Indianapolis Liberation Center: A common enemy of the sun: George Jackson and Samih Al-Qasim https://indyliberationcenter.org/george-jackson-samih-al-qasim-enemy-of-sun/

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.