Earlier this month Black Lives Matter published a platform called A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom & Justice. More than fifty organizations were involved in formulating this document, which is quite long and comprehensive. In terms of it encapsulating a broad range of objectives and recommendations, it answers the need for specificity. Whereas, in the past, it could be said that dreaming and raging, on the one hand, took up a good deal of energy, and the very circumscribed work of local and national organizations in the black community, on the other hand, focused their work with limited cross-consultation. 

This is no longer the case, in that a groundswell of agreed upon issues are coming to the fore. Not the least of factors motivating this work is the outpouring of anger about police violence spurred by social media and the willingness of people in the streets to lend transparency to racial crime perpetrated by agencies vested with the responsibility to establish community safety. Crimes against the black body are being documented, whereas earlier they were easily swept under the rug. 

Three writers have become relatively well-known names, for those who care to delve into analyses of the racial power imbalance: Michele Alexander, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Charles Blow. They are eminently persuasive and passionate writers, as is another, chronicler of a silent kind of injustice, Matthew Desmond. In his book Evicted, he shines a light on the profiteering long a feature in the inner city – in which landlords, irrespective of color but disproportionately impacting African American communities, are shredding families and neighborhoods. They wreak their own kind of violence by keeping the prices of rentals (often in terrible condition) artificially high. There is money to be made off the poor, thanks to our societal decision to evade tougher policy decisions that would keep people in their homes.

The recently published BLM platform was met with a good deal of controversy in the Jewish community at a moment in which it is riven by cries of hypocrisy about Israel. It shouldn’t have been surprising that mainstream Jewish organizations responded to specific analogies within the document to the plight of the Palestinians and an unjust occupation the way that they did. It is the failure of older American Jews to realize that liberals and progressives will understand that three billion dollars being spent on arms to keep Palestinians under siege is nothing short of state terror. White Ashkenazic Israel, long ascendant over Mizrachi Jews and Arabs, have begun to be perceived as an arm of our own white supremacist regime. The decades in which the state of Israel has continually confiscated Palestinian lands, foreclosed Palestinian statehood, locked down Palestinian freedom of movement – are represented, by dint of dedicated military appropriations and expenditures in Washington, as one of the most vivid examples of unjust American-supported foreign investment. 

But – still – what offends so many of us, who cannot be said to live in the Jewish political center, is the unequivocal use of a term in the document that has an international legal conceptual history – genocide. Even more than the references in the BLM platform to the boycott-divestment movement, this term, used to describe what Israel is all about, has been called “unfortunate” by progressive Jewish organizations. For black Americans to refer to Israel as a genocidal regime is shocking, because Israel sprung up as a response to genocide committed against Jews predominantly in the white Christian world. That blacks raised up in black churches (they still play a role, even if not the overridingly powerful role they once did) should foist this charge against the Jewish state goes too far. 

And yet – should we be surprised by the willingness of African Americans who articulate a bold array of recommendations for social and economic justice to link America’s gluttonous appetite for military weaponry, surveillance and incarceration with harm being perpetrated by its proxy in the Middle East? And even if genocide has come to be understood as the extreme case, namely the willful annihilation of a people because of its differing racial or ethnic status, isn’t Israel in fact dead set on erasing the Palestinians – their cultural geography, their history, their rootedness in the land? 

I am suggesting, as are others, that there’s a spectrum of genocidal operations that should come in for deliberation.

I realize that, in writing this plea for consideration of BLM’s platform, I risk papering over what is, in fact, a total lack of awareness of the causes of antisemitism. It operates in a way that is like and unlike many other prejudices, and it lends itself to one of the most odious types of political formulations – conspiracy theories. For the Jews were always, thanks to Christian teachings, understood to be underminers, germs, exploiters, who syphoned energy from below and above.  We are better than everyone else and worse. . . and aberrant. Now it’s true that the Arab presses brandish the same portrayals of Jews that Christian Europe once did. 

So, it’s distressing that the most progressive organizations ally themselves post haste with the BLM platform.  One local organization to which I belong did so “unreservedly.” I want to be counted in, but with my brakes on. For my part, as someone who has long avowed that the Israeli occupation and the devastation that it enables in Gaza will lead to more antisemitism, heightened animosity to Jews in the world, I will travel on the same highway as Black Lives Matter folks travel. I will join others who praise the work of this large coalition that has come out with an audacious list of demands and recommendations, because the work is ultimately important and I believe we should all listen to one another.

To be sure, I have plenty of reservations about all of this – and the singling out of Israel. I would like to point a finger at autocratic Turkey that persecutes the Kurds, or Myanmar, whose “humanitarian” leader watches as her government tramples the Rohingya people. There are plenty of other examples of supremacists annihilating lesser minorities (indeed committing genocide). But not with the outsize military budget that our US government earmarks for Israel, sadly enough.

The trench warfare we have witnessed by beloved Jewish progressive organizations, one dead set against the other, in recent days over this statement should lead us to be more introspective. Dueling press releases, shots across the bow, seem rather unproductive. It’s time for working out our differences about how to make our societies (from a Jewish vantage point) more equitable. One of my colleagues uses the metaphor of being amenable to travel on an expressway, one on which we get out of our lane every so often, to learn from others who are trying to get somewhere. 

I am a Boston driver, alas. I see a lot of swerving without signals, and I know how prone I am to making hasty decisions. If anything, this is the time for Jews who are working to remedy the injustices we see all around us to be kinder to one another. It’s time for us to pay attention to what others are expressing about their struggles, and in this spirit we too will negotiate the turns we need to make in order to get to the right destination. The prophet Isaiah called for the path up ahead to be cleared, as we read in a haftarah this month. It points towards a place where we can express ourselves in accordance with Jewish enlightened teachings, and so can others express themselves with hope, with pride, and with the respect that they richly deserve too.

Above photos are from Wikimedia. Lower photo is by Harald Hoyer from Schwerin, Germany - Security Prison 21.