Palestinian Solidarity and the Limits of Colonial Analogy

Toward a Genealogy of the Colonial Analogy

To appreciate the novelty of the forms of Black–Palestinian solidarity invoked by the M4BL platform, it is helpful to contextually situate its departure from notions of the colonial analogy that grounded transnational conceptions of anticolonial solidarity among Black Power political thinkers and activists in the 1960s. The hallmark of Black Power anticolonialism was the colonial analogy, in which global solidarity with other racially subjugated peoples stems from their analogous position as colonially subordinated populations. Despite their differences, what united disparate invocations of the colonial analogy in the 1960s was the metaphorical similarity they posited between colonial oppression in the Third World and the racial oppression of African Americans. Within these terms, self-determination rather than inclusion was the ultimate goal of domestic racial struggles. Just as colonized peoples in Algeria, for instance, obtained freedom through national independence and self-determination, Black freedom in the United States would also come through what Eldridge Cleaver called “the projection of sovereignty.”9 In this effort, the colonial analogy provided an understanding of solidarity that was premised on the shared position of colonized peoples in similar systems of colonial power.

While I cannot offer a comprehensive genealogy of the colonial analogy here, I want to signal at least one feature of any such genealogy necessary to explore the limits of the colonial analogy as the basis for transnational anticolonial solidarity. Specifically, any exploration of disparate theorizations of African Americans as an “internal colony” must attend to the shifting and contested meaning of terms like colony, colonialism, and colonization throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In his history of Black nationalism, Dean E. Robinson helpfully notes that “Black politics—even Black nationalist politics—tends to draw upon intellectual and political currents in American society and build upon them to advance the cause of African Americans.”10 Yet, as Sam Klug adds, such an insight applies with equal force to “Black internationalist politics.”11 In this way, understanding the limits of the colonial analogy requires appreciating the way in which its meaning—and that of adjacent terms such as internal colony or nation within a nation—was linguistically indexed to hegemonic meanings of colony and colonialism in U.S. and European imperial discourses. In other words, the meaning of colonial in the colonial analogy reflected rather than counteracted prevailing meanings of colony in imperial ideology.

One way to appreciate this is to reflect on perhaps the earliest analogizations of African Americans as an internally colonized population, what Martin Robison Delany referred to in 1852 as a “nation within a nation—a people who although forming a part and parcel of the population, yet were from force of circumstances, known by the peculiar position they occupied, forming in fact, by the deprivation of political equality with others, no part, and if any, but a restricted part of the body politic of such nations.” As examples, Delany listed Poles in Russia and Hungarians in Austria, as well as “the Jews, scattered throughout not only the length and breadth of Europe, but almost the habitable globe, maintaining their national characteristics, and looking forward in high hopes of seeing the day when they may return to their former national position of self-government and independence.”12 What is notable in these broader arguments for Black emigration proposed by Delany is the way his notion of a “nation within a nation” adheres to dominant meanings of colony in the nineteenth century. Rather than its contemporary meaning of a dependent population subject to the economic and political will of an alien power, colony in nineteenth-century imperial discourse was distinctively settler in nature, denoting a “body of people” who remove themselves from one country or political community in order to establish a “new and separate society . . . in some district which is wholly or nearly uninhabited, or from which they expel the ancient inhabitants.”13 In this way, Delany used the language of “nation within a nation” to characterize African Americans not as an internally colonized, dependent population but rather as an internally persecuted body of people that needed to break away from the metropole by establishing an external settlement. What made it colonial in nature was not the mode of oppression but rather the movement of population to vacant land.

By the 1920s, with the consolidation of the League of Nations and the first wave of twentieth-century decolonization initiated, the meaning of the Black colony started to take on conventional twentieth-century connotations of a dependent population economically exploited and politically subjugated by an alien power. This more contemporary meaning of the colonial analogy started to solidify with the Comintern’s 1928 Resolution (issued under Stalin’s leadership) recognizing Black Americans in the United States as a distinct nation entitled to the right of self-determination and national independence. Following this, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) established its program of pursuing a “Black Belt Republic” in the South.14 While this project of establishing a Black republic fizzled out, the analogy of African Americans as a colonially subjugated population persisted. Any account of the colonial analogy must attend to this shift in the meaning of colony away from its settler connotations. What is important in this shift is the way in which emergent discourses of Black anticolonialism began to adhere to a meaning of colony, resonant in global anticolonial movements, as a racialized population subjugated by an alien power in their own territory. Such an understanding represents a stark departure from the older understanding of colony as a mobile population that is internally persecuted within a foreign territory and that achieves liberation not by throwing off the yoke of an alien power but through communal migration to a new, putatively unsettled territory where Indigenous inhabitants are either civilized or eliminated.

In this shift, however, dynamics of settler colonial land dispossession were largely displaced in these new, emergent meanings of colony. This becomes clear in turning to the uptake of the colonial analogy among Black Power radicals in the 1960s. As activists such as Harold Cruse and Malcolm X resurrected the Black colony thesis of CPUSA, they were coming on the heels of a profound change in international order engendered by the passing of UN General Assembly Resolution 1514, the “The Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.” As Adom Getachew explains, the declaration enacted a shift from self-determination as a professed principle in international law to a legally binding right. In doing so, however, it also had to tacitly restrict the meaning of “colonial countries and peoples” by limiting independence from alien rule to instances of saltwater imperialism where colonial peoples were separated from metropolitan rule by an oceanic body. Initially championed by the United States in the 1950s to differentiate settler colonial rule and prevent the principle of self-determination from applying to Indigenous peoples within settler states, the saltwater stipulation prevented claims of self-determination from impairing the territorial integrity of existing states.15 In practice, this meant that any country claiming self-determination had to be geographically separate and noncontiguous from a dominant imperial power.16

Jodi A. Byrd powerfully shows how, in depending on the saltwater thesis, the concepts of internal colonialism and the colonial analogy reify “Indigenous peoples as ‘minorities within’ settler colonial states like New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States” rather than as colonized populations claiming rights of self-determination.17 Adding to this, I argue here that the colonial analogy as deployed by Black Power theorists further displaced attention to settler colonial dispossession and in turn potentially undercut Palestinian solidarity. Such displacement operates primarily through the metaphorical structure of the colonial analogy. Metaphor, as scholars like Paul Ricoeur and Hayden White note, operates through the transfer of meaning from one context to another in which a literal referent is given meaning through its contextual similarity to a figurative referent (e.g., my love, a rose).18 Rooted in the Greek term epiphora, metaphor enacts movement and displacement across contexts.19 Yet in reflecting the dominant meaning of colonialism tied to discourses of self-determination and the saltwater stipulation, the colonial analogy at once enabled transfers of meaning between two colonial contexts and displaced transfers of meaning between other (settler) colonial contexts.

