Danielle Purifoy (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Jews and Palestinians know of broken promises. From the time of the Balfour Declaration (during World War I) Palestine was under five British mandates, and England promised the land back and forth to the Arabs or the Jews, depending on which horse seemed to be in the lead. The Zionists—as distinguished from the people known as Jews—using, as someone put it, the “available political machinery”, i.e. colonialism, e.g. the British Empire—promised the British that, if the territory were given to them, the British Empire would be safe forever.

But absolutely no one cared about the Jews, and it is worth observing that non-Jewish Zionists are very frequently anti-Semitic. The white Americans responsible for sending black slaves to Liberia (where they are still slaving for the Firestone Rubber Plantation) did not do this to set them free. They despised them, and they wanted to get rid of them.

—James Baldwin (1979)

On Labor Day weekend, members of several fraternities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), including Pi Kappa Phi, Alpha Epsilon Pi, and Zeta Beta Tau converged at the local American Legion to be fêted by a hodgepodge group of US nationalists, from local American Legion members to country music stars to GOP boosters.[1] This event came after a series of spectacular occurrences on campus in late April 2024. The culminating occurrence was a moment at UNC’s Polk Place quad, when students, faculty, and community members, many of whom had participated in the Palestine solidarity encampment on campus (see Reilly 2024), launched an afternoon protest against the brutal dismantling of the encampment early that same morning.

At dawn, police from across the state—up to a four-hour drive away—descended on the campus wearing militarized riot gear, arresting protestors and detaining them in a campus building until the sheriff’s department arrived with semi-automatic rifles to haul them away in modernized paddy wagons. Later that day, after several impassioned speeches about the University’s complicity with the genocide in Gaza, the protestors conducted a non-violent direct action aimed at the US flag, which flies prominently in the center of the quad, halfway between UNC’s signature research library and the administrative building.

Locking arms, the protestors surrounded the flagpole while those at the center pulled down the US flag and raised the Palestinian flag to many cheers from the crowd that gathered mostly in solidarity with Palestine. This act prompted a violent escalation that drastically shifted the focus of everything that came afterwards. The people surrounding the flagpole had no weapons and threw no punches.

Suddenly, UNC Chancellor Lee Roberts marched out of the administrative building, flanked by an army of cops who rushed the protestors clinging to each other around the flagpole. Within seconds, one cop threw a student to the ground, dragging the person by their hair.[2] A student in their wheelchair, who had already been knocked over once by police pushing a barricade on them, was knocked over once again as police pushed down a faculty member trying to protect them. The cops beat and pepper-sprayed the protestors until they were dislodged from the flagpole (see Cox 2024). Members of various UNC fraternities, who had been at the afternoon protest in fairly small numbers, grew their ranks, and themselves rushed to the flagpole to hold the US flag off of the ground, and to join in the brutality. One student, who is shown in video footage that day being beaten up by the frat brothers, was sent to the hospital for his injuries.

The Chancellor was quoted by a local TV station as he was walking back into the administrative building: “‘The flag represents all of us’, Roberts said. ‘To take down that flag and put up another flag, no matter what flag it is, that’s antithetical to who we are, what this University stands for [and] what we have done for 229 years’” (Cox 2024).

Roberts was greeted by the counter-protestors, who now held both the US and the Israeli flags, side by side. He shook their hands. He told reporters that he would protect Jewish students “from a very small minority of students who want to disrupt their experience”. When asked about what he would say to Palestinian students, he turned and walked away (Cox 2024).

John Noonan and Susan Ralston, the former having served as Senior Counselor for Military and Defense Affairs to Republican Senator Tom Cotton, and the latter a veteran of the George W. Bush presidential administration, learned of the fraternities’ actions to protect the US flag that day, and started a GoFundMe campaign, along with a new organization, Pints for Patriots, to throw the young men a “rager” (Northam 2024).[3] Within two days, the campaign raised over $500K with additional pledges from musicians like John Ondrasik of Five for Fighting, Big & Rich, Lee Greenwood, and Aaron Lewis to perform at the rager for free, which they did on Labor Day weekend. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel (who attended high school in Philadelphia), valorized the fraternities’ actions during his speech to the US Congress in July (Doran 2024). Members of the fraternities were celebrated on stage this summer at the Republican National Convention (Battaglia and Dean 2024).

