Sam Klug
That history goes back to the 19th century. Many Black nationalist thinkers and activists, people like David Walker, Martin Delany, Henry McNeal Turner, really drew a lot of inspiration from the Exodus story in the Hebrew Bible.
In that story, Jews in bondage in Egypt and their resistance and eventual emancipation became a touchstone of African American politics and thought, in the struggle for abolition in the United States, and in 19th-century visions of a potential Black homeland for the African diaspora in the Americas.
The idea of an oppressed people, who have been oppressed throughout the West and are seeking a homeland that has a connection to their ancestral community and establishing a political community there, is not dissimilar from a lot of Black nationalist visions of self-determination based in land for Black people.
[Marcus] Garvey saw a model in the emerging Zionist movement and so did W.E.B. Du Bois, one of his main antagonists. Du Bois was quite supportive of the Zionist idea up through the establishment of the state of Israel.
And then, of course, you have important connections between Jewish Americans and African Americans in the mid-century civil rights movement and the important role that Jewish Americans played in advancing that movement and providing support for it. For example, there’s the martyrdom of Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, who were killed [by the KKK] in Mississippi in 1964 after registering Black voters.
Fabiola Cineas
But after the state of Israel was established, some Black leaders began to express dissent. Can you talk about that?
Sam Klug
The establishment of Israel in 1948 was celebrated by many corners of African American political life by organizations including the NAACP. At the time of the establishment, there was still much less awareness in African American communities of the Nakba and of the Palestinian dispossession that occurred as a result.
But others began to express dissent. Interestingly, Ralph Bunche — who was an African American diplomat and the UN mediator who actually helped to negotiate the treaty between Egypt and Israel after the 1948 war — expressed a lot of reservations about how the establishment of Israel would dispossess Palestinian people. There were other dissenting voices surrounding Israel-Palestine, particularly in the Nation of Islam, which had leaders who made explicitly antisemitic statements. But there were [members], including Malcolm X, who were wrestling with the complexities of the geopolitical situation.