Lauryn Hill appears in black-Palestinian solidarity video

While the BDS Movement pushed for the cancellation, Hill said at the time that her decision was made after being unable to schedule a performance in Ramallah, a Palestinian city.

Noura Erakat, assistant professor at George Mason University and a human rights attorney who spearheaded the video’s production, told Al Jazeera that Hill does not take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but “she believes in dignity for all sides”.

The video, entitled “When I See Them I See Us” on YouTube, features appearances from personalities as varied as Ms. Lauryn Hill, Angela Davis, Palestinian hip-hop ensemble DAM, Danny Glover, Dream Defenders Co-Founder Ahmad Abuznaid and PACBI co-founder Omar Barghouti.

The video goes on to state that “every two hours a Palestinian child was killed in Israel’s attack on Gaza last summer”.

The video comes on the heels of an August statement-signed by more than one thousand black artists, activists and constituent organizations-standing in solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian liberation from Israeli occupation.

Here were two groups of people dealing with completely different historical trajectories, but both which resulted in a process of dehumanization that criminalized them and that subject their bodies as expendable.

“Mutual expressions of solidarity have helped to generate a vigorous political kinship linking black organizers, scholars, cultural workers and political prisoners in the US with Palestinian activists, academics, political prisoners, and artists”, explained Angela Davis, who is featured in the video. In 2014, a contingent of Palestinian activists joined protests against police brutality in Ferguson, Missouri.

Palestinians have spoken out passionately against racist police violence in Ferguson and Baltimore as black people have vehemently stood up in defense of Rasmeah Odeh. Black Lives Matter activists also visited Palestine earlier this year, also in a show of solidarity and support.

In that statement, they put Zionism in the same category as anti-Blackness and white supremacy, which they see as the force behind the systematic racism against Blacks in the U.S as well as Africans and Palestinians in Israeli-controlled land. “But also to build real relationships with those on the ground leading the fight for liberation”.

The video, which juxtaposes Black American and Palestinians killed, isn’t the first example of solidarity between the two groups of people. She spoke with old Al Jazeera recently.