Differences of opinion in the Israel/Palestine conflict fall along racial lines in America.
The explosion of violence in Palestine over the last two months, as Israel seeks to root out and destroy the Hamas terrorist group that murdered 1,200 Israelis in October and took 240 people hostage, has shaken the world, with governments and individuals taking sides at a dizzying rate. Social media has brought every bomb to our doorsteps, making it impossible for many to ignore the human cost and scale of the power struggle between Palestine and Israel.
With few exceptions — most notably Ireland, which has found unexpected, albeit slight, kinship with Palestine in its history of being colonized — Western governments have been uniform in their support of Israel’s military operation. However, public support of the occupation has sharply shifted, as civilian casualties mount to a horrifying level in Gaza; more than 15,000 people have been killed thus far, and 6,000 are missing, according to the Gaza health ministry. At a fundraiser in D.C. Tuesday, U.S. President Joe Biden told Israel’s leaders that they were “starting to lose … support by the indiscriminate bombing that takes place.”
That shift is occurring within our own country as well, though support for Israel, a key democratic ally, was never uniform at the individual level. Much has been written lately about the difference of opinion about the conflict among generations, with older Americans much more likely to support Israel than younger Americans. There is another divide, however, that has been less explored — one across racial lines.
In a recent Gallup poll, while 61% of white people approved of Israel’s ongoing military action in Gaza, only 30% of people of color approved, with the latter group’s sensibilities aligning with countries from which American minorities derive. Nearly all Latin American countries, most African countries, and many South and Southeast Asian countries, including Indonesia and Vietnam, recognize Palestine’s statehood and generally have conveyed more sympathy for the Palestinian cause throughout the current conflict. The BRICS group of nations, which includes Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, on Monday called for an immediate end to the war, with South Africa’s president characterizing Israel’s operation in Gaza as “tantamount to genocide.”
Black Americans have arguably the closest and most intimate emotional proximity to Arab and Jewish populations in the U.S. In many parts of this country, they live side-by-side — sometimes in solidarity, other times in opposition, but always with some degree of religious and political kinship. For that reason, Black Americans’ stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict is of particular note, exposing a twisty evolution, one partly formed on religious creed and partly based on survivalism. Christianity, Black Americans’ primary religion, is seen as having a much closer spiritual affinity to Judaism (and Israel more broadly) — Jesus’ and Israel’s centrality in the Bible has long endeared Black churchgoers to Jews and the fabled idea of a Jewish state.
The NAACP counted several Jewish individuals — Henry Moskowitz, Emil Hirsch, Lillian Wald and Stephen Wise — as co-founders and boosters of the organization at its start in 1909. And Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald was a major financial backer of Howard University and Fisk University, two prestigious historically Black colleges. He also bankrolled dozens of Black-serving YMCAs in the 1920s.
These alliances strengthened through the mid-20th century. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. recognized the bond at an American Jewish Congress in 1958, telling the audience: “My people were brought to America in chains. Your people were driven here to escape the chains fashioned for them in Europe. Our unity is born of our common struggle for centuries, not only to rid ourselves of bondage, but to make oppression of any people by others an impossibility.”
Many Jews were involved in the wider Civil Rights movement, seeing a connection between their quest for self-determination and Black Americans’ quest for equal rights, and politically merging their fortunes. And they often paid for it. In 1964, three civil rights workers — one Black man, James Chaney; and two Jewish men, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman – were murdered in Mississippi by members of the Ku Klux Klan. The linkage was now etched in shared shed blood.
This bond lessened with the growth of pro-Black social activism during the 1970s. In one memorable incident in 1979, Jesse Jackson arrived in Israel to advocate for talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Prime Minister Menachem Begin refused to see him, as Israeli political leaders had done previously with Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X, each of whom was firmly wedded to the Palestinian cause. But Jackson delivered a prescient message that reverberates more strongly today than at any other point in time: Black Americans, he said, represented a “political reality that Israel should not ignore.”
Growing gaps in social and economic experience between Black and Jewish Americans, along with recent, high-profile cases of antisemitism from musician Kanye West and basketball player Kyrie Irving, have cast the fraying historical connection into sharp relief in this country. And antisemitism remains deeply embedded in many aspects of political and civic life in Africa, Latin America, and many Asian countries.
Still, the relationship between Arabs and Black people is not as strong as the polls might suggest. In many Black communities throughout the U.S., Arabs are chiefly seen by Black Americans as vendors and visitors, rather than co-residents. Take for example Dearborn, Michigan, which is majority Arab and is by some accounts the American epicenter of the Muslim-led protest over the war in Gaza.
Dearborn borders Detroit, where Nasser Beydoun, a Lebanese businessman and chairman of the Arab American Civil Rights League, remarked in a 2019 interview with The Guardian that “interactions between Arabs and African Americans are usually only transactional and rarely social.”
Outside of this, these relationships could be described as episodic or opportunistic, emerging during high-profile racial crises, like the George Floyd murder. In the aftermath of the police killing of Floyd, who was murdered on the grounds of a corner store owned by a Palestinian, Iran, the most powerful Muslim-majority country in the world, threatened to sanction the U.S. over its treatment of Black Americans, describing it as ongoing, flagrant human rights violations — ironic and self-serving, of course, given the country’s deep and persistent record of suppressing dissent.
It could be said that the current Israel-Palestine conflict is a multi-pronged war. One prong will be fought on the battlefield. Another will very much continue to wage in the court of public opinion in America. Latina congresswoman, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who has Sephardic Jewish roots, represents one of the nation’s most prominent pro-Palestine voices during the current crisis (she previously voted “no” on funding for Israel’s “Iron Dome,” citing “persistent human rights abuses against the Palestinian people”). She and Black congresswoman Cori Bush, a rising star in the Democratic party, have criticized Israel’s military response and called for a ceasefire.
Further, Bush and Ocasio-Cortex both voted “no” on H.R. 894, which has been argued to conflate anti-zionism with antisemitism. The congresswomen’s positions largely mirror the sentiments held by many other racial and ethnic minority millennials, as the uptick in college campus-based protests against Israeli occupation has shown,
Absent a stark shift in how Israel approaches its policies and rhetoric, this new generation of minority leaders, skilled in mobilizing and advocacy, will likely continue to accumulate and leverage clout for the Palestinian cause, drawing on lessons from their forebearers’ past efforts.
Jerel Ezell (jezell@berkeley.edu) is director of the Center for Cultural Humility at the School of Public Health within the University of California Berkeley. Aalayna Green (arg267@cornell.edu) is a doctoral student in the Department of Natural Resources and Department of Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Cornell University
