Recognizing and Saving Black Lives, Recognizing and Saving Palestinian Lives: The Power of Transnational Rhetorics in Locating the Commonality of Liberation Struggles

Summary

Matthew Abraham argues that the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States and the Palestinian liberation movement associated with the BDS movement meet in a common condition — precariousness, premature death and the constant surveillance of targeted bodies — and that their convergence, traced through Transnational rhetorics, is a resource for resisting both White supremacy and Zionism (Recognizing and Saving Black Lives, Recognizing and Saving Palestinian Lives: The Power of Transnational Rhetorics in Locating the Commonality of Liberation Struggles, PDF p.2 / printed p.78). Both populations, Abraham argues, constitute a problem to be managed, surveilled and kept at bay through police force by the US and Israeli governments respectively (PDF p.4 / printed p.80); the August 2017 FBI report on Black identity extremists, the paired killings of Walter Scott and Abdul Fattah al-Sharif, the militarisation of US policing, and Russell Rickford’s “Free Palestine” chant at a Cornell knee-in protest are his successive exhibits, and his conclusion is that the coincidence of the two precarities forces a recognition of the convergence of the anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles (PDF p.5-11 / printed p.81-87).

What the file is

• The file is Chapter 6 of Activism and Rhetoric: Theories and Contexts for Political Engagement, edited by JongHwa Lee and Seth Kahn, downloaded as an open-access chapter PDF (OAPEN record 20.500.12657/41359) and marked CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 on its first page (PDF p.1).
• PDF p.1 reproduces the book’s title page: “First published 2010” (as printed), with ISBN 13: 978-1-138-50170-6 (hbk), 978-1-138-50171-3 (pbk) and 978-1-315-14453-5 (ebk). The chapter itself cites sources accessed in June and July 2018 and events through May 2018, and its PDF was created in June 2020; the relation between the 2010 statement and this chapter version is recorded under Open questions.
• Length: 12 PDF pages, about 5,388 words in the text copy. Printed pagination runs from p.79 at PDF p.3 to p.88 at PDF p.12, so printed page = PDF page + 76; the chapter opener (PDF p.2) carries only the chapter numeral “6” at its head, and its printed page, 78, is inferred from the sequence (computed from PDF p.3 / printed p.79).
• Structure: chapter title and epigraph from Angela Davis (PDF p.2); the introductory section headed “From America to Palestine” (PDF p.2); an untitled opening on Bannon, Trump and Charlottesville and the section “Not-so-Disparate Narratives” (PDF p.3-6); “Convergence of Interests” (PDF p.7-8); “Identity Extremism?” (PDF p.8); “On the Ground” (PDF p.8-10); “Conclusion” (PDF p.10-11); Notes 1-8 (PDF p.11-12); and Works Cited (PDF p.12).
• Text quality: the supplied text copy is clean and complete. Its order on PDF p.2 is scrambled (the epigraph appears before the chapter title block); the original gives title, then epigraph, then the “From America to Palestine” prose, and the reading notes follow the original order. In the Works Cited the text copy breaks several URLs with spaces; those URLs were reassembled against the original, which confirms the titles, dates and outlets as recorded in the reading notes. Printed slips confirmed in the original are listed under Open questions.

Section by section

Book title page and chapter opener (PDF p.1-2 / printed p.78)

PDF p.1 gives the book title, editors, the “First published 2010” line, the three ISBNs, the chapter number and title, Abraham’s name, and the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 marking. PDF p.2 opens the chapter proper with an epigraph attributed to “(Angela Davis in From Ferguson to Palestine)”: Davis insists on “the intersectionality of movements”, on finding ways to talk about Palestine in the prison-abolition movement so that ending the occupation of Palestine is part of the ongoing analysis and not an afterthought — “It can’t be an afterthought. It has to be part of the ongoing analysis.” Under the heading “From America to Palestine”, Abraham recalls his previous contribution to Activism and Rhetoric, on how the charge of anti-Semitism is used against critics of Israel to shift attention from the United States’ and Israel’s rejection of a comprehensive diplomatic settlement to the critics’ character. Here he broadens the field to two subject positions, the African American facing racial profiling and state violence and the Palestinian living under Israeli occupation and “hence debilitated by the matrix of Zionism”, which meet in precariousness, premature death and constant surveillance of targeted bodies; his question is how the energies of BLM and of the Palestinian liberation movement associated with BDS might converge to resist white supremacy and Zionism.