In the end, the frat rager—eventually named “Flagstock”—that was anticipated to draw at least 3,000 people, only hosted a couple hundred attendees (Gretzinger 2024). The irony, at least for some of the frat members, was that in their efforts to protect the US flag, an act which many saw as in alignment with protecting Jewish people, they summoned members of the far right, including MAGA Republicans, notorious for White nationalism (Graham et al. 2021), anti-Arabism and Islamophobia (Beydoun 2017; Corbin 2017), anti-Blackness (Fording and Schram 2020), and of course, antisemitism (Johnston 2024; Lembcke 2023). The GoFundMe campaign pledged no commitment to fighting antisemitism or even to protecting Israel, only to “throw these frats the party they deserve, a party worthy of the boat-shoed Broleteriat who did their country proud”. Flagstock had nine named sponsors, which were all businesses owned by far-right conservatives, from banking to consulting.[4] Contrary to typical frat party protocol, Flagstock attendees (with the exception of VIPs) were required to purchase food and drinks. Flagstock-branded merchandise was also for sale at the event (and is still for sale as of October 24th, 2024) and donations to Pints for Patriots continued after the end of the GoFundMe campaign.[5]

According to reporting by NC media outlet The Assembly, the fraternities were largely kept in the dark about how the campaign money was spent, and what would happen with revenue earned at the event (Gretzinger 2024). Though the GoFundMe was updated to include a short list of potential recipients of funding, including Back the Blue NC, Wounded Warrior Project, Children of Fallen Patriots, and Zeta Beta Tau Foundation to Combat Anti-Semitism, there was little nexus between the rager and the concerns about Israel or antisemitism. Some of the frat members expressed reservations and disgust about being associated with the politics of the event, and others were frustrated with the lack of financial transparency and connection to the defense of Israel (Medina 2024).

So how does an act ultimately aimed at defending Zionism result in funding for US nationalists known for antisemitism?

A short answer is that the US has an interest-convergence with Zionism that has little to do with Jewish people, and is in fact grounded partially in antisemitism. The US’s investment in Israel is ultimately about advancing the economic and political strength of the US, which results in a positioning around Jewish people that is contingent on their usefulness to the US empire. Palestinians feel the weight of the US empire more viscerally, as their insistence on their own freedom and sovereignty is antithetical to the state’s interests in the region.

Jewish people (including those who identify as Zionists) and Palestinians express desires for what Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2018a) calls “freedom as a place”. But the horrors of the past year, as with those of the previous 75 years, have raised the truly imperative question of what kind of place that should be.

* * *

I am a Black scholar and professor from the US South who is complicit in the ongoing genocide of tens of thousands of Palestinian people with weapons purchased with taxes I pay to the US government. I am also a person who understands that my fate is tied to that of Palestinians, who are right now being massacred at the hands of the same Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) that are collaborating with law enforcement in the US on expansive, more militarized strategies for brutalizing everyday people, most especially non-white immigrants and Black and Native people (Rodriguez 2021). Over 42,000 Palestinians are dead, an unfathomable number made more devastating by the fact that this official number only counts the bodies that can be recovered or identified (see AJLabs 2024; Mallapaty 2024). Israelis have certainly not been spared, either. Irrespective of their political views, they have been dragged by Netanyahu’s administration into conditions of extreme violence and repression that have no foreseeable end, and will never make them safe or free.

