Although her Chicago synagogue would often sing, “Next year in Jerusalem,” Cydney Wallace, a black Jewish community organizer, never felt obligated to visit Israel.
The 39-year-old claimed to have a lot on her plate at home, where she often delivers speeches on combating anti-Black prejudice in the American Jewish community and ending white supremacy in the country.
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“I know what I’m fighting for here,” she noted.
This changed when she accepted an offer from a Palestinian American community organizer from Chicago’s south side to travel to Israel and the West Bank, where she met with religious leaders from the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities as well as twenty other black Americans.
Starting on September 26, the journey deepened Wallace’s comprehension of the challenges faced by Palestinians living under Israeli military rule in the West Bank. Sadly, though, it was cut short when Hamas terrorists launched an unprecedented series of strikes against Israel on October 7. Activists in the US and other countries have been sparked by horrifying global pictures of death and damage from Israel’s subsequent assault of the Gaza Strip.
Wallace and an increasing number of African Americans saw parallels between the Palestinian struggles in the West Bank and Gaza and their own struggles for civil rights and racial equality. In the US, where systemic racism permeates almost every aspect of society, the recent emergence of protest groups against police brutality has brought black and Palestinian activists together around a shared cause.
However, the over a century-long collaboration between Jewish and Black revolutionaries is occasionally strained by that closeness. Some Jewish Americans fear that support could increase the threat of antisemitism and erode the bonds between Jews and Blacks that were strengthened during the Civil Rights Movement. Examples of these ties range from black American groups that denounced the US backing of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory to black protestors advocating for the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.
The Center for Shared Society of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York is led by Bob Kaplan, “We are concerned, as a community, about what we feel is a lack of understanding of what Israel is about and how deeply October 7 has affected us.”
“Antisemitism has to be seen as a reprehensible form of hate … as any form of hate is,” he said. “Antisemitism is as real to the American Jewish community, and causes as much trauma and fear and upset to the American Jewish community, as racism causes to the black community, or anti-Asian feeling causes to the Asian community, or anti-Muslim feeling causes in the Muslim community.”
However, he said, many American Jews are aware that black Americans may have a connection to the Palestinian cause that is not at odds with their support of Israel.
A recent survey conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that black individuals were more likely than white and Hispanic adults to believe that the United States supports Israel too much (44 percent vs 30 and 28 percent, respectively). Black Americans did not, however, have a higher likelihood than any other group of saying that the US does not help the Palestinians enough.
There were also differences in terms of generation: the study found that younger Americans were more inclined to believe that the US supports Israel excessively. Certain younger and progressive Jews tend to be more critical of certain of Israel’s practices, even within the Jewish American community.
Black Americans have long supported Palestine since the Civil Rights Movement, thanks to the efforts of notable left-wing figures like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Angela Davis, among others. The two movements have become closer as a result of more recent violent episodes, including the Israel-Hamas conflict in 2021 and Israel’s current, historic bombing campaign against Gaza, which is being broadcast live on social media.
Ahmad Abuznaid, the director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights explained, “This is just the latest generation to pick up the mantle, the latest black folks to organize, build, and talk about freedom and justice.”
Israel freed hundreds of Palestinian inmates and detainees during a week-long ceasefire between Hamas and Israel as part of the recent agreement to liberate dozens of hostages taken by Hamas terrorists. Many were youths who had not been prosecuted after being arrested in the West Bank for relatively minor infractions like hurling stones.
After learning about Israel’s administrative detention policy—which holds detainees without charge or trial—and seeing the release of Palestinian prisoners, several African Americans compared the Israeli jail system to the US one. Studies of the American court system show that black people are incarcerated at a rate more than four times higher than that of white people, sometimes for minor infractions, even though almost two-thirds of inmates in the US have never been found guilty of a crime.
“Americans like to talk about being innocent until proven guilty. But black folks are predominantly and disproportionately detained in the United States regardless of whether anything has been proven. And that’s very similar to Israel’s administrative detention,” stated Julian Rose, an Atlantan activist for a black-run bail fund.
Wallace and the others were asked to join the “Black Jerusalem” trip by Rami Nashashibi, executive director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network, which explores the holy city from the perspectives of African Americans and Black Americans.
