A friend of mine recently shared a blog post titled “Why you might have lost all your Jewish friends this week and didn’t even know it.” This piece has recently been shared by many liberal Jewish people in the wake of the horrific Oct 7th attacks by Hamas. It’s not presented as a logical, fact driven analysis of the situation. It’s not a history lesson on the region. It is explicitly an emotional plea. It's a call for non-Jews to have empathy and express true support for their Jewish friends and family during an undoubtedly traumatic time. My friend shared it because it articulated a profound sense of sadness and fear, not just from these recent events but over a lifetime and beyond as collective generation trauma weighs heavy on his soul.
I hope that you can tell from my words that I am deeply empathetic to this perspective. I also found this article to be deeply problematic in a number of ways that can be difficult to articulate to people who are genuinely going through so much fear, anger, and sorrow. So I want to be clear, my intent is not to lecture. I’m not here to tell you that you are a bad person for vocally supporting Israel as they “defend themselves”, nor am I here to trivialize the grotesque violence and political project of Hamas. What I hope to do here is explain some things about why people aren’t 100% on board with only centering Jewish voices, why some seem to be less concerned with Hamas’s actions than they are with Israel’s retaliation, and particularly why Black people seem to be especially rejecting the Zionist narrative.
Coming to an Understanding
In his aforementioned blog, author Josh Gilman gets straight to the point:
You might have lost every last one of your Jewish friends this week, and you have no idea why. Please be patient with me as I try to explain. I’m going to be explaining things that are totally foreign to you. I didn’t even know I felt and thought this way until a couple of days ago myself.
Josh seems to be very confident that non-Jewish people could not understand what it’s like to be surrounded by people who hate you and want you dead just because of your identity, nor understand the collective trauma that stems from the horrific violence inflicted on the Jewish community. He expresses how he can’t feel completely safe around non-Jews who may say all the right things when convenient but when it comes time to meet the moment are not prepared to make a meaningful stand.
Which left me wondering if the author has had any conversations with Black people lately.
Gilman tells a story about his sisters who would play a game called “Hiding From Nazis” where they would find a place to conceal themselves and sit still for hours. When I was young, my Black friends and I got some version of “the talk”. Most of you reading this may see the phrase “the talk” and think about extremely awkward conversations about the birds and the bees, but for us growing up, “the talk” was about not putting your hands in your pockets when entering a store, not putting your hood up when walking around, not standing on a corner with your friends, and not giving white people any more attitude than you can stand to repress. And the consequence for not heeding these words of wisdom concerning aesthetics could be imprisonment and/or death.
Now I’m not trying to stake out a position on the hierarchy of oppression here, we’ve talked about how futile that project is. But a key part of solidarity is being able to identify the struggles of others and treat them just as importantly as your own. Gilman believes that feeling unsafe around people who aren’t members of his demographic is something completely foreign to the rest of us. The implication is that it's partly ignorance driving people to support the Palestinian cause in the aftermath of October 7th. And I would like to assure him that it’s not a foreign concept to many of us, we can understand those emotions. And that’s why we stand with Palestine.
Black Americans views on Palestine liberation go back to 1948 and the creation of South African Apartheid. We saw similarities between two European driven settler-colonialist projects that created a second class status for darker skinned indigenous people. Projects that sought to create stability through the establishment of an ethnostate (more on that later). We saw a hero in the struggle for global Black liberation tell the world that "We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians." We also saw that this hero, Nelson Mandela was branded a terrorist for much of his early life for waging a violent resistance against oppression.
Now this is not to say that the two situations are completely analogous. The ANC never committed an attack on a civilian population on such a scale as Hamas recently has done. The ANC was not a repressive fundamentalist theocracy, nor did it have the stated goal of eradicating white Afrikaners from the region. However, as we noted back in 2021, the defenses of Apartheid were remarkably similar to the defenses of Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and the disenfranchisement of Arabs.
While Gilman believes that the violence and fear created by global antisemitism is foreign to those outside his cultural background, I would contend that maybe having the most of the wealthy western global community defending your explicit subjugation, or having your peaceful resistance ignored and your violent resistance branded unacceptable terrorism is something that is foreign to him.
