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WHO IS REAPING THE FRUITS OF THE ISRAELI BLACK PANTHERS’ STRUGGLE?
 
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Ben Reiff
July 26, 2024
972 Magazine
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_ Half a century after setting off a political earthquake from the
impoverished streets of Jerusalem, the radical Mizrahi movement has
been largely forgotten. A new book seeks to untangle their contested
legacy. _

A Black Panthers protest in Jerusalem, 1971., Yosef Hochman, courtesy
of the Yad Yaari Research and Documentation Center

 

_“Israel’s Black Panthers: The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation’s
Founding Myth,” by Asaf Elia-Shalev, University of California Press,
2024._

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.

In today’s terms, the Israeli Panthers were not actually Black; they
were the sons and daughters of the Jewish exodus from the Arab world,
known nowadays as Mizrahi Jews (plural: Mizrahim), but more commonly
referred to at the time as Sephardim. These Jews arrived in their
hundreds of thousands to a fledgling Israeli state in the early 1950s.
But they soon found themselves being racialized as Black
[[link removed]] by
a hegemonic Ashkenazi class, tracing its heritage to Europe, whose
vision of a Jewish state had not much accounted for Mizrahim before
the Holocaust eliminated two-thirds of European Jewry.

Israel’s Ashkenazi founders — including David Ben-Gurion, the
first prime minister — greeted the Mizrahi arrivals with an
abundance of racist disdain. The authorities hosed
[[link removed]] them down with pesticide;
settled them in remote desert camps
[[link removed]] or
crammed them into the homes of exiled Palestinian refugees
[[link removed]] (such as
those in Musrara); proletarianized
[[link removed]] them and
funneled them into menial labor
[[link removed]]; suppressed
[[link removed]] their
culture; separated
[[link removed]] thousands of
them from their children; and forced tens of thousands to
undergo unsafe radiation treatment
[[link removed]] that
led to serious health complications. All the while, a rebellion was
brewing. 

When a group of impoverished Mizrahi youths announced the
establishment of their movement and declared a revolt against the
system, local and international reporters flocked to interview them.
Within weeks, the Panthers counted hundreds, if not thousands, among
their ranks, and led a series of escalating protests and direct
actions designed to make it impossible for the Israeli authorities to
ignore them. They demanded that the state channel its resources toward
addressing the stark social problems that plagued Mizrahim, pulling
back the curtain on Israel’s supposedly socialist ethos.

Saadia Marciano photographed on Jerusalem’s Jaffa Street, 1971.
(Meir Wigoder)

The authorities, however, denied that any such problems existed, and
instead sought to suppress the Panthers’ struggle. Police violently
cracked down on the protests, and infiltrated the organization with a
mole who would feed them information for years — and who was almost
accidentally elected the group’s leader, before convincing them to
choose somebody else. 

Golda Meir, the prime minister at the time, saw the Panthers primarily
as a public relations issue, fearing that their activities could give
Israel and Zionism a bad name abroad and discourage Jews in the
diaspora from immigrating. “I want to get it out of your heads that
you have brought a revolution to the country,” she told a group of
Panther leaders with whom she agreed to meet in April 1971, after they
had initiated a hunger strike in front of the Western Wall. Echoing
her infamous denial of the existence of a Palestinian people, she
insisted: “There is no issue of Ashkenazim and Sephardim here.”

A month later, the Panthers mobilized thousands to a demonstration in
downtown Jerusalem, which ended with protesters hurling glass bottles,
bricks, rocks, and even Molotov cocktails at police. Immortalized as
“The Night of the Panthers,” it was the largest civil disturbance
that the Israeli authorities would face until a mass uprising
[[link removed]] of
Palestinian citizens of the state five years later, which has been
commemorated every year since as Land Day
[[link removed]].

A contested legacy

Despite their seismic entrance into Israeli history, half a century
later, the Panthers and their rebellion have been largely — and
perhaps wilfully — forgotten. Their memory is primarily kept alive
only by a few surviving Panthers
[[link removed]], a
handful of dedicated archivists
[[link removed]] and historians
[[link removed]],
the Mizrahi left in Israel
[[link removed]] and abroad
[[link removed]],
and parts of the broader Israeli radical left
[[link removed]]. But the
Panthers’ relevance, argues Israeli-American journalist Asaf
Elia-Shalev in a meticulous new book, is enduring. 

