Zionism split the women’s movement in the ’70s. Will it do the same to BLM?

The Women’s March on New York, January 21, 2017

Dikla Taylor-Scheinman writes in +972, “Three months after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, thousands are still marching in American cities to decry police brutality and racial injustice. Asymmetric confrontations between heavily armed police officers in protective gear and unarmed civilians — particularly Black people and people of color — have become an almost daily occurrence.”

“Even as these protests have become a feature of American life in 2020, the images coming out of them invoke another asymmetric conflict — that between Israel and the Palestinians. Despite their different histories, the Palestinian and Black American predicaments have some common features: both groups lack full political rights and adequate representation, are subjected to daily state-sponsored violence, and have been physically segregated by a host of legal and illegal techniques. These affinities have long been recognized by Black activists, scholars, and politicians — from Angela Davis to Marc Lamont Hill, Michelle Alexander to Jamaal Bowman.”

Betty Friedan photographed in her home, Washington, D.C., 1978

“Yet pointing out these connections at Black Lives Matter protests has brought out a tension for liberal Zionists and mainstream American Jewish groups — including those who identify as feminist. Caught between their universal ideals of social justice and their affinity with Zionism, feminists within the American-Jewish establishment are grappling with moral contradictions that the current political moment has laid bare.” (more…)