“Love Is Older than ‘Israel’”

Introduction: Sociopolitical Flashpoints of the Black Radical Tradition and Black–Palestinian Transnational Solidarity

There is a haunting prescience to reflecting on Palestinian joint struggle at the very moment Israel launches its most brutal genocidal onslaught against Palestinians in Gaza to date and campus protests for Palestine across the country are invariably met with violent police repression. But as opposition to Israel’s Gaza genocide continues to rise globally, we are presented with an opportunity to reckon with the implications of pointed critiques of the Zionist project elaborated by activists who over the years have struggled against and resisted the bolstering of settler colonialism in Palestine as well as its global ramifications. We have also witnessed a revisitation and debate surrounding the terms, conditions, and possibilities of Black–Palestinian solidarity in relationship to the U.S. presidency: The possible election of former federal prosecutor Kamala Harris has topically reinvigorated conversations and contentious debates about the history and current possibilities for Black–Palestinian solidarity against the specter of another potential Trump presidency and the Biden administration’s unfettered support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. As such, writers and activists like Momodou Taal argue for recalling the rich history of Black–Palestinian solidarity as a corrective to the imperialist stalemate posed by the elections. Taal specifically urges us to recall the tradition of internationalism that guided revolutionary thinkers such as Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) in confronting Zionism as “a European colonial enterprise, akin to other forms of oppression faced by Black communities.” The emergence of new waves of solidarity in the wake of Israel’s genocide in Gaza in turn provide new opportunities to vindicate the principle of internationalism through collective, collaborative undertakings that challenge reductive liberal understandings of identity and histories of resistance.1 I argue that thinking through the extant formations of Black–Palestinian solidarity as reflected through creative expression can be useful in recalling the different possibilities for liberation-focused cooperation put forth by insurgent imaginations, past and present.

First, a clarification of terms: my analysis of literary Black–Palestinian transnational solidarity, or BPTS, is geographically situated between the United States and Palestine. I realize that this analytical framework runs the risk of reinscribing particular hegemonic trends in regional scholarship. As Noura Erakat and Marc Lamont Hill note in their introduction to the Journal of Palestine Studies’ special issue on BPTS, “A key shortcoming with regard to studying BPTS is the issue of geographic limitation. As it stands, the current scholarly literature focuses almost exclusively on Blacks and Palestinians within the United States.”2

Among other issues, this limitation also obscures the prominence of the South African antiapartheid struggle to broader considerations of BPTS. Erakat and Hill note as much in their introduction, observing how a U.S.-centric focus to questions of BPTS elides the unique character of South African political solidarity with Palestine.3 It is also crucial to acknowledge the broader confluence of anti-imperial and anticolonial solidarities signified by South Africa historically and presently. The triangulation of Palestinian, Black American, and Black South African solidarity emerging within the context of the South African antiapartheid movement allowed for the cohering of a broader global analytic for situating the racialist logics, aspirations, and potential material outcomes of Zionism as an ideology and state project. Robin D. G. Kelley notes that Black solidarity between the United States and South Africa came to coalesce around Palestinian liberation increasingly from the 1960s onward and that this coalescence gained increasing coherence and international legitimation through developments including the U.N. General Assembly’s approval of the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, its passage of U.N. Resolution 3379 declaring Zionism “a form of racism and racial discrimination,” its attempted expulsion of both Israel and South Africa from its body, and the alliance between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the African National Congress.4 Yet as Taal makes clear, even when not reflected in ostensible chronological or geographical focus, these solidary histories are latent within contemporary movements and moments.

I further note that none of the writers under analysis in this work are Afro-Palestinian, an omission I realize carries the potential to reinforce an additional form of hegemony through delinking Blackness from Palestinianness, however inadvertently or unintentionally. While I realize that acknowledgment alone may be insufficient to offset gaps of analytical framing, I nevertheless uplift the centrality of Afro-Palestinian resistance to the Palestinian struggle as well as the broader ethos of internationalism, Third-Worldism, and anti-imperial resistance that inform Black–Palestinian solidarity and related initiatives for comprehensive, collective liberation. As Greg Thomas observes:

For “Black Power” internationally, Kwame Ture would refer to Palestine as “the tip of Africa” and uphold Fatima Bernawi, the iconic Black woman who’s been named “the first Palestinian female prisoner,” as the paragon of “Black and Palestinian Revolutions.” She is likewise canonized by other Afro-Palestinian icons themselves, such as Ali Jiddeh and Mahmoud Jiddeh, of the African Community of the Old City of Jerusalem . . . [and] Ahmad and Jumaa Takouri of Occupied Jericho, who are each among the greatest of all icons across Historic Palestine, a country which has produced multiple Black Panther formations in Hebrew as well as Arabic in the 1970s and 1980s.5

It is my hope that commitment to the broader political and ethical context of struggle informing this analysis will be reflected despite these limitations, prefiguring new attempts that will continue to strive to validate the fullness and complexity of liberation work—even as striving does not constitute a fait accompli in and of itself. When we come to this realization, we arrive in turn at the zero point between action and principle and begin to grasp the paradoxical character of an always in-motion solidarity—its very incompleteness becomes productive. As Sophia Azeb argues:

The solidarities we build and enact are not inevitable. To assume any political coherence among the colonized reflects a desire for stasis of our political thought and liberatory action. We are not static, unmoving. We are in motion. Our commitments to one another (within and beyond the movement for Palestinian liberation) may reveal many more fissures than similarities. These commitments should reveal more fissures than similarities. These impasses are generative. If we move within and explore the contours of these impasses, we more effectively counter and complicate the stagnancy of sameness as constructing the bonds between us: that hollow impulse of analogy.6

Far from incidental, these considerations are part of the work of solidarity writ large.

Black–Palestinian solidarity offers a crucial node of resistance through which to access the possibilities of joint struggle constituting a multipronged critique of the global aspirations of Zionist settler colonialism. Yet rather than remaining rooted in the material sites of activism, I am particularly concerned with the critical work of the radical imagination in pointing to other necessary possibilities of global belonging made legible through the rejection of current paradigms of dehumanization and dispossession facilitated through the euphemism of “securitization.” For this reason, I turn to literature, specifically poetry. In this article, I analyze what I consider to be an example of literary joint struggle reflected within the dialogic creative works of Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd and Caribbean American surrealist blues poet aja monet. In speaking to one another across ostensibly disparate geographies and contexts of struggle and denouncing the felt convergences of racial and colonial violence, I argue that both poets collectively denounce racial-colonial paradigms of subjugation and effectively affirm the notion and possibility of solidarity as an ideal rooted in collective liberation and empowerment, an undertaking I define as “solidarity poetics.”7

In 2019, the Journal of Palestine Studies released a special issue coedited by Noura Erakat and Marc Lamont Hill dedicated to the issue of Black–Palestinian transnational solidarity. Tellingly, the first few lines of the introductory essay authored by the coeditors are dedicated to recounting a contemporary reflection of the very phenomenon the special issue was compiled to examine in depth. Erakat and Hill begin their essay by reflecting on legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s column in The New York Times in which she expresses the need to “break the silence” on Palestine, qualified as “one of the great moral challenges of our time,” as well as the subsequent backlash.8 Both authors dismiss columnist Bret Stephens’s critique of “progressive” (specifically Black) antisemitism demonstrated through support for the Palestinian cause as problematic not only for its false conflation of critique of Israeli policy with antisemitism but also for its ignorance of what they identify to be “part of a Black radical tradition that has always been transnational in character and international in scope.”9