In operating as a metaphor that transfers meaning between contexts, the colonial analogy fulfilled a specific purpose: It allowed Black Power activists a means of breaking out of the constricted discourse of race in the United States as a problem of individual psychology. In Black Power, one of the most thorough developments of the colonial analogy in the 1960s, Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton define racism as any set of policies or practices aimed at asserting control and domination over a racial group. They further distinguish between two forms of racism in modern America: individual racism and institutional (or structural) racism. By de-emphasizing acts of individual prejudice in favor of systemic domination, Ture and Hamilton shattered the edifice of racial liberalism, what Gunnar Myrdal calls the “American dilemma.” For Myrdal, racism in America arises as a dilemma because individual racial prejudices conflict with the universalistic principles of the American creed. As a result, fulfilling the American creed required inclusion into the liberal order.20

But for Ture and Hamilton, the American dilemma is illusory “because Black people in this country form a colony, and it is not in the interest of the colonial power to liberate them.” Echoing the critique of neocolonialism developed by Kwame Nkrumah, in which economic and cultural domination continue in former colonies despite formal political independence, Ture and Hamilton argue that, despite legal equality, African Americans still stand “as colonial subjects in relation to the white society.”21 They cast institutional racism as a form of colonial domination by likening racial oppression in America to colonial domination in Africa and Asia. As the epigraph of the first chapter, Ture and Hamilton quote I. F. Stone in saying, “In an age of decolonization, it may be fruitful to regard the problem of the American Negro as a unique case of colonialism, an instance of internal imperialism, an underdeveloped people in our very midst.”22 Invoking Frantz Fanon, Ture and Hamilton further develop this point by suggesting that the only path forward is to struggle alongside Third World independence movements. Although they acknowledge that the colonial analogy does not fit perfectly, they insist that the political domination and economic exploitation of Black geographical spaces demands self-determination rather than inclusion and integration.

In relying upon an argument by analogy, however, Black Power anticolonialism depended upon a further set of metaphors that illustrate the displacement of settler colonial contexts. Most prominent among these was the notion of land, which came to stand in for broader ideals of self-determination and community control. In his 1968 essay “The Land Question and Black Liberation,” Eldridge Cleaver used the metaphor of land as a symbol for the pursuit for self-determination that unites colonized populations. Yet with Cleaver, the limitations of the colonial analogy as the grounding for anticolonial solidarity come into focus in the way in which the metaphorical notion of land in the colonial analogy risks displacing attention to settler colonial dynamics of Indigenous dispossession and land expropriation. In extending the colonial analogy, Cleaver notes how Afro-America has a “land hang-up” in two ways. On the one hand, enslaved people were dispossessed of their ancestral homelands and transported to a “strange land” through the Atlantic slave trade. As a consequence, fleeing the “evil soil” of an alien environment became the hallmark of Black liberation. On the other hand, in the plantation economy, coerced slave labor was intricately connected to the land. As a result, higher social status has been measured in terms of one’s distance from agrarian economies.23 In extending land as a metaphor for political power, Cleaver criticizes racial liberalism and integration as solving the problem by sharing the land with white people. But for Cleaver, Black freedom rises and falls with sovereignty: “The feeling of alienation and dissociation is real and Black people long ago would have readily identified themselves with another sovereignty had a viable one existed.”24 The lack of freedom is thus a lack of collective sovereignty, which is in turn predicated on the lack of territorial control for the political community. To the extent that Black liberation proceeds through the projection of sovereignty, it requires the pursuit of landed freedom.

Cleaver’s primary problem with racial liberalism is the way that it subverts the quest for national liberation and self-determination by masking the relationship between “the Black colony” and “the white mother country.” Cleaver writes, “Black people are a stolen people held in a colonial status on stolen land, and any analysis which does not acknowledge the colonial status of Black people cannot hope to deal with the real problem.”25 Rather than create a self-determining and independent national community, integration transforms colonial subjects into American citizens. To foreground the role of land in Black political thought, Cleaver traces the centrality of land from the Civil War (i.e., land redistribution from enslavers to formerly enslaved people under the banner of “forty acres and a mule”) through Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and Elijah Muhammad. It was the Black Power movement, however, that recast Black liberation in terms of “a clear perception of the relationship of Black people to the land.” Land, for Cleaver, became a way of linking the pursuit of political, economic, and cultural self-determination, what he termed a “projection of sovereignty.”26

In rooting Black liberation in the control of land, Cleaver drew a peculiar parallel between African Americans and “the situation of the Jews at the time of the coming of Theodore Herzl.” Like African Americans, Cleaver cast Jews as a ghettoized population confined to European urban peripheries who were then dispossessed and left searching for land and sovereignty. To the extent that both populations were oppressed because of their racial background, Jews and Black people faced the similar problem of asserting sovereign freedom through the control of land. Based on this analogous form of colonial oppression, Cleaver calls on Afro-America to follow the Zionist example of Theodor Herzl and the National Jewish Congress, who “founded a government in exile for a people in exile.”27 In A Jewish State, Herzl delineated the legal basis of the new Jewish state by drawing on the antiquated principle of negotiorum gestio, a principal–agent relationship in which the government acts as the gestor on behalf of the transnational body of exiled Jewish citizens, the dominus negotiorum.28 In founding a Jewish state, the gestor is a corporate body (the Society of Jews) accountable to the diasporic body politic composed of landless Jews. Such a model offers Cleaver a means of placing anti-Black oppression within the United States in a global, anticolonial frame. With discourses of self-determination tied to the saltwater stipulation, Zionism provided the means for national liberation for a deterritorialized, diasporic community despite the lack of territorial contiguity.

