Israel, Palestine and the Future of the Black-Jewish Alliance

The argument over Israel has become about more than Israel. For Black Americans and American Jews, it is increasingly about what we remember, what we fear, whose suffering receives recognition, and whether one community understands enough of the other’s history to disagree without turning disagreement into estrangement.

That is why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become such a difficult test for the Black-Jewish relationship. The alliance Americans remember from the civil-rights era was never as harmonious as nostalgia sometimes suggests. Black and Jewish Americans disagreed over schools, neighborhoods, affirmative action, political power, Black nationalism, Zionism, racism and antisemitism long before October 7. Yet those disagreements occurred within networks of relationships and institutions that repeatedly brought people back into contact.

The problem today may therefore be larger than disagreement over Israel and Palestine. We may also possess less of the relational infrastructure that once helped the relationship survive disagreement. When conflict takes place primarily through social media, national advocacy organizations and competing public statements rather than sustained relationships, disagreement can become estrangement remarkably quickly.

In the first essay in this series, I argued that “pro-Israel” is not a single political position. In the second, I examined what a different pro-Israel position might require: Jewish and Palestinian national self-determination, Israeli security, Palestinian sovereignty, negotiated borders, compromises over Jerusalem and refugees, the disarmament of Hamas and Palestinian institutional reform.

That discussion ended with a harder question: must Palestinian freedom and Jewish security remain competing moral claims?

This final essay asks what happens when Black Americans and American Jews answer that question differently.

J Street has been useful because its politics disrupt a familiar binary. It supports Israel as a democratic national home for the Jewish people while affirming Palestinian national self-determination, opposing permanent occupation and annexation, and supporting an independent Palestinian state.[1]

But my deeper interest is not J Street. It is the Black-Jewish relationship. The framework provides distinctions that our public conversation often loses: Israel is not identical to its government. Palestinians are not Hamas. Jewish security does not require permanent Palestinian statelessness. Palestinian freedom does not require the disappearance of Jewish national self-determination. Criticism of Israel does not automatically constitute antisemitism.[1]

Those distinctions will not solve the conflict. They may help us remain in conversation about it.

When History Changes What We Hear

Black Americans and American Jews sometimes appear to be participating in the same argument while actually hearing different ones.

When many Jews hear forms of anti-Zionism that reject not simply Israeli policies but the legitimacy of Jewish national self-determination itself, they may hear something more existential than a disagreement over foreign policy. Jewish history contains repeated periods in which communities lived as vulnerable minorities under governments and majorities whose protection could disappear. Modern political Zionism emerged in late nineteenth-century Europe amid antisemitism and arguments that Jews required a secure national home rather than remaining indefinitely dependent upon the protection of others.[2]

Black Americans can hear another argument. We see Palestinians living without sovereign political power, settlement expansion in the West Bank, displacement, the destruction of Gaza and civilian suffering. Those realities enter a Black historical imagination shaped by slavery, segregation, redlining, disenfranchisement and unequal state power.

The histories are not identical. Palestinians are not Black Americans. Israelis are not white Americans. Israel is not the Jim Crow South, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not the American civil-rights movement transported to another continent.

Historical analogy is useful precisely because it can illuminate without making different histories interchangeable.

History also shapes what people hear. The same sentence can carry radically different meanings depending upon the historical memory through which it passes. Relational infrastructure matters because people who know one another are more likely to ask what another person means before deciding what they must mean.

Recent polling suggests that Americans themselves may be making distinctions that our political vocabulary sometimes misses. Pew Research Center found in May 2026 that 50 percent of Black Protestants viewed Israeli people favorably and 54 percent viewed Palestinian people favorably.[3] Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 67 percent viewed Palestinian people favorably and 43 percent Israeli people, while only 16 percent viewed the Israeli government favorably and 13 percent Hamas.[4]

Those numbers should not be overinterpreted, but they illustrate an important point: sympathy for Palestinians does not necessarily entail hostility toward Israelis, just as criticism of an Israeli government does not necessarily entail rejection of Israel itself.

American Jews cannot be reduced to Netanyahu, AIPAC or any other organization. Palestinians cannot be reduced to Hamas. Black Americans cannot be reduced to a single political movement.

What We Need to Understand About One Another

Black Americans who care about maintaining a serious relationship with American Jews should take Jewish fears seriously even when we disagree with the political conclusions drawn from them.

When criticism moves from Netanyahu, settlements or military policy to the proposition that Israel itself has no legitimate right to exist as a Jewish national home, many Jews hear more than criticism of a government. They hear the proposition that Jewish national self-determination should disappear.

