While Baldwin was widely known for being a major voice in the civil rights movement who marched alongside Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., a lesser-known fact about him was his enduring solidarity with Palestine and how he viewed strong parallels between Black and Palestinian liberation movements—united in their fight against oppression and imperialism.
In a then-controversial 1979 essay for The Nation, Baldwin wrote:
But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me). The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’ and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.
Baldwin had been writing about Israel-Palestine since the early 1960s, but his views changed radically over time. In his earlier essays, there is very little mention of Palestinians. It is in the late 1960s and early 1970s that, like many Black American intellectuals, Baldwin would become critical of Israel and supportive of Palestinians.
Nadia Alahmed, a Palestinian scholar, activist, and Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Middle Eastern Studies at Dickinson, told me that “once Baldwin changed his mind about Israel, he never stopped criticizing it. Baldwin was one of the very first prolific black American voices to recognize Israel for what it really is.”
Although his self-imposed exiles in France and Turkey are well-documented, Baldwin also travelled widely in Africa and the Middle East. In September 1961, Baldwin was invited by the Israeli government for a tour of Israel, which was promoting itself as a post-racial haven intent on attracting Black American thinkers, like Baldwin, who felt alienated by their country’s enshrined racism and were looking for a new home.
According to research by Nadia Alahmed in The Shape of the Wrath to Come and Keith Feldman in A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America, Baldwin was—like many Americans—initially optimistic about Israel and the idea of a nation for Jewish people, a group that had been violently discriminated and traumatized.
Baldwin recounted in “Letters from a Journey” that he was treated like an “extremely well cared for parcel post package” by the Israelis in 1961, and that “Israel and I seem to like each other” upon first impressions. He visited the Negev desert, the Dead Sea, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and a kibbutz near the Gaza Strip.