Black Lives Matter (hereafter BLM) was in the news a lot between 2016 and 2020 with its protesters getting run over in the road, (1) totally blocking road access to airports (2) and inspiring an assorted array of targeted killings of police officers. (3) BLM has been ‘campaigning’ publicly about various ethnic issues for quite some time now, but its primary official demands have always been to ‘stop the police killing young black men’ and for ‘reparations for slavery’.
I wanted to briefly write about since the group published a lengthy manifesto in 2016 in which it referred to the Palestinians - per the jargon of the radical left - as fellow ‘people of colour’ and called Israel an occupier who has created an apartheid state separating jews and their Palestinian neighbours.
The jewish response to this were – as you might expect – completely bi-polar. On the one hand there were plenty of condemnations of the language used by the BLM manifesto in regard to Israel such as ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’. (4)
Yet what is perhaps more interesting is the support that Black Lives Matter received from Israeli jews. For example Haaretz - one of the biggest media outlets in Israel - published an article arguing that jews should just ignore BLM’s statements about Israel and continue supporting them. (5)
As one Joseph Finlay wrote in the ‘Jewish Daily Forward’:
‘If, however, the movement starts commenting on issues around Israel/Palestine, the community’s response is likely to move from quietly supportive to actively hostile. The Jewish community is extremely active in advocating for Israel, and key figures such as Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and the head of the Board of Deputies Jonathan Arkush frequently defend Israel and its actions in the British media.’ (6)
Hence the need for the article in Haaretz because while jews have been very supportive of BLM. They do not react well as a group to criticism of Israel and never have.
The status quo will likely remain the same though: jews are left-wing domestically on social issues especially around immigration and minority rights. Yet the minute you criticise Israel on the same basis they become brutal nationalists who will stop at nothing to discredit you and consign you to the intellectual, social and political dustbin with the long-time jewish head of the American Federation of Teacher Randi Weingarten being a prime example. (7)
The manifesto was - despite predictable attempts to smear it as such - not anti-Semitic in the slightest (as Mondoweiss note it didn’t even mention jews as people but rather Israel as a country and Israel does not equate the jews except in the minds of Zionists), (8) but simply stridently anti-Zionist.
References
(1) http://conservativetribune.com/watch-blm-protesters-block/
(2) https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/aug/05/black-lives-matter-protest-sparks-heathrow-traffic-chaos
(3) http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/07/blacklivesmatter-kill-list-least-11-cops-shot-dead-9-wounded-blm-criminals/; http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/live-dallas-shooting-suspect-bomb-8375665
(4) http://mondoweiss.net/2016/08/organizations-demonstrates-communitys/; http://forward.com/news/346828/jewish-allies-condemn-black-lives-matters-apartheid-platform/
(5) http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/1.736119
(6) http://forward.com/opinion/347045/black-lives-matter-to-uk-jews-unless-israel-gets-in-the-way/
(7) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/randi-weingarten-israeli-nationalist
(8) http://mondoweiss.net/2016/08/organizations-demonstrates-communitys/