Black American solidarity with Palestinians makes more sense than the fallacious alliance between African Americans and Jewish Americans invented by Zionist propaganda. African Americans have come to the conclusion that American Jews are part and parcel of the ruling white establishment that continues to victimize them.
Cindy Wallace, a Black Jewish community activist, never felt compelled to travel to Israel, though “Next year in Jerusalem” was a constant refrain at her Chicago synagogue. Never mind that the existence of African Jews, Chinese Jews, Hindi Jews, Arab Jews... debunks the notion of a Jewish "people". Judaism is only a religion embraced by every culture and ethnic group on earth, except that white European Ashkenazi Jews dominate everyone else and insist that "their" European version of Judaism is the correct one. In Israel today, "white" Ashkenazi Jews run the country and discriminate against the "brown" Persian, Sepharad, Maghrebi, and Mizrahi Jews.
I always feel extremely annoyed when a Filipino Muslim commits an act of terrorism in reaction to what he perceives to be discrimination against an American Muslim in the US or an Arab Muslim in the Middle East. There is a Muslim religion, but there is no such thing as a Muslim "people". There may be a Muslim community, but not a people. So for a Filipino Muslim to feel so much kniship with an American Muslim is really primitive and absurd. And that same primitiveness prevails within the various Jewish communities across the world. Citizens of the member states of the British commonwealth are not all "one" English people. The Christians used to be primitive enough to speak of a "Christian people", but that was long ago back in the Dark Ages of Europe. But Muslims and Jews continue to perpetuate this notion of a religious "people". One might well argue that for some people Communism is a religion, but no one ever speaks of a Communist "people".
The 39-year-old Cindy Wallace said she had plenty to focus on at home, where she frequently gives talks on addressing anti-Black sentiment in the American Jewish community and dismantling white supremacy in the U.S. “I know what I’m fighting for here,” she said.
That all changed when she visited Israel and the West Bank at the invitation of a Palestinian American community organizer from Chicago's south side, along with two dozen other Black Americans and Muslim, Jewish and Christian faith leaders.
The trip, which began Sept. 26, enhanced Wallace’s understanding of the struggles of Palestinians living in the West Bank under Israeli military occupation. But, horrifyingly, it was cut short by the unprecedented Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas militants. In Israel’s ensuing bombardment of the Gaza Strip, shocking images of destruction and death seen around the world have mobilized activists in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Wallace, and a growing number of Black Americans, have finally come to see the Palestinian struggle in the West Bank and Gaza reflected in their own fight for racial equality and civil rights. The recent rise of protest movements against police brutality in the U.S., where structural racism plagues nearly every facet of life, has connected Black and Palestinian activists under a common cause.
Watching Black American groups denouncing the U.S. backing of Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory, or Black protesters demonstrating for the Palestinians' right to self-determination, Jewish Americans (many of whom, by the way, do not agree with the barbarian Jewish Israelis, yet defend them when wrong out of tribal religious fanaticism) are nervous and have begun activating their propaganda machine: They claim that if Black Americans now see commonality between their own Civil Rights struggle out of slavery and the Palestinian struggle from under Jewish colonialism, there will be an increased threat of antisemitism, the usual scarecrow that has been branded in the minds of western people.
Like they have tried to do with everyone on the planet to justify the crime of the creation of Israel, creepy Zionists brandish the antisemitic trope to scare off Black Americans from taking a pro-Palestinian stance, and every Black American who supports the Palestinian must by default be a Jew-hating antisemite. No nuances. You're either a Zionist, or you are a Jew hater. That has been the choice given to millions of people around the world. To the filthy Zionist propaganda machine, you cannot be for Palestinian rights without being an anti-semite, and the dumb Americans eat up this trash by the spoonful. This blackmail continues throughout Europe and the Americas. It works in the west because antisemitism began and remains endemic in the global West (Europe and the Americas), but it will never work elsewhere on the planet because people in the third world and the global south have never being antisemitic and bear no guilt whatsoever vis-a-vis the Holocaust.
According to a poll earlier this month from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 44% of Black adults say the US is too supportive of Israel, compared with 30% of White Americans and 28% of Hispanic Americans.
Generational divides also emerged, with younger Americans more likely to say the U.S. is too supportive of Israel, according to the poll. Even within the Jewish American community, some younger Jews tend to be more critical of Israel's barbaric policies.