Yet, in modeling Black self-determination on the Zionist example, Cleaver reveals the critical limits of the colonial analogy in capturing the conceptual nature of Black–Palestinian solidarity. Like Zionists colonizing Palestine, Cleaver writes, “Black Power says to Black people that it is possible for them to build a national organization on somebody else’s land.”29 The key phrase here is “somebody else’s land.” In the case of Israeli settlers, Cleaver clearly means the land of Palestinians, undertaking a self-conscious erasure of Indigenous peoples displaced by Israeli settlement. In the case of Black Power, however, “somebody else’s land” implies land in the possession of whites, thus disavowing the settler colonial dispossession of Native Americans. In his characterization of Black Americans as “stolen people on stolen land,” Cleaver casts the process of land theft as a past-tense injustice that lays the foundation for Black liberation rather than as an object of contestation in the present. In both cases, the colonial analogy displaces attention to the forms of land dispossession necessary to account for in order to develop solidarity with colonized Indigenous populations. What is notable, however, is that Cleaver does not cast the colonial analogy in terms of the distinction between labor exploitation and land expropriation central to settler colonial studies. Rather, he frames the struggle for both Black and Jewish self-determination as one for control of land on top of an already expropriated land base. In this regard, the metaphorical structure of the colonial analogy transfers meaning between two contexts by positioning a first-order contestation over land between Black and white over the erasure of a second-order contestation between native and settler. Put differently, in Erin R. Pineda’s words, even as Black radicals like Cleaver “located themselves in a world in motion beyond the nation-state” through the colonial analogy, this “same analytic that enabled them to relate and analogize (domestic) segregation to (foreign) colonialism simultaneously erased the expropriated, colonized ground on which they already stood.”30

For an example of what was displaced from view in Cleaver’s deployment of the colonial analogy, we might briefly turn to the writings of Fayez A. Sayegh, a Syrian diplomat and scholar who in 1965 penned the first analysis of Zionism as a settler colonial movement for the Palestine Liberation Organization. Central to Sayegh’s analysis is the suggestion that the Zionist colonization was in many respects an anomaly in the broader history of European colonialism insofar as the “forcible dispossession of the indigenous population” and “their expulsion from their own country” reached its climax precisely at a time when self-determination for colonized peoples was being written into international law in the midst of a historic wave decolonization.31 Sayegh located the origins of the Zionist colonization of Palestine in the broader context of the “scramble for Africa” of the 1880s, as European empires carved up the African continent into distinct colonial possessions with their own imperial sphere of influence. By mimicking these colonial projects, Zionists established themselves as a “settler-community” that would then blossom into a Jewish nation. Sayegh further argues, “Colonization would be the instrument of nation-building, not the byproduct of an already fulfilled nationalism.”32 This dialectic between nationalism and colonization gave rise to a distinctive dynamic that distanced Zionist settler colonialism from other European colonial projects. Where other European colonists would seek to coexist with Indigenous populations with the aim of exploiting native resources and labor, Zionist colonization was “essentially incompatible with the continued existence of the ‘native population’ in the coveted country.”33 That is, if European colonialism in the scramble for Africa was premised on hierarchical coexistence, Zionist colonialism was premised on the expulsion of native people. To maintain its rule, the Zionist settler-state rested on three pillars of racial self-segregation and supremacy, violent expulsion of native people, and territorial expansionism.

To be sure, Cleaver’s analogy equating the logics of Zionism and Black self-determination and his consequent displacement of attention to Zionist settler colonialism is not wholly unique. Robin D. G. Kelley traces Black identification with Zionism prior to the creation of Israel in 1948. For many, the Exodus story provided Black communities with a language of freedom and emancipation formed through the fugitive practice of fleeing oppression. With the founding of Israel, however, Zionism embodied the promise of founding a new society premised on liberation and self-determination in the wake of the collapse of old colonial hierarchies during the period of decolonization. For Kelley, these postwar Black intellectuals were not naively tricked into supporting Zionism, nor did they do so out of an obligatory Black–Jewish alliance. Rather, Kelley writes, “they failed to see Israel as a colonial project founded on the subjugation of Indigenous people.”34 Emerging out of the post-Ottoman hegemony of the British and French empires in the region, in 1948 Zionism appeared to many Black liberals and radicals as an anticolonial movement seeking to overturn European colonial domination. As Keith P. Feldman writes, “The intellectual tradition that had for over a century confronted the white supremacist kernel of U.S. Empire often self-narrated its contours through the lexicon of Jewish Zionism . . . [which] provided a resonant analogy for a diasporic Black political consciousness.”35 Zionism thus took an anticolonial guise that fit into prevailing discourses of self-determination emerging out of the United Nations, masking the settler colonial nature of Israeli settlement and founding. Rather than an incidental aspect of the colonial analogy, the identification of Zionism and Black self-determination stemmed partly from a mode of reasoning that collapsed different colonial legacies into one another due to their shared pursuit of self-determination through the projection of territorial sovereignty.

As a result, the analogical mode of reasoning implicit in the colonial analogy displaced from view a settler colonial optic.36 None of this is to discount the real forms of solidarity that the Black Power movement did draw with Palestinians, as extensively documented by scholars like Michael R. Fischbach, Feldman, and Nadia Alahmed.37 But it does suggest the complex ways in which, by attaching freedom to the projection of sovereignty through control of land for a diasporic population, the Black Panthers could be in solidarity with Palestinians and continue to model Black liberation on Zionism.

