In January 1971, a short news report appeared on the back page of the left-leaning Israeli newspaper, Al Hamishmar. The editors evidently didn’t think much of the story, but its publication caused an immediate sensation. The headline, a quote from one of the article’s subjects, foretold the emergence of a revolutionary new movement from Jerusalem’s Musrara neighborhood that would set off a political earthquake on Israel’s streets — one whose aftershocks can still be felt today. “We want to organize against the Ashkenazi government and establishment,” it read. “We will become the Black Panthers of the State of Israel.”
The adopted name was deliberately provocative. The Israeli media had regularly vilified the original Black Panther Party in the United States — a militant Black power organization founded some five years earlier in Oakland, California — as antisemitic for denouncing Israel as an imperialist state and expressing solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement. But the Israeli Panthers’ identification with their American counterparts went beyond merely borrowing their name: in the Black struggle against racism, poverty, and police brutality, the Jerusalem youths saw their own experience reflected back at them. ….more