UNC, like nearly all universities in the US, has disregarded the lives and safety of Palestinians and other Arab peoples both on campus and abroad, not only by refusing to divest from funds that are fueling the current genocide, but also by penalizing protests of the genocide itself, along with other forms of protected speech.[6] Anti-Arabism is rampant on college campuses (and far beyond them), and antisemitism is also on the rise, but the former is almost entirely ignored by college administrators, and the latter is addressed in a more contingent fashion. For example, though UNC has asserted its stance against antisemitism since October 7th and in most instances where Israel is a subject of campus debate or protest, the university was silent on the threat to Jewish people of white supremacist, neo-Confederate protestors who frequented the campus and harassed students and employees in the midst of multi-year fights over Silent Sam, the Confederate statue that anchored the University’s oldest quad until it was toppled in 2018. Similarly, there was no concern expressed about antisemitism or anti-Arabism during the raid of the Palestine solidarity encampment or the later attack around the flagpole, though there were many Jewish people protesting alongside Palestinian and other Arab folks. Conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism is the University’s weapon against dissent, not because of genuine concern for the safety of Jewish people, but because it protects its own political and financial interests, which are aligned with the larger interests of the US.

My own area of research focuses on the many ways that Black people in the US and across the African diaspora try to manifest what Gilmore (2018a) calls “freedom as a place”. Specifically, I am interested in how Black people, during and long after enslavement, experimented (and continue to experiment) with placemaking shaped by their own ideals of freedom, safety, spirituality, education, and economic imperatives. These experiments, as I and many others have argued, did not necessarily align with the premises of citizenship within the nation-states in which they were embedded (see e.g. Diouf 2014; Roberts 2015; Winston 2023). In the US and many parts of the Caribbean, along with Central and South America, there were Black people who openly (and understandably) disavowed being integrated into the body politic of the states that enslaved them. But for some, the alternative to integration was another form of nationalism, a way to control their destinies by creating worlds centered around themselves, sometimes to the exclusion of others. And, as we’ve seen particularly in the case of Liberia, as with Israel, where there is a despised and useful population willing to form a separate and dependent nation, the West is willing to oblige.

As political scientist Richard Solomon (2024) argues in the Nigerian magazine The Republic, direct comparisons between Israel and Liberia are false equivalencies for many reasons, including the vast gulf in Western resources and power invested in Liberia as compared to Israel, and the important distinctions between Zionism and Pan-Africanism (M’bayo 2004). The former was more expressly colonial, with the intent to displace Palestinian and other Arab populations from Palestine. The latter had an anti-imperialist agenda, seeking to relocate Black Americans to present-day Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Ghana in order to integrate them into existing West African societies and traditions (ibid.).[7] Nonetheless, both experiments were/are subject to the violent exploitation and various forms of dispossession of the already existing peoples of each place (Clegg 2004). And the commonality of that violence is intimately linked to the interests of the West. There could be no Israel without the British empire’s mandate in Palestine following World War I, and the concurrent interests of the West, including the US, in the oil-rich region and its strategic geographic position vis-a-vis growing Middle Eastern and Asian national powers, along with express desires to prevent millions of Jewish people fleeing persecution and genocide in Germany and Eastern Europe from relocating to the UK, Western Europe, and North America. Zionists knew from the beginning of the nation-state project that their success would require both the support of the West and maintaining Israel as its colonial vanguard in the East, subject always to the demands and desires of Western interests, including oil and economic/political supremacy. In fact, Theodor Herzl, considered the “father of modern political Zionism”, determined that the Jewish state could only be built under the “patronage of one of the imperial powers” (Awad and Levin 2020). Colonialism was seen as a necessity for Israel, which of course led to all of its attendant violences, including genocide.