What the worst of us have to offer
We should talk about the antisemitism rearing its ugly head within the free Palestine movement. Memes featuring the silhouette of parachuting Hamas fighters, ostensibly linking Palestinian freedom with the horrific success of the October 7th attacks are a pretty shitty way to advocate for liberation in my opinion. Calling for violence against any and all Jewish people world wide in response to Israel’s actions is not just shitty, it’s evil.
Antisemitism is real, it's ugly, and it’s something that no oppressed people need to engage in. But the question that some people like Gilman don’t seem to want to grapple with is does the antisemitism that can be found within leftist driven Palestinian liberation movements justify the genocidal war crimes that Israel is currently committing in Gaza? I don’t think it does. At least no more than pro Israel protesters calling for Gaza to be turned into a parking lot justifies Hamas’s actions.
If we are unable to differentiate criticisms of Israel’s actions and violence against the Palestinian people from naked bigotry against Jewish people, then what are we doing here? If we can only talk about one group's suffering, lest we be accused of identifying with terrorists, then the only peace that we can ever hope to achieve is one where tensions are suppressed with unimaginable violence.
Some people are explicitly fine with that premise, especially those within power in Israel’s government. Others don’t like to admit that they can only feel safe if others are brutally killed en-masse in retaliation, so they conflate talking about the suffering of Palestinians with the antisemitism present in the free Palestine movement and refuse to engage in that conversation.
This is something that Black Americans are intimately familiar with. Many of us live under an occupation that is justified as being in the interests of safety. We’ve seen family members and other assorted loved ones lose their lives and property in the name of keeping the peace. Long have we been told that the violence endemic to poor urban communities is a product of our own emotional and intellectual shortcomings and the only solution is a violent carceral state that treats human beings like animals. We even know what it's like when the authorities decide that the most expedient way to deal with criminal activity is to drop bombs on our neighborhoods.
Again, it's not a one to one comparison, and people have used simplified comparisons like this to justify odious antisemitic sentiments. But when I hear my Jewish friends feel relieved because of police presence at their cultural events and religious ceremonies due to the very real threat of terrorist violence, I can’t help but wonder what it's like to feel safe when the cops are nearby.
That’s one thing that actually is foreign to me.
Where it all leads
The first rule of understanding monolithic Black politics is that there is no monolithic Black political project. We contain multitudes. And as we’ve covered before with Kanye and Kyrie Irving, this can include some pretty despicable antisemitism. When we talked about Kyrie, the focus was on trying to explain some of the socio-political attitudes that undergird Black antisemitism, specifically a crisis in Black masculinity that is misguidedly deemed to be the fault of Jewish people with important jobs in entertainment and sports.
I’ve had the displeasure of arguing with a few Black people (mostly men) with antisemitic views and there is a dispiriting similarity to how liberal defenders of Israel talk about Palestinian liberation. With both there is a sense of siloed oppression that trumps anyone else’s claims to mistreatment. There is the conviction that the rest of the world is aligned against not only your interests but your right to live freely. There is the refusal to acknowledge anyone’s suffering outside of the group you identify with and the insistence that true allegiance to one's group means a narrow and exclusionary political perspective.
That last part is pretty crucial as being a Black leftist has led me to deeply empathize with my Jewish family and friends, along with millions of others, who find themselves completely erased by the rhetoric of people like Josh Gilman and others. Jewish people who are not made to feel safe by genocidal acts carried out in their name. People who can find the space to not only mourn the Israeli lives lost in Hamas’s attacks but the scores more Palestinians (many of whom are children) killed in an act of collective punishment. People who see suffering and want it to stop, no matter who is causing it.
Something else that may be totally foreign to Gilman is that the Knesset recently suspended one of its members for criticizing Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Or that Jewish Voices for Peace rallied thousands of protesters to shut down Grand Central Station. Or the thousands of Jewish people who went to capitol hill to call for a cease fire.
