A cloud of disappointment descended on the liberal-Jewish camp as Black Lives Matter adopted a platform hostile to Israel – a platform that blamed Israel for committing “genocide” against the Palestinians, no less.
“Calling Israel an apartheid state when it’s not, calling Israel and those who support it perpetrators of genocide when they are not, is more than inaccurate: It puts my life and the life of my people at risk. It flames hatred, incites violence and perpetuates anti-Semitism,” wrote Rabbi Ari Hart at the Forward. “I am deeply concerned by this frightening development within a movement that has catapulted onto the national stage as the voice of civil rights in recent months,” wrote rabbi Dan Dorsch in Haaretz. Jewish groups were quick to condemn the platform.
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Even Truah, an organization of leftist rabbis, highly critical of Israel, was not ready to accept a platform as biased as the one BLM endorsed: “we are extremely dismayed at the decision to refer to the Israeli occupation as genocide. We are committed to ending the occupation, which leads to daily human rights violations against Palestinians, and also compromises the safety of Israelis. Our work aims to build a just and secure future for both Israelis and Palestinians, both of whom deserve the same human rights protections as all people.”
Why are these activists devastated by the platform? Hart says it puts his “life and the life of my people at risk.” Fair enough. Dorsch understands that it makes the “voice of civil rights” at odds with any voice of support, as minimal and as critical as it might be, for Israel. It aims to make people choose: either you are for civil rights – or you are for Israel. The Truah rabbis seem to realize that the BLM platform is not about a “secure future for both Israelis and Palestinians,” it is about ending Israel.
So, suddenly, all of these activists and do-gooders realized that Black Lives Matter is not their ally. It is their enemy. An enemy that wants to destroy their people. Suddenly, all of these people realized that the promise of repairing the fractured Jewish-Black relations in America will not be fulfilled any time soon. With a broken heart you can count this as yet another Barack Obama promise that did not come to pass.
Obama made a promise as he was running for President. I was reminded of it in recent days, as I was going through my book from five years ago, to make updates for an audio edition that we are currently taping. Here’s Obama, in a debate against Hillary Clinton in Cleveland, on February 2008: “You know, I would not be sitting here were it not for a whole host of Jewish Americans, who supported the civil rights movement and helped to ensure that justice was served in the South. And that coalition has frayed over time around a whole host of issues, and part of my task in this process is making sure that those lines of communication and understanding are reopened”.
Obama, I wrote right after that debate, “touched a sensitive nerve when he was talking about one possibility that's inherent to his candidacy: he has the chance to restore the alliance between blacks and Jews.” This, I wrote, “is one promise that no American liberal Jew can ignore.”
And this was not a one-time slip of a tongue; it was a well-crafted, intentional message that the President repeated time and again. He spoke about this issue with Jewish activists, and he raised it as he spoke on Martin Luther King Day in a black church. “The scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community,” he preached to his African-American audience. He told them that this needs to end: “if enough Americans were awakened to the injustice; if they joined together, North and South, rich and poor, Christian and Jew, then perhaps that wall would come tumbling down, and justice would flow like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Obama promised to help amend white-black relations in America, and he was not able to achieve his goal. He specifically told the Jews of America that he can help them restore one of the great alliances in the history of American Jewry – and he was not able to achieve his goal. Is it his fault? I have no doubt that he was genuine about wanting to restore the alliance. I also have no doubt that by constantly questioning not just Israel’s policies but also its morality Obama somewhat contributed to the atmosphere that culminated in the BLM platform that was passed last week.
It is definitely saddening that fifty years after the Six Days War – a time that was “a turning point in black-Jewish relations,” as Adams and Bracey argue in their book about these relations – Jews are forced to make the same choice once again: support black activism, or the Jewish State. In What Went Wrong: The Creation & Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance by Murray Friedman, there is a story about The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (NSCC) newsletter publishing an article in which it was argued that “the United States supported Zionism for neocolonial reasons and was using Israel for its own purposes in Africa.” The article was accompanied by “anti-Semitic drawings and cartoons” – highlighting the fact that the anti-Israel campaign of radical activists does not distinguish between Israel and its Jewish supporters in America and elsewhere.
Nothing much has changed. Israel is still in control of disputed land and a disenfranchised people. Jews in America are still supportive of the idea of “black lives” but are still reluctant to support an organization with such positions on Israel. They cannot support an organization with such positions on Israel. That is, because the troubling aspect of the BLM platform is not its harsh denunciation of Israel’s control of the West Bank. It is the oh-so-familiar habit of singling out the Jews and of perpetrating ugly lies about the actions of Jews – a habit that goes way beyond the question of Israel’s policies.
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