In 1822, the US-based American Colonization Society (ACS) captured the lands that are now Liberia specifically to relocate Black people, due to concerns that the overall Black population of the US was growing uncomfortably large, as well as fear of increasing numbers of slave rebellions (Burin 2005). That colonization process dispossessed as many as 15 Indigenous groups, replacing their traditional lands with settlements of Black people extracted from the US (Mitman 2021). As James Baldwin alludes to in the epigraph above, many Black people who relocated to Liberia through the interest-convergence of the ACS and the Pan-Africanist movement ended up laboring for the Firestone rubber plantation, which fueled the US military and the Allied powers during World War II (ibid.), and which, as a ProPublica investigation revealed, supported the rise of Charles Taylor’s deadly dictatorship in Liberia from 1997 until 2003 (Miller and Jones 2014). Despite the fervent advocacy for Black self-determination and solidarity with African peoples advanced by Pan-Africanists like W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey (though each had different visions of success in Liberia), their misguided, Westernized fantasies of the future for the African continent combined with the experiment’s embeddedness within the more explicit colonial extractivism of the US meant that the vision was bound to fall short (M’bayo 2004). Similar to Zionists in Israel, Black American elites in Liberia captured land, resources, and capital in ways that perpetuated the expulsion and exploitation of Native peoples from the country and the exploitation of poorer Black American-descendants, while sharpening the country’s economic growth, ultimately “saving” Liberia from further colonial capture by the UK, the Netherlands, and other colonial powers chomping at the bit to claim it as a failed state in need of development (Mitman 2021). But Liberia’s independence was only ever relative to its neighbors who were still more firmly under the boots of Western empire. And just as anti-Zionist Jews rejected the establishment of the state of Israel (see e.g. Feld 2024; Magid 2023), there were legions of Black people across the Americas and the Caribbean who categorically rejected the unholy interest-convergence of the ACS and Pan-Africanists seeking what they saw as another wave of African colonization and forced Black labor.

But the very idea that a people’s freedom can be manifested through the nation can be a troubling one, particularly when what Frantz Fanon called “national consciousness” spins into nationalism and campaigns for statehood.[8] Nationalism can be seductive precisely because it promises safety in homogenous masses. The nation-state is even more alluring because it also promises geography, which is to say, an inscription of one’s power and presence permanently on the landscape. Here is where we can be free, especially if political conditions shift to endanger us again. These frameworks for freedom are problematic for the possibilities of co-existence—with other humans and non-humans. When Baldwin wrote the article for The Nation in 1979, his clarity about the parallel narratives of Jewish nationalism and Pan-Africanist pursuits in Africa was not only about the continuation of oppression imposed by the West under new cloth; it was also about the ways that the horror, trauma, and grief of oppression can be weaponized to foment a particular form of narcissism. By this I mean a false promise of security seeded in the centering of the self to the detriment of any others who might erect boundaries to your vision of the world. As Baldwin (1967) once put it, people are not “ennobled” by their own oppression.

Black Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and other peoples of the African diaspora have certainly not seen overall greater security (either in Liberia or in the US) by our exploits in Liberia and other nations on the African continent, though a few of us have been enriched financially and politically. And we have all now been witnesses to the false promise of security for the past year, and of course for the 75 years preceding it with the Zionist colonization of Palestine. What peace, what security, what freedom, and indeed what future can come from apartheid and genocide?

Modern statehood has thus far been one of the most humanly unviable, ecocidal ventures that one could make, even in the name of anti-oppression, even in the name of “never again”. It imposes life ways that often have little to do with the landscape, the ecology, the cultural traditions, the food, and the mode of governance practiced by the people already living there, who may also understand themselves to belong to “nations”, but ones that perhaps do not require supremacy or central rule of any one group. Humans have for millennia crafted myriad ways of organizing themselves and living in the world outside the structures of the nation-state, some as fully integrated within their larger ecosystems and in cohabitation with one another through treaties and exchanges (see e.g. Simpson 2017; Whyte 2018).

Gilmore (2018b) views the state not as an autonomous structure inhabited by humans, but rather as an entity fundamentally shaped and enlivened by humans. This is to say that there is a possibility for humans to shape nation-states in ways that are, per Katherine McKittrick (2006), more “humanly workable geographies”. To do so, per Gilmore (2022: 475), is the work of “abolition geography”—“combin[ing] people, and land, and other resources with our social capacity to organize ourselves in a variety of ways, whether to stay put or to go wandering”, ultimately to build “freedom as a place”. Though I am agnostic on the future of the nation-state, this last year has clarified the urgency of abolishing “the processes of hierarchy, dispossession, and exclusion that congeal in and as group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (Gilmore 2022: 476).