Erakat and Hill draw from Russell Rickford in qualifying Black internationalism as a “‘global Black imaginary’” that situated the Black struggle in the United States as “part of a global [struggle] against racial capitalism epitomized by imperial domination.”10 They note that Black internationalism emerged in the early twentieth century and evolved alongside and through “significant historical junctures such as World Wars I and II, as well as the anti-colonial revolt that defined the 1960s and 1970s.”11 Erakat and Hill place the aftermath of the 1967 war as the emergence of Black solidarity with Palestine, clarifying that “elements of the black radical tradition that allied with the Palestinian struggle understood it as not only a principled response to a specific historical injustice, but also as the signpost of an analytical understanding of imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy as global phenomena that subsume the Black American condition.”12

The authors introduce the term Black–Palestinian transnational solidarity to capture what they identify as a renewal of Black solidarity with Palestine that is evidence of the historical tendencies of Black internationalism. They cite the summer of 2014—a historic moment that witnessed both Israel’s bombardment of Gaza as well as the militarized police occupation of Ferguson, Missouri, following the police murder of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown Jr.—as the contemporary fulcrum for the renewal of BPTS in the present age.13

I cite Erakat and Hill’s analysis at length for its insights as well as its historical predicament, by which I mean its qualification of historical and contemporary convergence from the very space within which this convergence takes shape. The process of anchoring analysis of Black–Palestinian solidarity with the latest relevant example will, as Erakat and Hill demonstrate, inevitably contain an element of familiarity because such an example will both be in keeping with the Black radical tradition but also reflect a particular trajectory of global militarization. There is, therefore, always an analytical utility to excavating the past, for such an excavation makes a broader comprehension of the present possible through clarifying the echoes and the breaks of contemporary sociopolitical flashpoints.14

Solidarity Poetics and Pacification Prosaics

Indeed, 2014, the galvanizing example for contemporary BPTS cited by Erakat and Hill, exudes a deepened relevance today, at the very moment that Israel is engaged in its most genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza to date. In the introduction to his seminal anthology Gaza Writes Back, the late Palestinian poet and scholar Refaat Alareer, who was murdered by Israel in December 2023, reflects on how 2008’s Operation Cast Lead needed to be viewed both as part of an ongoing process of Palestinian dispossession initiated with the so-called founding of the Israeli state and as an escalation in the norms of Israeli violence against Palestinians in Gaza.15 The year 2008 marked the first large-scale instance under which the new normal for Palestinians in Gaza would mean not only grappling with an inhumane siege imposed since 2006 but also the routinization of periodic, large-scale bombardment campaigns, referred to by some scholars as “mowing the lawn.”16 Recalling 2008 and 2014 (Operation Protective Edge) and, ultimately, 1948 in sequence enables us to see how Israeli violence against Palestinians is structural and progressive even as it exceeds its own precedents in particular flashpoints. The Gaza genocide of today was therefore continuously rehearsed and ritualized within the foundational structure of violence that is Zionist settler colonialism.17

But 2014 is also notable for the now widely cited example of Palestinians tweeting instructions for Ferguson protestors on how to deal with tear gas.18 Such an exchange is unique in exuding the embattled potential for digital spaces to serve as conduits of dissent in addition to disciplinary sites of data extraction facilitating government and police surveillance (not to mention generally acting as an arm of Zionist settler colonial erasure of Palestine through censorship and direct coordination to provide Israeli occupation forces with data to facilitate the murder of Palestinians).19 The interaction also reflects the coming together of variously racialized subjects in real-time resistance against the disciplinary apparatuses of increasingly consolidating racial-colonial regimes. While the Ferguson uprisings were cited in U.S. media as examples of the dangers of police militarization, the Palestine overlap is crucial in cinching the colonial dimensions of policing in potential as well as historical formation considering the colonial histories and presents of both Israel and the United States. These convergences help illuminate the hollowness of the self-serving paradigm of “security” to capture the essence of the machinery and logics of disciplinary violence deployed to quash resistance to colonial and racial repression.

Palestinian feminist scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian argues that Israeli settler colonial violence against and surveillance of Palestinians is cohered through what she terms “security theology,” which is in turn facilitated through Israel’s successful mobilization of a “politics of fear”: “In order to maintain a productive global and local industry and political economy that produces and reproduces fear, Israel’s ‘security’ was transformed into a religion, and an indubitable theology. . . . The discursive collapse of biblical and security claims works to exonerate racist structures; to mask state violence through the biblical/security prism naturalizes the dispossession of Palestinians.”20

In the Western context, Mark Neocleous and George S. Rigakos write extensively on the importance of understanding “security” as a hegemonic framework that legitimizes the inherent violence of policing. They write that “the more we succumb to the discourse of security . . . the more we become complicit in the exercise of police powers.”21 Neocleous and Rigakos argue for replacing security with pacification to realize a more comprehensive assessment of the role of policing in society: “The question is therefore not ‘public versus private’ or ‘civil society versus the state,’ but the unity of bourgeois violence and the means by which pacification is legitimized in the name of security.”22

Jeff Halper applies Neocleous and Rigakos’s framework to argue that the exportation of Israeli military and surveillance models, weaponry, and techniques, which he terms “security politics,” reflects an increasingly homogenizing trend toward a “global pacification industry” in which Israel’s military occupation is an essential resource for developing military and surveillance technologies exported to other global hegemons.23 I concur that the materiality of converging disciplinary logics and practices between Israeli military and U.S. police forces (which themselves began as agents of racial and settler colonial genocidal expansion, as Andrea J. Ritchie writes in Invisible No More) is a crucial example of the analytic utility of conceiving “security” as “pacification.”24 I also maintain that the words and gestures of Black and Palestinian activists and writers engaged in moments of conjunctural dissent display a powerful refutation of security qua pacification, reflecting, however fleetingly, the possibilities for an alternative world order unbounded by racialized logics of hierarchical violence.25

In the aforementioned example, instructions on how to deal with tear gas transcend their literal connotations, becoming reference guides for escaping the increasingly monolingual character of racial state disciplinary paradigms. Its urgency cathected around the mutually implicating dangers of the globalization of racial-colonial paradigms and affinities, and the patent logic of “security” as pacification, the tear gas is a metonym, a symbolic stand-in doubly reflective of both converging patterns of racialized securitization and newly channeled possibilities for resistance. Through exporting strategies for ensuring individual well-being in resisting an increasingly common tool for pacifying dissent, these exchanges serve as an important prelude to what I am defining as solidarity poetics, which challenge hegemonic frameworks of securitization qua pacification.

Just as repressive colonial state projects draw from and reference one another, so too must the creative insurgency of resistance. Therefore, solidarity poetics operate in opposition to what we might term the “pacification prosaics” of the state, those hegemonic logics that variously justify or downplay the inherent violence of racialized security paradigms. By pacification prosaics, I’m categorizing different symbolic, linguistic, and cultural strategies and practices of rendering racialized and repressive security paradigms as variously prosaic or normal. Part of the work of solidarity poetics therefore lies in disrupting hegemony’s innocence, exposing the often-unspoken violences and oppressions that suture and structure quotidian existence under repressive racial and colonial regimes.

