On January 26, a crowd gathered in Washington Square Park, a historic hub for artists, political activity, and the LGBTQ community in New York City, to stand in solidarity with Palestine. The rally was led by the Audre Lorde Project, which organizes LGBTQ youth of color, and drew historic connections between the struggles of the Palestinian people and those of Black and LGBTQ people in the United States. The rally was cosponsored by several organizations including Black Men Build, NYC City Workers for Palestine, Queers for a Liberated Palestine, CUNY for Palestine, and others.
Rumi Akong of the Audre Lorde Project told Peoples Dispatch, “A lot of the folks here today have friends, family, people on the ground, who know that the information that we’re being told in mainstream media is not the full picture. We’re here to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people.”
Speaking in front of the crowd, Parisa from Queers for a Liberated Palestine declared that “there can be no queer liberation without Palestinian liberation!”
Parisa accused the US government of divesting “from healthcare, from education, every necessity of a dignified life, to send military aid to a genocidal child killing regime.”
“When Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Freddie Gray, Mike Brown, and so many others that have been ripped from us by police departments around the entire United States, it was the Palestinian people who told us, showed us, that the same weapons that they use to demonize, destroy, and murder our people here in the US, are the same exact weapons that they use to terrorize the Palestinian people,” Lenny Sekou, representing the ANSWER Coalition, told Peoples Dispatch.
Palestinians do indeed have a history of supporting the struggles of Black people in the United States. During the 2020 uprisings against police brutality, several murals appeared in occupied Palestine of slain police brutality victim George Floyd, adorning the infamous “apartheid walls” separating Gaza and the West Bank from the official Zionist state of Israel.
In turn, Black people in the United States have a rich history of standing in solidarity with Palestine. Malcolm X was one of the earliest Black leaders to speak up for the Palestinian cause, as early on as the 1950s, proclaiming during a 1958 press conference that the millions of people of color in the United States “would be completely in sympathy with the Arab cause.” Shortly before his assassination, he visited Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza.
In 1970, Black Panther Party leader Huey P. Newton released a statement in solidarity with Palestine, writing, “we support the Palestinians’ just struggle for liberation one hundred percent. We will go on doing this, and we would like for all of the progressive people of the world to join our ranks in order to make a world in which all people can live.”
