by FABIOLA CINEAS
How Black support for Zionism morphed into support for Palestine.
As violence and reprisals in Israel and Gaza have intensified since Hamas’s attack on October 7, reactions (or non-reactions) from Black Lives Matter and related groups in the US have come in for particular scrutiny.
Black Lives Matter Chicago was heavily criticized for a since-deleted graphic that seemingly celebrated Hamas’s killing of Israelis, featuring a paraglider with the Palestinian flag, and the words “I stand with Palestine.” (The group later said it “was not proud of” the image, adding “We stand with Palestine & the people who will do what they must to live free.”)
Comedian Amy Schumer reshared a video from former NBA star Amar’e Stoudemire, now an Israeli citizen, in which he criticized Black Lives Matter for its silence on Israel. “I woke up this morning with some disturbing news out of Israel — Hamas kidnapping children, putting them in cages, killing women, killing the elderly. That’s some coward shit. That’s cowardly,” he said. “And for all y’all Black Lives Matter [supporters] who ain’t saying nothing — ‘Well let me figure out exactly what’s happening before I say anything’ — f*** you.”
In a now-deleted post on X, which was reposted more than 1,000 times, writer Daniella Greenbaum Davis wrote, “Jews marched in Selma. Jews marched for George Floyd. Jews showed up for Black Lives Matter. BLM is a disgrace. We will all still be there for you guys next time. Because that’s who we are. But now we know who you are.”
Behind the uproar is a rich history of links between Black American and Palestinian activists — connections that go back to Israel’s founding but have deepened over the last decade, as activists for both issues have come to see their causes as related or even explicitly linked.
In 2014, only a few weeks separated the Gaza war that year from protests over Michael Brown’s shooting in Ferguson, Missouri; Palestinians tweeted advice to the protesters on dealing with tear gas. One of the most vocal activists in Ferguson, Bassem Masri, who died in 2018, was Palestinian American. In the wake of the protests, activists traveled to occupied territories, and in 2015, Black activists and leaders publicly declared their solidarity with Palestine.
By 2020, when the murder of George Floyd led to massive nationwide protests in the US, “People were painting George Floyd murals in Palestine. Palestinians were being attacked by Israeli security services, and saying, ‘I can’t breathe,’” said Sam Klug, an assistant teaching professor of African American History at Loyola University Maryland. “Over time, African Americans have looked at the Palestinian circumstance and Palestinians have also looked at what is going on in the United States.”
I talked to Klug about this history — about what Black and Palestinian and Black and Jewish relations have looked like over time. We discussed what it means for allyship, protest movements, public opinion, and the future of Palestine and Israel. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Fabiola Cineas
Before we get into the history of Black and Palestinian solidarity, I’d like to talk about Black support for the Zionist cause, which came earlier. What’s the brief history there?
Sam Klug
That history goes back to the 19th century. Many Black nationalist thinkers and activists, people like David Walker, Martin Delany, Henry McNeal Turner, really drew a lot of inspiration from the Exodus story in the Hebrew Bible.
In that story, Jews in bondage in Egypt and their resistance and eventual emancipation became a touchstone of African American politics and thought, in the struggle for abolition in the United States, and in 19th-century visions of a potential Black homeland for the African diaspora in the Americas.
The idea of an oppressed people, who have been oppressed throughout the West and are seeking a homeland that has a connection to their ancestral community and establishing a political community there, is not dissimilar from a lot of Black nationalist visions of self-determination based in land for Black people.
[Marcus] Garvey saw a model in the emerging Zionist movement and so did W.E.B. Du Bois, one of his main antagonists. Du Bois was quite supportive of the Zionist idea up through the establishment of the state of Israel.
And then, of course, you have important connections between Jewish Americans and African Americans in the mid-century civil rights movement and the important role that Jewish Americans played in advancing that movement and providing support for it. For example, there’s the martyrdom of Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, who were killed [by the KKK] in Mississippi in 1964 after registering Black voters.
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