Bannon, Trump and the chapter’s programme (PDF p.3 / printed p.79)

With the rise of white nationalism in Donald Trump’s election, Abraham argues, expressions of anti-Semitism and white supremacy by Steve Bannon supporters were tolerable because Bannon and the Breitbart constituency were reflexively pro-Israel: Bannon met the litmus test of ardent support for Israel, so he could be forgiven for being in league with racists and anti-Semites. Sources suspected Bannon was advising Trump in August 2017 on the aftermath of the Charlottesville controversy over the Confederate statues (“statutes”, as printed); Trump’s claim that there were good and bad people on both sides (“that there good and bad people on both sides”, as printed) seemed to indicate selective support for white supremacists. Abraham then states his programme: comparisons between BLM and the international efforts to liberate Palestinians are apt and consistent with rhetoric and composition’s focus on transnational and intersectional rhetorics, and finding commonalities can yield rhetorical strategies — including symbolic protests, attention to structural racism and violence, and the specific stories of loss and trauma of specific victims of racist and settler-colonial violence — for resisting anti-Semitism, terrorism and anti-white racism alike.

Not-so-Disparate Narratives (PDF p.3-6 / printed p.79-82)

Abraham sets two familiar narratives side by side: a US traffic stop in which a Black man is shot and the community asks why its young men are racially profiled and denied due process, and Israeli Defense Forces killing hundreds of Palestinians at the international border with Gaza while claiming to defend a border Israel has never declared. Rhetoricians, he says, are now considering how minority communities’ oppressive circumstances in the United States connect historically to minority suffering on other continents; transnational rhetorics — the rhetorical connectivity by which such communities signify to and communicate with one another — make the parallel between the Palestinian community’s fate and African Americans’ historical suffering legible. The convergence of Black liberation and Palestinian resistance comes from a felt necessity: both work against forces rooted in racism and neo-colonialism, and the movements need each other across audiences. Proclaiming “Black Lives Matter” is a performative invocation affirming Black bodies’ reality, agency and humanity against a materially constructed reality in which Black lives have historically not mattered; a similar Palestinian-lives movement is emerging but has not reached BLM’s level of support, and Abraham asks how it might draw energy from BLM. Both populations, he argues, constitute a problem to be managed, surveilled and kept at bay through police force. An FBI report published in August 2017 on Black extremist groups is then introduced as a moment of recognition by the state, and examined at length: titled “Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated to Target Law Enforcement Officers”, it presents BIEs as motivated since the Michael Brown shooting in August 2014 to take revenge on law enforcement, quotes its definition of black identity extremists and its parallel definition of sovereign citizen extremists, and names Dallas shooter Micah Johnson — who killed five white police officers during a First Amendment protected protest — and Queens hatchet attacker Zale Thompson as instances (PDF p.5-6 / printed p.81-82). Abraham turns from the report to the existential condition of Black life: Black subjectivity is conditioned by the demands of the police state, by a policeman’s gaze conforming to historical stereotypes, so that “driving while Black” is a seeming precursor to state violence; Palestinians under occupation know the counterpart in “Walking while Palestinian” or “Shopping while Palestinian”. BLM’s social-media documentation of Black precariousness, he argues, disrupts the discursive hegemony of white supremacy in policing, and the April 2015 video of Walter Scott’s shooting — by Columbia, South Carolina officer Michael Slager, after a stop for a broken taillight and outstanding child support payments — confirmed, in Abraham’s account, that police plant evidence to solidify self-defense narratives.

