Representing Permanent War: Black Power’s Palestine and the End(s) of Civil Rights

In the past few weeks, the Arab-Israeli conflict exploded once again into allout war as it did in 1956 and as it had done in 1948, when the State of Israel was created. What are the reasons for this prolonged conflict and permanent state of war which has existed between Arab nations and Israel? . . . Since we know that the white American press seldom, if ever, gives the true story about world events in which America is involved, then we are taking this opportunity to present the following documented facts on this problem. These facts not only affect the lives of our brothers in the Middle-East, Africa and Asia, but also pertain to our struggle here. We hope they will shed some light on the problem.

Thus opens what quickly became an infamous article published in the summer of 1967 by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC 1967). SNCC’s “Third World Round-up: The Palestine Problem: Test Your Knowledge” does groundbreaking rhetorical and imaginative work to remap the relationship between domestic movements for racial justice in the United States and transnational struggles for liberation in Israel/Palestine. This essay sketches a genealogy of this remapping project, uncovering how it was forged under extraordinary conditions: against a long intellectual tradition of Afro-Zionism in the black freedom movement and a U.S. Cold War, racial liberal regime shared in various ways by the state of Israel. The social, imaginative, and rhetorical spaces of what we might call Black Power’s Palestine clarify and contest the shifting imperial formation emerging in the confluence of the end of the U.S. civil rights movement and the beginning of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Although the article has been routinely condemned for participating in the tragic fracture of the so-called black-Jewish civil rights alliance, in the spaces it opened up in the months and years that followed its publication, a critique of the occupation could be lodged in discussions about the future of New Left racial politics (Jacobson 2006; Hall 2003); members of the Black Panther Party could cultivate durable allegiances with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from Oakland to Algiers (D. Du Bois 1975; Genet 2003; K. Cleaver 1998); Andrew Young, the first African American ambassador to the United Nations, could sacrifice his vaunted position by entering discussions with the PLO; organizations like Freedomways could pair with the Association of Arab American University Graduates to expose the 1982 massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps; and poets like June Jordan could bear witness to such tragedy, imagining being “born a Black woman” and in the presence of Sabra and Shatila having “become Palestinian” (1985, 124). Indeed, some of the most durable critiques of the colonial occupation of Palestine have emerged through the embattled post–civil rights spaces imagined by SNCC in 1967. That is the article’s oft-forgotten future. But what of its past, its genealogy?

Imperial Formation and “Permanent State of War”

Let us first consider the analytical purchase SNCC captures in the phrase “permanent state of war.” What does such an analytic reveal? And to what effect? One finds this figure in a range of literary and polemical works in the post–World War II black freedom movement. In the preface to the 1953 edition of The Souls of Black Folk, for instance, W. E. B. Du Bois revises his famous thesis about the “world problem of the color line”: “Back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem that both obscures and implements it.” This is a problem articulated through the functional register of permanent war as, he claims, it maintains through violence the material privileges of “so many civilized persons” so that “war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race” (in Edwards 2007, 130). More than a decade later, picking up on the Maoist conception of a people’s war, Huey P. Newton turns to the figure in his famous...