Black Orthodox Israelis

"There's African Americans that are walking around saying, 'free Palestine', thinking that they're saying, 'free Black people from racism in America'." 

"They think it's like a heightened sense of racism that ... people are experiencing in another part of the world. And it's the opposite."

"The people who they think are helping the Palestinians are the people who are actually enslaving the Palestinians: Hamas."

Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Ben Avraham

Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Ben Avraham. Photo by Courtesy Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Ben Avraham

The West's Black liberation movement stood foursquare behind the Palestinians in the days following the massacre of 1,200 civilians in southern Israel October 7, near the Gaza border, in vehement opposition to Israel which as far as BLM was concerned is a settler-colonial state oppressing and persecuting the Palestinians. A photo showing a paraglider, a Palestinian flag and the legend: "I stand with Palestine" was posted on the website of BLM's Chicago branch.

Having done so, it is not possible for them, in recognition of the news filling all legacy news sites not to know the extent of the savage bestiality inflicted by Hamas terrorists on the civilian population of Irsraeli border towns and villages in the marauding massacre that took place on that fateful day; the cruelty in remorselessly killing infants and children, the sadistic pleasure taken in mass-raping Israeli girls and women.

The terrorist attack was characterized as a "desperate act of self defense" by BLM Grassroots. BLM Canada, on the other hand, issued a statement to the effect that it was "horrified by the widespread violence, torture and murder inflicted on innocent civilians across Palestinian lands", studiously avoiding any mention of what had occurred in the state of Israel. 

 

Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Ben Avraham takes especial notice and umbrage of the Black community's stance against Israel. And that can be explained by the fact that he is himself an African American Israeli, profoundly disappointed by those of the Black community who feel justified in opposing Israel on the grounds of "liberation". 

His birth name was Shariff Hasan, a native of Los Angeles who converted to Judaism in 2013 and assumed a new name, more fitting to the career he soon found himself engaged in. In 2015 he travelled to Israel for the purpose of study, but he never left. Attracted by the uniting magnetism of a shared national identity with different cultures living together in a Jewish state as citizens.

He was cognizant that in the 1920s, Jewish philanthropy funded Black colleges and the reciprocal fallout in the 1930s and 1940s when Black colleges gave employment to Jewish academics who fled German fascism. That Jews played a lead role in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s was not lost on him. Nor the fact that both communities shared a long history of subjugation.

Blacks in the West turned away from Israel when it defeated Egypt, Jordan and Syria in a joint military venture meant to destroy Israel, during the 1967 Six-Day War, leaving Israel in control of land wrenched from Syria and Egypt; the Golan Heights and Sinai respectively. Black student activists supported the Palestinian 'cause'; newsletters described Zionism as a white colonial project. A stance active today.

According to a Wall Street Journal publication by Jason L. Riley, BLM scapegoats Jews, exploiting racial divisions by using an "old but effective playbook to rally others to their cause. And they are counting on the ignorance, complacency and guilt of white liberals to lend the movement credibility and power".

The Apartheid label so beloved of antisemites is an absurdity, with a fifth of Israeli citizens mostly Muslim Arabs. The remaining four-fifths of the population, are majority Jews native to the Middle East and North Africa who were exiled from their millennia-long diaspora in Muslim countries after their Roman-era expulsion from Judaea. A smaller proportion of Jews were mostly refugees from Europe. Additionally, close to 200,000 Black Israeli Jews originated from Ethiopia.

"We never looked to enact violence on white America. You could take the most radical Black groups that have ever existed in American history, and none of them have ever thought about mass murdering the people who they thought were oppressing them. Hamas and their supporters have no justification if they say, 'Oh, well, it's been oppression for 75 years'", stated the Rabbi.

Musician Nissim Black (in black hat and glasses) brings his two children for a visit with Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky in Bnei Brak, Israel. The rabbi told Black, “Being ‘Black’ is your mayla (virtue), not a chesaron (lacking).” Courtesy of Nissim Black

"[Universities] teach this liberation theory, or theology, around the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. So now that this conflict is happening, these people believe that, 'Hey, I'm actually educated  went to classes and my professors taught about this ... I know the truth of what's going on'."

"A lot of it's just the ego of bad, false education."

Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Ben Avraham

The European Pathology of Jew-Hatred

Anti-Semitism is virtually unknown in the East, it is a Western disease. Before and during the Second World War official Japan laid out a plan to rescue European Jews from Hitler's extermination plan although Japan was officially aligned with Fascist Germany's Axis alliance. Even so, Japanese society was not infected by suspicion and hatred of Jews; it found them of interest because of the reputation Jews had for business acumen and scientific success.