When October 7 is discussed in ways that seem to make its victims principally responsible for the violence committed against them, some Jews hear another familiar historical pattern: Jewish suffering being qualified before it is fully recognized. Political anger toward Israel can also spill into hostility toward Jews who exercise no control over Israeli government policy.

The reverse error matters as well. If criticism of Israeli policy is routinely treated as presumptively antisemitic, the term loses precision and legitimate debate becomes more difficult.

Jewish Americans also have to understand what Black Americans may hear. When Palestinian civilian deaths are explained almost entirely through Hamas’s responsibility, some hear a moral framework in which Palestinian lives appear to carry less weight. When settlement expansion is defended or ignored, Black observers may see a powerful state altering political realities on land inhabited by a much less powerful population. When Palestinians are discussed principally as a security problem, that language can resonate with parts of Black history in which demands for equality were filtered through concerns about order and control.

Analogy is not identity. One historical experience does not prove what should be done in another. But reactions themselves have histories, and recognition has to move in both directions.

The Difficult Word: Zionism

No word reveals the breakdown in shared vocabulary more clearly than Zionism.

For many Jews, the term expresses something elemental: Jews are a people entitled to national self-determination in their ancestral homeland. Modern political Zionism took organized form in the late nineteenth century, with Theodor Herzl convening the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897.[2]

For some Black progressives and other critics of Israel, Zionism has become associated primarily with the Nakba, occupation, settlement expansion and Israeli state power. The disagreement is partly semantic and partly substantive. People use the same word for different historical and political propositions.

That is why asking simply whether someone is a Zionist frequently tells us less than we imagine.

A more useful question is: What political rights, obligations and limitations follow from the Zionism you affirm?

Does Jewish self-determination require permanent control over the West Bank? Does it permit Palestinian statehood? Does it require settlement expansion? Does it place limits on Israeli military power? Does it recognize comparable Palestinian claims to national self-determination?

J Street offers one answer: Jewish national self-determination alongside an equivalent Palestinian right to national self-determination.[1]

The more precise questions therefore become: Can Jewish self-determination be exercised without permanent Palestinian subordination? Can Palestinian liberation be achieved without the destruction of Jewish national self-determination?

Those questions do not remove the disagreement. They identify it.

Sacred Attachment and Competing Memories

Jewish attachment to the land is ancient and real. Palestinian attachment to the land is real as well. Historical and theological attachment explains why the land matters so profoundly, but attachment alone cannot settle how political authority should be divided between two populations that inhabit and claim the same land.

I have described elsewhere the danger of what I call “divine deeds”: the human tendency to convert claims about God’s purposes into unconditional political ownership of territory. Christians should be particularly cautious about this temptation. Our own history includes Crusades, colonization, Manifest Destiny and theological arguments used to justify territorial domination.[5]

Sacred history establishes identity, memory, covenant and attachment. It cannot by itself determine contemporary sovereignty between two living peoples. A biblical promise can establish sacred attachment without functioning as an unlimited modern property deed.

That principle cuts in both directions. Palestinians cannot erase Jewish historical attachment by describing Jews simply as foreign colonizers. Jews cannot invoke ancient attachment as though Palestinian political rights consequently disappear.

The same humility is necessary when communities remember suffering.

Recognizing the Holocaust does not require using it to negate the Nakba. Recognizing the Nakba does not require relativizing the Holocaust. The history of antisemitism does not erase Palestinian dispossession, and Palestinian dispossession does not erase centuries of Jewish persecution.

Competitive suffering turns recognition into a scarce resource. Once that happens, acknowledging another community’s wound begins to feel like surrendering part of one’s own moral claim.

Historical memory should do something better. It should teach communities about vulnerability, fear, power and what human beings owe one another.

Memory Is Not Infrastructure

Black Americans and Jews frequently return to the civil-rights movement when the relationship becomes strained. There is good reason to remember it. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel joined Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march.[6] James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered by Ku Klux Klan members in Mississippi in 1964 while participating in Freedom Summer.[7]

But memory is not infrastructure.

Heschel marching with King cannot tell us what to think about Gaza. The murders of Goodman and Schwerner alongside Chaney do not determine the status of Jerusalem. Those memories tell us that relationship was possible. They do not maintain the relationship for us.

What earlier generations possessed, however imperfectly, was more than shared photographs. Clergy interacted. Organizations negotiated. Leaders argued across tables rather than only through public statements. Common campaigns produced familiarity, and familiarity helped disagreement remain disagreement rather than become estrangement.

That is what I mean by relational infrastructure.

Without it, communities encounter one another primarily through controversy: the statement that offended us, the organization we distrust, the protest sign we resent or the social-media post that confirms what we already feared.

A relationship cannot survive indefinitely on inherited goodwill.