“I was captivated,” Elia-Shalev writes in the preface, “by how a
group of kids with criminal records and a provocative name helped
redirect the course of the national conversation and forced Israel to
face issues it had been denying. What I was slowly learning about the
Panthers seemed deeply consequential, and in their forgotten story, I
saw the roots of the country that Israel has become.”

“Israel’s Black Panthers: The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation’s
Founding Myth” is the first English book to deal exclusively and
comprehensively with this turbulent chapter of history. It was born
out of an encounter that the author had about a decade ago with one of
the Panthers’ central figures, Reuven Abergel
[[link removed]].

“Israel’s Black Panthers: The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation’s
Founding Myth,” by Asaf Elia-Shalev, University of California Press,
2024.

“I went on a tour of Musrara that Reuven led, and my mind was just
blown by this guy,” Elia-Shalev recalled in an interview with +972.
“He was around 70 years old at the time, and he had this fire and
sense of urgency, and spoke so compellingly about his life. I had just
read the autobiography of Malcolm X, and Reuven sounded like him in
lots of ways; he was saying such powerful things. So I thought, how
come no one has heard this story?”

Over the next several years, Elia-Shalev would record some 50 hours of
interviews with Abergel, which eventually became the foundation of the
book. Abergel does not speak English, and he told Elia-Shalev — who
is himself the grandchild of Mizrahim who immigrated to Israel from
Iraq — that telling his story to an American journalist in Hebrew
felt like “smuggling a letter out of prison.”

Though the author would go on to interview dozens more Panthers,
Abergel’s recollections were crucial because he was the only one
among the group’s leadership cadre who had not yet passed away or
lost his full faculties. “Saadia Marciano
[[link removed]] died
long before I got started,” Elia-Shalev said. “Charlie Biton
[[link removed]],
when I got to him, was very sick and unable to sit down for interviews
with me for very long, and the same with Kochavi Shemesh
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both of whom have since also died.

Elia-Shalev concedes that, given the ideological and personal fissures
that later plagued the Panthers, the emphasis on Reuven’s point of
view risks privileging a certain perspective on events. But he
mitigated this by scouring archives, old news articles, and a
previously classified Israeli police intelligence file to find
everything he could on the Panthers’ activities, how they were
received, and the authorities’ attempts to repress them. 

“There are battles over the legacy of the Panthers,” Elia-Shalev
explained. “I did my best to be faithful to the facts, but I’m
also limited by the materials available and the people that are still
around. Reuven is someone who has spent the last decades of his life,
long after the Panthers, involved in virtually every social justice
struggle in Israel. And that has definitely given him a lot of
credibility to speak on the Panthers [while] others have died or
didn’t remain involved in activism.”

Indeed, in recent years, Abergel has been a regular fixture at
protests against Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories,
the cost of living
[[link removed]] in the country, and
government plans to deport asylum seekers
[[link removed]]. But he reflects back on
what became of the Panthers’ revolt somewhat wistfully, telling
Elia-Shalev: “In every revolution, the dreamers sow the seeds, the
courageous carry it forward, and the bastards reap the fruits of the
struggle.”

Israeli Black Panther Reuven Abergel addressed a crowd at the Levinksy
Park protest camp in south Tel Aviv, July 26, 2011. (Oren
Ziv/Activestills.org)

Rebelling to belong

The Panthers were hardly the first Mizrahim to challenge the racism
and discrimination they faced in Israel. Initially, resistance took
the form of new arrivals urging friends and relatives
[[link removed]] outside
Israel to defy the Zionist emissaries encouraging them to immigrate;
some of their letters never reached the intended recipients because
the Israeli government’s Censorship Bureau confiscated them, deeming
them a national security risk.

