July 26, 2024
HONG KONG – The
Beijing Declaration, signed earlier this week, constitutes yet another stunning
Chinese diplomatic coup, but the document goes far beyond affirming China’s
pull.
The gathering of
representatives of 14 Palestinian factions to commit to full reconciliation
showed the entire world that the road to solving intractable geopolitical
problems is no longer unilateral: it is multipolar, multi-nodal, and features
BRICS/Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) member China as an inescapable
leader.
The concept of
China as a peacemaking superpower is now so established that after the
Iran–Saudi Arabia rapprochement and the signing of the Beijing Declaration,
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba chose to tell his Chinese counterpart
Wang Yi in Beijing that Kiev is now finally ready to negotiate the end of the
NATO–Russia proxy war in Ukraine.
Palestinians who
came to Beijing were beaming. For Fatah Vice Chairman Mahmoud al-Aloul, “China
is a light. China’s efforts are rare on the international stage.”
Hamas spokesman
Hussam Badran said the Palestinian resistance movement accepted the Chinese
invitation “with a positive spirit and patriotic responsibility.” All
Palestinian factions have reached a consensus on “Palestinian demands to end
the war,” adding that the “most important” part of the declaration is to form a
government that builds Palestinian national consensus to “manage the affairs of
the people of Gaza and the West Bank, oversee reconstruction, and create
conditions for elections.”
The “three-step”
Chinese proposal
Wang Yi cut to
the chase: the Palestinian issue, says the Chinese foreign minister, is at the
core of everything in West Asia. He emphasized that Beijing:
“ … has never had any selfish interests in
the Palestinian issue. China is one of the first countries to recognize the PLO
[Palestine Liberation Organization] and the State of Palestine and has always
firmly supported the Palestinian people in restoring their legitimate national
rights. What we value is morality and what we advocate is justice.”
What Wang did
not say – and didn’t need to – is that this position is the overwhelming BRICS+
position, shared by the Global Majority, including, crucially, all Muslim
countries.
It’s all in a
name – everyone in the foreseeable future will note this is the “Beijing”
declaration unequivocally supporting One Palestine.
No wonder all
political factions had to rise to the occasion, committing to support an
independent Palestinian government with executive powers over Gaza and the
occupied West Bank. But there’s a catch: this will take place immediately after
the war, which the regime in Tel Aviv wants to prolong indefinitely.
What Wang Yi
left somewhat implicit is that China’s consistent historical position
supporting Palestine may be a decisive factor in helping future Palestinian
governance institutions. Beijing is proposing three steps to get there:
First, a
“comprehensive, lasting and sustainable” ceasefire in Gaza as soon as possible,
and “access to humanitarian aid and rescue on the ground.”
Second, “joint
efforts” – assuming western involvement – toward “post-conflict governance of
Gaza under the principle of ‘Palestinians governing Palestine.’” An urgent
priority is restarting reconstruction “as soon as possible.” Beijing stresses
that “the international community needs to support Palestinian factions in
establishing an interim national consensus government and realize effective
management of Gaza and the West Bank.”
Third, help
Palestine “to become a full member state of the UN” and implement the two-state
solution. Beijing maintains that “it is important to support the convening of a
broad-based, more authoritative, and more effective international peace
conference to work out a timetable and road map for the two-state solution.”
For all the
lofty aims, especially when it is patently clear that Israel has de facto
buried the two-state solution – as witnessed in the Knesset’s recent vote to
reject any Palestinian state – at least China is directly proposing what the
Global Majority unanimously considers as a fair outcome.
Also important
to note is the presence of diplomats from China’s fellow BRICS members Russia,
South Africa, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, alongside diplomats from Algeria, Qatar,
Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Turkiye at the signing of the declaration.
Genocide as a
wellness treatment
Now compare
China’s diplomatic coup with the US Congress giving 58 standing ovations to
Israel’s psychopath-in-chief peddling the notion of genocide as a wellness
treatment.
Bibi Netanyahu’s
hero’s welcome in Washington takes the notion of collective psychopathology to
new heights. And yet complicity in the Gaza genocide is not exactly an
exception to the rule when it comes to American political leadership.
The Hegemon’s
political “elites” – with Franco-British help – have also been active
collaborators and weaponizers of the oppressive Saudi and Emirati bombing and
blockade of Yemen, which, over nine years, collectively caused even more
civilian deaths than in Gaza. Famine in Yemen is far from over, yet this has
been a completely invisible war to the collective west.