The Scott and al-Sharif pairing (PDF p.7 / printed p.83)

IDF soldiers, Abraham argues, have committed similar actions to justify killing defenseless Palestinians in the name of counterterrorism: in March 2015 (date as printed) in Hebron, IDF soldier Elor Azaria (“solider”, as printed) shot the incapacitated Abdul Fattah al-Sharif in the head as he lay on the ground, on video; after a divisive trial Azaria received a brief jail sentence and was released in May 2018. Abraham presents the case as turning on whether Azaria perceived a threat or acted out of malice: Azaria claimed al-Sharif was reaching for a knife on the ground, but the knife is not present in the video at the time of the shooting, only afterward, suggesting it was planted; his commanding officer reported Azaria declared immediately after the shooting that the “terrorist was alive and needed to die”. Abraham poses the pedagogical question of how to teach the precarious lives of Scott and al-Sharif, targeted for extrajudicial killing because of their race/ethnicity, and the rhetorical strategies of the activists who publicise those lives and of their opponents.

Convergence of Interests (PDF p.7-8 / printed p.83-84)

The use of military-grade combat equipment in American cities as riot control, paralleling efforts in the Middle East, the United States in Iraq and Israel in the occupied territories, revealed that domestic and international policing are linked: much of the equipment came from surpluses produced after 2001 through the US invasion of Iraq, dumped on local police departments for surveilling and controlling public space, which is a zone of enforcement that can be militarised in moments of political crisis.

Identity Extremism? (PDF p.8 / printed p.84)

The FBI report raises how a racial politics challenging state domination can be reframed: racial minorities expose differentialized treatment, and the criminalisation of activism reframes expressions of racial or religious identity as extremism. Similarly, Israel bans and makes illegal Palestinian protests against the occupation — a peace or resistance sign can lead to arrest, rock-throwing to arrest, humiliation and indefinite imprisonment — creating a deterrence model. The African American inner-city youth and the Palestinian under occupation are distant parallels whose alienation is produced by the same kind of supremacist ideologies, white supremacy and Zionism, which position the Black and Palestinian body in a subordinate position requiring continual surveillance.

On the Ground (PDF p.8-10 / printed p.84-86)

Cornell history professor Russell Rickford chanted “Free Palestine” at a knee-in protest at Cornell honouring Black athletes who took a knee during the national anthem, Colin Kapernick (spelling as printed) being the most visible; Rickford was accused of bringing in a wholly irrelevant issue, and explained that the colonisation of Palestine is wholly about white supremacy, Zionism being grounded in a racialist supremacist logic that meshes with white supremacy. Pro-Israel supporters who could back Black liberation balked at the comparison with Palestinians under occupation: Abraham calls this cognitive dissonance intolerable to elite opinion, notes that parallels between Israeli occupation and Jim Crow racism draw accusations of anti-Semitism, and that Israel’s liberal supporters resist any suggestion the conflict is based in racial discrimination. The NFL kneeling controversy illuminates African Americans’ place in the national imaginary, as the 1968 Mexico City protest of “Tommy Smith” and John Carlos did (“Both Smith and Carlo wore black gloves and black socks with no shoes”, as printed): Trump’s showdown with players including “Lebron James” (as printed) and Stephen Curry, his call to fire the “sons of bitches” and his May statement that a player who will not stand “shouldn’t be in the country”, and the NFL’s new policy — remain in the locker room or stand — close the section, followed by a passage on BLM’s five years of raising consciousness of the surveillance of Black and brown bodies, promoted by writers such as “Ta-nahesi Coates” (as printed here) and Angela Davis.