Rebuilding the Table

If the problem is partly institutional, the answer cannot be merely rhetorical.

Rebuilding Black-Jewish relational infrastructure requires relationships that exist before the next crisis arrives: Black pastors and rabbis who know one another before they are asked to issue statements after an antisemitic attack, a racist incident or another explosion of violence in the Middle East; synagogue-church partnerships built around sustained civic work rather than occasional symbolic gatherings; and emerging Black and Jewish leaders who study one another’s histories before being asked to debate one another’s politics.

It also requires institutions capable of holding the Israel-Palestine conversation itself.

A serious relationship cannot require silence about the issue most likely to divide us. Black participants must be able to discuss occupation, settlements, Palestinian statelessness and Gaza without having those concerns automatically treated as hostility toward Jews. Jewish participants must be able to discuss October 7, antisemitism, Jewish national self-determination and Israeli security without having those concerns dismissed as rationalizations for domination.

October 7 and Gaza must be discussable in the same room. Antisemitism and Palestinian dispossession must be discussable in the same conversation. Hamas and settlement expansion must both remain subject to criticism.

The goal is not to manufacture agreement. It is to build relationships and institutions sturdy enough that disagreement does not terminate relationship.

Coming Back to the Table

J Street cannot serve as referee for the Black-Jewish relationship, nor should it. Its contribution is narrower: it offers a grammar of distinctions separating Israel from the policies of an Israeli government, Jewish self-determination from maximal territorial claims, Israeli security from permanent occupation, and Palestinian national rights from Hamas.[1]

Its usefulness does not depend upon proving that all of its policy prescriptions will work. It demonstrates that categories often treated as mutually exclusive need not always be so. Someone can care about Israel and Palestinian freedom, Jewish vulnerability and Palestinian dispossession, antisemitism and occupation, October 7 and Gaza.

The future of the Black-Jewish relationship may depend upon our ability to do something similar.

Black Americans and Jews could retreat into separate moral communities, each fluent in its own history and suspicious of the other’s historical language. Each community would retain its moral vocabulary.

We might lose one another.

The next Black-Jewish alliance will not be rebuilt by asking either community to surrender its convictions about Israel and Palestine. It will require relationships and institutions strong enough to contain those convictions when they collide.

The civil-rights generation left us memories of what collaboration once made possible. Memories alone cannot build the next alliance. That work requires contemporary relationships and a moral language capable of acknowledging Jewish self-determination and Palestinian self-determination as serious claims, and Jewish security and Palestinian freedom as serious concerns.

The question is no longer whether Blacks and Jews can agree about Israel. It is whether we can disagree about Israel without losing the capacity to see, hear and work with one another.

If we can do that, the alliance we remember does not have to remain merely something we remember. It can become the foundation for the alliance we build next.

Notes

1. J Street, “Mission & Principles,” accessed September 30, 2026. J Street describes itself as “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy,” affirms Jewish and Palestinian national self-determination, supports Israel’s right to defend itself under U.S. and international law, opposes extended occupation, settlement expansion and annexation, and distinguishes criticism of an Israeli government from denial of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish homeland.

2. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Holocaust Survivors and the Establishment of the State of Israel,” accessed September 30, 2026. The museum dates modern political Zionism to the late nineteenth century and identifies the First Zionist Congress of 1897 as a formative event. See also United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Alfred Dreyfus and the ‘Dreyfus Affair.’”

3. Pew Research Center, “Muslims and Religiously Unaffiliated View Palestinians More Favorably Than Other Groups Do,” July 9, 2026; survey conducted May 4–17, 2026. Among Black Protestants, 50 percent reported a favorable view of Israeli people and 54 percent a favorable view of Palestinian people.

4. Becka A. Alper and Laura Silver, “Americans’ Views of Israelis Have Grown Increasingly Negative, but Views of Palestinians Have Held Fairly Steady,” Pew Research Center, July 9, 2026; Pew Research Center, “Wide Partisan Gaps Exist in Americans’ Views of Israeli and Palestinian People and the Israeli Government.” Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 67 percent viewed Palestinian people favorably, 43 percent Israeli people, 16 percent the Israeli government and 13 percent Hamas.

5. Library of Congress, “American Acquisition and Migration,” Meeting of Frontiers. The Library of Congress describes nineteenth-century Manifest Destiny as including the belief among European Americans that continental expansion represented a “providential mission.” See also Library of Congress, “Westward Expansion: Encounters at a Cultural Crossroads.”

6. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, “Heschel, Abraham Joshua,” accessed September 30, 2026; “Selma to Montgomery March.”

7. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Mississippi Burning” and “KKK Series,” accessed September 30, 2026.