At least karma
ended up intervening. China promoted the rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and
Iran, and Riyadh has become a BRICS+ member and deeply engaged in the
de-dollarization drive, in which the petroyuan is emerging.
Moreover, the
Yemeni resistance movement Ansarallah managed to single-handedly humiliate the
US Navy. The US–UK “revenge” was to open another war front, bombing Yemeni
installations to protect Israeli shipping in the Red Sea and waterways beyond.
As much as Yemen
remains at war on two fronts – against the Hegemon and Israel while keeping an
eye on potential Saudi shenanigans – Palestine continues to be decimated by a
fully US-backed Israel. The Beijing Declaration will not mean anything if not
implemented. But how?
Assuming a
partial success, the declaration may be able to put a spanner in the works of
the absolute impunity of the Tel Aviv–Washington agenda because after the
Beijing deal, finding a collaborator Palestine government to perpetuate the
occupation could be much more difficult.
All Palestinian
factions now owe China a serious debt; internal squabbling will have to cease.
Otherwise, it would amount to a serious loss of face for Beijing.
At the same
time, the Chinese leadership seems very much aware that this bet is a Global
South bet – laying bare the Hegemon’s hypocrisy for the whole world to see.
Much like the Saudi–Iran deal clinched in Beijing, the optics could not be more
auspicious, especially when compared to the Israeli–American refusal of a
meaningful ceasefire.
Real Palestine
unity will also give extra bite to each and every global initiative at the UN,
the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and other global forums.
All of the
above, though, pales in comparison to the dire facts on the ground. The
ideologically genocidal Israelis – fully supported by US political “leadership”
– continue to get away with what they really want: the outright mass
murder-cum-ethnic cleansing of millions of Palestinians, something that, in
theory, should lead to an absolute demographic majority for Israel’s expansion
into all Palestinian lands.
This tragedy
will not stop anytime soon. The Beijing Declaration won’t make it stop. Only
the Hegemon severing its weapons funnel to Tel Aviv can force it to stop. Yet
today, what we’re instead seeing from Washington is 58 standing ovations for
genocide.
Ben Reiff
A Black Panther protest in Jerusalem 1971
In January 1971, a short news report
appeared on the back page of the left-leaning Israeli newspaper, Al Hamishmar.
The editors evidently didn’t think much of the story, but its publication
caused an immediate sensation. The headline, a quote from one of the article’s
subjects, foretold the emergence of a revolutionary new movement from
Jerusalem’s Musrara neighborhood that would set off a political earthquake on
Israel’s streets — one whose aftershocks can still be felt today. “We want to
organize against the Ashkenazi government and establishment,” it read. “We will
become the Black Panthers of the State of Israel.”
The adopted name was deliberately
provocative. The Israeli media had regularly vilified the original Black
Panther Party in the United States — a militant Black power organization
founded some five years earlier in Oakland, California — as antisemitic for
denouncing Israel as an imperialist state and expressing solidarity with the
Palestinian liberation movement. But the Israeli Panthers’ identification with
their American counterparts went beyond merely borrowing their name: in the
Black struggle against racism, poverty, and police brutality, the Jerusalem
youths saw their own experience reflected back at them.
In today’s terms, the Israeli
Panthers were not actually Black; they were the sons and daughters of the
Jewish exodus from the Arab world, known nowadays as Mizrahi Jews (plural:
Mizrahim), but more commonly referred to at the time as Sephardim. These Jews
arrived in their hundreds of thousands to a fledgling Israeli state in the
early 1950s. But they soon found themselves being racialized as “Black” by a
hegemonic Ashkenazi class, tracing its heritage to Europe, whose vision of a
Jewish state had not much accounted for Mizrahim before the Holocaust
eliminated two-thirds of European Jewry.
Israel’s Ashkenazi founders —
including David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister — greeted the Mizrahi
arrivals with an abundance of racist disdain. The authorities hosed them down
with pesticide; settled them in remote desert camps or crammed them into the
homes of exiled Palestinian refugees (such as those in Musrara);
proletarianized them and funneled them into menial labor; suppressed their
culture; separated thousands of them from their children; and forced tens of
thousands to undergo unsafe radiation treatment that led to serious health
complications. All the while, a rebellion was brewing.