They encountered Palestinians of Black African descent, many of whom can trace their ancestry back generations in the Old City, who make up the small Afro-Palestinian population in Jerusalem.
“Our Black brothers and sisters in the U.S. suffered from slavery and now they suffer from racism,” mentioned Mousa Qous, the executive director of the African Community Society Jerusalem. Her mother is Palestinian, while her father immigrated to Jerusalem from Chad in 1941.
“We suffer from the Israeli occupation and racist policies. The Americans and the Israelis are conducting the same policies against us and the black Americans. So we should support each other,” Qous noted.
Nashashibi concurred, stating: “My Palestinian identity was very much shaped and influenced by black American history.”
“I always hoped that a trip like this would open up new pathways that would connect the dots not just in a political and ideological way,” he remarked, “but between the liberation and struggles for humanity that are very familiar to us in the US.”
Wallace was horrified to discover during the trip how little she knew about the realities of Palestinians living under Israeli control.
Wallace claimed that her party was questioned whether their group was Jewish, Muslim, or Christian at an Israeli checkpoint near the Jewish holy site, the Western Wall. Wallace and the others produced their travel IDs, but an Israeli officer allowed her through after noticing her Star of David necklace, while the Muslims and Palestinians in the party were searched thoroughly and had their bags searched.
“Being there made me wonder if this is what it was like to live in the Jim Crow era” in America, Wallace noted.
Growing up in an African-American Muslim neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, Kameelah Oseguera also stated the trip widened her eyes.
Oseguera saw a large key at the entrance to the Aida refugee camp in the West Bank, near Bethlehem. The key represents the houses that the Palestinians lost during the 1948 formation of Israel, a period known as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.” Many of them retained the keys to the houses they were forced to leave or flee; this is a symbol of the right of Palestinians to return, which Israel has refused.
According to Oseguera, the key brought back memories of her trip to Senegal’s “door of no return” memorial, which honors the Africans who were forced into slavery and transported to the Americas via slave ships. Being an African ancestor who was enslaved, made me think of “what the dream of my return would have meant for my ancestors.”
She stated that going back home is a “longing that is transmitted through generations.”
Phillip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Dorothy Height, Shirley Chisholm, and Martin Luther King, Sr.—the father of the assassinated civil rights leader—all supported Israel’s Law of Return, which gives all Jews the opportunity to live permanently in Israel and get Israeli citizenship.
But in the past ten years, there has also been an increasing sense of solidarity between Palestinians and Black Americans.
In 2020, George Floyd’s death at the hands of a white police officer struck a chord in the West Bank, where Palestinians compared Floyd’s murder to their own experiences of violence under the occupation. Floyd’s image also appeared in large form on Israel’s enormous separation barrier.
The Black Lives Matter movement was only getting started when police killed Michael Brown, a black teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. This led to protests in the city. While Ferguson police used tear gas on demonstrators, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank posted tips for minimizing the irritants’ effects.
BLM activists expressed support for Palestinians in a program dubbed the “Vision for Black Lives” when they founded the coalition known as the Movement for Black Lives in 2016. Some Jewish organizations, which had previously supported the BLM movement mainly, objected to the black activists’ portrayal of Israel as an allegedly “apartheid state” that discriminates against the Palestinian people.
“There tends to be this doubt or astonishment that black people care about other oppressed people around the world,” stated Phil Agnew, co-director of Black Men Build. This national advocacy group has visited the West Bank four times since 2014.
Agnew stated that it would be a mistake to disregard the sizable numbers of Jewish and Black Americans who have a common affinity for the Palestinians.
When the October 7 Hamas assaults occurred, around 240 people were held hostage and 1,200 people were killed throughout Israel, none of the participants in the “Black Jerusalem” excursion realized that their journey would end tragically. Since then, Israel’s fierce air and ground war in Gaza, which is already in its third month, has claimed the lives of over 18,700 Palestinians. The West Bank has also seen an increase in violence.
Wallace has managed to speak out about her sympathy for Palestinians while preserving her Jewish identity and combating racism back home in Chicago. According to her, the ideas are not mutually incompatible.
“I’m trying not to do anything that alienates anyone,” she stated. “But I can’t just not do the right thing because I’m scared.”