Conclusion (PDF p.10-11 / printed p.86-87)

Exploring the transnational rhetorical intersections between BLM and the push for awareness of the Palestinian predicament lets rhetoricians view the commonalities of the anti-racist and anti-colonial struggle. BDS has made significant strides in the US public sphere, evidenced by the legislative attempts to criminalise participation in it, reminiscent of attempts to criminalise the 1950s-1960s desegregation movement; and Abraham notes the irony that aspects of the Civil Rights Act have been deployed against critics of Israel. BLM has focused on racial profiling in city policing, the Palestinian liberation movement on occupation’s effects on everyday Palestinian life and on human rights and international law violations; their coincidence forces recognition of convergence. The transnational solidarity has been taken up by Davis and by Ali Abunimah in The Battle for Justice in Palestine; its poignant Ferguson moment was Palestinian activists in the West Bank and Gaza tweeting tear-gas advice to Ferguson protesters. That conjoined solidarity links the civil rights struggle to Middle Eastern anti-colonial movements from the Algerian Revolution and the First and Second Intifada to the Arab Spring, implicates the United States in domestic segregation, CIA-backed coups — “to overthrow Mossadegh in Iran in 1955” (date as printed) — US-supported dictatorships, and US military and diplomatic support for Israel’s occupation since 1967; and it is precisely because both movements put US imperialism and white supremacy in focus, Abraham closes, that Israel’s supporters target BLM as an anti-Israel movement.

Notes and Works Cited (PDF p.11-12 / printed p.87-88)

Eight notes carry the chapter’s apparatus: note 1 to Rebecca Dingo’s Networking Arguments; note 2 to the Booth and Eglash, Horvitz, and Kubovich and Landau items on the Azaria trial; note 3 to John Yoon’s Cornell Sun article on Rickford; note 4 to William Jacobson’s Legal Insurrection post accusing Rickford of “hijacking other social justice causes”, with the added point that Jacobson played a key role in characterising Steven Salaita as anti-Semitic before Salaita’s derailed appointment at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (as printed); note 5 to P.R. Lockhart’s Vox article on Trump and the anthem rule; note 6 to Coates’s Between the World and Me; note 7 to Marc Molloy’s Telegraph article on Palestinian tear-gas tweets to Ferguson; and note 8 to Jonathan Greenblatt’s “Anti-Semitism is Creeping into Progressivism”. The Works Cited lists twelve entries — Abunimah (2014), Booth and Eglash (2016), Coates (2015), Davis (2016), Dingo (2012), Greenblatt (2017), Horvitz (2017), Jacobson (2017), Kubovich and Landau (2018), Lockhart (2018), Molloy (2014) and Yoon (2017) — each with its outlet, date and, for the web items, an access date in June or July 2018.

Key passages

• “These two subject positions meet in the common conditions of precariousness, premature death, and in the constant surveillance of their targeted bodies.” (PDF p.2 / printed p.78)
• “How might the activist energies that have emerged within these two movements converge to harness the potential within each to resist white supremacy and Zionism?” (PDF p.2 / printed p.78)
• “Both populations constitute a problem to be managed, surveilled, and kept at bay through police force.” (PDF p.4 / printed p.80)
• “The FBI defines black identity extremists as individuals who seek, wholly or in part, through unlawful acts of force or violence, in response to perceived racism and injustice in American society and some do so in furtherance of establishing a separate Black homeland or autonomous black social institutions, communities, or governing organizations within the United States.” (FBI report, footnote b, p.2, as quoted, PDF p.5 / printed p.81)
• “Black and Palestinian subjectivity, then, emerges in relation to white supremacist and Zionist frameworks that position the Black and Palestinian body in a subordinate position requiring continual surveillance.” (PDF p.8 / printed p.84)
• “The irony should not be lost on those who study rhetoric.” (PDF p.11 / printed p.87)