When a group of impoverished Mizrahi
youths announced the establishment of their movement and declared a revolt
against the system, local and international reporters flocked to interview
them. Within weeks, the Panthers counted hundreds, if not thousands, among
their ranks, and led a series of escalating protests and direct actions
designed to make it impossible for the Israeli authorities to ignore them. They
demanded that the state channel its resources toward addressing the stark
social problems that plagued Mizrahim, pulling back the curtain on Israel’s
supposedly socialist ethos.
Saadia
Marciano photographed on Jerusalem's Jaffa Street, 1971. (Meir Wigoder)
The authorities, however, denied
that any such problems existed, and instead sought to suppress the Panthers’
struggle. Police violently cracked down on the protests, and infiltrated the
organization with a mole who would feed them information for years — and who
was almost accidentally elected the group’s leader, before convincing them to
choose somebody else.
Golda Meir, the prime minister at
the time, saw the Panthers primarily as a public relations issue, fearing that
their activities could give Israel and Zionism a bad name abroad and discourage
Jews in the diaspora from immigrating. “I want to get it out of your heads that
you have brought a revolution to the country,” she told a group of Panther
leaders with whom she agreed to meet in April 1971, after they had initiated a
hunger strike in front of the Western Wall. Echoing her infamous denial of the
existence of a Palestinian people, she insisted: “There is no issue of
Ashkenazim and Sephardim here.”
A month later, the Panthers
mobilized thousands to a demonstration in downtown Jerusalem, which ended with
protesters hurling glass bottles, bricks, rocks, and even Molotov cocktails at
police. Immortalized as “The Night of the Panthers,” it was the largest civil
disturbance that the Israeli authorities would face until a mass uprising of
Palestinian citizens of the state five years later, which has been commemorated
every year since as Land Day.
A contested legacy
Despite their seismic entrance into
Israeli history, half a century later, the Panthers and their rebellion have
been largely — and perhaps wilfully — forgotten. Their memory is primarily kept
alive only by a few surviving Panthers, a handful of dedicated archivists and
historians, the Mizrahi left in Israel and abroad, and parts of the broader
Israeli radical left. But the Panthers’ relevance, argues Israeli-American
journalist Asaf Elia-Shalev in a meticulous new book, is enduring.
“I was captivated,” Elia-Shalev
writes in the preface, “by how a group of kids with criminal records and a
provocative name helped redirect the course of the national conversation and
forced Israel to face issues it had been denying. What I was slowly learning
about the Panthers seemed deeply consequential, and in their forgotten story, I
saw the roots of the country that Israel has become.”
“Israel’s Black Panthers: The
Radicals Who Punctured a Nation’s Founding Myth” is the first English book to
deal exclusively and comprehensively with this turbulent chapter of history. It
was born out of an encounter that the author had about a decade ago with one of
the Panthers’ central figures, Reuven Abergel.
“Israel’s
Black Panthers: The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation's Founding Myth,” by Asaf
Elia-Shalev, University of California Press, 2024.
“I went on a tour of Musrara that
Reuven led, and my mind was just blown by this guy,” Elia-Shalev recalled in an
interview with +972. “He was around 70 years old at the time, and he had this
fire and sense of urgency, and spoke so compellingly about his life. I had just
read the autobiography of Malcolm X, and Reuven sounded like him in lots of
ways; he was saying such powerful things. So I thought, how come no one has
heard this story?”
Over the next several years,
Elia-Shalev would record some 50 hours of interviews with Abergel, which
eventually became the foundation of the book. Abergel does not speak English,
and he told Elia-Shalev — who is himself the grandchild of Mizrahim who immigrated
to Israel from Iraq — that telling his story to an American journalist in
Hebrew felt like “smuggling a letter out of prison.”
Though the author would go on to
interview dozens more Panthers, Abergel’s recollections were crucial because he
was the only one among the group’s leadership cadre who had not yet passed away
or lost his full faculties. “Saadia Marciano died long before I got started,”
Elia-Shalev said. “Charlie Biton, when I got to him, was very sick and unable
to sit down for interviews with me for very long, and the same with Kochavi
Shemesh” — both of whom have since also died.
Elia-Shalev concedes that, given the
ideological and personal fissures that later plagued the Panthers, the emphasis
on Reuven’s point of view risks privileging a certain perspective on events.
But he mitigated this by scouring archives, old news articles, and a previously
classified Israeli police intelligence file to find everything he could on the
Panthers’ activities, how they were received, and the authorities’ attempts to
repress them.
