In 1944 members of the Palestinian Communist Party founded the National Liberation League, an organization Maha Nassar describes as, “a ‘socialist democratic party’ seeking the ‘national liberation of Palestine,’” in her book, Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World. In May of 1944, the NLL began publishing al-Ittihad, the news organ of the group. Al-Ittihad changed hands when, in 1948, a number of NLL members convened with a group of Israeli communists to form the Israeli Communist Party (written ICP or sometimes CPI). During the 1950s, following the exile of the editors of leftist publications Filastin and al-Difa‘ from the country, al-Ittihad became the only non-Zionist political platform in Israel. Thus al-Ittihad occupied a unique position to express solidarity with other radical movements globally.

 

According to Nassar, one element which contributed to this developing internationalist turn for al-Ittihad was a broader cultural shift among Palestinians and Israeli left-intellectuals, who were looking to place themselves within a wider context of anti-colonial struggle. This evolution, taking place in the late 1950s, was in some ways the antecedent of a similar shift which would take place among Black movement leaders across the world only a decade or so later. 

 

Al-Ittihad published article after article on U.S. imperialism and anti-Black racism in the United States, centering Black American politics in Israeli conversation. Much of this was due to the influence of the Israeli Communist Party on the media published. Al-Ittihad reflected the views of the Black Panther Party and Malcolm X in more ways than one, drawing connections between the Peekskill Riots and the May Day attack on ICP members in Israel, and overtly critiquing both segregation and white supremacist America’s condemnation of the re-integration of schools. Maha Nassar references this ideological alignment explicitly in her essay Palestinian Engagement with the Black Freedom Movement Prior to 1967. She writes, “another key element of al-Ittihad’s focus on Black subjectivity was its framing of Black American protesters as justified in their actions, regardless of the means they used.” This vocal support and validation of revolution by any means necessary parallels similar developments in Black radical consciousness in America. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, al-Ittihad published works by Black American and Arab radicals, as well as leftists hailing from around the world.

 

One such figure who would be published in al-Ittihad was Palestinian poet and essayist Mahmoud Darwish. In some ways exemplifying the developing connections between the Black Freedom Movement and the struggle for Palestinian liberation, Darwish penned an essay for the journal in 1966 titled “Letter To a Negro,” which expressed his feelings of solidarity towards the Black struggle in America, and in particular functioned as his response to James Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name. According to Nassar in Palestinian Engagement, Darwish conveys a robust conception of race as a social construct in his letter, drawing parallels between Blackness and Palestinian-ness as grounds for solidarity between the two struggles across national borders.

 

Sam Crocker and Sophia Perkins