A conversation about Israel’s Black Panthers – with author Asaf Elia-Shalev

by Jeremy Appel

(AJNews) – While Israel was founded by Ashkenazi Jews seeking a solution to the pervasive problem of antisemitism in Europe, the largest ethnic group in Israel today is the Mizrahim. 

During the first few decades of Israel’s existence, these Jews from the Middle East and North Africa were crowded into slums, with substandard housing, educational and employment opportunities. 

In 1971, a group of young Moroccan Jews in Jerusalem’s Musrara neighbourhood established the Israeli Black Panthers to draw attention to anti-Mizrahi discrimination. While they weren’t quite the Marxist revolutionaries of their American namesake, the Israeli government treated them similarly—surveilling and infiltrating them, arresting their leaders and attacking their demonstrations. 

While initially focused squarely on domestic politics, in 1980, Panthers co-founder Charlie Biton, who was then an MK with the left-wing Hadash party, became the first Israeli to meet Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Los Angeles-based Jewish Telegraphic Agency reporter Asaf Elia-Shalev wrote the book Israel’s Black Panthers: The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation’s Founding Myth, which was published last year by University of California Press. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and condensed for space. 

How did you first become interested in the Israeli Black Panthers?

It goes back to 15 more years ago when I was a college student at UC Berkeley. Then as now the campus was at the center of all kinds of radical activism and I was very interested in that at the time. The American Black Panthers were founded in the next town over in Oakland and had a lot of history on the UC Berkeley campus. 

I decided to write about them on a couple of occasions for my history papers and things like that, and I came across a reference to the Israeli Black Panthers.I could find almost nothing about them except for a Wikipedia page that said,that they fought for equality and against racism faced by Middle Eastern Jews, or Mizrahi Jews.

My family is from Iraq and Bulgaria, so this raised a lot of questions for me. 

Growing up in the United States, I felt a difference from American Jews because they almost all were Ashkenazi. There was some pronunciation stuff, there were certain assumptions about what Jewish food is, but I never felt oppressed by that difference.

I was raised in Israel for a number of years, but primarily I grew up thousands of miles away in California as a white person. And here I’m trying to connect with what it meant that my brown-skinned family moved to Israel and inevitably faced racism. What was that like? And how can I come to understand myself as part of a whole?

This line that separated Arabs and Jews all of a sudden seemed so blurry. I learned how my grandfather used to listen to all the great Arab singers and how my dad was so ashamed and embarrassed about that, and would never bring friends over because he didn’t want them to know that my grandfather was continuing to live as an Arab, essentially, with his big Arab mustache.

After Berkeley, I moved to Israel to work at Haaretz as a news editor and I met Reuven Abergel, who’s one of the founders of the Israeli Black Panthers. We strike up a conversation and we come up with this idea that I’ll interview him.

His voice just seems so urgent and so different from everything else you hear in the public discourse. We do maybe 50 hours of recorded interviews. 

Meanwhile, I’m also developing as a journalist and falling in love with the genre known as narrative nonfiction, by which I mean factual stories but written with dialogue, plot, scenes and character development. And I decided that I’m going to write the story of the Israeli Black Panthers. This is how I’m going to make my mark and make an intervention into the discourse around Israel and Palestine.

Why do you think this chapter of Israeli history is so little known?

We tend to think about Israel in binaries. There’s the Arab and Jew, Israel and Palestine, and the two shall not meet. The Mizrahi story drives a wedge into that binary and breaks it apart. 

A lot of people have a hard time with nuance and complication and It doesn’t fit into any of the pre-existing narratives. That’s one reason. 

The other reason is that Israel, for many decades, tried to present itself as a very white country in terms of who they sent to be represented abroad. Today, that’s totally different. Israel now emphasizes its diversity. But for most of its history, that wasn’t the case. 

