Jordan is lesser known nationally and internationally than Lorde, and it seems to me that her decades of unwavering support for the Palestinian people is partly responsible. Jordan’s vocal anti-Zionism hamstrung her career for nearly a decade, resulting in death threats, a loss of writing opportunities, and social ostracization within multiracial feminist circles. Even in the time since her death, Jordan’s pro-Palestine stance has made her less co-optable into a neoliberal diversity narrative in which Palestinian liberation has been taboo for decades. Lorde is famous for the maxim “Your silence will not protect you,” but in this case, Lorde’s initial silence on Palestine did protect her career and her flourishing afterlife as a patron saint of the oppressed. Meanwhile, Jordan’s decades of writing and advocacy on behalf of the Palestinian people have been woefully underappreciated. Jordan once wrote, “I say we need a rising up, an Intifada, USA,” and for her, intifada was not a metaphor. Unlike Lorde, Jordan intended her writing to be a weapon, a public act in the service of Palestinian liberation. Despite their biographical similarities, Jordan and Lorde had differing practices of solidarity. How can we add nuance to the historical narrative of Black feminist solidarity with Palestine? After all, even 40 years later, US-based solidarity movements are still threatened by the same fault lines that felled Lorde and Jordan’s friendship.
In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon and began a nine-week siege on the capital city of Beirut, targeting the regional Palestinian resistance movement. During this war and the ensuing carnage against Palestinian refugees led by Israeli-backed paramilitary groups, over 20,000 Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians were killed. In his 2020 book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017, Rashid Khalidi argues that “because of American backing for Israel and tolerance of its actions […] the 1982 invasion must be seen as a joint Israeli-US military endeavor—their first war aimed specifically against the Palestinians.” Back in the United States, mainstream media publications like ABC, NBC News, Time magazine, and The New York Times reported for the first time with sympathy on the Palestinian struggle and displayed outrage at Israel’s atrocities. Amy Kaplan argues in Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance (2018) that Israel, during this war, “had lost the claim to innocence that it had maintained during prior wars. Its messaging was no longer unassailable, and its worldview no longer smoothly nor automatically reflected that of the American news audience.” In August 1982, even Ronald Reagan called to admonish Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and wrote in his diary that “the symbol of [Begin’s] war was becoming a picture of a 7 month old baby with its arms blown off.”