And for there calls to the end the slaughter of thousands, the head of the ADL in DC responded thusly:
“Although they claim to do so, these far-left radical organizations do not represent the overwhelming majority Jewish community. Rather, these groups are anti-Zionists that challenge Israel’s very right to exist. Let’s be very clear – anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”
So about that……
From the River to the Sea
The idea that anti-Zionism is antisemitism had done yeoman's work in this cursed discourse on Israel and Palestine. But if we are going to be losing friends over this, it would really help if people clarified what they mean by the phrase “Israel has a right to exist”. Because the question close to the heart of people who support Palestinian liberation, even in the wake of October 7th, isn’t whether Israel has a right to exist.
It’s whether Israel has a right to exist as an ethnostate.
If you’re a liberal Zionist who finds themselves wondering why Black people don’t seem as eager to uncritically support your stance on the war, even after you donated and put a BLM sign in your front yard, it’s probably because Israel is an ethnostate. And you can’t really argue against the fact that Israel is an ethnostate because the most popular plan for peace in the region, the two-state solution, is predicated on the idea that Israel must be an ethnostate in order for it to survive.
A one-state solution has never been popular, not even with the left. But the chief criticism of the idea is that there isn’t a way to do it without Jewish people becoming a voting minority in what is ostensibly the only place in the world where Jewish people are guaranteed the right of self determination. If Arab people in Israel get an equal say in how the region is governed, there’s nothing stopping them from committing another pogrom.
And to that end, in 2018 Netanyahu and his Likud party passed the Jewish Nation-State Law which supporters call a landmark piece of legislation ensuring Jewish self determination and critics see as a codification of Israel’s status as an Apartheid state. In 2015 and 2019, Likud operated a strategy to place operatives (many of whom were students at nationalist religious yeshivas) at polling stations in Arab districts with hidden cameras. The nominal goal and legal justification for this program was to enforce moral standards on the Arab population and prevent voter fraud. But members of Likud and the private firm they hired to facilitate the operation openly bragged about the end result of lowering Arab voter turnout. Part of Netanyahu’s 2015 election strategy was urging Likud supporters to counteract the “droves” of Arab voters “bussed in” by “left wing organizations”.
All of which sounds very familiar to Black Americans.
Then there is the little issue of anti-miscegenation discourse in Israel. The far-right group Lahava is officially called the Organization for the Prevention of Miscegenation in the Holy Land and it pretty much does what it says on the tin. Lahava has been responsible for numerous attacks on innocent Arab-Israelis and vehemently opposes any interactions between Jews and Arabs.
However, the drive to keep Israeli Jews and Arabs separate is not just the purview of a fringe extremist group. In 2003 the Knesset passed a law preventing Israeli Jews with Arab spouses from occupied territories and several other named regions from living with their partners in Israel. The goal here is not only to limit interracial marriage, which Israeli anti-miscegenation activists refer to as assimilation, but also to limit the prospect of a sizable Arab voting block in the country.
As Ali Abunimah writes in his 2014 book, The Battle for Justice in Palestine:
The demographic purpose of the law was reaffirmed in 2012 when the Israeli Supreme Court threw out Adalah’s challenge. “Human rights are not a prescription for national suicide,” wrote Judge Asher Grunis for the 6–5 majority. Effectively endorsing demographic gerrymandering, the court’s ruling added that “the right to a family life does not necessarily have to be realized within the borders of Israel.” I’m reminded of a young man I met in South Africa in 2010 who was born in Transkei— one of the now-defunct, nominally independent Black “homelands” set up by the former apartheid government—because his parents had to move there from Johannesburg for violating South Africa’s prohibition on mixed marriages. Those policies were justified by South African rulers in the same terms used by Israel’s highest court today, as when Prime Minister Daniel Malan said in 1953 that “equality . . . must inevitably mean to white South Africa nothing less than national suicide.”
Honestly, I understand the logic here. Anti-Semitism is a global issue. Israel being an explicit Jewish ethnostate guarantees that at least one state won’t fall prey to anti-Jewish demagoguing like so many others throughout history. But we really need to carefully ask ourselves if the right to self determination justifies the creation of an ethnostate which would necessitate all those not belonging to the correct ethnicity being relegated to (at best) second class status.
Some would argue that the Jewish diaspora possesses an unique right to self-determination at the deprivation of others due to the horrific atrocities committed against them throughout history. That argument may be emotionally compelling, but it makes it quite difficult to explain to someone like white supremacist Richard Spencer why white people in Europe and America don’t also deserve their own ethno-states for the same purpose of self-determination.
