Pro-Palestinian Activists’ Dangerous Attempt to Co-opt the Black Lives Matter Movement

A cartoon has been circulating on social media that shows an American policeman crushing a black man’s throat with his knee while embracing an Israeli soldier doing the same to a Palestinian man; atop the picture is a caption reading “Black lives matter.” Such an attempt to link the Palestinian cause to that of the protests taking place across the U.S. is neither an outlier nor something new. Tracing the history of African American leaders’ embrace of anti-Zionism, Joshua Washington sees as a turning point the 1967 decision of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—a prominent civil-rights organization in which Jews once played a prominent role—to adopt not just a pro-Palestinian platform, but an anti-Semitic one. In his view, this move was not only wrongheaded, but highly detrimental, allowing Arab leaders to “hijack” the civil-rights movement in order “to legitimize their own cause.”