In addition to synthesizing the formulations of Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Neocleous and Rigakos, and Halper, solidarity poetics draws on Paulo Freire and Robin Kelley’s explorations of solidarity. In defining praxis as the interconnected processes of “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” by strugglers for liberation and those who show “true solidarity,” Freire captures the converging postures of action and reflection in resistance and genuine solidarity, culminating in an outcome by which praxis leads to a “critical awareness of oppression.”26

I also draw from the ideas of solidarity put forth in Robin D. G. Kelley’s concept of “world-making” (which is, incidentally, taken from an essay in the same special issue of Journal of Palestine Studies from which Erakat and Hill’s introduction originates). According to Kelley, solidarity grounded in revolutionary world-making means that “solidarity . . . is more than short-term alliances or coalitions, but a sort of prefigurative politics that demands of us a deeper transformation of society and of our relationships to one another.”27

As I define it, solidarity poetics enacted through BPTS is a radical and fugitive form of creative signification that emerges from the crossroads of U.S. racial capitalism’s global aspirations, reflected in particular through the consolidation of militarized settler colonial impunity vis-à-vis contemporaneous synchronization between U.S. and Israeli security regimes.28 In this way, solidarity poetics helps us to think of Palestine beyond analogy, for Palestine emerges not as an analytic but as a refractive space whose successful colonization feeds back upon the structure, integrity, and direction of U.S. disciplinary violence. Thus, while I believe solidarity poetics are evident in texts spanning decades, they are fundamentally a present-oriented mode of creative praxis that attest to how the current coming together of logics and technologies of racial and colonial dispossession can and must be dismantled as a precondition for liberated futures.

Become Palestinian, Born Black: June Jordan and Suheir Hammad

While solidarity poetics are not limited to poetry per se, poetry proves an effective vehicle for their dissemination—particularly what we might call Black–Palestinian dialogic poetry, which speaks to overlaps of oppression across geographies and temporalities of sociopolitical particularization. The most famous example of this phenomenon is no doubt the creative synergy between Suheir Hammad and June Jordan, with Hammad’s iconic Born Palestinian, Born Black having emerged in part as a statement of gratitude and resonance with Jordan’s own poetic solidarity with Palestine. Therí A. Pickens writes that Hammad’s “poetry and essays facilitate cross-cultural conversations between Blacks and Arabs about myriad social and political issues.” Pickens underscores Hammad’s acknowledged indebtedness to the influence of Jordan, who “transformed her understanding of what poetry can do and who can have a voice.” As a result, “Hammad’s poetry takes up a project similar to Jordan’s, discussing global injustice and also explicitly linking it back to US domestic issues with race, class, and gender.” Pickens’s observations reveal the recursive potential for literary influence and joint struggle: inspired by Jordan, Hammad in turn initiated a dynamic poetic praxis that mobilized the possibilities of interrelation.29 As is by now relatively well-rehearsed among critics, Hammad was so inspired by the final few lines of Jordan’s “Moving Towards Home,” which closed her 1985 collection Living Room, that she titled her own collection Born Palestinian, Born Black at her publisher’s suggestion.30 In an interview, Hammad states her belief that by making the suggestion to her, Harlem River Press founder Glenn Thompson was providing her with a gift and also possibly drawing connections between his own experiences as a Black man in the United States and what he had encountered on a trip to Palestine in the 1960s.31 “I was born a Black woman,” Jordan’s conclusion begins, “and now / I am become a Palestinian / against the relentless laughter of evil / there is less and less living room / and where are my loved ones? / It is time to make our way home.”32 A partial pun, “It is time to make our way home” signals not only a literal turning back toward home but also, and most importantly, the occasion to transform the world into a place truly fit for life, an authentic “home” for all whereby existence is no longer cohered through the pretext of differential oppression and marginalization.

“Moving Towards Home” emerged in direct response to the flashpoint of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, which highlighted the genocidal dimensions of Zionist violence and its facilitation by U.S. imperialism within the context of the Lebanese civil war, a detail that assumes a harrowing new relevance as current Israeli assaults on Lebanon have reportedly murdered more than 2,100 individuals and displaced 1.2 million.33 Jordan powerfully lists the various euphemisms used to justify the taking of Palestinian and Lebanese life—like “‘to purify’ a people,” “to step up the military pressure”—alongside language that refuses to sanitize the true extent of the violence committed by Israelis and fascist Lebanese forces: “I do not wish to speak about the bulldozer and the / red dirt.” Jordan’s poem thus reflects how literary BPTS draws universal and internationalist aspirations from comparative and contingent particulars of sociopolitical oppression.

Hammad’s collection is also concerned with an ethics of relation, but the voices of either poet differ greatly. The speaker in some of Hammad’s work seems to castigate American audiences for only thinking of domestic atrocities and remaining ignorant of the racialized violence to which Palestinians are subjected. Comparison emerges as the apparent register of select pieces, as Hammad writes of refugee camps that make one “long for the projects” and colonial-military violence that is read as domestic police violence on steroids. Yet another possible reading, in line with Alex Lubin’s analysis of how Jordan’s and Hammad’s collections emerge at a crucial juncture regarding the onset of neoliberalization, is that Hammad’s conflation of both struggles suggests the converging of processes of ghettoization and military/police violence.34 Perhaps it is what the poet feels to be the inherent relatedness of patterns of suffering and oppression that cinches the urgency of the elocution. Michelle Hartman writes, “Hammad’s poetry is clearly influenced by and reflects not only the rhymes and rhythms but also the break beats of hip-hop” and that Hammad forged connections with the Black Arts Movement as well as “the poets of the hip-hop generation, or as some have called them the BreakBeat poets.”35 Building off of these literary influences and solidarities, the groundbreaking work that Hammad began with Born Palestinian, Born Black and continued throughout her subsequent collections helped inspire Palestinian and Arab American hip-hop aesthetics through the use of hip-hop, an American genre defined in and through domestic antiracist struggle, to accommodate expressions of Palestinian, Palestinian American, and, at times, Arab American struggle. The returns of Hammad’s creative dialogism continue to be felt, as Palestinian and Arab American spoken word artists continue to mount performances in this vein and Palestinian hip-hop groups such as Ramallah Underground and DAM enjoy increasing visibility and fame.36

In In the Wake of the Poetic: Palestinian Artists After Darwish, Najat Rahman argues for a new classification of Palestinian poetry such as that practiced by Hammad following the Oslo Accords of the early 1990s. This new Palestinian poetry is often diasporic and multilingual, authored by Palestinians from all over the world who, even as they claim the celebrated national poet Mahmoud Darwish as their exemplar, complicate and extend Palestinian poetic identity in new directions not easily assimilable into the earlier formation of poetry in the service of a homeland liberated from colonialism in quite the same way that Darwish’s work had attempted.37 Indeed, Rahman notes that the exigencies of exile often force this new Palestinian poetry to redefine prior notions of “home” and “belonging” following the Palestinian political establishment’s capitulation to tête-à-tête diplomacy with Israeli colonizers before any concessions had been made regarding surrender of Palestinian lands or the granting of full autonomy, as well as the newly formed Palestinian Authority’s abdication of any responsibility toward exiled populations under the Oslo Accords, which reduced the future of a Palestinian state to only Palestinians in the bifurcated West Bank and Gaza Strip.38 Lubin argues that the time frame spanning the solidarity of June Jordan and Suheir Hammad ought to be distinguished from the preceding internationalist context that had formalized BPTS. While the earlier mode of internationalist political radicalism “emerged during the ‘global offensive’ of third world internationalism” under which “the logic of nonalignment helped forge a global, anti-imperialist ‘third-way’ between the US and Soviet frameworks,” the late 1980s saw the United States rise to “unipolar hegemon” and the onset of global neoliberal projects promoted by the United States (such as the Oslo Accords) as well as the United States’ interlinked launching of “domestic wars on crime, drugs, and then terror” that “placed urban communities in the United States within an increasingly militarized crucible.”39 The political conditions from which expressions of solidarity would be formalized were therefore reconfigured in a new era of neoliberalization and securitization.