Colonialism and Self-Determination in “Vision for Black Lives”

While it centers on the policing, criminalization, and incarceration of Black bodies in the United States, an equally salient centerpiece of the platform connected the struggles of African Americans with other racially subjugated populations in the international system of what Charles W. Mills calls “global white supremacy.”38 In acknowledging “that patriarchy, exploitative capitalism, militarism, and white supremacy know no borders,” the drafters went on to proclaim “solidarity with our international family against the ravages of global capitalism and anti-Black racism, human-made climate change, war, and exploitation.” While the drafters singled out diasporic solidarity with “African people all over the world,” they also drew a wider conception of solidarity in calling “for reparations for the historic and continuing harms of colonialism and slavery,” also recognizing “the rights and struggle of our Indigenous family for land and self-determination.”39 As we will see, the drafters most prominently singled out Palestinian struggles for self-determination as significantly in need of solidarity. As a colonially subjugated Indigenous population, Palestinians stand at the intersection of global structural forces named in the M4BL platform. The question to arise from this global analysis involves the precise nature of political solidarity it invokes. But before developing this conception of political solidarity, it is first necessary to look at the platform’s critique of Israeli settler colonialism and colonial framing of anti-Black oppression.

The policy platform follows a simple but familiar structure. As of 2022, it began with a preface outlining basic principles and then proceeds to develop specific policy positions in six key areas: End the War on Black People, Invest-Divest, Reparations, Economic Justice, Community Control, and Political Power. In at least three of these areas (Reparations, Invest-Divest, and Political Power), critical engagement with Euro-American colonialism and empire figures prominently. For instance, in their call for reparations, the drafters connect colonialism and slavery to broader forms of racial domination such as residential segregation, mass incarceration, and police surveillance. Anticolonial critique enters in by calling for reparations for the extraction of wealth and value from Black communities “through environmental racism, slavery, food apartheid, housing discrimination, and racialized capitalism.”40 By framing the issue of reparations in terms of extractive economies, the drafters cast slavery and its legacies in colonial terms. As a peripherally dominated population, Black communities serve as a fungible and dispensable source of economic wealth to enrich the imperial centers of racial capitalism. In this regard, the platform echoes Manning Marable’s (and Walter Rodney’s) argument that capitalism systematically underdeveloped Black America. In showing how Black people experiencing poverty represent an acute and advanced stage of underdevelopment, Marable characterizes the pockets of Black poverty as “the domestic periphery.”41 In response, the drafters of the platform call for a guaranteed basic income for all Black people and full access for all Black people to university education.

While it is certainly present in the call for reparations, the centrality of anticolonial critique becomes more prevalent in the Invest-Divest section of the platform, which calls for the simultaneous “divestment from exploitative forces” and “investments in the education, health and safety of Black people.” For instance, the drafters demand that federal, state, and local governments redirect funds used for policing, surveillance, and natural resource extraction into employment, universal health care, fully funded education, and sustainable energy projects. But the anticolonial framing of the Invest-Divest section came in the last demand: “A cut in military expenditures and a reallocation of those funds to invest in domestic infrastructure and community well-being.” In characterizing the problem that divestment is meant to solve, the drafters explicitly cue attention to an imperial and anticolonial framing: “America is an empire that uses war to expand territory and power.”42

On the one hand, the drafters focus on the injury American militarism and imperialism has done to individuals in the Black diaspora. Specifically, they claim that “American wars are unjust, destructive to Black communities globally and do not keep Black people safe locally” and single out the profits private corporations have made from “the death of our global diaspora.” In addition, the platform points to the establishment of AFRICOM in 2006, a U.S. military command aimed at providing a buffer in the region for the rise of so-called radical Islam. The platform then goes on to criticize a litany of instances of U.S. militarization of Africa, including air strikes in Libya, proxy wars in Mali, antipiracy campaigns in the Gulf of Guinea, the arming of mercenaries in Uganda and Kenya, and the use of Somalia as a site of experimentation for drone strikes. Beyond military intervention in Africa, the platform highlights the devastating effects of U.S. imperialism on the global Black diaspora in the Americas. In particular, the Garifuna people of Central America “have experienced rounds of forced migration leaving ancestral homeland . . . in part because of U.S. war-making” and U.S.-backed coups in the region. Military intervention in Haiti also brought damage to the Black diaspora that stands in need of anti-imperial solidarity. As the center of “global Black struggle” (i.e., the Haitian Revolution), Haiti stands as an especially serious instance of U.S.-backed coups and military intervention. On the basis of these instances, the drafters proclaim that U.S. imperialism is “a direct threat to global Black liberation.”43

On the other hand, the Invest-Divest section of the M4BL platform draws broader bonds of solidarity that extended beyond the United States to Black diasporic South Americans and Caribbeans who have suffered from the U.S.-led war on terror and to Palestinians struggling against Israeli settler colonialism. Focusing on the latter, the drafters cite U.S. military aid to Israel, in particular the stipulation that Israel use 75 percent of aid to buy U.S.-manufactured munitions. Relations between the United States and Israel result in a transnational military industrial complex: “Every year billions of dollars are funneled from U.S. taxpayers to hundreds of arms corporations, who then wage lobbying campaigns pushing for even more foreign aid.” Transnational militarization both draws funding away from investment in domestic social programs and makes “U.S. citizens complicit in the abuses committed by the Israeli government.” Likening South African apartheid to racialized policing in North America, the drafters also condemn Israel as an “apartheid state,” listing “over 50 laws on the books that sanction discrimination against Palestinian people.” In order to provide space for Israeli settlements and land grabs, Israeli soldiers engage in the heavily militarized policing of Palestinian people.44