“There are battles over the legacy
of the Panthers,” Elia-Shalev explained. “I did my best to be faithful to the
facts, but I’m also limited by the materials available and the people that are
still around. Reuven is someone who has spent the last decades of his life,
long after the Panthers, involved in virtually every social justice struggle in
Israel. And that has definitely given him a lot of credibility to speak on the
Panthers [while] others have died or didn’t remain involved in activism.”
Indeed, in recent years, Abergel has
been a regular fixture at protests against Israel’s occupation of the
Palestinian territories, the cost of living in the country, and government
plans to deport asylum seekers. But he reflects back on what became of the
Panthers’ revolt somewhat wistfully, telling Elia-Shalev: “In every revolution,
the dreamers sow the seeds, the courageous carry it forward, and the bastards
reap the fruits of the struggle.”
Israeli
Black Panther Reuven Abergil addressed a crowd at the Levinksy Park protest
camp in south Tel Aviv, July 26, 2011. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)
Rebelling to belong
The Panthers were hardly the first
Mizrahim to challenge the racism and discrimination they faced in Israel.
Initially, resistance took the form of new arrivals urging friends and
relatives outside Israel to defy the Zionist emissaries encouraging them to
immigrate; some of the letters never reached their intended recipients because
the Israeli government’s Censorship Bureau confiscated them, deeming them a
national security risk.
By mid-1949, Mizrahim had already
begun demonstrating at government buildings across the country to demand better
housing, jobs, and food provisions. Protests continued to spring up throughout
the 1950s in ma’abarot (tent camps for new immigrants) and the development
towns that replaced them, which the police promptly suppressed.
In 1959, a police officer shot a
Mizrahi resident of Haifa’s Wadi Salib neighborhood — where the state had
densely settled Mizrahim in Palestinian homes confiscated after the Nakba —
leading hundreds to flood the streets in fury. Under the leadership of the
Union of North African Immigrants, the protesters called for the elimination of
the ma’abarot and urban slums, and demanded quality education for all citizens.
The authorities eventually quelled
the rebellion, which had spontaneously spread to other Mizrahi localities as
well. A government commission of inquiry into the events insisted that Mizrahim
in Israel do not face discrimination on the basis of their ethnicity.
More than a decade later, however,
even with their share among Israel’s Jewish population being roughly equal, the
socioeconomic gaps between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim remained stark. This was
perhaps most apparent in the education system, where a majority of Mizrahi
adolescents were not in school, while Ashkenazim comprised about 99 percent of
university students.
Israeli
Black Panthers, including Charlie Biton, protesting on Dizengoff Street in Tel
Aviv, May 1, 1973. (Moshe Milner/GPO)
What distinguished the Panthers from
those who preceded them, though, was the extent to which the Israeli
establishment viewed the organization as a threat. As if to emphasize that
danger, the police and media initially sought to portray the Panthers as being
in league with the anti-Zionists of Matzpen — a Marxist group largely made up
of middle-class Ashkenazim — which the Israeli media had spent much of the past
decade demonizing.
“There was this racist urge to say
that these young Mizrahi men couldn’t possibly be organizing of their own
accord, and they must be puppets on a string,” Elia-Shalev told +972. While
Matzpen offered some support to the Panthers — such as by printing flyers and
T-shirts for their protests, and amplifying their struggle in Matzpen’s journal
— the Panthers were wary of allowing too much room for external influence over
their activities. At one meeting where Ashkenazi activists were felt to have
overstepped the mark, Elia-Shalev explained, “Reuven and his brothers
physically kicked them out.”
The Panthers’ relationship to
Zionism, meanwhile, was much less clear-cut. Throughout the book, the reader
can discern a constant tension between the Panthers’ repudiation of the Israeli
regime and their apparent desire to be welcomed into it as equal partners. From
action to action, and perhaps from activist to activist, the group seems to
have oscillated between these two tendencies.
On the one hand, the Panthers’
backing for a Palestinian state put them firmly at odds with all but the
tiniest minority of Israeli Jews at the time. On multiple occasions between
1973 and 1980, representatives of the Panthers contravened Israeli law by meeting
with, or trying to meet with, Yasser Arafat and other figures in the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO), which at the time was committed to armed
struggle in pursuit of liberation.
