Azzi: Everyone's freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians

In 1997, Nelson Mandela, president of South Africa, said “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

It was not an uncommon sentiment for Mandela.

In February 1990, before he became president, Mandela was questioned by ABC’s Ted Koppel about support he had expressed toward international leaders like Fidel Castro, Muammar Gaddafi and Yasser Arafat. He responded unambiguously:

“The support for Yasser Arafat in his struggle does not mean that the ANC has ever doubted the right of Israel to exist as a state, legally. We have stood quite openly and firmly for the right of that state to exist within secure borders. But, of course … We carefully define what we mean by secure borders. We do not mean that Israel has the right to retain the territories they conquered from the Arab world, like the Gaza Strip, the [Syrian] Golan Heights and the West Bank. We don’t agree with that. Those territories should be returned to the Arab people.”

Mandela, who once attended a summit in Algiers wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh - the iconic black and white checked scarf - said: “One of the mistakes which some political analysts make is to think that their enemies should be our enemies.”

We all have enemies, and we have come to deal with them in distinctly different ways.

On Wednesday, November 29, 2023, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) delivered a major speech on American antisemitism, inspired by the rise in anti-Israeli protests in response to Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza after Hamas's barbaric attacks, protests which appear in some cases as some sort of embrace of Hamas and its goal of the elimination of all Jews and the state of Israel.

"... I have noticed a significant disparity between how Jewish people regard the rise of antisemitism," Schumer said,  "and how many of my non-Jewish friends regard it. To us, the Jewish people, the rise of antisemitism is a crisis—a five-alarm fire that must be extinguished."

There are a lot of five-alarm fires ravaging our collective lands today - and they are all connected.

I was disappointed in Schumer's speech, disappointed not because he rightly and forcefully denounced the rise in antisemitism and antisemitic activity, disappointed not because he rightly called for it to be extinguished, but because he failed, in my opinion, to fully contextualize his critique and perspective within our shared American, and international, experiences.

Disappointed because he failed to connect his five-alarm fire to all our interconnected fires.

Schumer failed to address the fact that the primary inspiration, historical and contemporary,  for antisemitism in America is often white nationalist supremacy; that from the earliest days of settlement on this continent Black enslavement, the genocide and ethnic cleansing of America's indigenous peoples, the 1830 Indian Removal Act, the 1882 Chinese Expulsion Act, the thousands of lynchings, the 1921 Tulsa pogrom, the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,”  the 1939 refusal to allow the SS St. Louis to disembark 900 Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, the internment of Japanese-Americans - the lynchings of Emmett Till, Tamir Rice, George Floyd and others, the attacks on George Soros, the attacks on the Tree of Life Synagogue and Mother Emanuel Church - right up to the censure of Palestinian-Muslim-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, have all been attacks fueled in great measure by the colonial and institutional impulses of a white supremacist - often antisemitic - nation over a period of more than 400 years.

These acts, and so many more, were not the actions of young peoples from elite universities rioting in America's streets shouting hateful slogans. They're not happening today simply because the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania have failed to educate them properly.

Yes, it is true that many young people - including both supporters of Palestinian rights and aspirations and some antisemites - have been aggressive and confrontational toward Jews and Jewish interest since October 7th and that must be condemned and stopped. There is no room for any support or excuse for any of Hamas' war crimes.

They are happening because Schumer, Biden, Netanyahu, and Hamas' leaders are all thinking transactionally, and the people in the streets - including 1,000s of Jews who support the humanity of the Palestinian people - who are transformatively trying to bring about liberation and freedom.

They're not happening just because some are calling for an Intifada (uprising) or for freedom for Palestinians from the river to the sea - though some may believe that.

They are happening because conflicts are what happens when people are unjustly oppressed and occupied, whether in Ferguson or Gaza.

They are happening because they understand well that “... our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

They are happening, too, because Schumer's generation fails to appreciate the historic cultural and religious links binding Black American and Palestinian activists; that Black activists and Palestinians see in each other peoples engaged in existential anti-colonial struggles for freedom and liberation.

They are, in the end, happening because there are malign political and religious forces - true antisemites, alongside Islamophobes - at play in our nation who want to tear down our democratic institutions for their personal and political gain.

In 2013, The Muslim Public Affairs Council gave Anthony Bourdain and his show, Parts Unknown,  their Voices of Courage and Conscience award for his work in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. In his acceptance speech Bourdain spoke of the Palestinians with whom he cooked and ate and said:

"I was enormously grateful for the response from Palestinians, in particular, for doing what seemed to me an ordinary thing, something we do all the time: show regular people doing everyday things. ... The world has visited many terrible things on the Palestinian people, none more shameful than robbing them of their basic humanity. People are not statistics. That is all we attempted to show."

We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without everyone's freedom, know that attaining freedom is not a zero sum game. That is what we must all attempt to show of each other.

Anything less is a statistic.

Robert Azzi, a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter, can be reached at theother.azzi@gmail.com. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Azzi: Everyone's freedom incomplete without freedom of Palestinians