“Statement on the Middle East” is a transcription of an August 26, 1970 press conference held by Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton. The document is two pages of text, front and back, with the front of the second page displaying a photo of an armed Newton. Newton responds to accusations of anti-Semitism due to the Black Panther Party’s support of Palestinian liberation. The document provides insight into the climate created by the FBI’s attempts to destroy the BPP through the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), the climate of Palestinian advocacy, and Newton and the BPP’s conception of internationalist and anti-imperialist politics as essential for Black liberation.

Newton held the press conference transcribed in the document to respond to accusations that the Black Panther Party had a delegation in Jordan led by former Panther Stokely Carmichael (now known as Kwame Ture) “against the Jewish people.” An unknown David – likely David Hilliard, the BPP’s Chief of Staff – begins by refuting this claim, as the BPP did not have any delegation in Jordan, and says that the only international section of BPP existed in Algeria, headed by Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver. The BPP did have contact with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Newton then states the Party believes that Carmichael/Ture is a CIA agent. Ture had split from the party in 1968 due to his support for Pan-Africanism, which Newton opposed on the grounds that many African governments that supported Pan-Africanism at the time aligned with U.S. imperialism. Newton and the BPP’s position was internationalist rather than “cultural nationalist,” and supported African people in their fight against U.S. imperialism.

This opening context is a clear view into the difficulties facing the BPP as they were ruthlessly targeted by the FBI. While the sources of the accusations that BPP was involved with anti-Semitic activity are unnamed, declassified documents from the FBI’s COINTELPRO program show that the government agency worked to manufacture controversies about the BPP’s alleged “anti-Semitism” in order to inflame Black-Jewish tensions, turn the public against the Panthers, and drive a wedge between Jewish people and the broader Left (Shapiro). Newton’s accusation that Ture is a CIA agent also reflects the paranoia about informants sewed among the BPP. We now know that COINTELPRO specifically targeted Ture in 1968 with the technique of “bad-jacketing,” – the FBI spread rumors and manufactured evidence to lead BPP members to believe Ture was a CIA agent (Churchill & Ward, 49). There were real disagreements between Ture and Newton, as evidenced by their difference on the question of Pan-Africanism. But here, we can see how COINTELPRO worked to undermine the Black Panthers, fostering discord and distrust internally and externally.

Newton continues in the statement to clarify the Panthers’ position on Palestinian liberation and the Jewish people: first, he reiterates their support for the Palestinian people in their fight against the Israeli regime. He then acknowledges that some anti-Semitic statements have been made by individual members associated with BPP, but states that the official position of the BPP is not anti-Semitic. They are not against the Jewish people, they are opposed to the government of Israel that is persecuting Palestinians. They support a Palestinian-led establishment of a socialist people’s republic in the Middle East, as well as for revolutionary Jewish people inside of Israel to overthrow the Zionist government and establish a “secular people’s state instead of a religious state.”

Newton compares Jewish people, as a persecuted group, to Black Americans and asserts that they have a moral right to separatism and nationalism, but argues that an alliance with U.S. imperialism and settler-colonialism, as practiced in Israel, will not bring true liberation. Rather than separatism, Newton and the Panthers advocate for a world revolution that destroys U.S. imperialism and capitalism, and establishes socialism. They ask the “progressive forces, the revolutionary forces inside of Israel to transform that society so that the people of the Moslem religion, the people of the Jewish religion, the people who live in the Middle-East will be able to come together as one man and truly build a new world.” Newton denies, and believes to be racist, charges of anti-Semitism based in the BPP’s support for Palestinian liberation and anti-imperialism, as they ultimately want “the Jewish people and the Palestinian people to live in harmony together.”

Newton’s statement and the Party’s position fits into a long history of Black-Palestinian solidarity. Many parallels have been drawn between the plight of Palestinians under Israeli occupation and apartheid and the persecution of Black people in the United States, and a tradition of solidarity with Palestine has run through Black liberation movements from the Black Panthers to Black Lives Matter. Further, Newton’s need to clarify that support for Palestinian liberation is not anti-Semitism reflects the ongoing false equation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, as well as the weaponization of anti-Semitism to delegitimize pro-Palestine individuals and groups.

What is also important about this document is that Newton’s argument for Palestinian solidarity is rooted in the Panther’s often underemphasized anti-imperialist and internationalist politics. As Newton states, “Israel was created by Western imperialism and maintained by Western fire power.” The Panthers did not oppose Israel only because of its persecution and occupation of Palestine, but also because of Israel’s alignment with the U.S. and American imperialism. Black liberation, to Newton and many Panthers, could only come with the destruction of U.S. imperialism, and thus the Palestinian struggle against U.S.-backed Israeli apartheid and occupation and Black Americans' struggle against white supremacy in the U.S. are bound together.

Beyond Palestine, the BPP and Newton took a position of solidarity with anti-colonial, socialist, and anti-imperialist movements and nations that opposed the U.S. This internationalist politic translated beyond theory to real world connections such as that between the BPP and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, but also with revolutionaries and political organizations in Algeria, the Congo, “Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa, North and South Vietnam, North Korea, Japan, the People’s Republic of China, India, Uruguay, Peru, Nicaragua, Cuba… Iraq, Israel, Australia, and throughout Europe” (Vasquez). This praxis resembles the internationalism called for by George Jackson in a letter published in Soledad Brother (1970). Jackson called for revolutionary solidarity and reciprocal support between international liberation movements as the only way to destroy global capitalism, as he writes:

“to destroy [capitalism] will require cooperation and communion between our related parts; communion between colony and colony, nation and nation” (Jackson, 262).

International coordination between anti-colonial/socialist/anti-imperialist peoples and nations did have a tangible impact for Black political prisoners in the U.S. In her 1974 Autobiography, Angela Davis recounts that when she was incarcerated, an “international campaign had.. exerted serious pressure on the government” to free her, and “at the center of the international movement was the socialist community of nations” (Davis, 398). Internationalism, for the Black Panther Party, was both a theoretical conviction as well as a practical strategy in the fight for Black liberation.

Works Cited

Churchill, Ward, and Jim VanderWall. Agents of Repression: the FBIs Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. South End Pr., 2008.

Davis, Angela Y. Angela Davis: An Autobiography. 1974.

Jackson, George. Soledad Brother. 1970.

Shapiro, Aryeh. “VISION Magazine: Cointelpro, JDL & the Black Panther Party.” VISION, 17 Nov. 2019, https://visionmag.org/2019/11/17/cointelpro-jdl-black-panthers/.

Quest, Mathew. “The Black Panther Party and Palestine Solidarity.” Http://transculturalmodernism.org/files/mvo/2011-01-30/black_panther_paoesitinian_solidarity.pdf.

Vasquez, Delio. “Intercommunalism: The Late Theorizations of Huey P. Newton, 'Chief Theoretician' of the Black Panther Party.” Viewpoint Magazine, 23 Nov. 2018, https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/06/11/intercommunalism-the-late-theorizations-of-huey-p-newton-chief-theoretician-of-the-black-panther-party/.