When Israel Became a Test of Black–Jewish Solidarity
Black Lives Matter, AIPAC, Zionism, October 7 and Gaza
SERIES I — PART III
This series asks what Black and Jewish Americans need to say to one another when shared history is real but incomplete and when each community remembers the same relationship differently. I have spent several years writing simultaneously about antisemitism, Israeli democracy, Palestinian equality and Gaza. That experience has taught me how quickly a sentence heard as moral clarity in one community can sound like betrayal in another.
The contrast became especially vivid for me after visiting the Nova Music Festival Exhibition and writing about the experience. October 7 cannot be understood only as an argument about Israeli policy; for Jews, it activated memories of people being hunted because they were Jews. Yet my concern for Jewish vulnerability has not made Palestinian civilian suffering, occupation or political rights disappear.
That is the difficulty this essay addresses. Israel and Palestine have moved from the edge of Black–Jewish relations to the center, but the divide did not begin on October 7, 2023. It had been developing for decades through debates over South Africa, the Palestinian national movement, American campus politics, Black internationalism and competing understandings of colonialism.
Black Lives Matter and Competing Interpretations
The Black Lives Matter era made those tensions impossible to ignore. In 2016, the Movement for Black Lives released a broad policy platform dealing primarily with policing, incarceration, economics and racial justice. Its foreign-policy section, however, singled out Israel, describing it as an apartheid state and accusing the United States of complicity in genocide against Palestinians. Major Jewish organizations, including organizations otherwise deeply sympathetic to Black racial justice, reacted sharply.
What followed revealed two very different interpretations of the same dispute. Many Black activists heard something like this: You tell us that Jewish Americans stood with Blacks during the civil-rights era, but when a Black-led movement challenges Israeli policy, suddenly support for our domestic struggle becomes conditional. Many Jews heard something very different: You are asking us to support a movement that describes the Jewish state as genocidal and apartheid and then treating our objection as evidence that we do not care about Black lives.
Both reactions were real, but neither represented an entire community. Jewish opinion itself was never monolithic. Jewish Voice for Peace endorsed the 2016 platform, while other liberal Jewish organizations sharply criticized its language about Israel. Four years later, more than 600 Jewish organizations and synagogues signed a statement unequivocally affirming that Black lives matter even though disagreements over Israel had not disappeared. That history should have taught us something important: there is no single “Jewish position,” just as there is no single “Black position.”
AIPAC and Black Political Power
AIPAC makes this conversation more difficult because disagreement is no longer simply philosophical. It also involves political money and elected power. In 2024, AIPAC’s affiliated super PAC, United Democracy Project, spent $14.5 million in the Democratic primary in which Rep. Jamaal Bowman lost to George Latimer. Bowman had become one of Congress’s most outspoken critics of Israel’s war in Gaza. A few weeks later, United Democracy Project spent at least $8.6 million helping defeat Rep. Cori Bush, another Black progressive and an early advocate of a Gaza ceasefire.
They were not the first Black politicians caught in such battles. In 2022, AIPAC and its super PAC spent nearly $6 million in the Democratic primary that former Rep. Donna Edwards lost in Maryland. Edwards had taken votes on Israel that AIPAC considered problematic, but she had also traveled to Israel and the West Bank with the liberal pro-Israel organization J Street, which backed her candidacy. In Pennsylvania, AIPAC’s super PAC spent millions opposing Summer Lee, a Black progressive who nevertheless won. AIPAC said it opposed her because of what it considered dangerous views concerning the U.S.–Israel relationship.
Two things need to be said together. There is no evidence that AIPAC opposed Bowman, Bush, Edwards or Lee because they were Black; Israel policy was central to those contests. But acknowledging that does not end the racial conversation. Black voters can reasonably ask what it means when enormous outside political expenditures are used to influence which Black representatives remain in Congress because of their positions involving a foreign country. Jewish and pro-Israel voters can reasonably answer that Black elected officials are not exempt from political opposition when their views on Israel are considered dangerous or unacceptable. Both propositions can be true, and an honest conversation has to be capable of holding them together.
Zionism, BDS and Jewish Political Diversity
There is another complication: AIPAC is not synonymous with American Jews. That distinction has become clearer to me through Jewish communal life than it ever was from the outside. A synagogue, a Jewish newspaper or a trip to Israel quickly reveals arguments among Jews that disappear when American political discourse speaks casually of “the Jewish position.”
J Street, for example, is explicitly Zionist. It recognizes Jewish national self-determination while arguing that Palestinians possess the same right, supports a Palestinian state and an end to occupation, and opposes the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement while distinguishing between rejection of Israel’s existence and opposition to settlement policy. Those distinctions matter enormously because someone can be Jewish, Zionist and pro-Israel while also opposing Netanyahu, opposing settlements, supporting Palestinian statehood, criticizing the war in Gaza and rejecting global BDS. These positions are not mutually exclusive.
Some Black critics of Israel do not sufficiently understand that internal Jewish and Israeli diversity, and this is a legitimate Jewish complaint. A Black critic does not need to support Israel’s government, but criticism becomes less persuasive when the critic cannot distinguish Netanyahu from Israel, AIPAC from J Street, Zionism from a particular settlement policy, or Jewish national self-determination from support for every act of the Israeli state.
At the same time, some Jews do not understand why the language of boycott has such moral resonance for Black Americans. Boycott is not an exotic political tactic in Black political memory. It is woven into the history of Montgomery, selective buying campaigns, economic pressure against apartheid South Africa, divestment and sanctions. When Palestinians call for boycott, divestment and sanctions, some Black activists therefore hear a familiar nonviolent strategy historically used against systems they considered unjust.