Yet while the Oslo Accords reflected a blow to the revolutionary character of Palestinian national liberation, it is important to note that diaspora is not merely an endpoint but an active site that generates its own possibilities for dissent. Poets like Hammad helped to revitalize a diasporic connection to anticolonial struggle that also catalyzed important contemporary configurations of solidarity. The BPTS enacted by Jordan and Hammad entails the codification of new imaginaries of collective resistance that together imply the possible undoing of converging colonial and imperial realities and regimes. It also established a powerful precedent for transnational solidarity as newer generations of Palestinians in the generation of Mohammed El-Kurd have risen up to directly refute the collaborationist cadence of the Oslo Accords.

For the remainder of this article, I will turn to the literary solidarity expressed between El-Kurd and aja monet, arguing how it constitutes an urgent and timely reflection of solidarity poetics through its contemporary concern with the resonance between Israeli and U.S. racial-disciplinary regimes and the ensuant imperative to resist them.

“Love Is Older than ‘Israel’”

Self-described “community organizer, surrealist blues poet, and teacher” aja monet grew up in Brooklyn, New York, “where the incessant harassment of the Black community by way of the police was an untenable growing pain.”40 In 2007, monet, who proudly follows in “the long tradition and legacy of poets participating and assembling in social movements,” won the Grand Slam Poetry Award from the Nuyorican Poets Café, a storied cultural institution in New York’s Lower East Side dedicated to exhibiting and showcasing literary and performance art by people of color. 41 The space was an outgrowth of artistic and ethnic convergence: Nuyorican is a portmanteau combining New York and Puerto Rican, representing what Harald Zapf, borrowing from Guillermo Gómez-Peña, refers to as “an inter-American ‘New World Border.’”42 Zapf cites Ed Morales in attributing the reclamation of Nuyorican from an initial context of disparagement, denoting “inferior versions of Puerto-Ricanness,” to writer and poet Miguel Algarín. Algarín copublished the first anthology of Nuyorican poetry and cofounded the Nuyorican Poets Café along with Miguel Piñero in the mid-1970s. Supposedly, the Nuyorican Poets Café emerged out of literary salons hosted in Algarín’s living room. As Zapf argues, the history and evolution of the café, particularly its growing emphasis on slam poetry, captures two high points: the rise of “ethnic nationalism in poetry” and a movement toward “transethnic performance poetry.”43 When asked in an interview with Talib Kweli about the significance that the café and the broader scene of which it was a part had for her at the time that she won the award, monet responded that it represented a synchronicity between being in community and developing one’s skills as a poet. Because of the legacy and influence of poets such as Algarín, Piñero, Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, and others, the Nuyorican Poets Café was by design a space where “you perfected your craft in community with people.”44 Given its emergence as a space and vehicle for community self-determination and solidarity vis-à-vis culture, particularly poetry, the Nuyorican Poets Café is highly significant to discussions of BPTS and solidarity poetics. Given this background, it is unsurprising that monet frames her relationship to poetry as rooted in what seems to be a broader ethics:

Certain poets have reflected establishment values and have been very focused on an objective that is rooted in accolades and awards. Then there are poets who understand poetry as the function of the people’s heart and spirit and truth. Poetry, to me, is more of an approach. It’s a way of being in the world.45

Thinking of poetry in this way, as “a way of being in the world,” elevates poetic practice from a detached aesthetic framework to an understanding of the poet as grounded in community uplift and resilience. Poetry, she continues, is “really like a possessive, obsessive sort of devotion that transcends into a deeper sort of core truth that is really resonant to the spirit.” Monet envisions collective being as that which gives coherence and shape to poetry, a formulation redolent of Antonio Gramsci’s notion of the organic intellectual. However, it is not poets who make movements, but the other way around: “Movements are incredibly powerful for the poets that are created through them. I don’t think poets create movements; I think movements create poets.”46

Mohammed El-Kurd is a Palestinian poet and the first Palestine correspondent for The Nation from the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. El-Kurd and the rest of his family have been in the international spotlight for years: Their home was forcibly occupied by Israeli settlers in 2009, and in 2021 El-Kurd took part in the resistance to the attempted expulsion of Palestinian families from Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan.47 And as with monet, El-Kurd’s poetic practice and journalism are arguably shaped by a broader ethics—the refusal to concede to racial and Orientalist logics of the “perfect victim,” what he terms “the politics of appeal.” As El-Kurd writes for The Nation:

For decades, well-meaning journalists and cultural workers used a humanizing framework in their representation of oppressed people in hopes of countering the traditional portrayal of the Palestinian as a terrorist. Not only did this produce a false, flattening dichotomy between terrorists and victims, but the victimhood that emerges within this framework is a perfect victimhood, an ethnocentric requirement for sympathy and solidarity.48

El-Kurd acknowledges that even as it takes on a specific character in relation to Palestinians, the politics of appeal is not limited to the Palestinian liberation struggle but also has implications for the Black liberation struggle:

We often overemphasize an oppressed person’s nonviolence, noble profession, disabilities; we ring them with accolades. And we do this not only in the Palestinian context, but also with regard to Black American victims of police brutality: “They were artists” or “They were mentally ill” or “They were unarmed.” It’s as if condemning the state for sanctioning the death of a Black person is permissible only if the slain person is a sterile model of American citizenry.49

El-Kurd’s attention to the imperative for cultural workers to defy racial and colonialist-rooted paradigms of humanity is thus grounded in principles reflecting the interconnected stakes of cultural dehumanization.

The connection between monet and El-Kurd arises at another crucial flashpoint: the 2021 uprisings in defense of Sheikh Jarrah. These uprisings sparked others, as well as defiance of Israeli occupation forces’ brutalization of worshippers in Al-Aqsa Mosque. The collective identity of the Palestinian people in resistance was vindicated through these initial 2021 uprisings and the Unity Intifada, which witnessed an explicit declaration of the interconnectedness of Palestinians from all over the world, a powerful rejection of the failed “peace process” paradigm initiated by the Oslo Accords, which reduced the relevance of a future Palestinian state only to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. By contrast, the Unity Intifada and the groundswell of resistance that paved the way for it constituted a rejuvenation of the interconnectedness of all Palestinians in pursuance of the total liberation of land and people that had characterized the Palestinian revolutionary struggle from the inception of the modern Palestinian liberation movement in the 1960s.50 The “Manifesto of Dignity and Hope” issued by these Palestinian resisters proudly asserts, “Palestinians are one people, one society”—a direct challenge to the geographically isolated framework of the Oslo Accords. The document talks of the need for ongoing resistance from all Palestinians—whatever “prison” they happen to be forced into by the Zionist regime—asserting that all Palestinians are a single people united by the ongoing struggle for liberation and the imperative to resist collectively.51

