Hijacking Black History to Bash Israel

Aug. 13 2019

In his book Black Power and Palestine, the historian Michael R. Fischbach seeks to prove that there are longstanding, widespread, and deep-seated feelings of solidarity between African-Americans and Palestinians—and that the pro-Israel sentiments of such major figures as Martin Luther King, Jr. are mere exceptions. David Swindle sees in this argument an attempt to force the Israel-Palestinian conflict into fashionable notions of “intersectionality,” with little concern for the facts:

[I]ntersectional theory . . . poses a problem for academics seeking to delegitimize Israel. If . . . Israel is an inherently racist state and part of the same global structure of oppression holding down people of color everywhere, why have the overwhelming majority of African Americans historically been supportive of or indifferent to Israel? . . . Fischbach’s answer, in effect, is that pro-Israel sympathies within the African American community aren’t genuine.

In other words, Fischbach argues that Malcolm X and his allies distributed anti-Israel propaganda because they sincerely saw Palestinians as “kindred spirits,” whereas black leaders like Bayard Rustin who expressed support for Israel did so for purely tactical reasons, such as maintaining alliances with American Jews. Even more disturbing than this contemptuous dismissal of inconvenient African American opinions, Swindle writes, is Fischbach’s dismissal of black anti-Semitism:

[T]he ugly anti-Zionist rhetoric of Black Power militants, encapsulated in an infamous 1967 article that Fischbach hails as “one of the first expressions anywhere in the U.S.” of a “new vision of the Middle East,” was hardly the unadulterated offspring of [pro-Palestinian] sympathies alone. Its core substance was largely borrowed from a pamphlet published earlier by the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) Palestine Research Center, with a slew of additional Western anti-Semitic tropes already familiar to many African Americans thrown in for good measure (e.g., claiming that the Rothschilds, control “much of Africa’s mineral wealth”), topped off with a cartoon showing a hand with a Star of David and a dollar sign holding a noose around the necks of an Arab and an African.

For Fischbach, the belief that Jews plot conspiracies to cause wars with their ill-gotten money . . . isn’t anti-Semitism if it emanates from the African American community. It’s just one oppressed people expressing solidarity with another (Palestinians) in a “hard-hitting, polemic fashion.” But the belief of most prominent African American leaders, then and now, that Jews are entitled to self-determination has to be something other than an oppressed people expressing solidarity with another.

Read more at American Spectator

More about: African Americans, Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023