In the broader context of this anticolonial critique, M4BL couches its claims against racialized police violence and hyperincarceration in the language of self-determination, political power, and community control. In doing so, it echoes the 1960s Black Power radicals’ efforts to blend the pursuit of self-determination for colonized peoples with the New Left language of participatory democracy.45 In the Reparations section, for instance, the platform calls for “healing ongoing physical and mental trauma, and ensuring our access and control of food sources, housing and land.”46 In the Political Power section, the drafters demand “independent Black political power and Black self-determination in all areas of society.” They further call for the creation of a “real democracy where Black people and all marginalized people can effectively exercise full political power.”47 In particular, this entails decriminalizing Black resistance and the release of political prisoners, electoral expansion and protection for all, increased funding for Black media and educational institutions, and the public regulation of money in politics. In calling for community control of local institutions, the drafters privilege democratic control of law enforcement agencies and the ideal of local self-determination as the pinnacle of Black freedom. As we see in these instances, the M4BL platform clearly evokes earlier Black Power conceptions of liberation through communal self-determination. Yet, it also departs from earlier Black Power discourse in divorcing claims of transnational, anticolonial solidarity from the colonial analogy. As I argue next, the bases of Palestinian solidarity growing out of the Black Lives Matter movement reside in the structural interconnections of colonial power across transnational contexts rather than in structurally homologous forms of oppression.

“The Heart of a Global Empire”: Imperial Frameworks and Colonial Connections

The question to arise from all of this, then, is whether the colonial analogy can conceptually ground the kind of Black–Palestinian solidarity invoked by the M4BL platform. While Cleaver’s conception of Black self-determination risks displacing solidarity with colonized peoples in settler societies, contemporary currents of Black radicalism provide more promising ways of thinking about anticolonial solidarity. Rather than casting transnational solidarity in terms of analogous positions that racially and colonially subordinated groups share in colonial economies, solidarity in this alternative framework implies transnational relationships that derive from globally connected structures of colonial domination.

In key respects, the M4BL platform breaks from the colonial analogy that laid the basis of transnational solidarity in Black Power radicalism. Rather than argue by analogy—that structural racism was analogous to colonialism—M4BL takes a different approach:

The interlinked systems of white supremacy, imperialism, capitalism and patriarchy shape the violence we face. As oppressed people living in the US, the belly of global empire, we are in a critical position to build the necessary connections for a global liberation movement. . . . The Black radical tradition has always been rooted in igniting connection across the global south under the recognition that our liberation is intrinsically tied to the liberation of Black and Brown people around the world.48

Solidarity here rests on the interconnected systems of global oppression that connect the dispossession of Palestinians to racial oppression in the United States. Nowhere, however, do “the necessary connections for a global liberation movement” depend upon shared position in analogous structures of colonial power. Rather, M4BL evokes its position as a racially subjugated population in “the belly of global empire.” Their sense of solidarity arises from their “critical position” in structures of white supremacy, empire, racial capitalism, and patriarchy.

By referencing their positioning within U.S. empire, M4BL views solidarity with Palestinians in terms of transnational obligations that cut across national boundaries (though do not dissolve them). In this view, solidarity arises from connected structures of oppression that reinforce each other. The M4BL platform points to the manner in which resources required to address poverty and state violence domestically are siphoned off for purposes of war and imperial violence abroad. As a consequence, “state violence within the U.S. is intimately linked with empire and war-making globally.”49 What grounds Black–Palestinian solidarity is less the structurally similar forms of oppression each population faces than the interconnected structures of colonial power that feed off and reinforce each other.50 In response to criticism of the M4BL platform by pro-Israel political groups, the Dream Defenders—a Black radical organization—reaffirmed their stance: “As Black and Brown people living in the US, the heart of global empire, we bear a particular responsibility for global liberation. It is our taxpayer dollars that are funding Israeli apartheid and a military industrial complex that is devastating entire peoples and communities throughout the world.”51 As the statement suggests, Black–Palestinian solidarity need not rest on the analogous nature of shared struggles but rather on their critical positionality as citizens within the “heart of a global empire,” and as such their complicity in the transnational militarization of carceral technologies.

This idea is further supported in a related statement by a group called Black–Palestinian Solidarity, which issued a video featuring artists and intellectuals such as Angela Davis, Cornel West, Danny Glover, Boots Riley, Alice Walker, and Lauryn Hill expressing solidarity with Palestinians struggling against settler colonial domination: “We choose to join one another in resistance not because our struggles are the same but because we each struggle against the formidable forces of structural racism and the carceral and lethal technologies deployed to maintain them.”52 Important here is the explicit recognition that Black and Palestinian struggles are not necessarily analogous but are nevertheless connected by shared opposition to structural forces of neocolonial domination and militarized technologies of policing.

In Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, Angela Y. Davis further develops this idea of anticolonial solidarity. For Davis, the solidarities connecting Indigenous, African American, and Palestinian struggles cannot be made on the basis of abstract principles. Rather, “these connections need to be made in the context of the struggles themselves. So as you are organizing against police crimes, against police racism, you always raise parallels and similarities in other parts of the world. . . . And not only similarities, but you also talk about structural connections.”53 As Davis suggests, highlighting the parallels and similarities in global systems of oppression can be strategically useful in developing solidarity. But she also suggests that this is not enough. The question here concerns the theoretical foundations of solidarity. Political responsibility arises not from shared principles or interests but from “the common structural conditions that lead members of a political community to develop solidarity.”54 To the extent that solidarity emerges through a structural analysis of global conditions, it is highly contingent. That is, it is forged in the process of political struggle rather than through a priori theoretical principles or identity categories. As Kelley puts it, such forms of “Black–Palestinian transnational solidarity” move beyond “a politics of analogy based on racial or national identity, or racialized or colonial experience, [as] the sole or primary grounds for solidarity.”55