Many Jews hear something very different. The international BDS movement does not recognize Jewish national self-determination in the way a two-state framework does, even as some Jewish organizations argue that opposition to occupation and settlements should not be suppressed and that criticizing Israeli policy is not inherently anti-Israel. These distinctions should become part of Black–Jewish education, and so should a better understanding of what Zionism means.
Too often someone announces that “Zionism is racism” without being able to explain Zionism itself. Zionism is not one ideology. Jewish history has included labor Zionists, religious Zionists, liberal Zionists, revisionist Zionists and others who have disagreed profoundly about the kind of state Jewish nationalism should create. A useful minimal definition is recognition of the collective right of the Jewish people to national self-determination in the land of Israel, alongside the equal legitimacy of Palestinian national self-determination. That is much more useful than treating Zionism as synonymous with Netanyahu.
Netanyahu Is Not Israel
Netanyahu is not Israel, and Israeli public opinion and party politics reveal substantial opposition to him and to important aspects of his government’s policies. A Black American who says, “I cannot support Israel because I oppose Netanyahu,” should therefore understand that millions of Israelis could answer, “Neither can we.” Likewise, a Jew who hears criticism of Netanyahu or Gaza and immediately hears rejection of Israel needs to distinguish criticism of a government from rejection of a people.
That distinction is easy to state but increasingly difficult to sustain. The intensity of the war, the scale of Palestinian suffering and the trauma of October 7 have all made political criticism feel more existential. Yet precisely because the stakes are so high, distinguishing a nation from a government, a people from a political coalition, and a right to exist from a particular policy is more important rather than less.
October 7, Gaza and the Meaning of Betrayal
October 7 and Gaza have made all of these distinctions harder. For many Jews, October 7 begins with a massacre, hostages, sexual violence, the murder of civilians and the shattering reminder that Jewish vulnerability did not end with the creation of Israel. For many Black Americans, especially younger Black Americans, Gaza increasingly begins with civilian death, destruction, displacement, occupation and the disproportionate power of a state military over a largely stateless population. Different starting points produce different moral stories.
Jewish participation in the civil-rights movement also created an understandable reservoir of expectation. Some Jews looked toward Black America after October 7 expecting something analogous to the solidarity they remembered their community offering Black Americans. Instead, some immediately heard discussions of occupation, colonialism and Palestinian resistance. That produced an emotional response deeper than an ordinary disagreement over foreign policy: We stood with you. Why can’t you stand with us now?
Black Americans may begin the chronology somewhere else: apartheid South Africa, Palestinian displacement, West Bank occupation, “From Ferguson to Palestine,” and Gaza. The renewed dialogue therefore has to permit Jews to say that October 7 felt like betrayal, and Black participants need to be able to hear that word without immediately answering with Gaza. For many Jews, the grievance is chronological and relational: before there had even been time to mourn, some longtime allies were already explaining the massacre primarily through occupation and resistance. Understanding why that response wounded Jews does not require agreement with the war that followed.
Black Americans must also be able to answer that supporting Palestinian rights is not abandonment of Jews. That claim requires explanation rather than slogans, just as the Jewish claim of betrayal does. Neither community should be required to erase facts in order to enter the other’s story.
October 7 was an atrocity, but Palestinian civilian suffering is not less real because October 7 occurred. Israel has legitimate security needs, and Palestinians have legitimate political rights. Criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic, although anti-Israel language can become antisemitic when it turns into collective accusations about Jews, conspiracies about Jewish control or the denial to Jews of rights one recognizes for other peoples. Likewise, support for Israel is not inherently anti-Palestinian, but it becomes morally inadequate when it requires silence about occupation, settlements, civilian suffering or Palestinian political agency.
This is the conversation we have too often replaced with slogans: AIPAC, BDS, Zionism, apartheid, genocide, colonialism, antisemitism. Each word can become a conclusion that prevents the conversation it ought to begin. A renewed Black–Jewish alliance therefore has to demand something harder from both communities: enough knowledge to understand the strongest version of the other’s argument rather than merely the version easiest to dismiss.
A Black participant should understand why many Jews experience anti-Zionism as something much more threatening than criticism of another country’s foreign policy. A Jewish participant should understand why a Black person shaped by slavery, segregation, apartheid and liberation movements may interpret Palestinians through a moral framework very different from a Jewish framework shaped by exile, persecution, the Holocaust and national vulnerability. Recognizing those different historical lenses is not relativism. It is preparation for an honest conversation.
The question, then, is no longer whether Blacks and Jews agree about Israel. We plainly do not, nor should a renewed relationship depend upon pretending otherwise. The harder and more important question is whether we can disagree about Israel without deciding that the disagreement itself proves the other community has betrayed us.
Selected Sources and Research Notes
- Washington Post, “Movement for Black Lives platform controversy” — https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/08/05/jewish-groups-decry-black-lives-matter-platforms-view-on-israel/
- JTA, “AIPAC and Jamaal Bowman” — https://www.jta.org/2024/06/26/united-states/aipac-spent-more-than-14m-to-unseat-jamaal-bowman-did-it-have-to
- Washington Post, “AIPAC and Cori Bush” — https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/08/aipiac-cori-bush-primary/
- JTA, “Donna Edwards spending” — https://www.jta.org/2022/07/20/politics/donna-edwards-loses-maryland-primary-following-6m-pro-israel-spending-bonanza
- J Street, “Zionism and BDS” — https://jstreet.org/j-street-zionism-and-bds/