I’m a Black Slave to the Jews, Apparently

“Why do you support Israel and the Jews? You’re Black.”

This question has always confused me.

Often, if I’m honest, it isn’t really a question. It’s an insult.

I’ve received emails and comments calling me a “slave” to the Jews. A “house Negro” for supporting Israel. Some go even further and call me a traitor to “my people” simply because I call out Jew-hatred.

Many of the people sending these messages appear to be Arab. Other Black people who publicly support Israel get the same treatment.

But the racism is certainly not limited to Arabs. For some reason, white liberals also seem to feel completely comfortable saying astonishingly racist things to Black people who refuse to hold the political opinions expected of them.

I’ve had a sprinkling of that too.

They all seem to be making the same argument: because I am Black, there is a side I am supposed to support.

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My race is brought up constantly whenever I defend Israel from the endless stream of lies and distortions now circulating online. Which is strange, because skin colour has very little to do with how I understand this conflict.

Many Israelis are just as brown as the Arabs around them. Often, you couldn’t tell one from the other simply by looking at them.

I view this conflict primarily through the prism of history, ideology and political culture.

Yet many Westerners have managed to superimpose the racial politics of America and Europe onto a Middle Eastern conflict. Palestinians become emotional stand-ins for Black people, while Israelis are transformed into representatives of “whiteness.”

The entire framework starts collapsing the moment you look at the people who actually live there.

A very large share of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi or Sephardic, with roots in the Middle East and North Africa. After Israel’s creation and the wars surrounding it, hundreds of thousands of Jews fled or were driven from countries across the Arab and Muslim world. Ancient Jewish communities—some of them thousands of years old—were shattered through persecution, violence, dispossession, political pressure and expulsion.

Many eventually made their way to Israel.

You will hear endless discussion of the Nakba. You will hear considerably less about the disappearance of Jewish communities from much of the Middle East and North Africa.

Then there are Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up roughly a fifth of the population. There are Ashkenazi Jews, Ethiopian Jews, mixed families and people from almost every conceivable background.

Whatever else Israel is, describing it as some kind of homogeneous “white” colonial society is detached from reality.

And yet that caricature survives because it is politically useful.

It allows people to force the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a familiar Western morality play: white oppressor, brown victim.

That is also one reason the word apartheid has become so popular.

I routinely get told that Nelson Mandela would be ashamed of me.

Why?

Because I’m Black, and therefore my political sympathies have apparently already been assigned.

Apartheid Was About Race

I grew up in South Africa. Apartheid was a system of racial segregation imposed by law. People living under the same state were classified and treated differently because of their race.

That is an important distinction.

Arab citizens of Israel vote, hold public office, become judges, doctors, lawyers, soldiers and members of parliament. They possess Israeli citizenship and, under Israeli law, the civil rights attached to it.

Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are in a fundamentally different political category. They are not Israeli citizens. Gaza has been governed by Hamas, while Palestinians in parts of the West Bank live under the Palestinian Authority, within an unresolved territorial conflict involving Palestinian self-government and varying degrees of Israeli military control.

That situation can be criticised. Israeli policy can be criticised. The legal and political status of the West Bank can be debated endlessly.

But calling every restriction, checkpoint or security barrier “apartheid” simply because Palestinians and Israelis are treated differently strips the word of its historical meaning.

Those restrictions did not arise because Arabs have darker skin.

They arose in the context of decades of war, terrorism, suicide bombings, insurgency and territorial conflict.

That distinction matters.

Palestinians Are Not Black South Africans

Palestinians are routinely placed into the mould of Black South Africans under apartheid or African-Americans during the civil-rights movement.

Once you accept that framing, people like me become confusing.

How could a Black man possibly oppose the side represented as the oppressed brown population?

Palestinians are the poor, colonised brown people. Israelis are white Europeans. America is the imperial power funding them.

Everything fits neatly into a political template imported from somewhere else.

The reality is considerably uglier and more complicated.

Palestinian society has endured decades of radicalisation. Hamas openly embraces jihadism and the destruction of Israel. The Palestinian Authority has spent years glorifying terrorists and financially rewarding the families of Palestinians who attack Israelis. Children have been exposed to propaganda glorifying martyrdom. Palestinian political culture has repeatedly elevated the dream of eliminating Israel above the compromises required to build a functioning Palestinian state.