Yet part of the 2021 moment was a global shift in media narratives related to Palestine. As activists turned to social media to document their looming dispossession and resistance, the new configurations for discussions of Palestine were suddenly made possible. El-Kurd played an important role in this shift: A clip of an interview with him on CNN in which he refuses the interviewer’s attempt to characterize Palestinian protests against their looming expulsion from Sheikh Jarrah as “violent” by asserting that the forcible dispossession itself is the true example of “violence” went viral, embodying the sea change that was taking place in real time.52 But as El-Kurd himself notes, the discursive opportunities that met Palestinian resistance in 2021 were also informed by the George Floyd uprisings of 2020, which resulted in cultural shifts in attitudes related to legacies and structures of white supremacy. Responding to a question about his poem “Laugh” in an interview for Jewish Currents, El-Kurd states:

I am deeply influenced by Black liberation struggles. I don’t think our campaign this year—the global shift in rhetoric, people taking to the streets all around the world—would have been possible had it not been for the uprisings following the murder of George Floyd. That was the first time I’d seen abolition discussed repeatedly on TV, or widely inside American households. I think that emphasis on the need for a total shift prepared the world for the idea of decolonization from the river to the sea.53

While Palestinians have relentlessly documented and named their oppression, it is the broader opening about the nuances as well as the overall nature of white supremacy in 2020 that allowed for increased contemporary opportunities to call out the specific attributes of Zionist supremacy and Palestinian racialization reflected in digital feeds in real time. This sequential ordering of Black and Palestinian moments of resistance illustrates how BPTS is a cumulative and collaborative practice whose momentums can be mutually productive.

Aja monet took part in solidarity delegations to Palestine with the abolitionist organization the Dream Defenders and, along with other delegates, spent time in the home of El-Kurd and his great-grandmother, Rifqa El-Kurd, a celebrated figure of Palestinian steadfastness and defiance of Zionist settler colonialism who passed away on Tuesday, June 16, 2020, at the age of 103 years—older than the settler colonial state that emerged in 1948 and continues to dispossess her people to this day.54 Monet writes of this experience in her introduction to El-Kurd’s collection Rifqa:

We were a delegation of Black American movement organizers and artists. It was January 2015. The cold tapped bone. We huddled into a room to listen and learn, to feel and be connected, to organize. We visited Rifqa and Mohammed’s home in Sheikh Jarrah, where colonizing settlers had once forcibly entered and pushed their family to the back. Our delegation bore witness and asked what more could be done. “Go home and tell the world what you’ve seen here.”

Rifqa wasn’t asking a favor; it was a deafening command for American awareness and accountability. . . . I thought I was a radical poet before, but Palestine uprooted any sense of who I thought I was. I became more me, more true, more fearless.55

Monet’s concluding reflection of how visiting the El-Kurds’ family home in Palestine paradoxically made her “more me, more true” resonates with June Jordan’s notion of being “a Black woman / born again a Palestinian.” The experience of increasing familiarity with Zionist settler colonial violence cohering a sense of self as a Black artist reflects the mutual implications of imperially backed Zionist settler colonialism, as well as the colonial dimension of the Black liberation struggle.

Monet also wrote about this encounter in her poem “the giving tree,” featured in her debut 2017 poetry collection, My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter: “at the core of suffering, there is always a door, a wall. / the knob shouting, they came in violently. before / the sun rose, there was an Israeli flag / posted outside. Beit Hanina, Silwan, Sheikh Jarrah. They came in / violently for her home, her dignity, or both, veins on / a grandmother’s wrist pleading / over a stove that fed / the faces around it.”56

The grandmother here, clearly Rifqa, is portrayed as endangered yet resilient, proud, defiant, and generous. She feeds the delegates who assemble around her table, even as the staggering of Palestinian East Jerusalem neighborhoods resisting colonial encroachment (Beit Hanina, Silwan, Sheikh Jarrah) and the detail of the setter colonial Israeli flag being posted “outside” reflect an imminent attempt at displacement. The poetic Rifqa implores the delegates to locate El-Kurd: “Here / is my grandson, Muhammad, a poet. Please bring him.”57 And while settler violence encircles them (“there / is killing all around, blood thirsts the ground”), the poem concludes by linking the violence of Zionist settler colonialism currently taking place to the delegates’ U.S. citizenship, a privilege made possible through imperialism and settler colonialism: “They came in violently, she says. / we came in violently. / displaced, black, and american. still, still. / she fed us.”58

Here, “we came in violently” reveals how the violence of Zionist colonization, its forceful pacification of Indigenous life and resistance, is not wholly separable from the carrying of U.S. citizenship. Notably, “black” modifies but does not entirely disrupt the sense of complicity with which monet powerfully renders the scene. “Violently” here denotes the poetic speaker’s awareness of what their presence signifies for colonized Palestinians, but Rifqa El-Kurd nevertheless invites the delegates in, providing them food and shelter. Rifqa’s hospitality and monet’s conscientious framing of it are both powerful gestures of solidarity that reflect the violent essence of connected local and global structures of dispossession, as well as the gestures of love and support that constitute the key to their dismantlement.

The piece “Laugh” from El-Kurd’s debut collection Rifqa (titled after his grandmother) affirms BPTS by limning the distance between Atlanta and colonized Jerusalem. Undermining the hegemonically omnipotent and impervious image of the police is one strategy through which the poem enacts its performance of interconnection, revealed through the line “Atlanta showed me my first / pig carriage in flames.”59 The tone and language used to describe the act render the damaging of a police vehicle—referred to as a “pig carriage,” pulling from the Black Panther Party—as a process that enforces a sense of intimacy with immediate surroundings for the speaker. “Jerusalem taught me resilience. Atlanta taught me / a different kind,” El-Kurd observes. Furthermore, while El-Kurd reflects that “My grandmother taught me if / we don’t laugh, we cry,” the poem’s conclusion, “Atlanta knew that,” suggests an intimacy between racial repression and settler colonialism; the speaker realizes that this place has already known what he had initially felt to be a lesson particular to an individual plight, but he realizes it is an attitude conditioned through broad-based dispossession. The observation reveals the broader awareness and potential for familiarity with spaces of racialized struggle and resistance that come from navigating the world as a subject resisting settler colonialism and dispossession.

“I saw the audacity of evil and how it can be rationalized,” monet reflects on her time in Palestine in her introduction to El-Kurd’s collection: “Palestinians are not the only people to suffer at the hands of settler colonialism and white Western terrorism. Yet we cannot afford to stay quiet about what is taking place there. The state of Israel and the justification for its existence are a crime against all of humanity. The state is the worst of the human spirit manifested into a fully functioning government.”60

Solidarity poetics means poets necessarily challenge the unethical capacity for rationalization that operates under the hegemony of racial capitalism. This is why it is not merely the physical settler colonial state but the “justification for its existence” that are condemned as a “crime against humanity.” This is also why monet’s title to her introduction in Rifqa, “Love Is Older than ‘Israel,’” is so fitting. Love, appropriately identified by Chela Sandoval as an apparatus for revolutionary sentiment that informs the methodology of the oppressed, is what precedes and will necessarily follow the abolition of a state project founded in and sustained by colonial and racial violence, dispossession, and genocide.61 Love is also a praxis informed by sacrifice, even suffering, as concern for the other overtakes and determines political action. As Asma Abbas asks in Another Love: A Politics of the Unrequited, “How have we suffered to love this way?” Abbas continues:

