Anonymous Jewish Contributor 

In 1967, James Baldwin published the essay “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White” in The New York Times. In this essay, he details the sometimes fraught relations between African Americans and Jewish Americans in the U.S.A. and posits that antisemitic attitudes in Black communities stem from the generalised resentment Black people held towards White people after centuries of oppression. His primary argument is that because (White) Jewish people were living in proximity to Black people in Harlem, Black peoples’ most direct experiences of white supremacy were at the hands of Jews, even if Jewish people do not hold most institutional power in the US, nor were they uniquely racist compared to other White people.

Research on whether antisemitism among African-Americans is specifically related to anti-White sentiment yields mixed results, as writes Jessica T. Simes for the Social Science Journal. Nevertheless, Baldwin’s essay provides a starting point for examining racial conflict between minority communities. In the present moment, it may help enlighten us regarding Palestinian-Jewish relations. As pro-Palestinian protesters are increasingly repressed by the state under the guise that it would protect Jews, we must ask ourselves, what is the source of this (sometimes genuine, most often only perceived) antisemitism?

In the post-WWII period, Jewish Americans started to integrate into the White American middle class. In this context, Baldwin writes: “But if one is a Negro in Watts or Harlem, and knows why one is there […], one can’t but look on the American state and the American people as one’s oppressors.” Thus, as Jewish people became American, they also became part of the apparatus that oppressed Black people. Baldwin however recognizes that Jewish people are not at the top of the hierarchy in a white supremacist, Christian society such as ours. “[The Jew’s] major distinction is given him by that history of Christendom […]. [H]e is playing in Harlem the role assigned him by Christians long ago: he is doing their dirty work.” Baldwin refers to the fact that in the Middle Ages, Christians confined European Jewry to banking positions because Christians were prohibited from lending money. In Harlem, while the White Christian elites were the ones truly in power, Jews were among the white faces interfacing with the Black population and causing them grief, be it by their presence as landlords, business owners, teachers or police. However, these positions of power were not unique to Jewish people. Baldwin also clarifies: “Not all of these white people were cruel […] but all of them were exploiting us, and that was why we hated them.”

Let us now compare the situation Baldwin describes to the current state of Jewish-Palestinian relations. It is undeniable that even before the Holocaust, Jews were terrorised in Europe by the Inquisition and countless pogroms. However, as the Zionist project was concretizing, it became a weapon for the British in its quest to control territory in the declining Ottoman Empire. Thus, when the Zionist settlers came to conquer Palestine (and they explicitly outlined their goals as colonisation), they became another prong of European imperialism. While the Zionist project presents itself as Jewish, it is worth underlining that Israeli atrocities are carried out at the behest of the USA, and are funded by the majority-Christian West. Zionists– in contrast to Jewish liberation movements such as the Jewish Labour Bund– could only conceptualise Jewish liberation by occupying the same position of dominance as Europeans did in other colonised lands of the world. In this situation, Palestinians resent the occupiers because they have stolen their lands, and the Jewish faith of the occupiers, while weaponized by Israel through the conflation of Judaism and Zionism, is incidental. Palestinians would have resisted their extermination regardless of the occupiers’ religion. In our current reality, the ones carrying out the crime of genocide against Palestinians happen to be Jewish.

That being said, I do not wish to escape accountability for the crimes of the Zionist state. When Israel uses the Jewish history of victimisation to whitewash its crimes, it is the responsibility of all Jews to stand for justice. Baldwin writes: “It is true that many Jews use, shamelessly, the slaughter of the 6,000,000 by the Third Reich as proof that they cannot be bigots– or in the hope of not being held responsible for their bigotry.”  When Zionist rhetoric posits that Israel must exist as reparations for the Holocaust (despite the fact that plans for a Zionist state predated the Holocaust), it only further angers Palestinians and their sympathisers, who see an unempathetic victim who chose to unleash the same horrors upon them rather than stand in solidarity. From the past, Baldwin echoes: “The Jew does not realize that […] the fact that he has been despised and slaughtered, does not increase the Negro’s understanding. It increases the Negro’s rage.”

Because the world hegemony is Christian, it follows that the long history of antisemitism that Christianity carries becomes global too. I do not want to downplay the fact that justified anger at occupation can mix with genuine antisemitic attitudes. In an antisemitic society, the accurate description of Israeli pro-genocide lobbying can easily morph into “Jews control the media/economy”; the Israeli state’s death machine can easily be distorted to paint all Jews as bloodthirsty; the outrage at Israel’s annihilation campaign becomes perverted into statements such as “Judaism is a satanic religion that condones murder.” These are unequivocally unacceptable statements, but these prejudices are not exclusive to Palestinians. We must also understand that when the State of Israel commits mass murder and tells Palestinians it is done in the name of Judaism, a Palestinian living under occupation may start to believe all Jews are equally as violent as the soldiers who bomb schools and hospitals. It is not threatening Palestinians with extermination and then denying their genocide that will make them see Jews in a more favourable light. In my personal experience of protesting in solidarity with Palestine, I felt comfortable enough correcting people when their criticisms started to veer into the territory of antisemitism because I knew that prejudice is not something you can deconstruct in a single day.

