates this sense of promise?

Solidarity is a rejection of a depoliticized pessimism, a pessimism engulfed by one’s suffering. I’m very invested in the reignited Black-Palestinian solidarity movement; it points to the vibrancy of an anti-racist, anti-colonial left. A post on X from the progressive Jewish organization IfNotNow illuminates how these struggles are linked and what’s at stake: “The fanatical anti-CRT [Critical Race Theory] and anti-BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions] movements are one and the same: a desperate attempt to hide historical and current reality, to police free speech when it threatens nationalism.”

Both CRT and BDS trouble a collective psychic investment in the existing nationalist and racist order of things. This is why we see right-wing furor over it. Many racially sensitive liberals, on the other hand, are happy to publicly decry anti-CRT legislation but willing to join the same guardians of white supremacy in supporting anti-BDS bills. Among the liberal elite, there is little appetite for debating what pro-Palestinian activists have long decried as the Palestine exception, or “Progressive Except for Palestine” (PEP).

I believe that we need to read the generalized liberal hostility toward BDS not as ignorance about the subject matter but rather as evidence of liberal complicity and collusion with an anti-Black world, casting doubt on the actual liberal support of and commitment to CRT, to the movement for Black lives. Woke white liberals favor cosmetic changes. You can talk about Black suffering, celebrate and honor Black history as much as you want, but don’t ask America to give up on the white American dream and its claim to exceptionalism, to confront police brutality and the mass incarceration of Black and Brown bodies (in the end, liberals are by no means hostile to the racialized “law and order” narrative) — in short, don’t ask us white Americans to give up our privilege or priority. For the liberal left, America, not unlike Israel, is not a racist state or project.

But I see promise in the connections between the 2020 protests against anti-Blackness and the 2023-2024 protests against Palestinian genocide. The national and worldwide protests over Gaza stem from the systemic problems that gave rise to the outpouring of support for BLM and point to a lingering deep anger at America’s political class and its Western counterparts for the failures of reform as an answer to the violence of racialized policing and the nationalist order it supports. The world system does not need fine-tuning — it needs an overhaul. The chant “Palestinian Lives Matter” signals, repeats and harnesses the universalist cry of “Black Lives Matter.” What the protests are saying is that Blacks or Palestinians are not the “problem” — you are; it is the West’s racist core.