That does not mean every Palestinian believes the same thing.

It does mean we should stop pretending that Palestinian politics resembles the American civil-rights movement.

There is no Palestinian Martin Luther King.

There is no Palestinian Mandela.

And on October 7, the world saw something very different from a civil-rights struggle.

Civilians were brutally massacred. Women were raped. People were kidnapped. Families were slaughtered in their homes. Young people were hunted down at a music festival.

That violence was not incidental to Hamas’s worldview.

It was an expression of it.

And I am supposed to support this because I am Black?

How dare anyone make that demand of me.

What Exactly Do Black People Owe Arabs?

I’ll take the argument further.

If we really want to reduce politics to racial inheritance, what exactly do Black people owe Arabs?

I have received some of the most openly racist messages imaginable from Arabs because I refuse to support the pro-Palestinian movement.

Again: why should my race obligate me to them?

Arab and wider Islamic societies were involved in the enslavement of Africans for more than a thousand years. Enslaved Africans were transported across the Sahara, through the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean into North Africa, Arabia and the wider Muslim world.

The exact scale is difficult to calculate because the trade stretched across centuries and the historical records are incomplete. Estimates vary considerably, but they run into the many millions. Some historians have placed the overall number enslaved through the Arab and wider Islamic slave trades in the range of roughly 12 to 18 million, with the true number potentially higher.

And the brutality of that trade is often strangely absent from modern conversations about slavery.

Africans were marched across enormous stretches of desert, with many dying along the way. Women and girls were sold into domestic and sexual slavery. Boys and men were often times castrated.

This was not some brief historical episode. It went on for approximately 1300 years!

And anti-Black prejudice did not magically disappear when those slave systems declined.

Racism against Black people remains a serious problem in parts of the Arab world today. Even the Arabic word abeed—literally “slaves”—has historically been used as a derogatory term for Black people. In Gaza, a neighbourhood commonly referred to as Al-Abeed has long been associated with Afro Palestinians.

I normally dislike analysing history this way.

I do not believe modern Arabs inherit personal guilt for what Arabs did centuries ago, any more than I believe modern Europeans inherit personal guilt for the transatlantic slave trade or everything Europeans once did.

That is precisely the point.

But if someone insists that racial history should determine my political loyalties, then the argument cuts both ways.

You cannot tell me I must support Arabs because I am Black while conveniently forgetting one of the longest and most brutal histories of African enslavement in the world.

The Hypocrisy Is the Point

This is what irritates me most.

The hypocrisy.

The people calling me a “house Negro” imagine themselves to be anti-racists while racially policing the political opinions of a Black man.

They accuse Israel of being uniquely racist while ignoring racism throughout the societies they romanticise.

They invoke apartheid while disregarding the fact that Arab citizens of Israel participate in Israeli society under the same legal citizenship framework as Jewish citizens.

They speak endlessly about colonialism while barely acknowledging centuries of Arab conquest, imperial expansion and slave trading.

They accuse Israel of intolerance while holding up societies in which women, religious minorities and gay people face real persecution and sometimes death.

And then they call me the slave.

Israel is an imperfect country. Like every democracy, it contains racism, political problems, religious tensions and policies worth criticising.

But it is also a country in which Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Christians, Druze, Black Israelis, gay Israelis, secular Israelis and religious Israelis live under one political system and argue openly about the future of their country.

Israel carried out extraordinary operations to bring Ethiopian Jews to safety. Jewish history itself contains slavery, persecution, expulsions, pogroms and genocide.

None of that makes Israel morally infallible. It simply makes the racial caricature absurd.

I do not support Israel because I am Black, and I certainly do not support Israel because I am anyone’s “slave.”

I support Israel because I have read the history, looked at the societies involved and considered the values they represent.

I refuse to allow my skin colour to dictate my politics.

But if the people calling me a racial traitor insist on making race the standard by which my loyalties must be judged, they may not like where that argument leads.

Because even by their own standard, I would still choose Israel.