By mid-1949, Mizrahim had already begun demonstrating
[[link removed]] at
government buildings across the country to demand better housing,
jobs, and food provisions. Protests continued to spring up throughout
the 1950s in _ma’abarot_ (tent camps for new immigrants) and
the development towns
[[link removed]] that replaced them,
which the police promptly suppressed.

In 1959, a police officer shot a Mizrahi resident of Haifa’s Wadi
Salib neighborhood — where the state had densely settled Mizrahim in
Palestinian homes confiscated after the Nakba — leading hundreds to
flood the streets in fury. Under the leadership of the Union of North
African Immigrants, the protesters called for the elimination of
the _ma’abarot_ and urban slums, and demanded quality education
for all citizens.

The authorities eventually quelled the rebellion, which had
spontaneously spread to other Mizrahi localities as well. A government
commission of inquiry into the events insisted that Mizrahim in Israel
do not face discrimination on the basis of their ethnicity.

More than a decade later, however, even with their share among
Israel’s Jewish population being roughly equal, the socioeconomic
gaps between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim remained stark. This was perhaps
most apparent in the education system
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where a majority of Mizrahi adolescents were not in school, while
Ashkenazim comprised about 99 percent of university students.

Israeli Black Panthers, including Charlie Biton, protesting on
Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, May 1, 1973. (Moshe Milner/GPO)

What distinguished the Panthers from those who preceded them, though,
was the extent to which the Israeli establishment viewed the
organization as a threat. As if to emphasize that danger, the police
and media initially sought to portray the Panthers as being in league
with the anti-Zionists of Matzpen
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a Marxist group largely made up of middle-class Ashkenazim — which
the Israeli media had spent much of the past decade demonizing.

“There was this racist urge to say that these young Mizrahi men
couldn’t possibly be organizing of their own accord, and they must
be puppets on a string,” Elia-Shalev told +972. While Matzpen
offered some support to the Panthers — such as by printing flyers
and T-shirts for their protests, and amplifying their struggle
[[link removed]] in
Matzpen’s journal — the Panthers were wary of allowing too much
room for external influence over their activities. At one meeting
where Ashkenazi activists were felt to have overstepped the mark,
Elia-Shalev explained, “Reuven and his brothers physically kicked
them out.”

The Panthers’ relationship to Zionism, meanwhile, was much less
clear-cut. Throughout the book, the reader can discern a constant
tension between the Panthers’ repudiation of the Israeli regime and
their apparent desire to be welcomed into it as equal partners. From
action to action, and perhaps from activist to activist, the group
seems to have oscillated between these two tendencies.

On the one hand, the Panthers’ backing for a Palestinian state put
them firmly at odds with all but the tiniest minority of Israeli Jews
at the time. On multiple occasions throughout the 1970s,
representatives of the Panthers contravened Israeli law by meeting
with, or trying to meet with, Yasser Arafat and other figures in the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which at the time was
committed to armed struggle in pursuit of liberation.

Moreover, at demonstrations, Panthers frequently chanted “Less for
the Phantoms” — the name of the fighter jets that the United
States sold to Israel — “and more for the Panthers.” And to
protest what they saw as the state’s hypocritical support for the
liberation of Soviet Jewry while Mizrahim languished in poverty in
Israel, they tried to disrupt the 1972 World Zionist Congress.

A Black Panthers protest in Jerusalem, 1971. (Yosef Hochman, courtesy
of the Yad Yaari Research and Documentation Center)

But the Panthers’ rebuke of core Zionist tenets only went so far.
The flyers for their first official demonstration ended with the
sentence: “We will demonstrate for our right to be like all the
other citizens in this country.” Another rally ended with the
singing of Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem. And in their meeting
with Golda Meir, Abergel — who only later became avowedly
anti-Zionist — assured the prime minister that the Panthers are
“devoted to our country, and patriotic, and we love it.”

For Elia-Shalev, this ambivalence is one of the main differences
between the Israeli Panthers and their U.S. counterparts. “The
American Black Panthers were real ideologues, real revolutionaries,
who wanted to join with the oppressed people of the world and create a
new order,” he said. “The [Israeli] Panthers weren’t quite
there. In my view, they talked a big game, used phrases like ‘by any
means necessary,’ and threatened to overthrow the state, but I think
they ultimately wanted to belong.

