On September 2016, an Al Jazeera article was published with the title: “Black Lives Matter and Palestine: A Historic Alliance.” The article was written by Hamid Dabashi a professor of Iranian Studies at Columbia University who noted that the “historic solidarity between these two movements is all but inevitable, and its leaders are not the corrupt US politicians that AIPAC can buy and recruit to support one of the most vicious legacies of European colonialism, now sustained by US militarism, in the heart of the Arab and Muslim world.”
Professor Dabashi quoted an article by the “Movement 4 Black Lives,” which since then has simply become part of Black Lives Matter; “The US justifies and advances the global war on terror,” the document declared, “via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people.”
It is now 2021, and Black Lives Matter is again showing their solidarity with the Palestinian people, while the conflict between Hamas and the Israeli government rages once again.
Dabashi, after that document was published in 2016, commented on his article: “Needless to say such a bold, brave, and unequivocal declaration in solidarity with the Palestinian cause by a robust national movement in the US has robbed the Zionists the wrong way.” He goes on, “at home in their settler colony in Israel or else commuting to their imperial habitat in the US, they are now furious with this statement and have launched a concerted assault on it to make it “controversial”.
Black Lives Matter recently came out with a tweet saying “Black Lives Matter stands in solidarity with Palestinians. We are a movement committed to ending settler colonialism in all forms and will continue to advocate for Palestinian liberation. (always have. And always will be). #freepalestine.”
Shortly after, the organization stopantisemitism.org re-tweeted BLM and added: “Every Jew that stood with BLM should consider this a spit in the face. In July 2020 BLM scrubbed their entire social media footprint of every little nasty tidbit they ever said about the Jewish state. But now their antisemitic floodgates are back open.”
The truth is, BLM and their support for Palestine never went anywhere. It has been there from the beginning, despite the large Jewish support for the organization, including that of George Soros and Susan Rosenberg. Should their support for Palestine immediately mean they are anti-Semitic, or is it simply that they see the Palestinian plight as similar to the BLM struggle?
