The two of us come together each year at the midway point between Easter and Passover to watch DreamWorks’ 1998 film The Prince of Egypt. Having met in Des Moines, Iowa, as two young organizers on Vice-President Kamala Harris’s 2019 presidential campaign, we quickly uncovered this overlap in childhood memory – spending our drives through pastures and cornfields singing along to the adaptation of the Exodus parable. While our introductions to the film came through different avenues – children’s services at a Black Baptist church in suburban Atlanta and Passover seders in San Diego – we’d both been taught as children a common message of commitment to justice and freedom for oppressed people.
It’s a value that steered our door-knocking and phone-banking to beat Donald Trump in 2020. A value that forged our friendship – bonded across differences and yet, through common dreams. And it’s the same message that we carry with us in this current moment, Black and Jewish, respectively, arms interlocked together in organizing on behalf of Palestinians facing genocide in Gaza for the last 11 months. Our two communities working together on behalf of Palestinian freedom could not be more critical and should not be more obvious.
There exists a long history of Black and Jewish solidarity in the fight for collective liberation. The 1964 Mississippi murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were attacks on both Black and Jewish organizers doing the work of realizing multi-racial democracy during the civil rights era. The inheritance of their solidarity work, as well as the overlapping targeting that Black folks and Jews face simultaneously, should be just as clear to us today.
We watched in 2017 as white supremacists advancing the antisemitic great replacement theory descended on Charlottesville to protest against the removal of iconography honoring former American slave owners. And it’s a mirrored sense of mourning that our communities both endured following massacres at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and at Emanuel AME in Charleston.
This history is viscerally entangled, affecting both of our own communities. It is also undeniably intertwined with Palestinian freedom.
The tradition of Black and Palestinian coalition work has deep roots, going back to the Black Power and third world movements of the late 1960s. After all, the Israeli Defense Forces do regularly engage in exchanges with American police departments to train officers in anti-dissent tactics – first practiced in the West Bank and subsequently exported to cities like Ferguson and Minneapolis, where we’ve seen the stamping down of anti-racist dissent.
Now those same tactics are being used against Jewish Israelis calling for an end to the siege and protesting for a ceasefire and hostage deal. There should be little surprise at the bonds forged between Jewish and Palestinian organizers, both in this moment and in ones preceding it. Since 7 October, Palestinians and Jews across the United States have taken to the streets to mourn together and demand an end to the apartheid norm and continuing siege on Gaza, which has now spilled over into the West Bank.
We are both people descended from those who survived genocide – the Middle Passage and the Shoah. A world where this can happen to Palestinians is a world where this can happen to either of our communities again.
Today’s anti-war movement is being led by Palestinian, Black and Jewish organizers – and the power demonstrated by this coalition has already proven disruptive. Palestinians, Jews and Black folks working hand-in-hand for a world grounded in the principles of decolonization, reparative justice and solidarity may discomfit some to witness because it represents a new vision for our future that departs significantly from the status quo. While change doesn’t come easily to any of us, staying in place risks each of our communities taking turns on a rotating wheel of subjugation, with anti-Blackness, antisemitism and anti-Arab hate feeding into one another.
In Chicago, we saw this new vision laid out on full display. Democrats wandered the Democratic national convention hall wearing keffiyehs and cheering at the mention of a ceasefire by speakers on the main stage. And outside, a multi-racial coalition coalesced in support of the push for a Palestinian-American elected official to be granted a speaking slot.
The push was endorsed by representatives spanning the full range of the “Big Tent” party: United Auto Workers, Black Lives Matter, Bend the Arc Jewish Action, Sunrise Movement, Gen Z For Change and more. The call was even supported by families of Israeli hostages, who were rightly granted a platform to speak and many of whom today are insisting that the IDF’s unrelenting bombardment does not keep their loved ones safe, particularly following the deaths of six hostages, including the Israeli American Hersh Goldberg-Polin. At the 22-hour-long sit-in that followed the Democratic party’s rejection of this speaker request, Palestinians, Jews, Black folks and others held hands, sang together, mourned and slept on the pavement outside of the United Center – demonstrating what the movement for Palestinian liberation is truly about.
The Democratic party, a party that we both remain committed to bettering, has a habit of valorizing its organizers decades after the fact. Activists such as John Lewis and Fannie Lou Hamer have gotten their flowers in retrospect when, once upon a time, it was the party itself that stood as the prohibitor of change. How can we speak about Hamer’s work as a guiding memory, when her Mississippi Freedom Democratic party was denied seats at the 1964 DNC, and 60 years later we deny the Georgia state representative Ruwa Romman a speaking slot at our own convention in 2024?
We cannot make “freedom” – the word spoken more so than any other at the 2024 Democratic national convention – our creed if we cannot commit ourselves to the coalition work that might bring freedom for some of the most vulnerable among us in this moment: Palestinians facing genocide as a result of American-manufactured warheads.
Freedom is not simple rhetoric, nor is it a destination. It’s a hard-won process. It’s a continuing series of decisions that will always cause upheaval to the status quo, though must always be done in solidarity with others. Our path towards freedom – freedom for Black and Jewish people across the globe, freedom for all of us – leads through Palestine. It’s on us all to split the seas that we can.
Lily Greenberg Call is a former special assistant to the chief of staff at the Department of the Interior. She worked on Biden’s 2020 campaign and served in the administration until resigning to protest US policy in Gaza. She has appeared as a guest on MSNBC, CNN and NBC and given commentary for the Washington Post, Politico and the AP
Henry Hicks IV is a Washington DC-based writer and organizer. His work has appeared in Mother Jones, Teen Vogue, In These Times, the Drift, the Brooklyn Rail and elsewhere
