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111 c h a p t e r f o u r The Black Panthers and the PLO     We cannot be nationalists, when our country is not a nation, but an empire. . . . We have the historical obligation to take the concept of internationalism to its final conclusion—the destruction of statehood itself.—Huey Newton The [U.S.] Black Panther Party fit Mizrahim just like Zionism fit America. —Reuven Abergil In his 1975 novel, . . . And Bid Him Sing, David Graham Du Bois, the stepson of W. E. B. Du Bois and son of Shirley Graham Du Bois, focuses on the Afro-Arab politics that emerged within 1960s Cairo, a city in which he lived for twelve years. The novel centers on a community of African American expats in Egypt, some of whom are former Nation of Islam members, while others are drawn to Egypt due to its location at the intersection of the AfroArab world. The novel is set within the historical context of Malcolm X’s famous 1964 visit to Cairo and address to the Organization of African Unity, as well as within the tumultuous history—especially for Egypt—of the SixDay War in June 1967. Readers encounter Egypt as a cosmopolitan third world capital where African American Muslims, like one of the novel’s protagonists, Suliman Ibn Rashid, reads antiracist poetry to Cairo café audiences comprised of “young black students from West and East Africa, young African diplomats and freedom fighters from southern Africa, some Pakistanis and Indian students from South Africa. They included some Palestinians and some Egyptians.” Du Bois had arrived in Cairo in 1960, working as an English instructor at Cairo University, just when the city had become the fulcrum of Afro-Arab politics, largely due to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s prominent role in the 1955 Bandung conference and his contributions to the formation of the United 112 / The Black Panthers and the PLO Arab Republic (UAR)—a pan-Arab constellation of Arab states—and the Organization of African Unity. Both of these organizations worked to foster continental, internationalist politics routed across national formations. Du Bois embraced Egypt, where in 1961 he would become an editor for the English-language Egyptian Gazette, a newspaper he contributed to for the next twelve years. While working for the Gazette, Du Bois published Malcolm X’s address to the Organization of African Unity conference that, importantly , signaled Malcolm’s break from the Nation of Islam as he moved away from black nationalism to advocacy of global human rights. Du Bois moved to the United States in 1971, and in 1973 Huey Newton recruited him to become editor of the Black Panther Intercommunal News Agency. In this capacity Du Bois would publish a serialized version of . . . And Bid Him Sing, while inserting his analysis of Afro-Arab politics and the question of Palestine into the newspaper. Du Bois would help Newton draft a Panther policy statement on the Middle East crisis, contributing to Newton ’s ideas a nuanced understanding of Arab politics and the complexities of Islam. There is little doubt that Du Bois’s experience in Cairo and his focus on Afro-Arab politics inspired him to connect the question of Palestine to the black freedom movement. He had witnessed the 1967 June war, in which Egypt was quickly defeated by Israeli power, and was interested in the sorts of comparative racial politics that animated black politics in the United States and Arab politics in Egypt. In Chapter 3 we saw how 1930s Popular Front black American radicalism overlapped with the Palestinian Communist Party’s binationalist politics . In a much different context, yet in very similar ways, the post-1967 era inspired the reconstitution of Popular Front anti-imperialism; in the 1970s, this conjuncture took place around the liberation geography of intercommunalism , which was the Panthers’ understanding of how local communities were sutured together by global processes of imperialism and racial capitalism. In this chapter I illustrate the ways that the tumultuous politics of 1967 and 1968, in the United States and across the Arab world, constituted new conditions of possibility for Afro-Arab political imaginaries. Nasserism , the Cold War, the global politics of decolonization, the catastrophes of imperial warfare, and the narrowing of black freedom struggles in the U.S. to the confines of national inclusion and racial liberalism all influenced the possibilities for Afro-Arab politics. Yet the contradictions exposed by the end of the 1960s also revealed new political imaginaries that were most forcefully articulated by...

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