The Black Panthers and the PLO

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the formation of Black Panther intercommunalism as an anti-imperialist, trans-community politics that united the U.S. Black Panther Party, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and a group of Arab Jews in Israel who called themselves the Israeli Black Panthers. It considers how anticolonialism emerged as a post-1967 response to the ascendancy of the Israeli colonial state as an occupying army. The chapter looks at the ways in which the PLO and the U.S. Black Panthers drew comparisons between racial capitalism in the United States and in Israel, as well as between U.S. imperialism globally, in which Israeli politics in the West Bank and Gaza were implicated. It demonstrates how the Panthers’ political imaginary reverberated within Israel, where some Mizrahi Jews began to see themselves as members of a different sort of political imaginary, one that was shaped by the Afro-Arab politics of the Panthers.