In the late 1960s, the African-American Black Panther Movement had a global appeal and became a point of reference for the second generation of Mizrahim Jews in Israel. After Angela Davis visited Israel in 1971, a group of young activists named their movement “Black Panthers” as well. It was Saadia Marciano, one of the founding members of the Israeli Black Panthers and a second-generation Moroccan Jewish immigrant, who met Davis and adopted the name for the Arab Jewish Movement to associate racism, segregation, and discrimination against Mizrahi Jews in Israel with the radical African-American liberation movement.

The Israeli Black Panthers were the first to make the connection between the concepts of ‘class’ and ‘ethnicity’. They claimed very clearly and directly that a state in which Mizrahim (and Arabs) are so economically unequal has no right to exist. This was expressed by Martziano’s radical words regarding the division of the cake: “Either the cake will be shared by all or there will be no cake”. (1)

Early one morning in March 1972, they stole bottles of milk from the doorsteps of the middle-class Jerusalem suburb of Rehavia and delivered them to the poor with a label reading: “The children in poverty stricken neighborhoods do not find the milk they need on their doorstep every morning. In contrast, there are cats and dogs in rich neighborhoods that get plenty of milk, day in, day out.”

Many of their actions were directed at the problem of unequal housing conditions and spatial segregation. The Israeli Black Panther movement took the Mizrahi/class struggle out of its local and nationalist framework, linking it to the civil rights struggle in the United States, Third World Marxism, and, for the first time, to the Palestinian struggle in Israel. Another goal was “the shattering of central myths of European Zionism and the state, mainly presenting the prevailing myths of ‘integration of the exiles’, and ‘the law of return’ as false. The innovations here were in the attack upon the ideological roots of inequality - namely, the attack was not directed only at the political policy-makers of the present, but also upon the World Zionist Movement that induced the Mizrahim to immigrate to Israel with various false promises and declarations. It is not by chance that the ‘Black Panthers’ erased the word ‘Zionism’ from their political jargon, albeit they never declared that they were anti-Zionists.”(2)



(1) Saadia Marciano was born in the Moroccan town of Oujda in 1950. His family moved to Jerusalem later that year. He grew up in the impoverished Musrara neighborhood on the border between the Jewish and Arab parts of the city.

(2) See: Chetri, Sami Shalom: "30 years to the Black Panthers in Israel." http://www.kedma.co.il/Panterim/PanterimTheMovie/EnglishArticles.htm#_ftnref1