“They saw the Palestinian struggle as a legitimate one, and they
defined Mizrahim as a potential bridge to the Arab world,” he
continued. “But fundamentally, they thought it was wrong that the
Jewish state would marginalize more than half of its Jewish
population. They were hurt that they were denied an opportunity to
belong to society and the state, and were willing to at least threaten
to overthrow it in order to get a seat at the table. Whatever Zionism
is or was, it wasn’t serving Mizrahim, and so the Panthers came out
against the people who represented it.”

An avenue into power

In March 1972, the Panthers carried out one of the stunts for which
they are most widely remembered — “Operation Milk” — stealing
milk bottles from the doorsteps of one of Jerusalem’s wealthiest
neighborhoods and delivering it to the poor, for whom fresh milk was
vastly unaffordable. Support for the Panthers was growing; one survey
in mid-1971 put it at around 40 percent among Jewish Israelis. And it
was having a tangible impact: the state budget for 1972 — which has
been retrospectively labeled “The Budget of the Panthers” — saw
substantial funding diverted from defense spending to housing,
welfare, and education.

The organization was also gaining prominence abroad. In September
1971, the New York Times ran a cover story on them. Left-wing radicals
from Europe scrambled to meet them, and Panther leaders took up
invitations to attend political summits around the world. 

Israeli Black Panthers take part in a May Day demonstration in Tel
Aviv, May 1, 1973. (Moshe Milner)

Before long, and in spite of some fairly acrimonious infighting, the
Panthers sought to translate their soaring popularity into political
power. A significant showing for the movement in the ballot for the
Histadrut — Israel’s quasi-governmental national labor union,
which was dominated by the Labor Party — in September 1973 raised
hopes that they could bring about a major upheaval in the upcoming
Knesset election, scheduled for late October. They campaigned on a
platform that called for universal health insurance, increased welfare
support, and the freeing of all prisoners.

But three weeks before the polls, on Oct. 6, Syria and Egypt launched
an attack that caught Israel completely off guard, marking the start
of the Yom Kippur War. The election was postponed, and by the time it
eventually took place on Dec. 31 — after the nation had buried over
2,500 troops — the public’s attention was focused squarely on
issues of national security. The Panthers’ momentum, built up over
the span of nearly two years, had completely fizzled, and they failed
to cross the minimum vote threshold required to enter the Knesset.

Over the next few years, the Panthers would try to regroup and recover
from their electoral defeat. But the mood inside the country had
changed dramatically, and there was little interest in “social”
issues anymore. By the time the next election came around four years
later, a series of splits meant that the Panthers were represented
across four different lists. Two of the leadership cadre entered the
Knesset — Charlie Biton, with the Arab-Jewish party Hadash, and
Saadia Marciano, with the Left Camp of Israel (Sheli) — where they
went on to promote the Panthers’ cause inside the corridors of
power.

But most of the Panthers’ traditional base didn’t vote for either
of these leftist parties. Instead, in what’s remembered as the
“Ballot Rebellion” of 1977, they opted en masse for the right-wing
Likud party of Menachem Begin, an Ashkenazi populist who courted
Mizrahim disaffected with decades of Labor hegemony while attacking
Meir’s government for its security failures. Nearly half a century
later, it is Likud — and Begin’s eventual successor as party
leader, Benjamin Netanyahu — that reigns supreme in Israeli
politics, thanks in no small part to a loyal base of Mizrahim
[[link removed]].

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara attend the Jewish
Moroccan Mimouna celebrations, Or Akiva, April 21, 2014. (Avishag
Shaar Yashuv/Flash90)

“If we want to understand how Netanyahu maintains power, and where
the alliance comes from between a large chunk of the Mizrahi public
and the Likud party, the Panthers help us understand how we got there
— even if the causation is a little complicated,” Elia-Shalev
explains. “The Panthers brought to the surface not just the squalid
conditions that [Mizrahim] were living in, but also the injustice of
it, and they told people who to blame: the Labor-dominated Israeli
government.