Part of it is also the failure of intellectuals in Israel and in the United States to give the story its due. Israeli universities didn’t make room for many brilliant Mizrahim, who found themselves without space to engage in critical thinking about Israeli history at the universities near where they lived so they ended up moving abroad in large numbers. 

It’s worth noting that Mizrahim aren’t just Arab Jews. They’re also Persian Jews, Turkish Jews and Kurdish Jews, among others, all with their own distinct histories and cultural practices. How was the Israeli state able to construct a unified Mizrahi identity?

The founders of Israel and the people running the show were swimming in the same intellectual waters as the wider European society.

Racial attitudes were imported from Europe and according to this racial attitude, there are the worthy races of the world that happen to be concentrated in Europe and there’s everyone else. When groups are coming from these different countries, there are already racist assumptions about their needs and capacities. 

They all were all grouped together because it was seen that their differences didn’t really matter. There was this idea that being among Muslims, regardless of which country or the specifics of your culture, had degraded the cognitive and spiritual level of the Jews, and hopefully with exposure to the superior European Jews, they would be able to be rehabilitated within some amount of years.

The experience of being racialized in Israel, of being treated as another because you come from the East, forged this new Israeli Mizrahi identity. People still had held onto their Turkish heritage, but now they had a way to build solidarity and say, ‘We’re all experiencing this thing. We all live in this little ghetto. We all are stuck in Dimona. Now we are alike and we’re Mizrahi.’ 

What was the catalyst for this group of Mizrahi street youth in Jerusalem setting up an organization that was named after the Black Panthers?

This group of kids who would become the Black Panthers were either born in Israel or arrived as babies or young children. Their parents refused to go along with the program of being settled on the frontiers of Israel. They say, ‘We’ve been praying to Jerusalem since time immemorial, we’re going to go to Jerusalem, whether you like it or not.’ No one’s offering housing, so the only place that they can find where to live is in this border zone separating East Jerusalem from West Jerusalem. These are bombed-out houses where Palestinians had previously lived, but they fled in 1948, and it’s right in the Old City. 

But it’s a no-man’s land. There’s barbed wire running through the neighborhood, and there’s snipers from the Jordanian side and Israeli side from them exchanging fire from above, sometimes shooting at residents below. It’s extremely crowded, unsanitary. Sewage is running through an open canal through the neighborhood.

There’s almost no government services, hardly even a school and later just a religious school. Most of their interaction with the Israeli state is through the police that comes in and arrests kids who maybe stole a piece of fruit from the market or scavenged from the no-man’s land and try to sell 

metal or different fixing that they could find in the bombed-out housing. 

You have a whole generation of young men in particular who get in trouble with the law, end up in and out of juvenile institutions. They’re without jobs. They don’t serve in the military because the military won’t take anyone with any kind of running in with the law at this point. 

The Six-Day War in 1967 catalyzes tremendous amounts of change in Israel. For one thing, Musrara overnight almost goes from being the backwaters of Jerusalem, which itself is the backwaters of Israel at the time, to the very center of a super exciting city. 

All these phenomena that were going on in the world and hadn’t really arrived in any major way to Israel came rushing in. Rock and roll music, psychedelic drugs, radical politics, the hippie movement—all that stuff’s coming in. 

Well-off Ashkenazi Jews who are traveling to Europe and visiting the student revolts in Paris and the United States to see what’s going on there with the civil rights movement bring that back to Israel. 

Many of the people in this group that become the Panthers didn’t even know how to read and now they’re suddenly working with these really innovative social workers who are starting to empower them through education. They’re learning about the world in these ways. 

One of the things they’re noticing is that there’s a lot of articles in the newspapers about the American Black Panthers, calling them antisemitic because they were making pro-Palestinian statements and talking about overthrowing American imperialism, which was allied with the Israeli state. 

The main takeaway for these youths reading about the Panthers was that the Israeli establishment was very scared of this group and they decided they’re gonna emulate them.

Jeremy Appel is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter