Black Israelis — Ethiopian Jews, Hebrew Israelites, and children — have been volunteering for the front lines of battle against Hamas, both in the military operation in Gaza and in the propaganda war that rages constantly on social media platforms.
The Jerusalem Post reported Monday:
[Ethiopian Israeli Kalkidan] Tegin, who has more than 25,000 TikTok followers, is part of a group of Black Israelis in their 20s and early 30s who have been vigorously defending Israel online — and in English — since its war with Hamas began on Oct. 7. They are an informal but increasingly visible part of Israel’s public diplomacy, known as hasbara, which seeks to defend Israel from criticism and burnish the country’s image overseas, and kicks into high gear during wartime. (TikTok, especially, has become a major online battleground, with a recent analysis showing that pro-Palestinian hashtags are massively outperforming pro-Israel hashtags on the platform.)
In social media posts and TV appearances, they have shared stories about how they and other Black Israelis have been affected by the war. They have called out African-American critics of Israel, including those aligned with the Black Lives Matter movement. They have also pushed back against race-based, anti-Israel narratives spread by pro-Palestinian activists, such as that Israelis are white, European colonizers of land belonging to indigenous Palestinians.
In addition to Tegin, the most prominent Black content creators include Titi Aynaw, an Ethiopian Israeli model and former Miss Israel; Noah Shufutinsky, better known as the rapper Westside Gravy, an African-American Jew who immigrated to Israel last year; Ashriel Moore, a former contestant on Israel’s version of the reality show “The Amazing Race” and a Hebrew Israelite activist; Yirmiyahu Danzig, a Caribbean-American Israeli educator; and Lilaq Logan, an IDF commander with both Jewish and Hebrew Israelite heritage.
Read the full article here.
Black people have been targeted by Hamas since October 7, when terrorists murdered African farm workers on Israeli kibbutzim. Yet the Black Lives Matter organization within the U.S. has thrown its support behind Hamas since the days after the attack.
Black Hebrew Israelites consist of several sects, some of which are antisemitic, but others of which are pro-Israel. A large group immigrated to Israel and converted to Judaism decades ago, and moved to the southern city of Dimona, in the Negev desert.
Recently, a Black Hebrew Israelite school was targeted in a terror attack in Indiana, after a woman drove a car into the school in the mistaken belief that it was Jewish. She was attempting, she said, to take revenge for “her people back in Palestine.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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