Evidence the work relies on

• The August 2017 FBI report “Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated to Target Law Enforcement Officers”, quoted and paraphrased at PDF p.4-6 / printed p.80-82, including its definitions (report footnote b, p.2; footnote c, p.3, as cited), its assessments (report p.3 and p.7, as cited), and its treatment of Micah Johnson and Zale Thompson.
• The April 2015 video of Walter Scott’s shooting by officer Michael Slager in Columbia, South Carolina, and the March 2015 (as printed) video of Elor Azaria’s killing of Abdul Fattah al-Sharif in Hebron, with the Azaria trial reporting cited in note 2 and the Works Cited (Booth and Eglash, Washington Post, 1 Nov. 2016; Horvitz, 5 Jan. 2017; Kubovich and Landau, Haaretz, 8 May 2018).
• The Russell Rickford knee-in protest at Cornell and its coverage (Yoon, Cornell Sun, 5 Oct. 2017; Jacobson, Legal Insurrection, 27 Sep. 2017), including Rickford’s explanation as quoted from Yoon.
• The NFL anthem controversy of 2017-2018, Trump’s statements as quoted, and the NFL’s new anthem policy (Lockhart, Vox, 24 May 2018).
• Angela Davis’s Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Haymarket, 2016), quoted in the epigraph in the short title form “From Ferguson to Palestine”, and Ali Abunimah’s The Battle for Justice in Palestine (Haymarket, 2014), on Ferguson–Palestine solidarity, including the Palestinian tear-gas tweets (Molloy, Telegraph, 15 Aug. 2014).
• Rebecca Dingo’s Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational Feminism, and Public Policy Writing (2012), Ta-Nahisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015) and Jonathan Greenblatt’s “Anti-Semitism is Creeping into Progressivism” (Time, 30 June 2017), cited at notes 1, 6 and 8 respectively.

Analysis

Abraham’s method is juxtaposition under a rhetorical frame: two narratives, two killings on video, two protest movements and two state apparatuses are placed in parallel, and the parallel itself is the argument, warranted by the defined term transnational rhetorics rather than by a comparison of the two situations’ histories or legal structures, which the chapter does not undertake. Its strongest documentary moment is its close reading of the FBI report’s own definitions, where the state’s language is quoted and glossed; its other exhibits are presented through the press coverage listed in the Works Cited, without independent evidence beyond those reports. The chapter’s perspective is advocatory — it argues for the convergence it describes, and its account of contested episodes (the Bannon litmus test, the planted knife in Hebron, the use of the Civil Rights Act against critics of Israel) is given in Abraham’s voice without a counter-account. Its limits follow from its genre: it is a programmatic chapter for rhetoric and composition, proposing that the field attend to these intersections, and its claims about the movements’ levels of support, and about elite opinion’s intolerance of the comparison, are asserted rather than measured.

People, organizations, places and events

• People: Matthew Abraham, Angela Davis, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Elor Azaria, Abdul Fattah al-Sharif, Russell Rickford, Colin Kapernick, Ali Abunimah, Steven Salaita
• Organizations: Black Lives Matter, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Israel Defense Forces, BDS movement
• Places: Hebron, Gaza, West Bank, Ferguson uprising
• Events and documents: Ferguson uprising, Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated to Target Law Enforcement Officers

Concepts

Transnational rhetorics, Black–Palestinian solidarity, Intersectionality, White supremacy, Zionism, Settler Colonialism, Precarity, Biopolitics, BDS movement

How it relates to other sources

• Abraham’s chapter is the wiki’s rhetorical statement of the connection that Palestine: A Socialist Introduction Chapter 9 narrates historically: both centre the Ferguson uprising, the Palestinian tear-gas tweets and Angela Davis, but where Awad & bean ground Black–Palestinian solidarity in the line from Malcolm X, SNCC and the Panthers, Abraham grounds it in the shared subject position of precarious, surveilled bodies and in the FBI’s 2017 report, a document no earlier source here uses.
• With Palestinian Chicago — Identity in Exile: Lybarger records Chicago Palestinian activists travelling to Ferguson in 2014 and collaborating with BLM chapters on police violence and surveillance of Black and Arab communities (PDF p.41 of that source); Abraham supplies the national rhetorical frame for the same collaboration, without the local detail.
• With Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights: Barghouti presents BDS as intersectional, rights-based resistance in his own voice as a movement founder; Abraham, from outside the movement, reads BDS’s US strides through the backlash against it — the legislative attempts to criminalise participation and the deployment of civil-rights legislation against critics of Israel — a backlash mechanism Barghouti’s 2011 book predates.
• With Written Testimony of Kenneth S. Stern (2017) and 3D Test of Anti-Semitism: Demonization, Double Standards, Delegitimization: Abraham’s opening premise, carried from his previous contribution to the same volume, is that the charge of anti-Semitism is used to deflect criticism of Israel; Stern, a drafter of the working definition, argues against equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism while treating campus antisemitism as real, and Sharansky’s 3D test makes delegitimization of Israel itself an antisemitic act. The three positions stand attributed and unreconciled.
• Abraham’s account of the Azaria killing is a single-paragraph exhibit in a rhetorical argument; no other source ingested here treats the case, so there is no second account in the wiki to set beside it.

