Black History, Israel and Palestine
February 26, 2024
As a Black Studies community, we believe in our educational responsibility to teach and learn about how and why colonialism and racism as well as anti-colonialism and anti-racism have shaped our contemporary world. Black History Month represents a time of critical reflection for Black Studies. And as Carter G. Woodson envisioned, it offers an invitation to consider which histories we invoke to understand and bear witness to our present. Over the last few months various discussions have taken place in our Black Studies community about whether and how we should respond to the Hamas attack on Israel, and the Israeli settler-colonial war on Palestine. And while our community holds a range of ideas and sentiments about the war, as a community, we are opposed to the continuing Israeli bombardment of the Palestinian people in Gaza.
Since the horrific attack and hostage taking by Hamas on October 7, 2023, which resulted in the deaths of approximately 1,200 Israeli citizens, and the ongoing horrific bombing of Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli state, which has disproportionately killed over 29,000 with many more thousands injured and displaced, we have regularly reminded ourselves that these atrocities did not begin on October 7. There are contested and interconnected global colonial histories – including atrocities in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo – preceding, surrounding, and following October 7. Reminders of this history resonate in the long tradition of solidarities between Black liberation struggles and Palestinian liberation struggles against settler colonialism, racism, and apartheid as demonstrated in the campaigns of a global Black Power movement and the strategic alliances forged between grassroots activists in Gaza and Ferguson in the wake of state violence against protesters following the death of Michael Brown and the bombing of Palestinian territories in 2014. In the 1970s and 1980s, when both the US and UK opposed United Nations’ economic sanctions against Apartheid South Africa, and Israel developed a special relationship with Apartheid South Africa supplying it with trade and weapons, it was the worldwide anti-apartheid movement that held the West to account and pressured for sanctions against South Africa, with Black organizations, activists and intellectuals across the world playing a significant role. Today it is the settler colonial state violence of Israel that also needs to be held to account.
Time for Ceasefire
We urge Northwestern to follow the City of Chicago, nearly 50 other US cities, and coalitions of faculty, staff and students across the country in calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s bombing of the Palestinians in Gaza. For over 100 days, Israel’s colonial war on Palestine has led to the deaths of over 29,000 people and the displacement of 90 percent of Gaza’s population. Israel’s latest campaign to displace Gazans – which included an attempt to move several hundred thousand Gazans into Egypt – may be seen as another chapter in the Nakba, in which 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in 1948, leading to the creation of the State of Israel. Since October 7, 2023, it is estimated that 90% of schools and 60% of homes in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged. Not a single one of Gaza’s 36 hospitals is currently fully functional.
It has been perhaps fitting and certainly deeply ironic how South Africa has made clear in its case at the International Court of Justice that Israel’s state officials have repeatedly expressed genocidal intent against the Palestinian people in the last four months. As Israeli forces prepared their land invasion of Gaza in late October, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu twice invoked the biblical story of the total destruction of Amalek by the Israelites. The passage to which Netanyahu referred leaves little doubt for interpretation: “Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep.” Israel’s President Isaac Herzog has also made clear that Israel sees no distinction between Palestinian civilians and Hamas militants, stating in a press conference in October that “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true ... and we will fight until we break their backbone.” Within the parameters of Black History these words are reminiscent of those that led to colonial Germany’s genocide of the Herero and Nama people in southwest Africa, 1904-08, in which a German commander issued an “extermination order” with the intent of “destroying the Herero.” By 1908, 80% of the Herero people had been killed.
The destructive words and actions of Israel against the Palestinian people all come with the political, financial, and military support of western governments, especially our own in the United States. Since World War II, the U.S. has sent $158 billion in aid to Israel, more than it has given to any other nation. There is ongoing exchange between the U.S. and Israel of training, tactics and weapons of policing and suppression. Since October 7, U.S. President Joe Biden has authorized the shipment of guided missile carriers and F-35 fighter jets that have been used in the destruction of Gaza. In December 2023, the US made use of its permanent membership on the UN Security Council to veto a resolution demanding a ceasefire and to abstain on a resolution supporting more humanitarian aid into Gaza. Most recently, President Biden released a statement marking 100 days of captivity for Israeli hostages while not making a single reference to the loss of Palestinian life since then.