To be sure, this is not to deny the important parallels between the oppression and racialization of African Americans and Palestinians. In an effort to illuminate the “deep and overlapping histories” between the legacies of slavery and settler colonialism, Justin Leroy importantly notes that “it is through the language of anti-Blackness—apartheid, open-air prison, ghetto—that the ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza have been legible to anti-Zionist activists around the globe.”56 Stretching back to the 1970s, Black radicals had long seen Blackness as “the name of political camaraderie” with Palestinians, as Palestinians were portrayed as phenotypically Black and as groups such as the Israeli Panthers turned to U.S. models of Black Power to combat Ashkenazi supremacy in Israel and discrimination against Arab Jews. Yet, as Russell Rickford notes, such solidarities were not without contradiction. In suggesting that transnational bonds of solidarity were biological or rooted in racial identity rather than primarily political or ethical in nature, Black radicals restricted such solidarities by confining them to “the narrower logics of Black nationalism.”57 As such, Rickford calls for conceptions of solidarity that transcend “bonds of color” and instead posit “anti-imperialist struggle, rather than racial affinity, as the precondition of camaraderie.”58

I want to put a finer point on this by suggesting that the nature of anti-imperialist struggle that provides the political bases of transnational solidarity invoked by M4BL and adjacent movements is not analogous modes of racialization or colonization but rather what Nadine Naber refers to as the “transnational structure of U.S. Empire.” Naber writes, “As the U.S. Empire . . . has found its perfect imperial ally in Israeli settler colonialism, this alliance reverberates back within the United States through the growing collaboration between the U.S. government, Zionist institutions in the United States, and the Israeli government.”59 Such reverberations point not simply to the discrete spatiotemporal contexts occupied by Palestinians and African Americans but rather to a structured imperial whole constituted through key developments highlighted by M4BL, such as the interconnected militarization of policing in both the United States and Israel, the repressive power of the Zionist movement in the United States, which punishes and silences transnational solidarities, and the way U.S. military aid to Israel leads to divestment in impoverished communities of color.60 In all these cases, it is the positionality of citizens within transnational networks of imperial control—“the heart of a global empire”—that generates the ethical and political terms of anticolonial solidarity.

Yet while Palestinian and Black activists in the contemporary moment appear to have sidelined the colonial analogy or racial affinity as the bases of transnational solidarity, forms of Palestinian–Indigenous solidarity in North America persist based on common experiences of settler colonialism and land dispossession. While this is not to deny that the labor of both Native peoples in the United States and Palestinians has been exploited and expropriated, it is to foreground that such regimes of land dispossession led to distinctive forms of racialization that follow the logic of what Patrick Wolfe calls “native elimination.” Zionism, Wolfe explains, is characterized by “the ideology of return,” which merges settler colonialism’s twinned goals of “eliminating Native territoriality and constructing a new society in its place.”61 In different contexts, Wolfe notes that while African Americans and Aboriginal people in Australia have been similarly racialized as “Black,” the practices of racialization each group faces are shaped by differing regimes of colonization. While the one-drop rule in the United States works to preserve and perpetuate the stigma of Blackness, the one-drop rule in Australia operates to assimilate and absorb Aboriginal peoples into settler culture. For Wolfe, this points to differences in the “elementary structures of race”: the expropriation of native land and the expropriation of Indigenous/slave labor. Within this framework, “cross-colonial” and “anti-racist solidarities” require historically and geographically specific analysis of how the elementary structures of race have interacted and taken root across different colonial contexts.62

Such frameworks have played a significant role in the anticolonial discourse of Palestinian scholars and activists. In collaboration with the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the Palestinian philosopher Elias Sanbar characterizes Palestinians as “the American Indians of the Jewish settlers in Palestine. In their eyes our one and only role consisted in disappearing. In this it is certain that the history of the establishment of Israel reproduces the process which gave birth to the United States of America.”63 In order to resist occupation, Palestinians first had to assert their presence and culture against settler narratives that imagined Palestine as empty land. Edward W. Said also characterizes the Palestinian struggle for self-determination as a “politics of dispossession” in which Palestinian culture, history, and identity was rendered nonexistent by Zionist settlers.64 On the basis of this shared struggle against land dispossession, a federation of Palestinian activist groups issued a declaration of solidarity with the Indigenous resurgence movement Idle No More in North America, proclaiming, “We recognize the deep connections and similarities between the experiences of our peoples—settler colonialism, destruction and exploitation of our land and resources, denial of our identity and rights, genocide and attempted genocide.”65 Yet, even in this case, Juliana Hu Pegues notes that analogizing North American and Israeli settler colonialism provides a tenuous basis for imagining contingent solidarities. Instead, she argues that an imperial framework capturing the two as mutually reinforcing rather than as simply analogous forms of oppressions better captures the contingent basis of transnational, anticolonial solidarity.

Conclusion

Nevertheless, as the above comments and analysis demonstrate, the colonial analogy is an ever-present dimension of discussions of Palestinian solidarity in the United States, whether that analogy is with the “internal colonialism” faced by African Americans or the settler colonialism plaguing Indigenous peoples. Even when we attempt to move beyond the limits of one analogy, we potentially slide into another. Rather than reject colonial analogies altogether, I thus want to conclude by embracing the politics of indeterminacy invoked by Iyko Day and Nasser Abourahme in the introduction to this special issue. To call attention to the limits of analogy is not to reject colonial analogies altogether. As scholars such as Brenna Bhandar and Mahmood Mamdani powerfully show, comparative frameworks emphasizing analogies with the histories and continued colonization of cases like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States not only illuminates key dimensions of the complex relations of power characterizing settler colonial contexts like Israel/Palestine, including but not limited to the mutually reinforcing processes of racialization and property acquisition as well as the construction of exclusive conceptions of political community. For both of these scholars, analogies between Israeli settler colonialism and South African apartheid provide new normative horizons for the politics of decolonization, while for others such analogies provide powerful tools in repertoires of nonviolent resistance against colonial rule.66

