The connection between Black liberation movements and Palestinian resistance is not a recent political convenience. It has deep historical roots — grounded in the era of global decolonization, shaped by shared frameworks of settler colonialism, and sustained through decades of solidarity that influenced activists, scholars, and movements on multiple continents.
A new episode of the FloodGate podcast explores those roots directly. Host Bouna Mbaye speaks with Dr. Nadia Alahmed about how Black political thinkers — particularly during the mid-20th century period of anti-colonial struggle — interpreted the Palestinian situation through a lens of national liberation and settler displacement. The conversation examines how networks developed between African liberation movements and Palestinian organizations, and how that solidarity shaped political discourse that continues to influence activism and scholarship today.
The conversation matters now more than ever. As Israel continues its assault on Gaza and the West Bank, and as movements in the United States and Europe mobilize around Palestinian rights, the question of who understands this struggle — and why — has become urgent again. Black Americans who grew up under Jim Crow, whose cities were policed with surveillance tactics developed in coordination with Israeli security firms, whose children were criminalized by systems that share structural DNA with occupation policy — many of them arrived at Palestine not through ideology but through recognition.
That history is documented. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee began its formal engagement with the Palestinian question in the late 1960s. The Black Panther Party made explicit links between Zionism and colonialism. Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, and other figures of that era wrote and spoke about Palestine as part of an interconnected struggle against racial capitalism and imperial power.
Dr. Alahmed’s work situates these connections in the longer arc of decolonial thought, moving beyond the claim that solidarity is simply politics, and toward an understanding of it as a product of shared experience and structural analysis. The episode does not offer slogans. It offers history — and the argument that understanding it changes how we see the present.
How Black Liberation Movements Came to See Palestine as a Shared Struggle
The connection between Black liberation movements and Palestinian resistance is not a recent political convenience. It has deep historical roots — grounded in the era of global decolonization, shaped by shared frameworks of settler colonialism, and sustained through decades of solidarity that influenced activists, scholars, and movements on multiple continents.
A new episode of the FloodGate podcast explores those roots directly. Host Bouna Mbaye speaks with Dr. Nadia Alahmed about how Black political thinkers — particularly during the mid-20th century period of anti-colonial struggle — interpreted the Palestinian situation through a lens of national liberation and settler displacement. The conversation examines how networks developed between African liberation movements and Palestinian organizations, and how that solidarity shaped political discourse that continues to influence activism and scholarship today.
The conversation matters now more than ever. As Israel continues its assault on Gaza and the West Bank, and as movements in the United States and Europe mobilize around Palestinian rights, the question of who understands this struggle — and why — has become urgent again. Black Americans who grew up under Jim Crow, whose cities were policed with surveillance tactics developed in coordination with Israeli security firms, whose children were criminalized by systems that share structural DNA with occupation policy — many of them arrived at Palestine not through ideology but through recognition.
That history is documented. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee began its formal engagement with the Palestinian question in the late 1960s. The Black Panther Party made explicit links between Zionism and colonialism. Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, and other figures of that era wrote and spoke about Palestine as part of an interconnected struggle against racial capitalism and imperial power.
Dr. Alahmed’s work situates these connections in the longer arc of decolonial thought, moving beyond the claim that solidarity is simply politics, and toward an understanding of it as a product of shared experience and structural analysis. The episode does not offer slogans. It offers history — and the argument that understanding it changes how we see the present.