Open questions

• Edition and date: the title page reproduced in the file says “First published 2010” and gives ISBNs 978-1-138-50170-6 / -171-3 / 978-1-315-14453-5, while the chapter cites works accessed on 1 July 2018 and 2 June 2018, narrates events through May 2018, and describes itself as a broadening of Abraham’s “previous contribution to Activism and Rhetoric”. The file does not state the publication date or edition of the version it contains; the 2020 year in the slug and the published field rests on the chapter PDF’s creation in June 2020 and is not a date the chapter itself prints.
• Davis title: the epigraph is attributed to “Angela Davis in From Ferguson to Palestine” (PDF p.2) and the conclusion calls From Ferguson to Palestine her book (PDF p.11), while the Works Cited lists Davis’s book as Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Haymarket, 2016) (PDF p.12). The file does not say whether the shorter form is a short title for the same book or a different work.
• Azaria date: the killing of Abdul Fattah al-Sharif is dated “in March 2015” (PDF p.7 / printed p.83), while the Works Cited items on the trial are dated 1 Nov. 2016, 5 Jan. 2017 and 8 May 2018 and the chapter says Azaria was released in May 2018 after a brief sentence; the file gives no second date for the killing against which to check the 2015 date.
• Mossadegh date: the conclusion dates the CIA-backed coup “to overthrow Mossadegh in Iran in 1955” (PDF p.11 / printed p.87); no other date for the coup is given in the file.
• Booth and Eglash title: note 2 gives “The military trial that is tearing Israel Apart” (PDF p.11), while the Works Cited gives “The Military Trial that is Earing Israel Apart” (PDF p.12, as printed in the original); the URL printed in the Works Cited contains the slug “thats-tearing-israel-apart”.
• Spellings as printed, each confirmed against the original and held here rather than corrected: “IDF solider” for soldier (PDF p.7); “Elor Azariaand Israeli Moral Core” in note 2 and the Works Cited (PDF p.11-12); “Colin Kapernick” throughout (PDF p.8-9), with no other spelling in the file; “Tommy Smith” and “Both Smith and Carlo wore…” (PDF p.9); “Ta-nahesi Coates” in the text (PDF p.10) against “Ta-Nahisi” in the Works Cited (PDF p.12); “Lebron James” (PDF p.9); “Israeli Times” as the outlet for the Horvitz item, against its timesofisrael.com URL (PDF p.12); “the this all-too-common narrative” (PDF p.3); “that there good and bad people on both sides” (PDF p.3); “Confederate statutes” (PDF p.3); “there has a been recent convergence” (PDF p.7); Rickford “accused of bring in a wholly irrelevant issue” (PDF p.8); “the Palestinian predicament in the West Bank in Gaza” (PDF p.10); “Urbana Champaign” (PDF p.12); and the Lockhart title’s “say kneeling players” (PDF p.12). None is resolved in the file.
• The FBI report is quoted with internal locators (p.2, p.3 and p.7, as cited) but is not itself in raw/; its full bibliographic identity beyond the title Abraham gives is not stated in the chapter.

Coverage

PDF p.1-12 of 12, read in full. Printed p.78-88 (printed p.78 inferred from the sequence; PDF p.3 is printed p.79).