As I have suggested, however, there are also real limits to relying on the colonial analogy as the basis for transnational solidarity—limits that M4BL and adjacent Black–Palestinian solidarity activists have sought to move beyond. The problem with the colonial analogy as it was evoked in the Black Power movement in the 1960s is that the hegemonic meaning of colonialism risks displacing attention to the specificities of settler colonialism in Palestine. By collapsing differences between distinct forms of racial-colonial injustice, the colonial analogy fails to pay attention to the historical specificities of different systems of colonial and racial domination. Any form of anticolonial solidarity between differently racialized and colonized groups requires some framework of intellectual operations that connect those different instances of colonial domination. Analogies purport to compare objects when what is under consideration in such anticolonial connections are relations of power. Analogical modes of comparison risk obscuring certain relations of production by hypostatizing different sites of colonial domination into what Feldman calls a “stable epistemic grid.” In juxtaposing disparate forms of colonial domination in a comparative frame, the colonial analogy collapses contextually bound relations of power into a matrix of identity. Comparative procedures embedded in the colonial analogy thus potentially obscure structural transnational connections.67 When freed from this presumptive necessity to ground anticolonial solidarity on colonial analogies qua distinct objects (e.g., anti-Black oppression is like the Israeli occupation of Palestine), a focus on structural interconnections allows for a more historically sophisticated analysis of the geographic specificities of different colonial forms without allowing these specificities to overdetermine or undermine transnational solidarity. In this regard, it is essential to always ask what colonial analogies might enable in terms of a critical analysis of colonial technologies of rule as well as what they might constrict or displace from view.

Grappling with these limits, however, need not entail a complete rejection of analogical modes of thinking. Rather, the question is what we ask analogies to accomplish politically. While colonial analogies may inform our critical analyses of power relations and logics of capital accumulation, they need not provide the primary or even necessary basis of transnational solidarities. For instance, in an effort to disaggregate the specificities of different forms of primitive accumulation, Robert Nichols commends “working with a distinction between exploitation [of labor] and dispossession [of land].”68 The purpose is not to wholly separate the two but rather to allow for relating to the two in a variety of historically distinct and contingent ways, as mutually constitutive in shaping the internal logics of contemporary, globalized capitalism. Moreover, the absence of such distinctions in theories of racial capitalism leads to a dynamic of conceptual stretching where the concept of primitive accumulation comes to stand in for a wide array of disparate forms of land and labor expropriation/exploitation.69 Yet when we no longer rely on the colonial analogy as the necessary or primary basis of solidarity, these kinds of critical distinctions between exploitation and dispossession can be retained without necessarily limiting solidaristic political claims. It is precisely by loosening the need for colonial analogies to ground transnational solidarity that we can guard against the risk of “creating unnecessary binaries between studies of colonialism and settler colonialism” and better account for the how the “racially inscribed dispossession and the capitalist modes of accumulation that subtend expropriative practices have developed in spatially and temporally differentiated ways.”70 In this way, the structural view of anticolonial solidarity elaborated here centers not on analogical struggles against colonial empire but on the mutually imbricated technologies of capital accumulation and colonial governmentality that circulate across colonial spaces.

Adam Dahl is associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research sits at the intersection of critical theory, democratic theory, and intellectual history. Specifically, it examines the colonial and imperial lineages of key concepts in democratic thought such as citizenship, political responsibility, peoplehood, and popular sovereignty. He is the author of Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought (2018). His other research has been published in an array of venues such as the Journal of Politics, Modern Intellectual History, Perspectives on Politics, Polity, and Constellations.

Notes

1. 1. Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Platform,” https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/.

2. 2. Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (University of California Press, 2013).

3. 3. M4BL, “Vision for Black Lives: Invest-Divest,” https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/invest-divest/.

4. 4. Greenblatt quoted in Mazin Sidahmed, “Critics Denounce Black Lives Matter Platform Accusing Israel of ‘Genocide,’” Guardian, August 11, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/11/black-lives-matters-movement-palestine-platform-israel-critics.

5. 5. Sidahmed, “Critics Denounce Black Lives Matter Platform.”

6. 6. Jewish Community Relations Council, “Statement Regarding Black Lives Matter Platform,” August 3, 2016, https://www.jcrcboston.org/jcrc-statement-regarding-Black-lives-matter-platform/.

7. 7. Barbara Arneil, Domestic Colonies: The Inward Turn to Colony (Oxford University Press, 2017), 20.

8. 8. Siddhant Issar, “Listening to Black Lives Matter: Racial Capitalism and the Critique of Neoliberalism,” Contemporary Political Theory 20, no. 1 (2021): 48–71. Also see Erin R. Pineda, Seeing like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford University Press, 2021).

9. 9. Eldridge Cleaver, “The Land Question and Black Liberation,” Post-Prison Writings and Speeches (Random House, 1968), 67.

10. 10. Dean E. Robinson, Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 88. On this point, also see Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (Archon Books, 1978).

11. 11. Sam Klug, “Making the Internal Colony: Black Internationalism, Development, and the Politics of Colonial Comparison in the United States, 1940–1975” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2020), 20.

12. 12. Martin Robison Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States and Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party (Humanity Books, 2004), 42.

13. 13. George Cornewall Lewis, Essay on the Government of Dependencies (Clarendon Press, 1891), 168, 172.

14. 14. Michael Gorup, Counterrevolutionary Shadow: Race and the Making of the American People (University Press of Kansas, forthcoming), chap. 5.

15. 15. Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton University Press, 2019), 86.

16. 16. David MacDonald, “Indigenous Peoples and Self-Determination in Settler States,” in Routledge Handbook of Self-Determination and Secession, ed. Ryan Griffiths, Aleksander Pavkovi, and Peter Radan (Routledge, 2023), 103–4.

17. 17. Jodi A. Byrd, Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 135.

18. 18. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 31.

19. 19. Paul Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor (University of Toronto Press, 1977), 17.

20. 20. Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (Vintage, 1992), 4–5; Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, vol. 2, The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (Transaction Publishers, 1996).

21. 21. Ture and Hamilton, Black Power, 5; Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (International Publishers, 1966).

22. 22. Stone quoted in Ture and Hamilton, Black Power, 2–3.

23. 23. Cleaver, “Land Question and Black Liberation,” 57–58.