Not only did the country take in tens of thousands of Jewish refugees desperate to escape the oppressive threats that Nazism meant for their future, but a Japanese consul in Lithuania and his wife managed to rescue another ten thousand Jews from death. The Japanese saw a similarity between Shinto Buddhism and Judaism. Fleeing the Third Reich, European Jewish families travelled to Shanghai, then under Japanese control, where they were able to survive the war.

Asian countries had no tradition of Jew-suspicion and hatred. China and India, members of the Conference of Non-Aligned States led by Nehru, Chou En Lai, Nasser and Tito, saw fit to regard Israel at one time with disfavour, because it was in their economic interests to befriend the Arab states. Once it became clearer to them that much could be gained for their countries' futures by aligning with Israel to further research and business opportunities, that changed; business propelled them, not antipathy toward Jews.

South Korea was fascinated by the unusually high number of Israeli and Jewish scientific Nobel Prize-winners and puzzled over the cause. Their own thinkers concluded that the mental agility required of minds exposed at a young age to Talmud study might be one of the reasons for Jewish ability to think, to imagine creatively, to excel at research and discovery. With this conclusion they thought to introduce Talmudic studies in their schools.

Contrast that to the reception that Jews receive in the countries of the West, where they have historically been barely tolerated, distrusted, blamed and held in contempt. There is a correlation between antipathy toward Jews by Western nations and their respective religions. Judaism was the original monotheistic path to an omniscient, omnipotent being. From Judaism sprang Christianity.

Christians believed that their religion, built from and upon the scaffold of Judaism, perfected monotheism, making Judaism obsolete and redundant. Offense was taken that Jews hadn't the perspicacity to acknowledge this, abandon Judaism and embrace Christianity. Seven hundred years later a middle-aged Arab merchant thought he could perfect Christianity, and inspired by its origins, plucked what he thought useful from both to present to Middle Eastern Bedouins their new religion of Islam.

When Jews refused the Prophet Mohammad's invitation to forsake an outdated Judaism and embrace its updated version of Islam, their tribes were ordered out of Medina and those who refused to leave were slaughtered. Muslims have ever since, while acknowledging both Judaism and Christianity as Abrahamic religions alongside Islam, held both Christianity and Judaism in contempt, exacting a special tax on Jews and Christians to enable them to live in peace alongside Muslims, never as equals.

Western anti-Semitism has a long and dishonourable tradition. The West seems obsessed with Judaism, intolerant of Jewish 'otherness', the Jewish faith and its peoples' inexorable clutching of their authentic monotheism through the millennia, despite the oppressive intolerance that has always characterized Christian-Judaic relations. In the modern era, the State of Israel has appeared as the leading brunt of Western hatred for Jews.

While Israel and Jews are held to a high standard of morals and behaviours, those who oppress them exhibit a paucity of both. Israel is admired for its vitality and resilience, its economic success -- despite having to allocate so much of its resources to defence -- its research and development successes, which other countries clamour to have part of in signing joint ventures that will further their own economies.

Yet while the European Union countries line up to take advantage of Israeli inventions and research successes forging the way into the future of high technology, it also debases itself by regarding Israel as an oppressor of innocent Palestinian refugees as though Palestinian terrorism and violence against Jews have no bearing on the relations between Jews and Arabs.

Israel is invited into membership of the OECD, to become a partner in CERN, as the only non-European member of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, since the obvious adeptness of Jews in both those spheres represents a bonus for Europe. Yet special labelling identifying Israeli products manufactured in the West Bank is righteously imposed, even while products from Tibet in Chinese trade are exempt from any such treatment, along with products emanating from Turkey's occupation of half of Cyprus.

Boycott and Divestment of Israeli academics and products is hugely popular with trade unions and universities in the West; with the migration of Arab and Muslim academics and other economic immigrants to Western countries, a new and incendiary form of anti-Semitism has surfaced, one where the West can make common cause in support of 'Palestinian refugees', holding Israel and Jews to blame for a complex and simmering vendetta against Israel's existence in her historical homeland.

The West insists that Jerusalem, Judaism's capital and the location of Judaism's most sacred site before the existence of either Christianity or Islam, be decreed a capital for a nascent Palestinian state. Taking from the original Palestinians, who were Jews, their Biblical-era heritage and handing it to those denying that there were ever ancient Israelites whose geography Arabs have latterly 'inherited'.

While Christians of ancient heritage are being systematically cleansed through violence and vile discrimination throughout the Middle East, the Vatican looks past the massacres and the torching of churches to sign a treaty placing its own churches in Jerusalem under the care of the Palestinian Authority in a tender acknowledgement of its brotherhood with Islam, and its abandonment of Judaism.