Moreover, at demonstrations,
Panthers frequently chanted “Less for the Phantoms” — the name of the fighter
jets that the United States sold to Israel — “and more for the Panthers.” And
to protest what they saw as the state’s hypocritical support for the liberation
of Soviet Jewry while Mizrahim languished in poverty in Israel, they tried to
disrupt the 1972 World Zionist Congress.
A
Black Panthers protest in Jerusalem, 1971. (Yosef Hochman, courtesy of the Yad
Yaari Research and Documentation Center)
But the Panthers’ rebuke of core
Zionist tenets only went so far. The flyers for their first official
demonstration ended with the sentence: “We will demonstrate for our right to be
like all the other citizens in this country.” Another rally ended with the
singing of the Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem. And in their meeting with
Golda Meir, Abergel — who only later became avowedly anti-Zionist — assured the
prime minister that the Panthers are “devoted to our country, and patriotic,
and we love it.”
For Elia-Shalev, this ambivalence is
one of the main differences between the Israeli Panthers and their U.S.
counterparts. “The American Black Panthers were real ideologues, real
revolutionaries, who wanted to join with the oppressed people of the world and
create a new order,” he said. “The [Israeli] Panthers weren’t quite there. In
my view, they talked a big game, used phrases like ‘by any means necessary,’
and threatened to overthrow the state, but I think they ultimately wanted to
belong.
“They saw the Palestinian struggle
as a legitimate one, and they defined Mizrahim as a potential bridge to the
Arab world,” he continued. “But fundamentally, they thought it was wrong that
the Jewish state would marginalize more than half of its Jewish population.
They were hurt that they were denied an opportunity to belong to society and
the state, and were willing to at least threaten to overthrow it in order to
get a seat at the table. Whatever Zionism is or was, it wasn’t serving
Mizrahim, and so the Panthers came out against the people who represented it.”
An avenue into power
In March 1972, the Panthers carried
out one of the stunts for which they are most widely remembered: “Operation
Milk,” in which they stole milk bottles from the doorsteps of Jerusalem’s
wealthiest neighborhoods and delivered it to the poor, for whom fresh milk was
vastly unaffordable. Support for the Panthers was growing; one survey in
mid-1971 put it at around 40 percent among Jewish Israelis. And it was having a
tangible impact: the state budget for 1972 — which has been retrospectively
labeled “The Budget of the Panthers” — saw substantial funding diverted from
defense spending to housing, welfare, and education.
The organization was also gaining
prominence abroad. In September 1971, the New York Times ran a cover story on
them. Left-wing radicals from Europe scrambled to meet them, and Panther
leaders took up invitations to attend political summits around the world.
Israeli Black Panthers
take part in a May Day demonstration in Tel Aviv, May 1, 1973. (Moshe Milner)
Before long, and in spite of some
fairly acrimonious infighting, the Panthers sought to translate their soaring
popularity into political power. A significant showing for the movement in the
ballot for the Histadrut — Israel’s quasi-governmental national labor union,
which was dominated by the Labor Party — in September 1973 raised hopes that
they could bring about a major upheaval in the upcoming Knesset election,
scheduled for late October 1973. They campaigned on a platform that called for
universal health insurance, increased welfare support, and the freeing of all
prisoners.
But three weeks before the polls, on
Oct. 6, Syria and Egypt launched an attack that caught Israel completely off
guard, marking the start of the Yom Kippur War. The election was postponed, and
by the time it eventually took place on Dec. 31 — after the nation had buried
over 2,500 troops — the public’s attention was focused squarely on issues of
national security. The Panthers’ momentum, built up over the span of nearly two
years, had completely fizzled, and they failed to cross the minimum vote threshold
required to enter the Knesset.
Over the next few years, the
Panthers would try to regroup and recover from their electoral defeat. But the
mood inside the country had changed dramatically, and there was little interest
in “social” issues anymore. By the time the next election came around four
years later, a series of splits meant that the Panthers were represented across
four different lists. Two of the leadership cadre entered the Knesset — Charlie
Biton, with the Arab-Jewish party Hadash, and Saadia Marciano, with the Left
Camp of Israel (Sheli) — where they went on to promote the Panthers’ cause
inside the corridors of power.
But most of the Panthers’
traditional base didn’t vote for either of these leftist parties. Instead, in
what’s remembered as the “Ballot Rebellion” of 1977, they opted en masse for
the right-wing Likud party of Menachem Begin, an Ashkenazi populist who courted
Mizrahim disaffected with decades of Labor hegemony while attacking Meir’s
government for its security failures. Nearly half a century later, it is Likud
— and Begin’s eventual successor as party leader, Benjamin Netanyahu — that
reigns supreme in Israeli politics, thanks in no small part to a loyal base of
Mizrahim.
