Israel and the Crisis of Radical Blackness

Christopher T Fisher

doi:10.3390/genealogy6010019

Abstract

This article examines the reach of Black Internationalism, a dialogue on race, politics, and modernity nurtured by Black nationalists in the United States, between 1971 and 1974. It focuses on Israel’s encounter with the topic and how Israeli political leaders neutralize its effects. Israel, one of America’s closes Cold War allies, faced three explosive movements with ties to the discourse and politics of Black Internationalism—the Israeli Black Panthers, the Black Hebrews, and the Jewish Defense League. Each group challenged the narrative of inclusion the nation cultivated since its inception. Israel’s ability to manage the crisis of Black Internationalism demonstrates the topic’s global reach in the final stages of the Cold War, but also its limitations.

Highlights

The Mizrahi fashioned their notions of selfdeterminate inclusion from the sound bites and anecdotes of America’s Black Panthers and deployed them against the state of Israel, turning symbolism into substance, as Blackness became a counterpoint to Israeli politics and culture
The alternating versions of Israeli Blackness, as an imagined community in the case of the Mizrahi Jews who made up the Black Panthers and as a sociohistorical fact in the case of the African Americans who comprised the Black Hebrews, pressed the Israeli state to clarify exactly what pluralism meant and where it rested in the social forces that shaped the Israeli modernity
By 1971, Israel was an epicenter in the Near Eastern World, and when Saadia Marciano and his cohort of Black Panther protesters took to the streets of Jerusalem, they were invoking the name of a movement foreign to Israeli politics, but they were forcing the unpleasant realities of Israel’s state-building program into plain view

Summary

Introduction

Southside who called themselves Black Hebrews, settled in the city of Dimona, much further south in the Negev Desert They heeded Israel’s call to Aliyah, but for them, Israel was their spiritual home that had been lost in history. The Mizrahi fashioned their notions of selfdeterminate inclusion from the sound bites and anecdotes of America’s Black Panthers and deployed them against the state of Israel, turning symbolism into substance, as Blackness became a counterpoint to Israeli politics and culture. The alternating versions of Israeli Blackness, as an imagined community in the case of the Mizrahi Jews who made up the Black Panthers and as a sociohistorical fact in the case of the African Americans who comprised the Black Hebrews, pressed the Israeli state to clarify exactly what pluralism meant and where it rested in the social forces that shaped the Israeli modernity.

How the Mizrahi Became Black

Radical Blackness

The Point of Crisis

Sacrifice as Containment

Marxists Internet

11. American