“By attacking the old order over and over again, they freed people
to rebel and to seek an avenue into power and belonging,” he
continued. “The Mizrahi public by and large didn’t follow the
Panthers after they unleashed this rebellion. The person who was able
to capitalize on the energy was Menachem Begin, who said [to
Mizrahim]: ‘I’m offering you a place on center stage. You’re the
real Jews, the real warriors of this country. Come, join me.’ That
was very appealing, and it worked.”

Unresolved grievances

With widespread Mizrahi assent to Likud hegemony, the socioeconomic
chasm between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim that characterized the era of
Labor rule has certainly narrowed over the past five decades, even if
concrete data remains hard to come by
[[link removed]].
Mizrahi culture flourishes
[[link removed]] in
Israel today, and the authorities have taken concrete steps
[[link removed]] toward
recognizing some past injustices.

Yet vast inequalities still remain. Albeit to a far lesser extent than
Palestinian citizens of Israel, Mizrahim are effectively barred
from accessing
[[link removed]] or living
in [[link removed]] certain
parts of the country due to racist laws and practices emanating
largely from the Zionist left
[[link removed]]. They are
underrepresented in fields such as media, academia, law, and politics.
There has never been a Mizrahi prime minister, and only a handful of
Mizrahim have been appointed to the most highly coveted government
ministries.

The army, too, reflects Israel’s enduring ethnic-class divide, with
Ashkenazim commonly chosen for command positions and intelligence
units; Mizrahim, on the other hand, are more likely to be the cannon
fodder for combat units
[[link removed]] — even as they
have increasingly begun to assert their power
[[link removed]] from
below. And after enduring tortuous legal struggles
[[link removed]] for
housing rights, Mizrahim continue to be evicted from the very homes
[[link removed]] that the state
settled them in three generations earlier
[[link removed]]. The
“bastards who reaped the fruits of the struggle,” as Abergel put
it, have failed to bring about the profound changes that the Panthers
envisioned.

Members of the Israeli Black Panthers disrupt the opening session of
the World Congress of North African Immigrants in Tel Aviv, October
25, 1975. (Ya’acov Sa’ar)

By the 1980s, many Mizrahim had already grown disillusioned by
Likud’s inability to turn its rhetoric into material action, and
found a home in new religious Mizrahi parties: first Tami, which
gained three MKs in the 1981 election, and then Shas
[[link removed]], which has grown since 1984 to
become a major force in Israeli politics. Rather than continuing where
the Panthers left off, however, critics
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characterized Shas as merely “the state’s subcontractor for
welfare services to the needy.” More recently, growing numbers of
Mizrahim have found a home on the radical right
[[link removed]], with
Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is of
Mizrahi heritage himself, succeeding where his idol Meir Kahane
failed.

None of this has stopped Likud and Netanyahu from continuing to
present themselves as saviors of the Mizrahim and the champions of the
downtrodden masses — even invoking the memory of the Panthers in
doing so. “It’s interesting to see nostalgia for the Panthers on
the Israeli right, Elia-Shalev remarked. “You’d never see the
Republican Party being nostalgic for the Black Panther Party of
Oakland. But Likud has very effectively tapped into Mizrahi
grievances, and they obscure the fact that the Panthers were a
distinctly left-wing group, with a very radical program that called
for a socialist economy and recognition of a Palestinian state.”

Nonetheless, Elia-Shalev is not convinced that the bond between
Mizrahim and the right is unbreakable, especially in the wake of
October 7 and Netanyahu’s desperate attempts to cling to power
[[link removed]] as
his public support wanes
[[link removed]].
“I think Israel is going through a paradigm shift right now —
similar to the shift that followed the 1973 War, which ultimately led
to the downfall of Labor and the rise of Likud,” he said.

“It might not happen tomorrow; it could take a few years like it did
after 1973. But I think we’re going to see the downfall of Likud and
the rise of something else,” Elia-Shalev continued. And the legacy
of the Panthers suggests, if the Israeli political map is redrawn,
that an alternative Mizrahi political vision may still be possible.

_BEN REIFF is an editor at +972 Magazine and Vashti Media. Twitter:
@bentreyf._

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