If the events at UNC and at the subsequent “rager” are indicative of anything, they demonstrate the dire consequences of defining freedom with borders narrowly contoured to the singular collective, whether it is ethnicity, race, class, or religion. The mirroring of US (white) nationalism in the context of Zionist politics sees little hope for abolishing antisemitism, much less anti-Arabism. That hope is also dim under the current and prospective US Democratic administration, which have been just as explicit as the GOP that Israel is a means of US expansionism and power in the region, not a pathway towards Jewish freedom (Becket 2024).[9]

Our lives and futures depend on us finding other ways to live and thrive beyond serial colonialism and ethno-statism. Freedom as a place requires abolition.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Antipode for the invitation to write this piece, and express my deepest gratitude to Sharon Holland, Juliane Hammer, Antonia Randolph, Elyse Crystall, Sara Smith, Melissa Weiner, and a dear friend and International Studies scholar from Detroit for their meticulous reading and helpful suggestions. Special thanks to my students at UNC Chapel Hill (particularly those in UNC Students for Justice in Palestine), who inspire me every day to hold the line for our collective humanity and liberation. And thank you to UNC Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine for all the ways that you create multiple spaces for education and dissent against genocide. I’m proud to call you my colleagues.

Free Palestine. Free Congo. Free Haiti. Free Sudan. End the genocides, now.

Endnotes

[1] Historians Joseph Thompson and Amanda Martinez both highlight the nexus between contemporary US country music and hawkish patriotism (Thompson 2024) and White supremacy/anti-Blackness (Martinez 2020, 2022).

[2] See https://www.instagram.com/p/C6Zn7bwviCm/?igsh=Nm5tbmphYTVrdmEw (last accessed 24 October 2024).

[3] “UNC frat bros defended their flag. Let’s throw ’em a rager”—see https://www.gofundme.com/f/UNC-frat-bros-defended-their-flag-throw-em-a-rager (last accessed 24 October 2024).

[4] For example, Old Glory Bank, which brands its mobile application as an “anti-woke payment app” (https://x.com/OldGloryBank/status/1741535206798926250) and was founded by right-wing conservatives, including John Rich of Big & Rich, and the Secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development under Trump, Dr. Benjamin Carson.

[5] See https://flag-stock.square.site/ and https://secure.anedot.com/pints-for-patriots-foundation/7c251529-7538-48f5-9687-88f0b2a88206 (last accessed 24 October 2024).

[6] UNC Students for Justice in Palestine has filed a Title VI civil rights complaint against UNC for systematic discrimination against Palestinian students since October 7th (Killian 2024).

[7] It must be said that Du Bois and Garvey saw some alignments between Pan-Africanism and Zionism, and that despite their “decolonial” politics, they specifically sought to impose Western forms of governance on Indigenous populations—a displacement of socio-political structures even if they didn’t seek the displacement of the Indigenous peoples themselves.

[8] Fanon, writing about the Algerian decolonial struggles in The Wretched of the Earth, distinguishes between “national consciousness” and “nationalism”. The former is predicated on building a collective vision and ownership of a decolonial vision for the masses (which then must transform into international solidarity). The latter is a regression into elite capture and rule, often under the auspices of the ethno-state, quite similar to the colonial project of the nation-state (see Fanon 1963; Sajed and Seidel 2019).

[9] The specific line by VP candidate Tim Walz is, “But the expansion of Israel and its proxies is an absolute, fundamental necessity for the United States to have the steady leadership there. You saw it experienced today, where, along with our Israeli partners and our coalition, able to stop the incoming attack. But what’s fundamental here is that steady leadership is going to matter. It’s clear…” (Becket 2024).

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This is the fifth of our essays on Pro-Palestinian and Anti-War Protest on Campus; the first four can be found at https://antipodeonline.org/2024/08/05/pro-palestinian-and-anti-war-protest-on-campus/ Authors were invited to engage with such concepts as imperialism, militarization, settler colonialism, racism, gender, transnational Left solidarities, and the conflation of any critique of Zionism with anti-Semitism in the context of police and institutionalized violence against pro-Palestinian and anti-war protesters on university campuses in (and beyond) North America. Authors were invited based on their expertise and ongoing participation in critical discussions, and we would like to thank them, again, for their important contributions.