24. 24. Cleaver, “Land Question and Black Liberation,” 57.

25. 25. Cleaver, “Land Question and Black Liberation,” 61.

26. 26. Cleaver, “Land Question and Black Liberation,” 65, 67.

27. 27. Cleaver, “Land Question and Black Liberation,” 68.

28. 28. Theodor Herzl, A Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question (Federation of American Zionists, 1917), 34.

29. 29. Cleaver, “Land Question and Black Liberation,” 67.

30. 30. Pineda, Seeing like an Activist, 59.

31. 31. Fayez A. Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (PLO Research Center, 1965), v.

32. 32. Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, 1–2.

33. 33. Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, 5.

34. 34. Robin D. G. Kelley, “Yes, I Said, ‘National Liberation,’” in Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation, ed. Vijay Prashad (Verso, 2015), 147.

35. 35. Keith P. Feldman, A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 62.

36. 36. Kelley goes on to note that Black identification with Israel shifted and waned largely as a result of the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, which brought into focus the connections between Israel and U.S. imperialism. It is notable, however, that Cleaver’s argument persisted into this postwar phase.

37. 37. Michael R. Fischbach, Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color (Standford University Press, 2019); Feldman, Shadow over Palestine; Nadia Alahmed, “‘Black Intifada’: Black Arts Movement, Palestinian Poetry of Resistance and the Roots of Black and Palestinian Solidarity” (PhD diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2019).

38. 38. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997).

39. 39. M4BL, “Vision for Black Lives: Policy Platform,” https://m4bl.org/v4bl/.

40. 40. M4BL, “Vision for Black Lives: Reparations,” https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/reparations/.

41. 41. Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (South End Press, 2000); Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Howard University Press, 1982).

42. 42. M4BL, “Vision for Black Lives: Invest-Divest.”

43. 43. M4BL, “Vision for Black Lives: Invest-Divest.”

44. 44. M4BL, “Vision for Black Lives: Invest-Divest.”

45. 45. See, for instance, Kwame Ture (as Stokely Carmichael), “Power and Racism: What We Want,” Black Scholar 27, no. 3/4 (1997): 52–57.

46. 46. M4BL, “Vision for Black Lives: Reparations.”

47. 47. M4BL, “Vision for Black Lives: Political Power,” https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/political-power/.

48. 48. M4BL, “Vision for Black Lives: Invest/Divest.”

49. 49. M4BL, “Vision for Black Lives: Invest/Divest.”

50. 50. My structural understanding of transnational solidarity is deeply indebted to Iris Marion Young, “Responsibility and Global Justice: A Social Connection Model,” Social Philosophy and Policy 23, no. 1 (January 2006): 102–30.

51. 51. Dream Defenders, “Dream Defenders Statement on the Condemnation of Movement for Black Lives Platform by Some Pro-Israel Groups,” Mondoweiss, August 7, 2016, https://mondoweiss.net/2016/08/defenders-statement-condemnation/.

52. 52. Annie Robbins, “New Black-Palestinian Solidarity Video Features Lauryn Hill, Rasmea Odeh, Danny Glover,” October 14, 2015, Mondoweiss, https://mondoweiss.net/2015/10/palestinian-solidarity-jerusalemthey/.

53. 53. Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle (Haymarket Books, 2016), 20.

54. 54. Juliet Hooker, Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2009), 38.

55. 55. Robin D. G. Kelley, “From the River to the Sea to Every Mountain Top: Solidarity as Worldmaking,” Journal of Palestine Studies 48, no. 4 (Summer 2019): 69.

56. 56. Justin Leroy, “Black History in Occupied Territory: On the Entanglements of Slavery and Settler Colonialism,” Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (2016): https://muse.jhu.edu/article/633276.

57. 57. Russell Rickford, “To Build a New World,” Journal of Palestine Studies 48, no. 4 (Summer 2019): 59–60.

58. 58. Rickford, “To Build a New World,” 53.

59. 59. Nadine Naber, “‘The U.S. and Israel Make the Connections for Us’: Anti-Imperialism and Black–Palestinian Solidarity,” Critical Ethnic Studies 3, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 23, 25.

60. 60. Naber, “‘U.S. and Israel Make the Connections,” 19.

61. 61. Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (Verso, 2016), 243–44. On the exploitation of Palestinian labor, see Andrew Ross, Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel (Verso, 2019).

62. 62. Wolfe, Traces of History, 270.

63. 63. Jordan Skinner, “The Indians of Palestine: An Interview Between Gilles Deleuze and Elias Sanbar,” Verso Blog, August 8, 2014, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1684-the-indians-of-palestine-an-interview-between-gilles-deleuze-and-elias-sanbar. Also see Elias Sanbar, “Out of Place, Out of Time,” Mediterranean Historical Review 16, no. 1 (2001): 87–94.

64. 64. Edward W. Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969–1994 (Vintage Books, 1995); Steven Salaita, Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

65. 65. Quoted in Juliana Hu Pegues, “Empire, Race, and Settler Colonialism: BDS and Contingent Solidarities,” Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (October 2016): https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/633272.

66. 66. Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Duke University Press, 2018); Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Harvard University Press, 2020); Nina Fischer, “Palestinian Non-Violent Resistance and the Apartheid Analogy,” Interventions 23, no. 8 (2011): 1124–39.

67. 67. Feldman, Shadow over Palestine, 70; Micol Seigel, “Beyond Compare: Comparative Method After the Transnational Turn,” Radical History Review 91 (Winter 2005): 62–90.

68. 68. Robert Nichols, “Disaggregating Primitive Accumulation,” Radical Philosophy 194 (November/December 2015): 22.

69. 69. Siddhant Issar, “Theorising ‘Racial/Colonial Primitive Accumulation’: Settler Colonialism, Slavery, and Racial Capitalism,” Race & Class 63, no. 1 (2021): 23–50.

70. 70. Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah, “Acts and Omissions: Framing Settler Colonialism in Palestine Studies,” Jadaliyya, January 14, 2016, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/32857.