To honor Kwame Ture is to condemn Zionism. Yet the lecture bearing his name platformed a speaker who calls anti-Zionism 'hate', erasing Ture’s clarity that Palestine’s liberation is inseparable from Pan-African struggle.
We note with vexation that the Kwame Ture Memorial Lecture Series at the Pan-African Festival, University of Trinidad and Tobago, June 15th, was launched by Distinguished Professor Lewis R. Gordon, of the University of Connecticut. Gordon delivered a talk entitled “Decolonising the Mind: The Relevance of Fanon in the Modern Caribbean.” The selection of Gordon for this event is a travesty of Ture’s powerful legacy and his strident anti-Zionist position, which is also core to his Pan African vision.
Ture spoke many times against the modern Zionist project in crystal clear terms: “I am anti-Zionist and will remain so until it is destroyed because it is an unjust, illegal, immoral, and racist system.” In a 1995 interview, Ture made it clear that Zionism has, “nothing to do with religion”, but has its organizational origins in modern Europe via Theodor Herzl. Herzl himself had written to Cecil Rhodes in 1902, asking for support for “the idea of Zionism, which is a colonial idea.”[1] Ture named Zionism as the genocidal, settler colonial project it was: “it is imperialism... It has gone and taken the lands of the Palestinian people and through terrorism has driven them out.”
For Ture, decolonization requires the end of all settler and apartheid state formations, and this includes the apartheid state of Israel, which has been committing genocide against the Indigenous people of Palestine since the Nakba of 1948. Ture, like other Caribbean radicals, Aimé Césaire, Walter Rodney, Claudia Jones, and Frantz Fanon, directly linked settler colonialism and Western imperialism to the “underdevelopment” of Africa, via theft of its peoples, lands, and resources. For Ture, Pan African liberation requires the end of settler colonial states like the US and South Africa, which are rooted in white supremacy.
In opposition to Ture, Gordon is a proponent of the Israeli state and the project of Zionism. In a recorded talk for the American Bar Association, January, 2024, he stated that to use the term “Zionist” critically is a “slur”, egregiously conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism. These last 21 months have exposed his commitment to a feel-good liberal Zionist project, which is ultimately fidelity to the spirit of imperialism, and hides the interlinkages of genocidal colonization between Palestine and the Caribbean.
On the escalation of the genocide since October 7th, Gordon has remained silent. In October 2023, when pressed to explain his silence on the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, he stated on Twitter: “Given my limited time, I focused my energy on grave matters elsewhere.” Both Ture and Fanon have told us plenty of times that silence is a parasitical business model which, in this case, profits off maintaining the plantation capitalist status quo in the Caribbean. Gordon is also silent on the fate of Black Palestinians under Israeli bombardment.
Predictably, Gordon continued his silence on the genocide in Palestine on 15 June. After delivering the Kwame Ture Memorial Lecture, he was asked directly by an audience member about Gaza and if we should view it with “Fanon’s position that the logic of colonialism is genocidal?” Gordon replied,“Fanon actually argues that the logic of colonialism is apartheid.” He went on to separate the state of Israel and Zionism itself from genocide by saying that only “the aspirations of Likud were genocidal” and said, “while there are Zionists in Israel, criminals are in a different category.” But Fanon was clear on the evil of settler colonialism’s “brute force” in The Wretched of the Earth. Gordon focused on love and radicalism in his talk: “Hate is easy, you see something you hate, burn it down. But (love is) building.” Fanon, in contrast, was always clear that decolonization cannot occur without liberative “violence” and “struggle.” Decolonization is both upheaval and “creation” of “new humanity.”[2]
Gordon’s evasions, along with his clear circumscriptions of Fanon’s work, are characteristic of a wider agenda of critical counterinsurgency, particularly within Caribbean studies, to appropriate Fanon for “liberal Zionism,” and to capture his radical anti-colonial work for all that he opposed.
These moves are ongoing precisely because, within a global-imperial order, Palestine and the Caribbean have much in common. At the time of writing, the new Prime Minister of Trinidad, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, has extended a curfew along coastal areas that supposedly targets “criminals” and “gangs.” Over-policing in the Caribbean is inseparable from antiblack colonial structures still in place. Non-sovereignty and the political fragility of independent states stifle our imagining or creating truly liberatory ways of being. Haiti and Cuba freeing up would radically transform Caribbean slaveocracy geopolitics: consequently, they must suffer from everlasting foreign occupations and life-threatening embargos. US imperialism still governs the Caribbean through neocolonial leadership in the region and diaspora to keep people in check. And the Dominican Republic's ethnic cleansing of Haitians mirrors Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Palestinians.
Yet within this context that requires clarity, Gordon, like so many others, chooses to uphold Zionist oppression and to limit Fanon’s anti-colonial legacy. A philosopher with a one-dimensional gaze, unable to undo his colonial masquerade for the advancement of humanity, Gordon traps himself in his own bacchanal of intellectual wordplay, a mixup of religion, Torah scriptures, and Black Judaism savourism–all while invisibilizing the oppressive nature of the Jewish Sefardim ruling elites in the Caribbean who are still on the run from the reparative ghosts of accountability for enslavement and present day colonial subjection within economic spaces and financial institutions.
The theme of this year’s Pan-African Festival is sustainable futures and reparatory justice, but Zionist imperial logics do not like to educate the people on the interconnectedness of the genocide in Palestine with those in Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Any call to free up the African continent from genocidal warfare keeps being misnamed as antisemitism: a neat trick to stop real critique.
Josie Fanon and Mireille Fanon-Mendès assure us of Fanon’s pro-Palestine legacy. Even though Gordon fantasizes about the opposite, there is no doubt that Fanon would be in full agreement with Palestinian cultural worker Ghassan Kanafani that liberating Palestine by throwing roses at the Israelis is not how it really works in 2025. And if you listen carefully, you might hear Ture echoing Marley saying he would have never wanted to hear such blatant devil-duppy philosophy!
Jermain Ostiana is a black working class cultural worker from Curaçao. A devotee to freeness from colonial power structures in the Caribbean.
Kerry Sinanan is a Trinidadian/Irish scholar. She specialises in the culture of the Black Atlantic, Caribbean slavery and race, and the global dimensions of Black resistance and abolition.
[1] See John Quigley, The Case For Palestine: an International Law Perspective (Duke University Press, 2005), p.7.
[2] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (Grove Press, 1963), 36-7.
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