Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.
Updated Feb 15 at 4:55 p.m.
It’s the early 1970s. Revolution is in the air, and the Black Panthers are on the march. But these are not the streets of Oakland or Chicago, and the protesters are not African Americans. This is Jerusalem, and these are the Black Panthers of Israel.
The Israeli Panthers were founded more than half a century ago by Mizrahi Jews, mostly young men whose families had made aliyah from Arab countries. Their experience of the Zionist dream had become more a nightmare of discrimination, poverty and hopelessness.
In its short existence in the ’70s, the protest movement alarmed Israeli leaders and frightened the public. But by articulating the inequities in Israeli society, the Panthers also helped bring about positive changes.
Journalist Asaf Elia-Shalev has chronicled the history of the group in a new book, “Israel’s Black Panthers: The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation’s Founding Myth,” out March 19 from University of California Press.
The Ashkenazi founders of modern Israel, such as David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, originally hoped to create a Western European-style, secular nation. For those early leaders, the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Arabic-speaking Mizrahi immigrants from countries such as Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Iraq during Israel’s first two decades “jeopardized that dream,” Elia-Shalev said in an interview earlier this month.
“There was certainly discrimination in practice and in policies,” he explained. “In housing, education, employment — every field you can think of. There were racist attitudes towards Mizrahim. There was condescension and ignorance. [Ashkenazim] were embarrassed by their Mizrahi cousins, and they justified the discrimination by saying they were not well suited for civilized society.”
Drawing on archival press accounts, government documents and interviews with surviving Panthers, Elia-Shalev — a Los Angeles-based reporter with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency — weaves a tale of young street toughs who underwent a political awakening. These young men saw their plight as a result of entrenched prejudice and lack of public resources, and they decided to fight back.
“The core group was in the dozens,” he said. “The number of people involved was probably in the hundreds. The number of people who showed up for demonstrations was in the thousands.”
Though by all appearances militant, most of the violence surrounding the Panthers came from the police, who would arrest and often beat the young radicals. But the Panthers had a flair for capturing media attention and the public imagination. For example, one day in 1972, Panthers stole bottles of freshly delivered milk from the doorsteps of wealthy Jerusalemites and, in a Robin Hood-like gesture, handed them over to the poor.
Ultimately, Israel squandered the gifts and talents of a whole generation of Mizrahi people by marginalizing them.
They even managed to land a two-hour summit with then-Prime Minister Golda Meir, who tried to understand the Panthers but ultimately could not and instead blamed them for their own misfortune.
“Golda is the villain in this story. She was compared to Pharaoh. She was a total racist,” Elia-Shalev said. At the same time, he acknowledged, “people who want to celebrate the biggest contributors to Israel’s development pass over her too often. She had this legacy of creating state institutions.”
After meeting with representatives of the Panthers in April 1971, Meir called them “not nice boys.” Some were caught up in drug abuse, and all were surveilled closely by the police. One of the book’s shadowy characters is a Panther turned police informant who was embedded for years in the upper echelon of the group’s leadership. His steady stream of intel compromised the group’s effectiveness.
“Ultimately, Israel squandered the gifts and talents of a whole generation of Mizrahi people by marginalizing them,” Elia-Shalev said. “They weren’t permitted to participate in society. They had criminal records, were barred from the military because of it, and were then barred from other opportunities, and were relegated to life on the margins. That was the tragedy a lot of the Panthers expressed.”
Elia-Shalev, the grandson of Iraqi and Ladino-speaking Bulgarian Jews, was born in California to Israeli parents and has also lived in Israel.
His interest in Israel’s Black Panthers began after he started as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley in 2006, majoring in political science.
“I wrote a history paper about how students at UC Berkeley were affected by the shift from the civil rights era to Black nationalism and the militancy of the [American] Black Panthers,” he said. “In exploring my own identity as Jewish, Israeli and Mizrahi, I stumbled upon the Israeli Black Panthers.”
While in Israel a few years after earning his degree, he attended a seminar with Reuven Abergel, one of the founders of the Panthers.
“The things he was saying I hadn’t heard anyone else say,” Elia-Shalev recalled. “I said, ‘I’d love to interview you.’ Turns out he was looking for an American who could put his story out there. He always felt imprisoned by his lack of English. He felt [telling his story in] English was really important.”
Not much had been published about the group in English, Elia-Shalev said, and “some of it was wrong.” He spent a decade piecing the story together while working at news organizations in Israel and the U.S., including from 2019 to 2021 at the Monterey County Weekly, where he covered agriculture and the environment.
The Mizrahi Jews of Israel have come a long way since the days of the Panthers, he said. They have risen in all aspects of society, including national politics. In his book, Elia-Shalev details a list of policy changes that arguably would not have happened without political pressure from the Black Panthers. They include expanded allocations to Mizrahi communities to fight poverty, hunger and inadequate housing. The government also changed the rules with respect to serving in the Israel Defense Forces and began allowing individuals with prior criminal records to enlist.
“It would not have happened on its own,” Elia-Shalev said. “It was this rare moment in Israeli history when social domestic issues had more prominence than security and existential concerns. The Black Panthers fought so hard.”