(Part 2: The early Black nationalists’ love of Zionism, Malcolm X as a closeted Zionist, the Black Panther Party’s rebuke of the holy war against Israel, and the real point of this story) 

In part 1 (immediately below this article), I reviewed early Zionist thought and showed how the Black Panther Party’s 1966 ten-point platform reflected Zionist philosophy. I suggested that this overlap between Black and Jewish liberation had to be more than a coincidence. I received feedback indicating that some of my points were a stretch. Maybe. Or not. In this final part, we will see how and why this relationship between Black and Jewish liberation first developed, and the power of the Jewish story.

How the early Black Nationalists Came to Embrace Zionism

Edward Blyden and W.E.B. Du Bois were two of the most influential figures in the late 19th- and early 20th-century Pan-African and Black Nationalist movements. But Blyden was widely known as the father of Pan-Africanism. According to Dickinson College Africana Studies Professor Nadia Alahmed, Zionism was a significant influence on 19th-century Black nationalists such as Blyden because “they saw a powerful connection between the goals of [Zionism and Black nationalism] from which it grew: an oppressed people fighting for land and sovereignty in their historical, ‘ancestral’ lands.”[1]

Blyden felt strongly that Zionism, the plight of the Jews, and Black nationalism were interrelated, and he expressed these beliefs in his 1898 pamphlet, “The Jewish Question.” In that pamphlet, Blyden warmly recounts growing up in St. Thomas, the West Indies, where his neighbors and friends were Jews. This experience led him to visit Palestine and take a deep interest in Jewish history and “especially in that marvelous movement called Zionism” which “in some respects, is similar to that which agitates thousands of descendants of Africa in America,…”[2]

Blyden saw it as his “privilege and my duty” to study Zionism, “as the history of the African race—their enslavement, persecution, proscription, and sufferings—closely resembles that of the Jews.”[3] To Blyden, “There is hardly a man in the civilized world—Christian, Mohammedan, or Jew—who does not recognize the claim and right of the Jew to the Holy Land;..”[4]

By Professor Alahmed’s account, “W.E.B. Du Bois’ scholarship and activism created one of the most lasting, multidimensional, and complex impacts on Black radical political philosophies.”[5] Du Bois, a founding member of the NAACP, was among the foremost Black intellectuals of his era. Du Bois saw a direct link between Zionism and the “African movement” of his time, stating in a 1919 editorial that “The African movement means to us what the Zionist movement must mean to the Jews, the centralization of race effort and the recognition of a racial fount.”

Almost thirty years later, Du Bois remained a champion of the Zionist cause. “Everyone knows the way in which the Jewish religion is wound through Palestine and from there how the thread runs through all modern history,” Du Bois wrote in his May 8, 1948, Chicago Star editorial where, just a week before the U.N. vote, he passionately pleaded the case for a Jewish state: “In the meantime, a million displaced Jews are begging to be allowed to migrate to Palestine, where there’s room for them, where there is work for them to do, where what Jews have already done is for the advantage, not simply of the Jews, but of the Arabs.” A week later, the U.N. voted to create the State of Israel and a separate Arab........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)