Black American solidarity with Palestinians is rising and testing longstanding ties to Jewish allies

Cydney Wallace, an activist from the black Jewish community, never felt compelled to travel to Israel, although “Next year in Jerusalem” was a constant refrain at her Chicago synagogue.

The 39-year-old said she has plenty to focus on at home, where she regularly lectures on tackling anti-black sentiment in the American Jewish community and dismantling white supremacy in the US.

“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 the South Side of Chicago, along with 20 other black Americans and Muslim, Jewish and Christian faith leaders.

The trip, which began on September 26, improved Wallace's understanding of the struggles of Palestinians living in the West Bank under Israeli military occupation. But this was cruelly cut short by the unprecedented attacks on Israel by Hamas militants on October 7. Israel's subsequent bombardment of the Gaza Strip has seen shocking images of destruction and death around the world mobilize activists in the US and elsewhere.

Wallace, and a growing number of black Americans, see the Palestinian struggle in the West Bank and Gaza reflected in their own struggles for racial equality and civil rights. The recent rise of protest movements against police brutality in the US, where structural racism plagues almost every facet of life, has united black and Palestinian activists under a common cause.

But that kinship sometimes puts pressure on the more than century-long alliance between black and Jewish activists. From black American groups denouncing U.S. support for the U.S. occupation of Palestinian territory to black protesters demonstrating for Palestinians' right to self-determination, some Jewish Americans are concerned that support could escalate the threat of anti-Semitism and could weaken the Jewish-black ties that were strengthened during the war. the civil rights movement.

“We as a community are concerned about what we feel is a lack of understanding of what Israel stands for and how deeply October 7 has affected us,” said Bob Kaplan, executive director of The Center for Shared Society of the Jewish Community. New York Relations Council.

“Anti-Semitism should be seen as a reprehensible form of hatred… as any form of hatred is,” he said. “Anti-Semitism is just as real for the American Jewish community, and causes as much trauma, fear and anxiety for the American Jewish community, as racism is for the black community, or anti-Asian sentiments are for the Asian community, or anti-Muslim sentiments. causes in the Muslim community.”

But, he added, many Jews in the U.S. understand that black Americans can have an affinity for the Palestinian cause that does not conflict with their respect for Israel.

According to a poll earlier this month from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, black adults were more likely than white and Hispanic adults to say the U.S. supported Israel too much — 44% compared to 30% and 28%, respectively. . However, Black Americans were no more likely than others to say the U.S. does not support the Palestinians enough.

Generational differences also emerged, with younger Americans more likely to say the US supports Israel too much, according to the poll. Even within the Jewish American community, some younger and other progressive Jews tend to be more critical of some aspects of Israel's 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 bombing campaign against Gaza, shown live on social media, have deepened ties between the two movements.

“This is just the latest generation to take up the mantle, the latest Black people to organize, build and talk about freedom and justice,” said Ahmad Abuznaid, director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.

During a weeklong ceasefire between Israel and Hamas as part of the recent deal to free dozens of hostages seized by Hamas militants, Israel released hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and detainees. Many were teenagers recently arrested in the West Bank for minor crimes such as throwing rocks and who had not yet been charged.

Some Black Americans who saw the release of Palestinian prisoners and heard about Israel's administrative detention policy of holding detainees without trial made comparisons to the American prison system. While more than two-thirds of inmates in the U.S. have not been convicted of a crime, black people are more than four times as likely as white people to be incarcerated, often for low-level offenses, studies of the U.S. justice system show. .

“Americans like to talk about being innocent until proven guilty. But black people are overwhelmingly and disproportionately detained in the United States, regardless of whether anything is proven. And that looks a lot like Israel's administrative detention,” said Julian Rose, organizer of a Black Run bail fund in Atlanta.

Rami Nashashibi, executive director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network, invited Wallace and the others to join the trip called “Black Jerusalem” – an exploration of the holy city through an African and Black American lens.

They met members of Jerusalem's small Afro-Palestinian community – Palestinians of black African descent, many of whom can trace their ancestry back centuries in the Old City.

“Our black brothers and sisters in the United States suffered from slavery and now they suffer from racism,” said Mousa Qous, executive director of the African Community Society Jerusalem, whose father immigrated to Jerusalem from Chad in 1941 and whose mother is Palestinian.

“We suffer from the Israeli occupation and racist policies. The Americans and the Israelis are pursuing the same policy against us and black Americans. So we have to 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 journey like this would open new paths that would connect the dots not only in a political and ideological way,” he said, “but also between the liberation and the struggle for humanity that brought us into the USA are very well known. ”

During the trip, Wallace was appalled 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 necklace bearing her name in Hebrew, she was waved through, while the Palestinians and Muslims in the group were subjected to intense surveillance and bag checks.

“While I was there, I wondered 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 huge key — a Palestinian symbol of the homes lost during Israel's creation in 1948, known as the Nakba or “catastrophe.” Many held the keys to the homes from which they had fled or been forced – a symbol signifying the Palestinian right of return, which Israel has denied.

Oseguera said the key recalled her visit to the Door of No Return monument in Senegal, dedicated to the enslaved Africans who were 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 to my ancestors.”

Returning home, she said, is a “desire passed down from generation to generation.”

Israel's Law of Return grants all Jews the right to settle permanently in Israel and acquire Israeli citizenship – a concept that received support from many black American civil rights leaders, including A. Phillip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Dorothy Height, Shirley Chisholm and Martin Luther King, Sr., father of the assassinated civil rights leader.

Over the past decade, however, black Americans and Palestinians have also found growing solidarity.

In 2020, the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer resonated in the West Bank, where Palestinians drew comparisons to their own experiences of brutality under the occupation, and a huge mural of Floyd appeared on Israel's colossal separation wall.

In 2014, protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police killing of Michael Brown, a black teenager, sparking the emerging Black Lives Matter movement. As police officers in Ferguson fired tear gas at protesters, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank tweeted advice on how to manage the effects of the irritants.

When BLM activists formed the coalition known as the Movement for Black Lives in 2016, they included support for Palestinians in a platform called the “Vision for Black Lives.” A handful of Jewish groups, which had largely supported the BLM movement, denounced black activists' characterization of Israel as a so-called “apartheid state” engaged in “discrimination against the Palestinian people.”

“There is often doubt or surprise that black people care about other oppressed people around the world,” said Phil Agnew, co-director of the national advocacy group Black Men Build, which has made four trips to the West Bank since 2014. .

It would be a mistake, Agnew said, to ignore significant numbers of Black and Jewish Americans who are united in their support of the Palestinians.

None of the members of the “Black Jerusalem” tour expected it to come to a tragic end with the October 7 Hamas attacks, which killed about 1,200 people and took about 240 hostage in Israel. 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 has also increased in the West Bank.

At home in Chicago, Wallace has spoken about her support for Palestinians while maintaining her Jewish identity and opposing anti-Semitism. She says she doesn't see these things as mutually exclusive.

“I try not to do anything that alienates anyone,” she said. “But I can't just not do the right thing because I'm afraid.”

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AP writer Isabel DeBre in Jerusalem contributed.

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Nasir and Morrison are members of AP's Race and Ethnicity team. Follow Nasir on social media. Follow Morrison on social media.