By Lenrod Nzulu Baraka

A very good friend of mine just sent me a video on WhatsApp in which an African American woman is advising people of African ancestry to stay out of the conflict between the Jews and the Arabs.  The rationale for her injunction lies in the historical and ongoing reality of anti-Black racism exercised by both Jews and Muslims. Historically speaking, the Black female presenter is correct.  Generally, neither Jews nor Muslims have been the greatest allies of Black people historically.

Individually however there have been pristine examples of Jewish and Muslim allies who paid the ultimate price in the struggle to promote Black dignity. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, not withstanding the bad press he received, was a great friend of Sub-Saharan Africa.  Jewish blood was shed during the Civil Rights era in an attempt to challenge the forces of Caucasian supremacy in the US.

A monolithic view of a group of people will therefore hardly every tell the full story of the group and its relationship with anti-Black racism. Just as they were good Jews, Muslims, and Europeans who acted as our allies during the darkest period of Black oppression, the best among us should also strive to be the allies of the oppressed wherever oppression rears its ugly head.

As a people who are still recovering from centuries of slavery, colonization, exploitation, and violent repression, people of African ancestry can both sympathize and empathize with the oppressed people of Palestine.  Palestinians, like our African ancestors whose land was seized by force, have become victims of the Doctrine of Discovery formulated in Europe in 1493.

The Doctrine of Discovery provided the legal framework for European explorers acting as agents of their sovereigns, to seize the land of non-Christian people. Simply put, if you were not a Christian, your land could be discovered and seized by Europeans.  Vacant ancestral land in Africa and the New world was also declared to have been discovered by the Europeans.

Ironically, the Catholic Church was the main instigator of the Doctrine of Discovery. The Papal Bull, Inter Caetera, issued by Pope Alexander VI on May 4, 1493, gave Spain exclusive rights to all lands ‘discovered’ by Columbus. Central to the Doctrine of Discovery was the exaltation of the Christian religion and the overthrowing of barbarous nations.

Another delicious irony connected to the Doctrine of Discovery is the embryo of the doctrine found in the Old Testament scriptures.  After Moses went up the mountain and inhaled some of the burning bush, he came back down and told the Israelites that they were going into a land where they would meet people whom they would kill, and discover land, houses, and cities, that they would surreptitiously misappropriate.

Clearly the modern nation of Israel is following the same script used by Moses as a blueprint for its inhumane treatment of the Palestinian people.  The terms apartheid and the world’s largest mass prison have been used to describe the system of oppression being dished out to the Palestinians by the nation of Israel. The brutality, dislocations, and deaths that are a part of the daily experience of the Palestinian people suggest that a second conquest of Canaan is being attempted by modern day Jews.

Just where should the global Black collective stand on the issue of Palestine as the nation of Israel with its Western allies prepares for a ground offensive that could obliterate the possibility of a two-state solution? Should we like President Biden be solidly in support of Israel notwithstanding its oppression of the Palestinian people or should our voices be heard at the UN and from Black capitals calling for the dismantling of the system of apartheid being practiced by the state of Israel and the restoration of land discovered or stolen from the Palestinian people?

The nation of Israel is the last surviving openly racist and white supremacist nation internationally.  European Jews with their Western allies have taken it upon themselves to carve out a nation in the Middle East that is ruled and financed by Caucasians.  As in the case of South Africa under apartheid, the Jewish state is forced to rule by fear, intimidation, and violence.  President Biden and the rest of the Caucasian world, by showing their unwavering support for the nation of Israel, are openly demonstrating their commitment to global Caucasian supremacy. Black democrats in the US should take note of this.

Perhaps the greatest irony in the Palestinian saga is to be found in the reality that a group of people who garnered international sympathy because of an attempt at ethnic cleansing directed against them, have adopted very similar repressive methods in dealing with another group of people. After centuries of persecution, pogroms, dislocations, and a final solution that ended in genocide perpetrated by Christian Europeans as opposed to Middle Eastern Muslims, Jews ought to be the least likely people to turn around and use the same tactics against a people who very often were more merciful to them than their new found allies, the Christian Europeans.      

Lenrod Nzulu Baraka is the founder of Afro-Caribbean Spiritual Teaching Center and the author of The Rebirth of Black Civilization: Making Africa and the Caribbean Great Again.