Kwame Ture’s Anti-Zionism: The Meeting Between Pan-Africanism and Palestine

Kwame Ture, formerly Stokely Carmichael, defined Pan-Africanism as “the total unification and liberation of Africa under scientific socialism.”[1] This formulation is important not only for what it affirms—unity, liberation, socialism—but also for what it rejects: reformism, nationalism without political economy, and solidarities emptied of material analysis. Ture’s Pan-Africanism was not the Negritude of Senghor; it was a theory of power rooted in anti-imperial struggle.

Within the framework of Pan-Africanism in the twentieth century, Ture emerged as one of the most vocal and uncompromising critics of Israel and Zionism outside of the Arab-Iranian region. Long before Palestine became a household cause, Ture insisted that Black liberation and Palestinian liberation were structurally linked. He understood Zionism not as an aberration of the post-World War II order or a question of competing nationalisms, but as a colonial ideology embedded within a global imperial system dominated by the United States.

In a moment when reactionary forces work relentlessly to erase, distort, or domesticate histories of radical internationalism, Kwame Ture offers not only an archive but a model. His Pan-Africanist orientation rejects the separation of domestic racial injustice from global imperial violence. Key moments of Ture’s anti-Zionist organizing illuminate the tradition of principled, internationalist struggle that speaks directly to the present.

In August 1968, the Organization of Arab Students (OAS) convened a five-day national conference at the University of Michigan. Contemporary reporting notes the presence of between 300 and 400 Arab students from across the United States, alongside a delegation from the Black Panther Party. The conference took place just over a year after the June 1967 Six-Day War , which resulted in Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula.

Far from a cultural or academic gathering, the OAS convention reflected a growing radicalization among Arab students in the United States. A report written at the time by Jan Garrett and Peter Herreshoff observed that the convention marked “a further deepening of the Arab students in the direction of revolutionary struggle and community-building struggle and the identification with the liberation struggles of the colonial world.”[2] This identification was neither accidental nor rhetorical; it emerged from a shared understanding of imperialism as a global structure rather than a series of isolated injustices.

The internationalist orientation of the conference was underscored by a message sent to the delegates by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, a central figure in Third World anti-imperial politics. Nasser warned: “I do not wish to sketch a rosy picture of the Arab future. You are well aware of the fact that it is not Zionism alone that we are facing, but indeed all the forces of imperialism, which despise all human and moral values and look with contempt on whatever is sacred in international relations. Israel is the spearhead of those forces.”[3] Nasser’s statement framed Zionism not as a clash of civilisations as Bernard Lewis would write , but as an instrument of imperial power. This framing would deeply resonate with Black radicals in the United States who were increasingly seeking international allies.

This moment unfolded amid a decisive political shift within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1967, SNCC issued a public statement denouncing Zionism and expressing solidarity with Palestinians , marking a sharp break from mainstream U.S. political discourse. Under Ture’s leadership , SNCC moved decisively toward an internationalist, anti-imperialist framework—one that understood African Americans, or as Ture insisted, Africans in America, as part of a global struggle against colonial domination.[4] This position came at a high cost. SNCC was accused of antisemitism. Yet rather than retreat, the organization doubled down on its analysis. In defiance of the backlash directed at SNCC, the OAS invited Kwame Ture to serve as a keynote speaker at its 1968 convention. In his address, Ture made his position unmistakably clear: “People who want our support will have to condemn Zionism.”[5] With this declaration, Ture established anti-Zionism as a litmus test for solidarity. Solidarity in praxis then required taking sides against imperial structures.

Central to Ture’s analysis was his understanding of Zionism as a form of settler colonialism. He rejected the framing of Israel as a unique historical exception, instead situating it alongside other settler projects produced by European expansion. In speeches delivered throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ture repeatedly named Israel in the same breath as the United States, Canada, Australia, and Southern African settler regimes. As he argued: “The settlers’ aim is to make the colony an extension of their original country. Mozambique is a settler colony. Angola is a settler colony. Portuguese Guinea is a settler colony. Australia is a settler colony. My brothers and sisters, Israel is a settler colony. But more importantly for you and for me, we must come to understand that America and Canada are settler colonies.”[6]

This analysis collapses the artificial distinction between “foreign” and “domestic.” For Ture, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island, the enslavement and racial domination of Africans in America, and the colonization of Palestine were not parallel tragedies but interconnected outcomes of a single global system. U.S. imperialism, in his view, constituted the structural condition of possibility for Zionism in the post WWII order. In Stokely Speaks, particularly in the speech “The Black American and Palestinian Revolutions,” Ture articulated his position with characteristic clarity: “We have begun to see this trickery of Zionism; we have begun to see the evil of Zionism, and we will fight to wipe it out wherever it exists, in the Middle East or in the ghetto of the United States. The United States is the greatest de-humanizer in the world, and Israel is nothing but a finger of the United States of America.”[7] By explicitly tying Israel’s continued existence to U.S. geopolitical ambitions, Ture made clear that Israel functioned as an extension of American power. Its violence was not accidental or defensive; it was systemic, structural, and internationally enabled.

In 1989, Kwame Ture was invited to deliver a lecture at Oberlin College. As had become routine, his invitation sparked organized efforts to have the event cancelled. He was labelled antisemitic, and organizers were pressured to publicly denounce him. These tactics—moral panic, donor pressure, and institutional intimidation—bear a striking resemblance to those deployed against pro-Palestinian voices today . However, Oberlin College refused to capitulate. In a public statement, the administration rejected the false binary imposed upon them, insisting, “We refuse to be drawn into an exchange in which we only have one of two choices: either to denounce Kwame Ture as an anti-Semite or to be labelled anti-Semitic ourselves.” The statement further clarified: “Anti-Zionism is the principled opposition to the notion that the land of Palestine was given by God to the Jews… Anti-Semitism is the racist discrimination against Jewish people. There is a world of difference between these two positions, and people are presently paying with their lives for the difference.”[8] At a time when universities increasingly capitulate to state pressure and donor intimidation , Oberlin’s refusal stands as a rare example of institutional courage.

Ture’s anti-Zionism was not idiosyncratic; it was rooted in a broader Pan-African and Third World consensus. In 1975, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) adopted a resolution identifying Zionism as a danger to world peace and as structurally linked to apartheid regimes in Southern Africa. The resolution explicitly recognized the shared imperial origins of Zionism, apartheid in South Africa, and settler colonialism in Zimbabwe and Namibia. This position informed African support for United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 , which declared Zionism a form of racism and racial discrimination. The resolution was overturned in 1991, not because its analysis had been disproven, but as a condition imposed on Palestinians and Arabs for Israel’s participation in the Madrid Peace Conference.

In 1991, Ture helped found the World-Wide African Anti-Zionist Front , reaffirming Africa’s historic opposition to Zionism despite mounting U.S. pressure. In his opening address, Ture summarized the matter succinctly: “Many think that Zionism is not Africa’s direct enemy and therefore Africa’s struggle is relegated to a supportive role. We conscious Africans know that Zionism is Africa’s direct enemy.”[9] Ture’s claim was not rhetorical. Israel demonstrated consistent hostility to African liberation through concrete actions, including:

• Participating in the killing of Egyptian soldiers during the 1967 war
• Opposing Algerian and Tunisian self-determination at the United Nations from 1954-1962
• Provisioning military and diplomatic support to apartheid regimes in South Africa, Rhodesia, and Portuguese-controlled Angola and Mozambique from 1960’s to the 1980’s:
• Training police forces across North America, starting in the 1970s, exporting counterinsurgency tactics that intensified racialized policing, and
• Ongoing support of the illegal U.S. blockade of Cuba, standing alongside Washington against a Black-led socialist revolution

These actions reveal in no uncertain terms that Israel is no friend to African people. As such, for Kwame Ture, anti-Zionism was not an optional position within radical politics. Opposition to imperialism, capitalism, and racism required the complete rejection of Zionism. As he declared : “We know many who call themselves anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist—but are not anti-Zionist. However, when one is anti-Zionist, one is automatically anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and definitely anti-racist.”[10]

“I dream,” averred Ture, “of having coffee with my wife in South Africa; and mint tea in Palestine.” These simple, grounded dreams remain unrealized. And they remain ours.

Momodou Taal is a member of AISC's student wing.

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[1] Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2007), 179.

[2] Jan Garrett and Peter Herreshoff, “Arab Student Movement in the United States,” Liberated Guardian, 1968.

[3] Gamal Abdel Nasser, message to Arab student delegates in the United States, 1968, cited in contemporary OAS materials.

[4] Peniel Joseph, Stokely: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 215-30.

[5] Kwame Ture, speech at OAS Convention, University of Michigan, 1968.

[6] Carmichael, Stokely Speaks, 201.

[7] Ibid., 183-84.

[8] Oberlin College Administrative Statement, 1989 (Oberlin College Archives).

[9] Kwame Ture, address to African Liberation Support Committees, late 1980s.

[10] Carmichael, Stokely Speaks, 201.