The strategy of divide and conquer is one of the oldest methods by which dominant powers have maintained their control over disparate disenfranchised populations.
Jewish history is especially rife with examples, from the Macedonian’s exploitation of the Hellenists and the Roman’s exploitation of Hebrew sectarianism, to the British Mandate’s use of the Zionist establishment against the anti-imperialist Jewish underground. In the intervening millennia, landlords, kings, and nobles have used Jews in intermediary roles as debt collectors and bankers to maintain the divisions between Jews and peasants.
Even the story of Jews in the United States, which defies many norms of historical anti-Semitism, contains its fair share of divide and conquer exploitation. In the 1960s, with the rise of the New Left, people from across the spectrum of race, class, ethnic and religious backgrounds joined together to fight racial discrimination, the war in Vietnam, and other US policies driven by capitalism. Many Jews joined in these movements, seeing an alignment between their Jewish values and the ideals for which the left was fighting.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation under Director J. Edgar Hoover, however, saw the Jewish community as particularly vulnerable to divide and conquer tactics. Through programs like the GI Bill, America’s Jews had since World War II been granted inclusion in many spaces that continued to discriminate against visibly non-white populations. This, along with the New Left’s growing hostility towards the State of Israel, created points of contention within the left over the Jewish Question, specifically when it came to whether Jewish comrades should be seen as members of an oppressed minority population or as privileged white allies to oppressed peoples.
Therefore, operatives within the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (Cointelpro) decided to feed falsified intelligence to leaders in the Jewish community detailing anti-Jewish plots of the Black Panther Party. Their intended target, the activist Rabbi Meir Kahane, had already proved useful to the bureau as an anti-communist consultant and had recently founded the militant Jewish Defense League to combat anti-Semitism.
In a memo from the FBI archives, recently publicized by political analyst Yousef Munayyer, the New York Office (NYO) wrote to Hoover that Kahane’s journalist credentials “would enable him to give widespread coverage of anti-Semitic statements made by the BPP and other Black Nationalist hate groups” to the broader Jewish community.
The memo also notes that “the NYO does not feel that [JEDEL] could be motivated to act as called for… if the information gathered by the NYO concerning anti-Semitism and other matters were furnished to that organization without some embellishment.”
In other words, in order to effectively turn the JDL into a weapon against the Black Panther Party, the FBI must fabricate evidence of their anti-Semitic aims.
To this end, the FBI created a character, a Black veteran of WWII who was sympathetic to Jews after being motivated to learn in high school by his favorite teacher “Mr. Katz” and being treated by a “Dr. Rothstein” after an auto accident.
A letter was sent to Rabbi Kahane from this “source” regarding his son, who was an active Black Panther and had recently returned from a trip with fellow panthers to Algeria. The letter claims, “Last night my boy had a meeting at my house with six of his Black Panther friends. From the way they talked it sounded like they had a plan to force Jewish store owners to give them money or they would drop a bomb on the Jewish store. Some of the money they get will be sent to the Arabs in Africa.”
Soon after, in May of 1970, Kahane led the JDL in clashes against the panthers in Harlem, and, true to FBI expectations, he proclaimed to the press that the Black Panthers were “Nazis” and “vicious anti-Semites who pose a definite clear and present danger to Jews.”
Building off existing Jewish fears of Black Panther reprisal against successful Jewish businessmen and landlords, the FBI targeted a vocal, sympathetic, Jewish leader to amplify tensions between the Jewish and Black communities, in New York and across America, at the peak of the New Left’s rise. At this crucial turning point for US Jews, on the precipice of greater acceptance within America’s white power structure while simultaneously in a period of close cooperation with the country’s disenfranchised minorities, the FBI guided the Jewish community towards greater cooperation with the powers that be at the expense of our pursuit of justice and equality.
America’s Jews today find themselves at a similar turning point. The political climate of the Donald Trump presidency, and the greatest resurgence of the American Left since the 1960s, present an opportunity for Jews committed to advancing our people’s traditional understanding of economic and social justice.
But again, the powers that be seek to divide Jews from the left with dogwhistles of anti-Semitism and embellished accounts of the left’s anti-Jewish sentiments. Again, the establishment leaders target Jewish figureheads to parrot this messaging in the press and over social media, dividing the Jewish public from movements that seek to end the marginalization and oppression of groups both at home and abroad. Again, the Jewish community stands at a crossroads, and our decisions will define our people’s story in the American Diaspora for decades to come.