Black American support for the Palestinian cause dates back to the Civil Rights Movement, through prominent left-wing voices, including Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis, among others. More recent rounds of violence, including the 2021 Israel-Hamas war and now Israel's unprecedented savagery against Gaza shown live on social media have deepened ties between the two movements. “This is just the latest generation to pick up the mantle, the latest Black folks to organize, build and talk about freedom and justice,” said Ahmad Abuznaid, the director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights.
Some Black Americans who watched Palestinian prisoners being released by Israel's occupation forces and learned about Israel’s administrative detention policy, where detainees are held without trial, drew comparisons to the U.S. prison system. While more than two-thirds of jail detainees in the U.S. have not been convicted of a crime, Black people are jailed at more than four times the rate of white people, often for low-level offenses, according to studies of the American judicial system.
“Americans like to talk about being innocent until proven guilty. But Black folks are predominantly and disproportionately detained in the United States regardless of whether anything has been proven. And that’s very similar to Israel’s administrative detention," said Julian Rose, an organizer with a Black-run bail fund in Atlanta.
Rami Nashashibi, executive director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network, invited Wallace and the others to take part in the trip called “Black Jerusalem” — an exploration of the sacred city through an African and Black American lens. They met members of Jerusalem's small Afro-Palestinian community — Palestinians of Black African heritage, many of whom can trace their lineage in the Old City back centuries.
“Our Black brothers and sisters in the U.S. suffered from slavery and now they suffer from racism,” said Mousa Qous, executive director of the African Community Society Jerusalem, whose father emigrated to Jerusalem from Chad in 1941 and whose mother is Palestinian. “We suffer from Israel's occupation and racist policies. The Americans and the Israelis are conducting the same policies against us and the Black Americans. So we should support each other,” Qous said.
Nashashibi agreed, saying: “My Palestinian identity was very much shaped and influenced by Black American history.” “I always hoped that a trip like this would open up new pathways that would connect the dots not just in a political and ideological way," he said, "but between the liberation and struggles for humanity that are very familiar to us in the U.S.”
During the trip, Wallace was dismayed by her own ignorance of the reality of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. At an Israeli checkpoint outside the Western Wall, the Jewish holy site, Wallace said her group was asked who was Jewish, Muslim or Christian. Wallace and the others showed IDs issued for the trip, but when an Israeli officer saw her Star of David necklace, she was waved through, while Palestinians and Muslims in the group were subjected to intense scrutiny and bag checks. “Being there made me wonder if this is what it was like to live in the Jim Crow-era” in America, Wallace said.
Kameelah Oseguera, who grew up in an African American Muslim community in Brooklyn, New York, also said the trip opened her eyes. At the entrance to the Aida refugee camp near Bethlehem in the West Bank, Oseguera noticed a massive key — a Palestinian symbol of the homes lost in the 1948 creation of Israel, referred to as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.” Many kept keys to the homes they fled or were forced out of — a symbol signifying the Palestinian right to return, which Israel has denied.
Oseguera said the key recalled her visit to the “door of no return” memorial in Senegal dedicated to the enslaved Africans forced onto slave ships and brought to the Americas. As a descendant of enslaved Africans, it brought thoughts of "what the dream of my return would have meant for my ancestors.” Returning to home, she said, is a "longing that is transmitted through generations.”
In 2020, the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer resonated in the West Bank, where Palestinians drew comparisons to their own experiences of brutality under occupation, and a massive mural of Floyd appeared on Israel’s hulking separation barrier.
In 2014, protests in Ferguson, Missouri, erupted after the police killing of Michael Brown, a Black teenager, which gave rise to the nascent Black Lives Matter movement. While police officers in Ferguson fired tear gas at protesters, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank tweeted advice about how to manage the effects of the irritants.
In 2016, when BLM activists formed the coalition known as the Movement for Black Lives, they included support for Palestinians in a platform called the “Vision for Black Lives.” Jewish groups that had largely been supportive of the BLM movement denounced the Black activists for charactrizing Israel as an “apartheid state” that engages in “discrimination against the Palestinian people.”
None of the members of the “Black Jerusalem” trip anticipated it would come to a tragic end with the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in which some 1,200 people were killed in Israel and about 240 taken hostage. Since then, more than 18,700 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s blistering air and ground campaign in Gaza, now in its third month. Violence in the West Bank has also surged.
Back home in Chicago, Wallace has navigated speaking about her support for Palestinians while maintaining her Jewish identity and standing against antisemitism. She says she doesn’t see those things as mutually exclusive.
“I’m trying not to do anything that alienates anyone,” she said. “But I can’t just not do the right thing because I’m scared.”
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