Black and Jewish Activists Have Allied for Decades. What Now?

Eva Borgwardt first embraced the Palestinian cause the summer after she graduated from high school. It happened because of Michael Brown. It was August 2014, and in Ferguson, Mo., not far from her family’s well-off St. Louis neighborhood, protests were erupting after Brown was killed by a police officer. At home, Borgwardt had often wondered who she would have been during the civil rights movement. Would she have really stood up for what was right? Now, as the demonstrations for racial justice and against police brutality dominated the news, her mother, a history professor and scholar of human rights law, told her, “This is a ‘Where were you in history?’ moment.”

Borgwardt went to the protests wheeling a large cooler and handed out bottled water from the sidelines. “I was an 18-year-old white girl,” she said, “trying to be useful.” When the protesters marched, she tugged her ungainly cooler alongside them.

In Ferguson, day after day, Borgwardt underwent “a deep reckoning with systemic racism for the first time,” she said. “I was having to realize that in these protests, on the streets, the police are not the good guys. That structures, like the police, that have served me my entire life are literally deadly and designed to oppress people who live in my city. It was nothing I had been exposed to before.”

At the demonstrations, she was confronted by something else: the connection between the fight for racial justice in this country and the movement for Palestinian liberation. There were Palestinians at the rallies, their banners proclaiming, “Palestine Stands With Ferguson” and “Palestinian Lives Matter.” On Twitter, Borgwardt saw that Palestinians were tweeting support from 6,000 miles away, along with advice on how to cope with tear gas fired by the police. That summer, a deadly Palestinian attack and retaliation by the Israeli military in the West Bank led to weeks of warfare between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. “Suddenly,” Borgwardt recalled, “the parallels were so obvious to me. Black Americans facing a militarized police force and Palestinians in the West Bank facing a military charged with policing.”

Borgwardt, who is Jewish, started to process language she heard at the protests in a new way. “I was socialized to hear phrases like ‘From the river to the sea’ and ‘Free Palestine’ as threatening, as meaning ‘Wipe the Jews off the map,’ instead of being about freedom and equality.”