We are all interested in one thing: liberation for all oppressed peoples. Pro-Palestinian organizing continually rejects antisemitism. The public statements of organisations such as the Palestinian Youth Movement criticise the Zionist project, not the Jewish people as a whole. This is also true for many Palestinian factions since the beginning of the occupation. The Palestinian National Charter of 1968 specifies in Article 6 that “The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians”. The PFLP’s Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine (1969) states that “The Palestinian liberation movement is not a racial movement with aggressive intentions against the Jews” but rather clarifies that “it is against Zionism as an aggressive racial movement connected with imperialism, which has exploited the sufferings of the Jews as a stepping stone for the promotion of its interests.” 

Furthermore, in North America, Palestinians do not have the institutional power to harm Jews on a mass scale. The Pro-Israel, Christian far-right, however, believes in many of the conspiracies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and contrary to the Palestinian Resistance, it does not get sanctioned because the Zionist project eagerly accepts the financial support from Jew-hating fascists. The most murderous and disturbing crimes against Jews in North America were not committed in relation to the Palestinian cause. The Unite the Right Rally of 2017, where cries of “Jews will not replace us” were heard, was led by a coalition of far-right groups including neo-Nazis and the KKK. The police, representing the state apparatus, let the fascists enact violence upon counter-protesters because it is permissible in our society for white supremacists to be violent, but forbidden to resist. The Tree of Life synagogue shooting in the following year was also carried out by a far-right white supremacist. 

The fatal flaw in this discourse is to see Palestinian and Jewish identities as inherently conflicting. Baldwin positions American Jews as exclusively white by the omission of Jews of colour in his analysis, including Black Jews. In the case of the discourses about Palestine, on all sides of the spectrum, we can see arguments that presume all Israeli Jews are Europeans, and no Palestinians are Jews. We must be aware of who we exclude when we engage in discourse about Palestine, and acknowledge how it impacts our arguments. In the accusations of antisemitism against all Palestinians as a whole, we are erasing Palestinian Jews. By painting all Jews as being of European origin, the complex and multiple Jewish histories get flattened into a monolith, which only further propels the Zionist project by denying our long history of cohabitation with other ethnic groups.

Baldwin concludes that “[t]he ultimate hope for genuine black-white dialogue in this country lies in the recognition that the driven European serf merely created another serf here, and created him on the basis of colour. […] One can be disappointed in the Jew if one is romantic enough– for not having learned from history; but if people did learn from history, history would be very different.” Thus, we as Jews must recognize that in Palestine, we– victims of atrocity– created another such victim in subjugating the Palestinians. At the same time, this is not because Jews are by some inherent reason more duplicitous (as the antisemite will argue), but because humans hold in themselves the capacity for both good and evil.

Baldwin continues, “The crisis taking place in the world […] is not produced by the star of David, but by the old, rugged Roman cross on which Christendom’s most celebrated Jew was murdered. And not by Jews.” In this last sentence, Baldwin refuses the Christian narrative that Jews are Christ-killers. After demonstrating why some Black Americans fall into antisemitic thinking, he refutes one of the most persistent antisemitic myths and thus affirms that any bigotry is unacceptable, even if we understand where it comes from.

 The Holocaust, a machination of the Christian world, killed six million Jews, and also decimated leftist Jewish communities that were staunchly anti-Zionist. European countries such as Poland did not suddenly recognize Israel because they wanted to repent for their crimes– in 1946, Poles murdered Jews who returned to Kielce, trying to come back to the life that was stolen from them. Europeans, it seems, simply wanted to export their “Jewish problem” elsewhere.

 To repair the relations between Jews and Palestinians, we must recognize the wrongs committed by Israel, and understand that the Christian far-right will never give us liberation. Becoming colonisers will not save us. Israel will never keep us safe. The only safety is in solidarity regardless of race, ethnicity, or religion. These last months have shown us that many Jews no longer accept to be pawns for the Zionist machine. I have witnessed kinships develop between Palestinians of many religions and Jews of many backgrounds. I can only hope to see these kinships reproduce in a freer world, where we are liberated from the shackles of prejudice.