This coming August, the Movement for Black Lives is orchestrating a national conference to form a “new agenda” building off the worldwide protests in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd this past May 25th.
In light of this, and the general concerns the American Jewish community has raised around the purported anti-Semitic/anti-Israel sentiments of the Black Lives Matter movement, perhaps this is the perfect time to address those allegations, debunk misconceptions, and address the rhetoric of anti-BLM talking points.
Firstly, Black Lives Matter is a movement formed in 2014 after the police murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. It is a decentralized movement with no single group, or collection of groups, that speaks for everyone affiliated with it. At no point did it ever release a platform concerned with Israel or any other international issues. In fact, BLM has already produced its 2020 platform, which, again, contains no international issues.
The point of contention is that the American Jewish community has, and continues to, conflate Black Lives Matter with being one and the same as the Movement for Black Lives, a 2016 coalition of Black Lives Matter-affiliated groups.
Concerning M4BL, they indeed produced a platform in 2016, which presented 40 policy proposals largely focused on domestic issues such as abolishing the death penalty and designating reparations for Black Americans. Among these proposals was a section titled “Invest-Divest”, calling for–among other things–a reallocation of funds at the federal, state and local level from policing and incarceration, and cuts in military expenditures and a reallocation of those funds to invest in domestic infrastructure and community well-being. As a resource footnote to this policy, it further included a document titled “Cut Military Expenditure Brief,” a bullet point of which reads:
“The US justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people. The US requires Israel to use 75 percent of all the military aid it receives to buy US made arms. Consequently, every year billions of dollars are funneled from US taxpayers to hundreds of arms corporations, who then wage lobbying campaigns pushing for even more foreign military aid. The results of this policy are twofold: it not only diverts much needed funding from domestic education and social programs, but it makes US citizens complicit in the abuses committed by the Israeli government. Israel is an apartheid state with over 50 laws on the books that sanction discrimination against the Palestinian people. Palestinian homes and land are routinely bulldozed to make way for illegal Israeli settlements. Israeli soldiers also regularly arrest and detain Palestinians as young as 4 years old without due process. Everyday, Palestinians are forced to walk through military checkpoints along the US-funded apartheid wall.”
Many in the American Jewish community thus considered that the entire platform, and therefore all of the Black Lives Matter movement, was not only critical of Israel, but also anti-Semitic. The most visceral reaction to the platform was caused by charging Israel with being apartheid and committing genocide. Which, on its face, given the connotations those words have in the common parlance, seems to be justifiable recoil.
However, according to Article II of the United Nations definition of “genocide” as entered into force on January 12, 1951 by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, “genocide” is not limited to killing–wholesale or otherwise–in fact being defined as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Concerning apartheid, Article II of the 1976 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid defines apartheid as “apply[ing] to the following inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them:
(a) Denial to a member or members of a racial group or groups of the right to life and liberty of person:
(i) By murder of members of a racial group or groups;
(ii) By the infliction upon the members of a racial group or groups of serious bodily or mental harm, by the infringement of their freedom or dignity, or by subjecting them to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment;
(iii) By arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment of the members of a racial group or groups;
(b) Deliberate imposition on a racial group or groups of living conditions calculated to cause its or their physical destruction in whole or in part;
(c) Any legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups, in particular by denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to work, the right to form recognized trade unions, the right to education, the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association;
(d) Any measures including legislative measures, designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups, the prohibition of mixed marriages among members of various racial groups, the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof;
(e) Exploitation of the labour of the members of a racial group or groups, in particular by submitting them to forced labour;
(f) Persecution of organizations and persons, by depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms, because they oppose apartheid.”
While there may be an understandable uncomfortability with the terms of “genocide” and “apartheid” being employed, there seem to objectively be–as noted in the bullet points of the “Cut Military Expenditure Brief”–elements of both in operation, not only in Israel, but here in America as well.
At any rate, with the upcoming conference in August, there is a second chance for pro-Zionist/pro-Israel American Jews to make their voices heard, and to come to a table that they previously dragged their feet to. After all, the first organizations to support Black Lives Matter were Palestinian ones, and the first Jews to show up were groups such as If Not Now. One can’t complain about the table settings if they don’t show up to the table.
If American Zionist Jews want that seat, then now is the chance.