The ways in which we suffer and love index our political locations, defined as the spatial and temporal coordinates of our existence relative to the bindings of state, nation, society, and ideology. Beyond the fact that our political locations demand certain love and suffering from us that writes us as political subjects, our modes of love and suffering also index our political subjectivities. . . . Beyond marginal forms of relations of love, love is an action from the margins to begin with, inseparable from a certain relation to one’s inclusion or exclusion in spaces and, indeed, spaces of time.62

It is arguably from this ethical matrix that James Baldwin drew in writing that Andrew Young, close confidant to Martin Luther King Jr., and the Black U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who was pressured by the State Department and then-President Jimmy Carter to resign in 1979 for holding conversations with PLO U.N. representative Zehdi Terzi, had acted “out of tremendous love and courage, and with a silent, irreproachable, indescribable nobility.” “Open Letter to the Born Again,” Baldwin’s defense of Young, catalyzes its ethical critique around hypocrisy, connecting the falsity of the notion that Israel’s founding had anything to do with countering antisemitism—“But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests”—to the falsity of the Christian ethos of the “cowards” who “betrayed” Young, chief among them the “born again” Jimmy Carter. For it is only Young, Baldwin reveals, whose conduct suggested authentic dedication to the maxim “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Through pointed contrast, Baldwin shows how Young’s “tremendous love and courage” exposes the duplicitousness of the Western imperialism and racism that subtends Zionism.63

“Advocating for this book [Rifqa] is one small way I have chosen to demonstrate my solidarity,” monet writes in her introduction.

We are made up by those we love, and it is by our relationships with people that we are transformed. . . . Solidarity is not just about our shared pain or struggle but also, most importantly, about our shared joy, visions, and dreams. It is an energetic force and a resounding love. . . . Rifqa is my grandmother, and she is your grandmother, too. We are the grandchildren of her fight, her fierce and enduring love—her poetry.64

Like Rifqa, love is “older than ‘Israel.’” The ultimate basis of solidarity, love is what informs joint struggle and the insurgent creativity of writers, resistors, and dreamers who dare to attest that another world is not only possible but imminent.

Omar Zahzah is a writer, poet, freelance journalist, and assistant professor of Arab and Muslim ethnicities and diasporas studies in the Department of Race and Resistance Studies at San Francisco State University. A scholar-activist of Lebanese Palestinian descent, Zahzah is the former education and advocacy coordinator of Eyewitness Palestine. Omar’s book Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital/Settler-Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle is forthcoming from the Censored Press in partnership with Seven Stories Press in Fall 2025.

Notes

1. 1. Momodou Taal, “Dear Black Liberals: Palestine TikTok Activists Aren’t the Enemy,” New Arab, August 21, 2024, https://www.newarab.com/opinion/dear-black-liberals-palestine-tiktok-activists-arent-enemy. Given that this is a paper dedicated to teasing out the attributes of Black–Palestinian solidarity, it seems important to note that Taal, a Black Muslim international student, was suspended from his doctoral program by Cornell University for participating in a Palestine demonstration and was faced with the threat of deportation as a result of the school initially terminating his F-1 visa. Organizations such as the Middle East Studies Association of North America wrote appeals on Taal’s behalf in an attempt to reverse this process. Fortunately, as of this writing, Cornell reversed course, no doubt as a result of the outcry on Taal’s behalf. See “Letter to Cornell University Protesting the Suspension and Threatened Deportation of Graduate Student Momodou Taal,” Middle East Studies Association, September 30, 2024, https://mesana.org/advocacy/committee-on-academic-freedom/2024/09/30/letter-to-cornell-university-protesting-the-suspension-and-threatened-deportation-of-graduate-student-momodou-taal. See also Momodou Taal (@MomodouTaal), “Update on my situation,” X (formerly Twitter), October 10, 2024, 5:34am, https://x.com/momodoutaal/status/1844355774824448283?s=46.

2. 2. Noura Erakat and Marc Lamont Hill, “Black–Palestinian Transnational Solidarity: Renewals, Returns, and Practice,” Journal of Palestine Studies 48, no. 4 (2019): 12.

3. 3. Erakat and Hill write: “The political dynamics and stakes of BPTS in the United States stand in sharp contrast to those in South Africa, where the African National Congress (South Africa’s ruling party since 1990) has had longstanding ideological and diplomatic ties to the Palestinian national movement.” “Black–Palestinian Transnational Solidarity,” 12.

4. 4. Robin D. G. Kelley, “1948: Israel, South Africa, and the Question of Genocide,” Hammer & Hope 3 (Spring 2024): https://hammerandhope.org/article/robin-kelley-israel-south-africa; U.N. Resolution 3379, “Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination: Zionism as Racism,” November 10, 1975, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-181963/.

5. 5. Greg Thomas, “Afro-Blue Notes: The Death of Afro-Pessimism (2.0)?,” Theory and Event 21, no. 1 (January 2018): 294.

6. 6. Sophia Azeb, “On Solidarity, In Solidarity,” Funambulist, June 21 2021, https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/they-have-clocks-we-have-time/on-solidarity-in-solidarity.

7. 7. Naturally, this is far from the only article to consider the broader defining characteristics of interlinked poetic expressions. As such, it seems worthwhile to address the issue of how I envision my current formulation in relation to related conceptual endeavors. What about Khaled Masood’s examination of the poetic strategies of Palestinians resisting carceral and colonial confinement? What about “necropoetics,” as mobilized by Renée Fox to describe the Victorian era poetry of Robert Browning, or “necropolitical poetics,” which Pradip Sharma comes to by combining necropoetics with Achille Mbembe’s notion of “necropolitics” to situate the murdered female subjects of Browning’s poetry in relationship to a broader system of gendered subjugation? What of the “entangled poetics” framework that Michelle Decker utilizes to consider the relationship between Black Consciousness poetry and white, conservative formalist poetics during South African apartheid? Moreover, what of relevant comparative assessments of politically linked literatures that exceed generic similitude—with Barbara Harlow’s concept of “resistance literature,” itself drawn from an Arabic-language coinage (Adab al-muqawama) by the Palestinian writer, critic, and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani, perhaps being the most prominent example? Such a consideration affords me the opportunity to clarify through contrast and interconnection. For instance, while unlike Masood, my specific focus is not the imaginative resistance strategies of incarcerated Palestinians alone, solidarity poetics is likewise concerned with how poets galvanize the imagination as a mode of defiance to colonially inflected mechanisms of violence qua securitization—in this case, collectively and despite geographical separation. Thus, while, like Espiritu Gandhi’s concept, solidarity poetics involves a reimagination of modes of relationship to politicized spaces defined by and through imperial, colonial, and racial violence, and the subsequent implications for political interconnection across various regions, unlike exilic poetics, solidarity poetics is not strictly defined through an alterantive political and ethical affiliation to the (at times, colonial) state but instead considers the fugitive and radical possibilities for interconnection that cohere in the recognition of the similarity of converging modes of state violence. “Entangled poetics” comes the closest of all of these concepts in capturing my attempt to consider interlinked yet disparate poetic traditions in their simultaneity. The implications of Decker’s argument of South African poetry reflecting a “social form” through the recreation of the political and social mechanisms of apartheid vis-à-vis the (white) supremacist conventions established by dominant poetic institutions has clear implications for solidarity poetics; like Decker, I am concerned with entanglement but, in this case, not between oppressed and oppressor so much as actors speaking to one another across different and yet nevertheless increasingly interconnecting paradigms of oppression. I do consider how poets address social and political regimes with the power to dispense death according to hegemonic hierarchy—hence the connectedness of “necropolitical poetics”—though the poets I turn to, aside from their geographical and chronological distinction from the poet of Sharma’s focus, center and perform resistance to necropolitical regimes first and foremost, and often do so through speaking to one another across time, space, and locality. This aspect of “resistance” brings us to the relevance of Harlow’s (through Kanafani’s) critical categorization, and yet unlike Harlow, I am not only considering nationally distinct literary practices formed through and as part of the fight for national liberation, I am also elucidating a framework for how to make sense of the gesture whereby such literatures may participate in and be the subject of a broader dialogic initiative that understands collective and anticolonial liberation as inherently interconnected. Khaled M. Masood, “Prison Literature: A Palestinian Literary Revolution,” Al Istiqlal University Research Journal 7, no. 2 (2022): 2–20; Renée Fox, “Robert Browning’s Necropoetics,” Victorian Poetry 49, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 463–83, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23079668; Pradeep Sharma, “Browning’s Poetics of Necropolitical Power Dynamics,” Bon Voyage 6, no. 1 (2024): 88–97, https://doi.org/10.3126/bovo.v6i1.68256; Michelle Decker, “Entangled Poetics: Apartheid South African Poetry Between Politics and Form,” Research in African Literatures 47, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 71–90, https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.47.4.05; Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (Methuen, 1987); Ghassan Kanafani, Literature of Resistance in Occupied Palestine: 1948–1966 [in Arabic] (Institute for Arab Research, 1982); Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization Across Guam and Israel-Palestine (University of California Press, 2022), 157–84.

8. 8. Michelle Alexander, “Time to Break the Silence on Palestine,” New York Times, January 19, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/opinion/sunday/martin-luther-king-palestine-israel.html.

9. 9. Bret Stephens, “The Progressive Assault on Israel,” New York Times, February 8, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/08/opinion/sunday/israel-progressive-anti-semitism.html; Erakat and Hill, “Black-Palestinian Transnational Solidarity,” 8.

10. 10. Russell Rickford quoted in Erakat and Hill, “Black-Palestinian Transnational Solidarity,” 8.

11. 11. Erakat and Hill, “Black-Palestinian Transnational Solidarity,” 8.

12. 12. Erakat and Hill, “Black-Palestinian Transnational Solidarity,” 8.

13. 13. Erakat and Hill, “Black-Palestinian Transnational Solidarity,” 8.

14. 14. “Flashpoints” are a crucial and complex component of evolutions in discursive renderings of the Palestinian struggle through and beyond BPTS. For decades, scholars and activists have called attention to the media’s role in manufacturing consent for Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians. Yet corporate media’s loss of total control over the image of Palestine and Palestinians posed by the increasing evolution of communications technologies continues to result in new revelations of Israeli colonial violence that inspire resistance and counternarratives, even as corporate media generally remains committed to the philo-Zionism that constitutes a broader U.S. imperial politic. As Miriyam Aouragh notes, such revelations, increasingly expedited through blogging and social media, inspire the Israeli state’s countermovement toward “manufacturing discontent” with Palestinians through strategies of cultural demonization and hasbara. See Miriyam Aouragh, “Hasbara 2.0: Israel’s Public Diplomacy in the Digital Age,” Middle East Critique 25, no. 3 (2016): 273.

    Flashpoints that reflect the urgency of BPTS, such as the Gaza–Ferguson tear gas nexus, are also conditioned by the particular forms of popular resistance that challenge the impunity of U.S. police forces such as those indexed by what César “che” Rodríguez defines as “the Oscar Grant moment.” Rodríguez defines the Oscar Grant moment as a matrix of popular resistance and sousveillance that “broke the cultural production of police impunity” in the wake of Oscar Grant’s murder by Johannes Mehserle on January 1, 2009, and spanned until November 5, 2010, when Mehserle was sentenced to two years for involuntary manslaughter. César “che” Rodríguez, “‘Oscar Did Not Die in Vain’: Revelous Citizen Journalism, Righteous/Riotous Work, and the Gains of the Oscar Grant Moment in Oakland, California,” Social Justice 48, no. 3 (2021): 100.

15. 15. Refaat Alareer, introduction to Gaza Writes Back, ed. Refaat Alareer (Just World Books, 2013), 15–18.

16. 16. Noam Chomsky, for example, describes “mowing the lawn” as a post-2005 policy of Israeli assaults upon Gaza whose sequence can be understood as follows:

    There’s a standard procedure that’s gone on since 2005: a truce accord is established. Hamas lives up to it. Israel violates it, never keeps up to it. . . . Finally, Israel escalates its violation. That elicits some kind of Hamas reaction that’s the pretext for the next act of what Israel calls “mowing the lawn,” another major attack, each one worse than the last. . . . Then comes the Western propaganda, just following Israeli hasbara. . . . Poor Israel is attacked by rockets, what can they do, they have to defend themselves. It works very nicely.

    Noam Chomsky, “Noam Chomsky Discusses Israel and Palestine with Professor John Haas,” posted November 10, 2022, by the Global Consortium for Sustainable Peace, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8UKO6NNb5w.

17. 17. As Saree Makdisi observes about Patrick Wolfe’s 2016 study Traces of History, the book makes clear how the ever-incomplete imperative to eliminate the native that structures settler-societies applies to Israel, and this incompletion in turn translates to an anxious repetition of actions meant to secure what is in point of fact an impossible elimination, impossible because “the eliminationist structure renders the native necessary; with nothing to eliminate . . . the structure would collapse.” Saree Makdisi, “Elimination as a Structure: Tracing and Racing Zionism with Patrick Wolfe,” American Quarterly 69, no. 2 (June 2017): 282.

18. 18. Kristian Davis Bailey, “Black–Palestinian Solidarity in the Ferguson–Gaza Era,” American Quarterly 67, no. 4 (December 2015): 1017–26.

19. 19. Blogger Paul Biggar writes that the Israeli Lavender AI program seem to be using membership in groups on Meta’s WhatsApp platform to generate “kill lists” of Palestinian targets—and that Meta is most likely directly leaking the data to Israeli officials, despite promoting WhatsApp as a private app. Paul Biggar, “Meta and Lavender,” Paul Biggar (blog), April 16, 2024, https://blog.paulbiggar.com/meta-and-lavender/.

20. 20. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 14–15.

21. 21. Mark Neocleous and George S. Rigakos, Anti-Security (Red Quill Books, 2011), 15.

22. 22. Neocleous and Rigakos, Anti-Security, 16–17.

23. 23. Jeff Halper, War Against the People (Pluto Press, 2015), 3–4.

24. 24. Ritchie writes: “The earliest manifestations of policing in the United States took the form of military violence, as European colonizers seized and stole land by exterminating or relocating many of the ten to twelve million Indigenous inhabitants of the land.” Andrea J. Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color (Beacon Press, 2017), 15.

25. 25. I have in mind here Keith P. Feldman’s approach in A Shadow over Palestine. In the introduction, Feldman writes of an attempt to “tell a better story about the present entanglement of the United States, Israel and Palestine through a conjunctural analysis of its past,” by which Feldman means excavating the past “from the vantage point of the political present.” Keith Feldman, A Shadow over Palestine (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 22.

26. 26. Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Continuum, 2005), 49–51.

