The Black Lives Matter Movement, Jewish Allies, and the Long Legacy of Black Anti-Zionism

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Abstract: From the emergence of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, massive numbers of Jews, committed to resuming the Black-Jewish coalition of the civil rights era, became its avid allies. They failed to recognize that this alliance, which foundered and was sundered by the late 1970s, had increasingly been replaced by Blacks' identification with "their Brown Palestinian siblings," which rendered the conflict with Israel in stark racial terms. After the Six Day War, Black militants promoted a narrative that replaced Jews as a fellow oppressed group with Jews as iniquitous Zionists, who had established an illegitimate settler-colonial state that ethnically cleansed and victimized indigenous people of color—a narrative upon which their successors in the BLM movement drew heavily. With the rise of the BLM movement, the Black-Palestinian alliance was solidified—their wide divide on issues of race, gender, and homosexuality overridden by their shared anti-Zionism. In 2016, when the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a constituent partner of the BLM umbrella organization, issued a policy platform identifying Israel as "an apartheid state," committing "genocide against the Palestinian people," leading Jewish organizations appeared confounded and dismissed these views as a minority position. Spokespersons of secular and religious Jewish associations condemned what they labeled BLM's "anti-Israel rhetoric," which they insisted was "totally unrelated" to the movement's "social justice work." They appeared to be unaware that far from mere "rhetoric," the denigration and delegitimization of the Jewish state had long been at or near the core of the anti-racist ideology propounded by the Black militants revered by BLM leaders and activists. Thus, in 2020, organizations allegedly "representing over half of Jewish people in America" published a statement that endorsed the BLM movement "unequivocally," while several of the signatories released additional statements condemning those Jews who had rejected the movement once it posted the policy platform. The Jewish community fractured over the issue of Black antisemitism, but unlike in earlier periods, far more Jews, identifying as "progressives," continued to support a movement whose leaders and activists espoused or tolerated antisemitism, albeit lightly cloaked in anti-Zionist garb.