Responding to the Northwestern Campus
Like many elite U.S. institutions, Northwestern University (NU) has financial and political ties to Israel and its settler colonial project. Several members of NU’s Board of Trustees have served as executives to companies supplying arms to Israel. Recently NU President Michael Schill set up an “Advisory Committee on Preventing Antisemitism and Hate.” The timing of the initial announcement of this committee came on the heels of an appeal from Israel’s President Herzog, who wrote to U.S. college presidents on November 7, 2023, urging them to “lead the way in combating the scourge of antisemitism by creating a Task Force.” While antisemitism has risen in the U.S. since October 7, this fact should not be used to suppress criticism of Israel or Zionism, nor should the scourge of antisemitism be elevated above the scourges of anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim, and anti-Arab racisms, all of which have also risen in the US since the start of the war. The conditions of fear, distress, and terrible loss are particularly acute among Palestinian, MENA, and Muslim students at Northwestern. If we are to confront the historic realities of racism at Northwestern in all of its forms and unsettle the status quo, we need to have a more critical and nuanced anti-colonial and anti-racist response that actively confronts the enduring institutional atmosphere.
While the scope of this new advisory committee includes other forms of racism like Islamophobia under the generic category of ‘hate,’ this measure appears to be oblivious to the last time a university announcement was made by a Northwestern president on tackling racism in June 2020, by President Schapiro. Then, against the background of protests taking place around the police killing of George Floyd, President Schapiro committed himself to tackling ‘anti-Black racism’ as well as to implementing the recommendations of previous task forces on racism. As a Black Studies community, we pointed out in our open letter to President Schapiro in October 2020, “of great concern to us is that many of the recommendations made by the Task force report in 2016 are very similar to the recommendations made in the Diversity working group report of 2010 for Northwestern’s subsequent strategic plan and resemble recommendations from other Northwestern committees in prior years to that.” We also asked, “Why does Northwestern keep making the same recommendations which are not being implemented?” Since that time, we have heard nothing about the 2020 initiatives against racism. We wonder whether the current task force on antisemitism will come to resemble a formulation of recommendations against different racisms never to be implemented. It makes sense that this should be a moment for Northwestern to not only honor previous commitments to addressing racism on campus, but also to understand how the historical persistence of structural racism is connected to cyclical, institutional responses that recognize but avoid redressing its continuing existence.
The question of how to respond critically to the expression of different racisms, while reconciling that responsibility with the duty to protect freedom of expression, has exercised many of us at Northwestern. One recurring discursive manifestation of this issue is how current public bodies denounce as antisemitic virtually any criticism of Israel’s systematic killing of Palestinians or support for Palestinian human rights. We have seen this take place recently on Northwestern’s campus. In October, two Black students critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza voiced their positions by creating fake copies of The Daily Northwestern and placing them around campus. They were identified and investigated by Northwestern campus police and faced Class A Misdemeanor charges with the prospect of a one-year prison sentence. While the Cook County State’s Attorney recently dropped charges against these students, we find this episode to be particularly pernicious given the history of the over-policing of Black students that has historically taken place on this campus.
Where do we go from here?
In highlighting the structural, rhetorical, ideological, and experiential connections between ongoing events in Gaza and the broader global context, our Black Studies community is sensitive and committed to the long anti-colonial and anti-racist history of solidarity between oppressed populations, which has often found its voice in student activism. We encourage all forms of peaceful protest and respectful displays of solidarity that do not flatten the experiences and politics of the historically marginalized by recognizing their value to our communities only when things “go wrong” or as a pretext to understanding these demographics solely in terms of the harm we experience. In the tradition of understanding Northwestern as an active, facilitating participant in the world and imagining habitable, inclusive communities, we encourage the Northwestern community to take up the question of where we go from here through declaring support for a ceasefire in Gaza and effectively tackling the institutional history of racisms at Northwestern. As we uphold a sense of responsibility in how we engage with each other in the name of anti-racism, it is likewise important that we guarantee the safety of all students to protest without fear of criminal prosecution or institutional, discriminatory reprisals from the university. Finally, in making this statement during Black History Month we are mindful of the histories of racisms and colonialisms that endured for centuries under the violences and denials of the western dominated international community, and where those colonial powers with the greater military capacities and resources for waging war claimed the status of victims, and those colonized, dispossessed and displaced were designated brutes, savages and animals in order to legitimize their on-going slaughter. Our motivating concern here has simply been to oppose and denounce these colonial and racist repetitions of history.
The Black Studies Community at Northwestern University
February 23, 2024