The Nexus Between Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Hamas Runs Deep

The liberal Jewish community was shocked after October 7, 2023 to witness the virulent anti-Israel and anti-Semitic demonstrations backed by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.

"We need to understand that Black identification with Zionism predates the formation of

Israel as a modern state." says Robin D. G. Kelley, a historian at the University of

California, Los Angeles who studies social movements. "It goes back to the Book of Exodus in the Bible — the story of the flight of the Jews out of Egypt, which was not only a

narrative of emancipation and renewal, but it was deployed by African Americans to critique American slavery and racism."

In the 1950s, Malcolm X was among the first Black activists to speak out for the "Arab cause" in the Arab-Israeli conflict, beginning during his time with the Nation of Islam when he sometimes talked up antisemitic conspiracy theories.

But after the 1967 war, a different perspective was becoming more visible.

"It became much easier not to see Israel as, you know, the brave little republic farming in

the desert and instead see it in their view as a Western-sponsored interloper, a colonial

settler state that had dispossessed a people of color," says Michael Fischbach, a Middle

East historian at Randolph-Macon College and author of Black Power and Palestine:

Transnational Countries of Color.

The Movement for Black Lives, the coalition of Black-led advocacy organizations, in its

political platform called Israel "an apartheid state" and argued that by providing military aid

to Israel, the U.S. is "complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people."

Social media images and video of the war between Israel and Hamas brought

many Black Lives Matter activists in the U.S. to the streets.

Now let’s do a deep dive into “the black struggle” and the Palestinians.

Open Slavery existed in the region of Palestine until the 20th-century. The slave trade

to Ottoman Palestine officially stopped in the 1870s, when the last slave ship is registered to

have arrived, after which slavery appeared to have gradually diminished to a marginal

phenomenon in the census of 1905.

However, the former slaves and their children still continued to work for their former enslavers, and were reported to still live in a state of de facto servitude in the 1930s. Many members of the Black Palestinians minority are descendants of the former slaves.

Palestine was close to the Red Sea slave trade, but also to the slave ports of the Mediterranean Sea, where slaves from the Trans-Saharan slave trade were imported via Libya and Egypt.

The Ottoman Empire issued decrees to restrict and gradually prohibit the slave trade and

slavery between 1830 and 1909, but these laws were not strictly enforced in the Ottoman

provinces, such as Palestine and the Arabian Peninsula.

The last official slave ship arrived to Haifa in Palestine in 1876, after which the official slave trade to Palestine appeared to have stopped. The end of the open slave trade also appeared to have resulted in the gradual death of slavery itself.

"However, while no longer officially referred to as slaves, it appeared as if the former slaves

continued to work for their former enslavers, as did their children." -  Buessow, Johann. Slaves and Slave Agency in the Ottoman Empire

Slaves were given tasks which were regarded as disdained and degrading to free Muslims, such as domestic servants, municipal services, industrial work, sex slaves (concubines), and farmhands and sharecroppers. As commonly in other parts of the Muslim world, slaves were preferred to free employed people as domestic servants, since they were dependent on their employer and not loyal to their clan and their own families.- ibid

Female slaves were used as domestic servants in private households as well as concubines (sex slaves), while male slaves were used in a number of different tasks such as laborers, bodyguards, servants and attendants.- ibid

The sex slave-concubines of rich Urban men who had given birth to the son of their enslaver were counted as the most priviliged, since they became an Umm Walad and became free upon the death of their enslaver; the concubine of a Beduoin mainly lived the same life as the rest of the tribal members and the women of the family. Female domestic slaves lived a hard life and reproduction among slaves was low; it was noted that the infant mortality was high among slaves, and that female slaves were often raped in their childhood and rarely lived in their forties, and that poorer slave owners often prostituted them. - ibid

Randal William MacGavock from Tennessee visited Ramla in the 1850s, described the custom regarding the children of the Palestinian slaves and compared it to slavery in the United States:

"During our visit the subject of slavery was suggested by the appearance of a likely negro

boy bearing coffee and pipes, which resulted in my gaining some information that I would

have otherwise. When two slaves intermarry belonging to different masters, the owner of the man claims the male issue [progeny], and the owner of the woman the female issue;

whereas with us the owner of the woman is entitled to both. Quite a strong attachment exists between the master and slave, and it is not unfrequently the case that they marry and live happily together.” - MacGavock, Randal William. A Tennessean Abroad; Or, Letters from Europe, Africa, and Asia. New York: Redfield, 1854,

In 1920, Ottoman Palestine was formally transformed in to the British Mandatory Palestine. The British Empire, having signed the 1926 Slavery Convention as a member of the League of Nations, was obliged to investigate, report and fight slavery and slave trade in all land under direct or indirect control of the British Empire. The British policy was thus abolitionist, however in reality they were reluctant to interfere in cultural issues if they feared their interference could cause unrest.

In 1931, the police and the Welfare Inspector Margaret Nixon conducted an investigation on

behalf of the British government regarding the enslaved servant girls of private Arab

households. The result of the investigation showed that after the slave trade to Palestine

stopped, the African abid-slaves of the Bedouin tribes of the Jordan Valley sold their children (primarily their daughters) as maidservants. After the World War I, this custom started to be called employment, upon which the girls were sold as contract servants for a period between seven and twenty-five years. In 1934, a report to the League of Nations acknowledged that slaves were still kept among the Bedouin  shaykhs  in Jordan and Palestine, and that slavery was maintained under the guise of clientage.- Likhovski, A. (2006). Law and identity in mandate Palestine. Storbritannien: University of North Carolina Press.

Seventy years after the end of the American Civil War, the slavery of Black people, especially

Black women, still existed in the Muslim communities of Palestine.