A common enemy of the sun: George Jackson and Samih Al-Qasim

The September 25, 1971 edition of The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service is centered around a full page spread dedicated to George Jackson, their fallen comrade and Field Marshal whom San Quentin prison guards assassinated on August 21 that year [1]. While the paper dedicated two consecutive editions to Jackson in late August and early September, this particular spread is notable for its encapsulation of the deep bond between Black and Palestinian liberation.

The right side of the centerfold is dedicated to a five-stanza poem across two columns. Just below the last stanza in the center there’s a hyphen followed by George Jackson in bold, capital letters. The left side is dominated by a centered portrait of Jackson, on top is the title of the poem and below it there is Jackson’s name and days of birth and death. The poem ostensibly attributed to Jackson, “Enemy of the sun,” was that of revolutionary Palestinian poet Samih Al-Qasim, whose poetry Jackson had copied in his own handwriting.

George Jackson in the sun of Palestine

Black revolutionary scholar, artist, and activist Greg Thomas obtained a memorandum, first published on Liberation News, in 2009, listing the 99 books taken from George Jackson’s cell after his assassination [2]. Sitting at number 93,  just before the third volume of Karl Marx’s Capital, is Enemy of the Sun, an anthology edited by Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeb. The book, subtitled Poetry of Palestinian Resistance, was published by Drum and Spear Press in 1970.

Drum and Spear Press’ origins were in the revolutionary wing of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. In an article accompanying his exhibition and translated into English by Samidoun, Thomas notes that this wing of SNCC “also took a bold position in support of Palestine.” According to Thomas, this pro-Palestine position contributed to SNCC’s dissolution, as funding from “white liberalism in general and white ‘Jewish’ liberalism in particular came to a screeching halt” [3].

It is difficult to comprehend that this was controversial position at the time, even on the radical left—the realm in which a pro-Palestine position was even audible or legible. SNCC’s position came out in 1967, a turning point in the Palestinian struggle. In June 1967, Israel, France, and the U.S. launched a strike attack against Palestine, colonizing the rest of Palestine and seizing Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights in Syria.

Few on the left openly supported the Palestinian struggle, which grew more radical and unified after the setback [4]. In his study of the U.S. left and Palestine, Michael R. Fischbach writes that most “Old Left” groups issued statements against Israel, but only a few “took to the streets with brash, NewLeft style protests and demonstrations,” citing the Workers World Party and their Ad Hoc Committee on the Middle East [5].

Like the Workers World Party, the Black Panther Party stood resolutely with the Palestinian resistance. Thomas writes they “issued at least three official statements on Palestine and the ‘Middle East’ in 1970, 1974, and 1980, besides anonymous Black Panther articles promoting Palestinian liberation as well as assorted PLO editorials” [6]. 

Thus, the significance of the September 1971 issue of the Party’s weekly paper. The poem “Enemy of the Sun,” Thomas writes, was in the anthology 

“seized from the cell of George Jackson (Black Panther Field Marshal), after his assassination by San Quentin prison guards on August 21, 1971: ‘Enemy of the Sun’ by Samih al-Qasim was even mysteriously published in the Black Panther newspaper under ‘Comrade George’s’ name in a magical ‘mistake’ that would cement a certain Black/Palestinian connection for decades to come.”

Whether or not this was really a “mistake” is beside the point. The fact that an anthology of radical Palestinian poetry made its way to a U.S. publishing house in 1970, was smuggled into a maximum-security prison, and studied and copied by George Jackson before his assassination is of remarkable significance. It was not as if they were scanning, uploading, and emailing PDFs. It speaks to the enduring solidarity between the two struggles. 

As Thomas concludes one article, “Blame it on the Sun: George Jackson and the Poetry of Palestinian Resistance: ”The ‘mistake’ of capitalist property and commercial copyright turns out to be a revelation, a sign of radical identification and uncanny connection beyond rhetorical declarations of solidarity” [7].

References

[1]The Black Panther Party, The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, 25 September 1971: 10-11. Available here.
[2] Liberation Staff, “Exclusive: Official Inventory of George Jackson’s Prison Cell Library,” Liberation News, 21 August 2009. Available here.
[3] Greg Thomas, “The Black Panther Party – For Palestine,” Samidoun, 30 September 2016. Available here.
[4] Richard Becker, Palestine, Israel and the U.S. Empire, 2nd. ed. (New York: 1804 Books, 2024).
[5] Michael R. Fischbach, The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), 76-77.
[6] Thomas, “The Black Panther Party.”
[7] Greg Thomas, “Blame it on the Sun: George Jackson and Poetry of Palestinian Resistance,” Comparative American Studies 13, no. 4 (2015): 244.