27. 27. Robin D. G. Kelley, “From the River to the Sea to Every Mountaintop: Solidarity as Worldmaking,” in “Black–Palestinian Transnational Solidarity,” ed. Noura Erakat and Marc Lamont Hill, special issue, Journal of Palestine Studies 48, no. 4 (Summer 2019): 85.

28. 28. Drawing from Cedric Robinson and Kelley, César “che” Rodríguez defines racial capitalism “as a particular—not universal, indomitable, nor inevitable—parasitic social order that, since its inception within Europe, requires the cultural ordering of racialism to legitimate the material violences necessary to reproduce itself across time and space: expropriation, exploitation, exclusion, and, in moments of crises, the attempted extermination of negatively racialized people.” Rodríguez, “‘Oscar Did Not Die in Vain,’” 86.

29. 29. Therí A. Pickens, “Excerpts from New Body Politics,” in Sajjilu Arab American: A Reader in SWANA Studies, ed. Louise Cainkar, Pauline Homsi Vinson, and Amira Jarmakani (Syracuse University Press, 2022), 81.

30. 30. Suheir Hammad, Born Palestinian, Born Black (UpSet Press, 2012), 10.

31. 31. “He must have made a promise to Palestine when he experienced what he experienced there,” Hammad states. “Suheir Hammad: Oral History Interview Conducted by Zaheer Ali,” Center for Brooklyn History, September 13, 2018, https://oralhistory.brooklynhistory.org/interviews/hammad-suheir-20180913/.

32. 32. June Jordan, Living Room (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1985), 134.

33. 33. “Israeli Offensives in Lebanon and Gaza Kill Dozens, Displace Thousands,” Al Jazeera, October 9, 2024.

34. 34. Alex Lubin, Geographies of Liberation (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 143.

35. 35. Michelle Hartman, Breaking Broken English (Syracuse University Press, 2019), 57.

36. 36. Najat Rahman, In the Wake of the Poetic: Palestinian Artists After Darwish (Syracuse University Press, 2015), 4.

37. 37. Rahman, In the Wake of the Poetic, 11–12.

38. 38. Rahman, In the Wake of the Poetic, 11–12.

39. 39. Lubin, Geographies of Liberation, 143–44.

40. 40. “Aja monet,” aja monet, https://ajamonet.com/biography/.

41. 41. “Aja monet,” AFROPUNK, https://afropunk.com/festival/blackherstory/line-up/aja-monet-3/.

42. 42. Harald Zapf, “Ethnicity and Performance: Bilingualism in Spanglish Verse Culture,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 51, no. 1 (2006): 14. Zapf notes that while the performance piece of Gómez-Peña that he cites in his qualification refers to the U.S.–Mexico border, the term can also apply to “the Nuyorican cultural space” given the more figurative possibilities that the term border can encompass. Zapf draws particularly from Ed Morales’s “Spanglish Manifesto” in building this argument; Morales explains how the literal imposition of the border gives way to a “dynamic, continuing recombination of cultures” that takes place deep within the cities of “North American territories” and is represented in the emergence of Spanglish, “the ultimate space where the in-betweenness of being neither Latin American nor North American is negotiated. . . . When we speak in Spanglish, we are expressing . . . a new region of discourse that has the possibility of redefining ourselves and the mainstream.” Ed Morales, Living in Spanglish: The Search for a Latino Identity in America (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002), 4, 95.

43. 43. Zapf, “Ethnicity and Performance,” 13.

44. 44. “Aja Monet Reflects on the Impact of the Nuyorican Poets Café on Hip Hop & NYC: People Party’s Clip,” posted September 23, 2022, by UPROXX, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7GLoe8oiZQ.

45. 45. Aja monet, interview by Nastia Voynovskaya, “How the Struggle for Liberation Made aja monet into a Poet,” KQED, February 15, 2024, https://www.kqed.org/arts/13952372/aja-monet-poetry-interview-noise-pop-san-francisco.

46. 46. Monet, “How the Struggle for Liberation Made aja monet.”

47. 47. Noura Erakat, “‘I Would Like to See the New York Times Wash the Blood off Its Hands,’” Nation, November 4, 2021, https://www.thenation.com/article/world/qa-mohammed-el-kurd/.

48. 48. Mohammed El-Kurd, “The Right to Speak for Ourselves,” Nation, November 27, 2023, https://www.thenation.com/article/world/palestinians-claim-the-right-to-narrate/.

49. 49. El-Kurd, “Right to Speak for Ourselves.”

50. 50. As Mjriam Abu Samra writes, after students and other segments of Palestinian society wrested control of the Palestine Liberation Organization from the elites who had hitherto managed the organization, they turned it into

    a more popular expression of the people’s will. The PLO then became the umbrella institution under which the broad-based popular movement operated and “functioned according to the ethos of the time, based upon the model employed by national liberation movements worldwide in the anti-colonial struggle for liberation.” Not only was the Palestinian movement inclusive, a direct expression of the Palestinian “imagined community” and its ambition for liberation, but it was also conceived by its people and perceived by its allies as a revolution based on an “indivisible sense of justice for all” and strongly connected to the struggle of other liberation movements.

    Mjriam Abu Samra, “The Road to Oslo and Its Reverse,” Allegra Lab (blog), October 2015, https://allegralaboratory.net/the-road-to-oslo-and-its-reverse-palestine/.

51. 51. Open Letter, “The Manifesto of Dignity and Hope,” Mondoweiss (blog), May 18, 2021, https://mondoweiss.net/2021/05/the-manifesto-of-dignity-and-hope/.

52. 52. Barnaby Papadopulos, “This Palestinian Writer Is Going Viral for Challenging US Coverage of Israel-Palestine,” VICE News, May 12, 2021, https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dvdb/mohammed-el-kurd-cnn-interview-sheikh-jarrah.

53. 53. Mohammed El-Kurd, interview by Claire Schwartz, “For the Sake of Truth,” Jewish Currents (blog), October 21, 2021, https://jewishcurrents.org/for-the-sake-of-truth.

54. 54. Mohammed El-Kurd, “My Grandmother, Icon of Palestinian Resilience,” Nation, July 1, 2020, https://www.thenation.com/article/world/palestinian-grandmother-resistance/.

55. 55. Aja monet, “Love Is Older than ‘Israel,’” foreword to Rifqa, by Mohammed El-Kurd (Haymarket Books, 2021), ix.

56. 56. Aja monet, My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter (Haymarket Books, 2021), 80.

57. 57. Monet, My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter, 80.

58. 58. Monet, My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter, 82.

59. 59. Mohammed El-Kurd, Rifqa (Haymarket Books, 2021), 46.

60. 60. Monet, “Love Is Older than ‘Israel,’” ix.

61. 61. Consolidating the psychic resistance strategies of oppressed peoples across geographical and temporal boundaries, in Methodology of the Oppressed Sandoval puts forth a new means for revolutionary thinking in the present day organized under the “apparatus” of “‘love,’ understood as a technology for social transformation.” Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 2.

62. 62. Asma Abbas, Another Love: A Politics of the Unrequited (Lexington Books, 2018), 25–26.

63. 63. James Baldwin, “Open Letter to the Born Again,” Nation, September 29, 1979, https://www.thenation.com/article/society/open-letter-born-again/. For grounding context, see Keith P. Feldman, A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (University of Minneapolis Press, 2015), 100–101.

64. 64. Monet, “Love Is Older than ‘Israel,’” x–xi.