Understanding Jewish and Palestinian Equality in Israel explores how questions of law, belonging, and justice define everyday life between the river and the sea. Written from my perspective as an African-American Christian who also practices Judaism, the series seeks understanding rather than ideology—beginning with equality among Israel’s citizens (Part I), comparing civilian and military rule (Part II), examining how security structures shape discrimination (Part III), exploring how personal and social bias reinforce those structures (Part IV), and now reflecting on what moral lessons the American civil-rights struggle offers for Israel and Palestine (Part V).

These essays ask shared questions: How does the pursuit of security, identity, and sovereignty affect the meaning of equality under one state’s rule? And what does equality mean when the same nation governs different peoples by different laws?

Part V now places these tensions within a broader historical and moral landscape by turning to a defining analogy of American constitutional history: Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education.

This essay asks:
What can the civil-rights struggle teach us about the limits of “separate but equal” in Israel-Palestine?

This essay uses the U.S. legal trajectory from Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) to Brown v. Board of Education (1954) as an interpretive lens for examining equality between Jews and Palestinians under Israeli rule.
The comparison is not a claim of equivalence but of insight: both situations reveal how legal structures can promise equality while enforcing separation.

Inside Israel’s 1948 borders, Palestinian citizens possess full legal rights yet experience structural inequality.
In the West Bank, Palestinians live under military rule while Israeli settlers enjoy civilian law—creating a dual legal framework.

Drawing on history, civil-rights theology, and interfaith ethics, the essay argues that systems of separation—whether justified by order, identity, or security—inevitably erode equality, legitimacy, and social trust.
Like Brown, a future resolution in Israel-Palestine will require recognizing that separation itself is incompatible with democratic equality.

As an African-American Christian who practices Judaism, I see echoes of my own nation’s history in the legal and social arrangements of Israel-Palestine.

The American South once claimed that segregation maintained “order.”
Israel claims that separation—legal, territorial, and........

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