Blacks and the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Over time, blacks have become more sympathetic to Palestinians, but they won't express their views loudly -- despite President Obama's plunge into the Middle East conflict.

Courtesy of Life

Blacks in the United States have a complicated history with the Middle East. We identify with the Jewish Old Testament history. Think how many times we've crossed the Jordan River or told Moses to tell Pharoah to let our people go. In Moses' time, Egyptians -- Africans -- held Jews in captivity.

In the mid-20th-century civil rights era, Jews were some of our staunchest supporters when we woke up with "our minds stayed on freedom." In the Mississippi about which Nina Simone so famously sang, the three civil rights workers lynched in 1964 included two Jewish men. After the fight for voting rights, most dramatically demonstrated by the Selma-to-Montgomery march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, blacks and Jews found less to agree upon -- especially when affirmative action took center stage.

But for decades, many blacks have increasingly identified with Palestinians because they see them as underdogs in the superpower plays that cast Israel as the bully, supported by billions of dollars from the U.S. government and a very activist Jewish-American community. Palestinians appeal to many of us because of their enduring freedom struggle. We can identify with being displaced and dispersed, with having limited rights, with poverty, with being stigmatized. Even former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is reported to have privately pointed out the obvious parallels with the black experience.

Before President Obama, when blacks tried to point out that Palestinians have a freedom song that should be heard, they got into trouble. Jesse Jackson, who has committed a number of gaffes when it comes to American Jews and Israel, embraced Yasser Arafat in 1979 and again in 2002 -- each time to widespread censure. Arafat, the über-Palestinian leader, died in 2004 without realizing his goal of a Palestinian state and without convincing Israel that he was a man of peace.

Think of Andrew Young's loss of his United Nations ambassadorship after it became public that he had met with representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization -- ironically, to head off a confrontation at the U.N.

Think of former Rep. Cynthia McKinney's checkered political career, defined and thwarted mainly by her willingness to embrace the Palestinian cause.

Those incidents may explain why so few black voices are heard on the Middle East today. It's been wrenching to see President Obama left swaying in the wind for saying in public speeches what other presidents have long said behind closed doors: Israel needs to move toward a peace that includes Palestinians living in their own "nonmilitarized" state.



Obama wants negotiations to start with the borders that existed in June 1967 -- before there was a war between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Negotiations would involve land swaps so that Israel could keep some of its settlements in the West Bank. This is what the president said: "Precisely because of our friendship, it is important that we tell the truth: The status quo is unsustainable, and Israel must act boldly to advance a lasting peace. The dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation."