Image courtesy of Forward.com
A left-wing Jewish organization has stepped out to express its full support of the Black Lives Matter movement, despite recent backlash from the Jewish community over BLM’s controversial remarks regarding the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
The Jews of Color Caucus, organized in partnership with Jewish Voice for Peace, announced its solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives Friday, cementing its co-resistance against the “systematic violence against Black people in the United States.”
“As a caucus we fully endorse the Movement for Black Lives platform in its entirety without reservation,” the Jews of Color Caucus said in an e-mailed statement to Atlanta Black Star. “We do this first and foremost because it was created as ‘a response to the sustained and increasingly visible violence against Black communities in the U.S. and globally.’ This fact must be foregrounded in all discussions of the Platform, which was created to protect Black Lives.”
Early last week, the Movement for Black Lives, along with 60 other BLM affiliates, unveiled a new policy platform demanding reparations for slavery, sweeping criminal justice reforms and an end to capital punishment among other things. Titled “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom and Justice,” the document also included a section dedicated to discussing foreign policy. In it, the anti-police violence group criticized Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people and the United States’ unrelenting support of the Israeli nation.
Israel is “a state that practices systematic discrimination and has maintained a military occupation of Palestine for decades,” the document reads. “The US justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people.”
The Movement for Black Lives went on to describe Israel as an “apartheid state” committing “genocide” against the Palestinians.
The organization’s comments sparked controversy and outrage from those in the Jewish community — even Black Jews. Jewish coalitions like T’ruah: The Rabbinic Council for Human Rights, the Union for Reform Judaism, and Boston Jewish Community Relations Council have since denounced the movement’s remarks and distanced themselves from the new platform.
“While we agree with many of the policy recommendations, we are extremely dismayed at the decision to refer to the Israeli occupation as genocide,” read a statement from T’ruah.
Now, the Jews of Color Coalition is working to push back against what they call “a white supremacist power structure that’s trying to maintain the status quo.”
“We are appalled at the actions of the white US institutional Jewish community in detracting and distracting from such a vital platform at a time when Black lives are on the line, simply because the organizers chose to align their struggle with the plight of Palestinians,” the coalition wrote in a statement. “U.S. Black relationships to Palestine and Israel have never been monolithic, but there are deep historical ties between Black and Palestinian struggle that go back to the Black Power Era. Any attempt to co-opt Black struggle while demeaning these connections, is an act of anti-Black erasure.”
Aside from expressing disdain over conservative Jews’ condemnation of Black Lives Matter, the coalition also called on the Jewish community to defend the anti-police violence group against the backlash. It asserted that such negative reactions only contribute to the false claim that solidarity between Black struggle in the U.S. and Palestine is on par with anti-Semitism.
Like the Movement for Black Lives, the Jews of Color Coalition has criticized U.S. support of Israel, specifically the police exchange programs between America and the middle-eastern country. The coalition expressed resounding accordance with Atlanta-based activist group #ATLisReady and its demands that the state of Georgia cease its police exchange program with Israel. #ATLisReady also called for an end to Atlanta police coordination with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“We roundly condemn Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed’s refusal to honor this demand, an act that legitimizes both U.S. and Israeli racist police violence,” the Jews of Color Coalition wrote.
“Police exchange programs with Israel are widespread in the United States, and can be tied to abusive tactics used against protesters in communities like St Louis, New York City, and Oakland,” it continued. “Atlanta’s Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program sends US police to Israel to learn violent and Islamophobic “counter terrorism” methods tested on Palestinians living under occupation, and brings Israeli police officers to Atlanta where they learn tactics of the US War on Drugs, which are later deployed against mostly Palestinian, Mizrahi, and Ethiopian communities.”
To close its statement, the coalition issued its own set of demands from the the U.S. Jewish community and “U.S.-based Zionist movement.”
Demands:
-We call on the US Jewish community to end its legitimization of anti-Black racism through its combined attacks on the Black Lives Matter Platform and U.S. Palestine solidarity. We call on the US Jewish groups that have engaged in this anti-Black violence to retract their racist and harmful statements.-We call on the US Jewish community to end its legitimization of US and Israeli state-violence, police militarization, and violence through its role in promoting and organizing police exchange programs that directly contribute to violence against Black and Brown people in the US, Palestinians, and Jews of Color.
-We call on the US Jewish community to examine the ways it promotes an image of Jews as necessarily “white allies” to Black struggle, thereby erasing the strong presence and leadership of Black Jews.
-We call on the mainstream US-based Zionist movement to stop simultaneously promoting tactics that harm Jews of Color while erasing Jew of Color struggle. We call on you to cease the use of our bodies as a moral shield for Israeli occupation.