That the virulently antisemitic far right has such admiration for the Zionist project should cause some introspection. For some it's enough to scoff at the comparison, wave away inconvenient details like Netanyahu’s friendly relationship with Hungary’s authoritarian dictator and Nazi sympathizer Viktor Orban, and dismiss any criticism of Israel’s right to an ethnostate as inherently antisemitic. For Black Americans, we don’t have the luxury to trust any rhetoric that defends identarian rule.
The phrase “from the river to the sea” is seen by many as hate speech. Academic, author and journalist Marc Lamont Hill was fired from his job as a contributor to CNN for using the phrase in a speech calling for peace. Several European countries including England and Germany have proposed criminalizing it. This is on top of many other examples of free speech suppression concerning the Boycott Divest and Sanction movement, students expressing support for Palestinian freedom (or just posting a picture of their sister’s wedding) in Israel, and even just describing oneself as anti-Zionist.
A single phrase can mean different things to different people. For many supporters of Palestinian liberation, from the river to the sea means that Palestinians deserve equal rights and their own self determination no matter where they happen to live. For Hamas and other Islamic fundamentalist groups the phrase has exactly the genocidal connotations that prompt people to call it antisemitic. For Netanyahu’s Likud party, a very similar phrase can be read in its 1977 founding charter: "between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty."
Likud was obviously trolling pro-Palestinian groups who made the phrase popular in the ‘60s. And conservatives today were obviously trolling when they put “white lives matter” on tee shirts.
If you are someone who defends Israel’s actions in Gaza, or who feels that support for Palestinians cannot be meaningfully separated from genocidal antisemitism, or just generally feels like now is not the right time to be talking about Palestinian casualties, settler colonialism, and apartheid in the wake of the largest mass killing of Jewish people since the Holocaust, my goal here is not to lecture you. I have no interest in invalidating your fear and anger about what happened on Oct 7th.
What I want you to consider is that the people who do not share your feelings may not be operating solely on hatred for you and yours. Despite the attempts at erasure by the ADL and assorted politicians and celebrities, many of those people are Jews and have every bit as claim to that identity as you do. And when it comes to Black people, who I’m attempting to speak for here, our opposition to Israeli occupation and apartheid is rooted in our own marginalization and oppression. It's based on our recognition that solidarity with the oppressed and marginalized is the only route forward for true peace and true safety. Peace and safety can never come at the barrel of a gun or underneath a bomb dropped from the sky.
None of us are free, until all of us are free.
Solidarity Forever.
You should submit this to a publication or find a way to disseminate this essay to a wider audience. It's too good to keep behind a paywall
hey, i want to read what people have already said but first respond to the piece because there is so much to hold in mind. i agree, this piece should be out in the world, it is the response the world needs to the article that instigated it. one thing that makes what's happening now so unnerving and complicated is that a lot of responses (from all kinds of people) seem partially based in unconscious feelings and reactions. and the unconscious of people who've been targets of collective brutality can contain blind spots. that's one thing you're describing here, the blind spot of feeling, my people were targeted for extermination, my people are being attacked again, we are victims and need and deserve unqualified support. you're saying yes to all of that except the unqualified. without qualifying the complexity of victimhood (how often, not always, it leads to a kind of reciprocal dehumanization. in the case of israel, the oppressor was the german government (and a lot of the german people, like here with the widespread support in the south for the apartheid of race), and the israeli government reciprocated against the palestinians whom they displaced, who were actually already THEIR victims. thus making enemies of them for the unjustified attack (not to mention the years of dehumanization since). in not seeing this displacement of punishment, it's hard for people supporting israel to see the legitimate basis for palestinians' bitter and violent feelings toward israel, and understand the widespread support for them as they are being mowed down by the many thousands.. and without seeing this legitimate basis, and feeling entitled to kill as many thousands as it takes, israel does, as you say, multiply its enemies by that many thousands, and everyone who feels in common with them. this kind of non-reciprocal retaliation is something that's pretty absent in the history of black people in this country, which is itself a story that should be told (if you haven't already), and studied.