(Part I: The Jew boy fight, the JDL, Zionists, and the Black Power Party’s Zionist-inspired platform)  

I was introduced to the Black Panthers in the eighth grade by my friend Gene—I think that was his name. We were walking to the train station from Shallow Junior High School in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. I’d been in a fist fight with an Italian the week before (Shallow was about eighty percent Italian). This Italian called me a Jew boy. It was a traumatizing encounter, not so much by the actual fight as from the blinding speed at which my gut overrode any sense of retreat. Before I knew it, I was planting my fist on this Italian’s face (to be fair, he got his licks in too). The fight was the talk of my class. We all had our view of who won, and Gene was consoling me.

Gene told me that the black panther avoids confrontation and attacks only when threatened or in self-defense. That’s how Gene explained the Black Panther Party to me, and my reaction to the Italian. “Welcome to the oppressed,” I remember Gene saying. As soon as the words left his mouth, Gene and I were struck by how much the Jewish and Black experiences overlap. Thus began my fascination with the Black Panthers and the Black struggle.

Back in my Boro Park neighborhood, I saw Jews as weak. Then, when I was fifteen, I took karate lessons from a bearded, payos-wearing, muscle-bound Jew in a karate gi. He was from the Jewish Defense League. I had no trouble seeing the ideological overlap between the JDL and the Black Panthers. Yet, it was a Black Power fist medallion I wore around my neck, and not a Magen David. I carry that fist with me to this day. But instead of a Magen David around my neck, I made Aliyah to Israel from Oakland, California, ten months ago. As a Zionist, I wanted to be with Jews who were proud of their identity and had the courage to do what it takes to deal with Jew hatred.

The medalion I’ve carried with me since high school. 

I had recalled what Gene told me while researching for an article on Jewish Americans who were carrying guns as a defensive response to violent Jew hatred. So, I revisited the Black Panthers and came across the Party’s 1966 Ten Point Platform. I read the very first point and thought, “Wow. That’s a page out of Herzl”: “We Want Freedom. We Want Power to Determine the Destiny of Our Black Community. We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.”

Just substitute “Jewish” for “Black,” and you have Zionism. Far out, right? Was the Black liberation movement, and the Black Panther Party (“BPP”), inspired by Zionism and the Jewish experience? That would be a mindblower to those married to the antizionist settler-colonist ideology. I had to know. It would be like informing a Ku Klux Klansman that he’s been half black all his life and didn’t know it.

Zionism as Self-Determination (“We Want Power to Determine the Destiny of Our Black Community”)

First, I had to nail down what Zionism meant before it was hijacked by the left and made into a dirty word. Educator, novelist, and author of People Love Dead Jews, Dara Horn, in her 2024 Atlantic article, “Why the Most Educated People in America Fall for Anti-Semitic Lies,” offered a good starting point by her observation that “Jewish civilization has been centered for thousands of years, in ways large and small, on its homeland in Israel, where Jews have had a continuous presence since ancient times. The modern political idea of Zionism as Jewish self-determination in this homeland emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries amid many........

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