One of the most interesting segments in Israeli-American journalist Asaf Elia-Shalev’s book, Israel’s Black Panthers, is when the Panthers asked for, and received, a meeting with Israel’s then Prime Minister Golda Meir. Meir, a woman operating powerfully in a patriarchal society and world, uses connections with the Arab world (she says through a family marriage) to seek common ground with the Panthers in the meeting. Meir is delusional in her approach.
Israel’s Black Panthers: The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation’s Founding Myth, by Asaf Elia-Shalev
University of California Press, 325 pages
Release date: March 2024
The Panthers, led by Robert Reuven Abergel, a Moroccan Jew brought to Israel when he was a boy, respected Meir. But Abergel and the Panthers were hardly amused by the way she spoke to them. In fact, in the meeting with Meir, and throughout this text, the Black Panthers of Israel were quite serious about bringing change in Israel. They also wanted to confront Israel’s racism and the maltreatment of Arab Jews in the country. This is why Elia-Shalev calls the Black Panthers of Israel “the radicals who punctured a nation’s founding myth.”
The Black Panthers got Meir’s attention even before the meeting. They hand delivered a letter to Meir threatening a hunger strike at the Wailing Wall if she did not grant their delegation an audience with her. They also didn’t wait for an answer from Meir; they began their strike. Meir immediately acted to quash their play by granting them a meeting.
At the meeting, the Panthers presented her with thirty-three demands for reform in the area of “housing, criminal justice, education, and youth delinquency.” It was very similar to the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense’s approach in the United States. America ignored their Panthers; Meir ignored Israel’s.
University of California Press
“The five Panthers and three ministers,” from the Israel government, including Meir, “spoke and chain smoked,” Elia-Shalev writes. “Meir continued to play the role of social worker to the young men one by one” regarding their “education, employment, and family history.” This scene speaks loudly to the overall message of the book. Israel has had problems with “the Other” (as described by Toni Morrison) from the beginning of its founding, and it wasn’t just what they were doing to the Palestinians. Yes, there was Zionism and the forced removal of Palestinians but, at its core, Israel was as racist as most of the European countries at the time, old and new.
The Meir encounter is just one of many that prove this pretty unknown story is important. I hadn’t ever heard of Israel’s Panthers, even though I am aware that the Black Panthers in the United States, my country, inspired many movements for change around the world.
The group began when North African Jews from Morocco came to Israel because of their Jewish faith traditions, at the encouragement of the State of Israel. They were treated horribly, and decided to organize themselves, along with various Arab street gangs, into a serious protest movement called “The Black Panthers.” This story didn’t reach most of us unless we were Israeli and alive during that time. Elia-Shavel talked to people who experienced this movement, including those who participated in the protests—Palestinians and Israeli Jews alike He had access to government records and actual footage of protests.
Robert Reuven Abergel, the key character in Elia-Shalev’s account, was born in 1943 in the Moroccan city of Rabat. His family, “a minority” in Morocco because they were Jewish, were “wards of the Jewish Agency,” the “organization devoted to relocating Jewish people all over to move to the new nation of Israel.” Israel, at the time, was begging Jews to come help build this new homeland.
Robert Reuven Abergel’s parents uprooted their family and headed for Israel. Their transition was dreadful. Their lives included “makeshift camps” and a “fenced-off tent city” where non-European new arrivals to Israel were treated like rubbish. Meanwhile, Israel, following its victory over forces in Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in the Six Day War in June 1967, was actively seeking to make life easier for European and Russian Jews in the city of Jerusalem.
Another Arab Jew in Elia-Shavel’s account, Saadia Mariciano, was the strongest advocate for the creation of a formal protest organization like Black Panthers of the United States. Marciano had read about Huey Newton and Bobby Seale’s work. Other members of the various Arab street gangs who became part of the organization also felt an alignment with the American Black Panthers. The members even chose the name “Black Panthers” because they were often referred to as “Black animals” (shvartse khaye) in Israel because of their North African heritage. They also chose the name because their counterparts in the United States protested, organized, and dissented, but they also fought back. These Panthers were not going to meet violence with love either.
While it is difficult to ascertain any substantive change they inspired, this coalition was able to expose Israel as a nation rife with racism. The many protests the Panthers led in Israel forced the government to crack down with violence and arrests. It was not much different from the way African Americans were able to expose the United States as a deeply troubled, unequal nation.
Israel’s Black Panthers, as Bobby Seale would say, they seized the time.