“If we want to understand how
Netanyahu maintains power, and where the alliance comes from between a large
chunk of the Mizrahi public and the Likud party, the Panthers help us
understand how we got there — even if the causation is a little complicated,”
Elia-Shalev explains. “The Panthers brought to the surface not just the squalid
conditions that [Mizrahim] were living in, but also the injustice of it, and
they told people who to blame: the Labor-dominated Israeli government.
“By attacking the old order over and
over again, they freed people to rebel and to seek an avenue into power and
belonging,” he continued. “The Mizrahi public by and large didn’t follow the
Panthers after they unleashed this rebellion. The person who was able to
capitalize on the energy was Menachem Begin, who said [to Mizrahim]: ‘I’m
offering you a place on center stage. You’re the real Jews, the real warriors
of this country. Come, join me.’ That was very appealing, and it worked.”
Unresolved grievances
With Mizrahi assent to Likud
hegemony, the socioeconomic chasm between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim that
characterized the era of Labor rule has certainly narrowed over the past five
decades, even if concrete data remains hard to come by. Mizrahi culture flourishes
in Israel today, and the authorities have taken concrete steps toward
recognizing some past injustices.
Yet vast inequalities still remain.
Albeit to a far lesser extent than Palestinian citizens of Israel, Mizrahim are
effectively barred from accessing or living in certain parts of the country due
to racist laws and practices emanating largely from the Zionist left. They are
underrepresented in fields such as media, academia, law, and politics. There
has never been a Mizrahi prime minister, and only a handful of Mizrahim have
been appointed to the most highly coveted government ministries.
The army, too, reflects Israel’s
enduring ethnic-class divide, with Ashkenazim commonly chosen for command
positions and intelligence units; Mizrahim, on the other hand, are more likely
to be the cannon fodder for combat units — even as they have increasingly begun
to assert their power from below. And after enduring tortuous legal struggles
for housing rights, Mizrahim continue to be evicted from the very homes that
the state settled them in three generations earlier. The “bastards who reaped
the fruits of the struggle,” as Abergel put it, have failed to bring about the
profound changes that the Panthers envisioned.
Members
of the Israeli Black Panthers disrupt the opening session of the World Congress
of North African Immigrants in Tel Aviv, October 25, 1975. (Ya’acov Sa’ar)
By the 1980s, many Mizrahim had
already grown disillusioned by Likud’s inability to turn its rhetoric into
material action, and found a home in new religious Mizrahi parties: first Tami,
which gained three MKs in the 1981 election, and then Shas, which has grown
since 1984 to become a major force in Israeli politics. Rather than continuing
where the Panthers left off, however, critics have characterized Shas as merely
“the state’s subcontractor for welfare services to the needy.” More recently,
growing numbers of Mizrahim have found a home on the radical right, with
Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is of Mizrahi heritage
himself, succeeding where his idol Meir Kahane failed.
None of this has stopped Likud and
Netanyahu from continuing to present themselves as saviors of the Mizrahim and
the champions of the downtrodden masses — even invoking the memory of the
Panthers in doing so. “It’s interesting to see nostalgia for the Panthers on
the Israeli right, Elia-Shalev remarked. “You’d never see the Republican Party
being nostalgic for the Black Panther Party of Oakland. But Likud has very
effectively tapped into Mizrahi grievances, and they obscure the fact that the
Panthers were a distinctly left-wing group, with a very radical program that
called for a socialist economy and recognition of a Palestinian state.”
Nonetheless, Elia-Shalev is not
convinced that the bond between Mizrahim and the right is unbreakable,
especially in the wake of October 7 and Netanyahu’s desperate attempts to cling
to power as his public support wanes. “I think Israel is going through a
paradigm shift right now — similar to the shift that followed the 1973 War,
which ultimately led to the downfall of Labor and the rise of Likud,” he said.
“It might not happen tomorrow; it
could take a few years like it did after 1973. But I think we’re going to see
the downfall of Likud and the rise of something else,” Elia-Shalev continued.
And the legacy of the Panthers suggests, if the Israeli political map is
redrawn, that an alternative Mizrahi political vision is still possible.
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