I am a Zionist Jew, and I believe with every cell in my body that Zionism and Pan-Africanism are the same fire burning in two different hearths.

Both are the cry of indigenous peoples who were torn from their ancestral lands, scattered across the world, enslaved, colonized and told they had no right to exist as free nations. Both are the answer: “We are going home. We will live free on our own soil, or we will die trying.”

Israel did not “rise from the ashes” in 1948 by accident or conquest.  

Israel was resurrected in 1948; the legal, moral and historical restoration of the world’s oldest indigenous nation to its ancestral homeland after two thousand years of exile.

That resurrection was no random event. It rested on an unbroken chain of international law and recognition stretching back decades:

• The San Remo Conference (1920), where the victorious Allied powers of World War I formally adopted the Balfour Declaration and assigned Britain the Mandate for Palestine with the explicit purpose of “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”  

• The League of Nations Mandate (1922), which enshrined San Remo into binding international law, recognizing “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and calling for “reconstituting their National Home in that country.”  

• The U.N. Partition Resolution 181 (1947), which reaffirmed the Jewish right to statehood and was accepted by the Jewish leadership (the Arabs rejected it and launched a war of annihilation).

• Napoleon Bonaparte’s Proclamation (1799), which was the first time a modern head of state publicly called for the restoration of Jewish national sovereignty in the Land of Israel, inviting Jews “to claim your political existence as a nation among the nations” under French protection.

Every brick of Israel’s rebirth was laid on legal foundations recognized by the entire civilized world long before 1948. The Jewish people did not steal a country; we returned to the only land that had ever been ours, under the same kind of international guarantees that later midwifed the independence of Ghana, Togo, and dozens of other African nations.

And when famine and genocide struck our black African brothers and sisters in Ethiopia, which country on earth opened its arms, risked its planes, and airlifted tens of thousands of black Jews—“Operation Moses” in 1984, “Operation Solomon” in 1991—straight into the Jewish homeland? Israel.

The only nation in history to rescue black Africans by air because it saw them as family, not as “others.” No European power, no Arab state, no global superpower did what Israel did. We brought our black cousins home because their blood is our blood.

That is Zionism in action: the love of a people who know exile and slaughter, reaching out to another people rising from the same chains.

Today, that same love demands we stand together again—because the same enemy has returned.

When students in New York, London, Paris and Berlin march waving Palestinian flags and chanting “From the river to the sea,” they have been twisted into believing they are fighting for something noble. They think they are on the side of the oppressed. They are not. They have become the unwitting tools of evil itself.

These demonstrators are not thinking people. They draw no correlation between their demands and the consequences that will follow. They scream for Israel’s destruction without ever asking what happens the day after—the moment the only Middle Eastern bulwark against jihadism is gone and the black-flag armies pour south unopposed.

They are driven only by the need to feel righteous, to inflate fragile egos with the illusion that they are “on the right side of history.”

Accountability is alien to them; when the churches of Africa burn brighter because of the path they helped clear, they will simply change the subject, rewrite their slogans and pretend that their hands are clean.

They will never admit that their “constructive activism” was pure destruction—that they spent their youth as the loudest cheerleaders for the re-enslavement of black Africa.

These self-styled “progressives” have been seduced by a lie so complete that stares them in the face, yet they refuse to see: They now serve the most racist, imperialist force on earth today—jihadist supremacy that views black African Christians as inferior beings to be converted, enslaved or erased.

By screaming for Israel’s destruction while ignoring the crucifixion of pastors in Mozambique and the convert-or-die massacres in Mali, they expose their own racism. Their “justice” is selective: Jewish lives are expendable, and black Christian lives are invisible unless they can be weaponized against Jews.

One day—when the jihadi tide reaches deeper into Africa and the churches of Accra and Abidjan burn—they will wake up. And on that day they will face a lifetime of repentance, because they will have to admit they spent their youth epitomizing evil, marching for the re-enslavement of black Africa, and cheering the very ideology that wants to wipe indigenous peoples—Jewish and African—off the map.

If Israel falls, the jihadi southward march accelerates tomorrow. There will be no Western tears if Accra or Abidjan falls, just as there were none when Gao and Timbuktu fell.

Fourteen centuries ago, Arab armies swept out of the peninsula, conquered North Africa, enslaved millions of black Africans and imposed a religious supremacy that never fully left. Today, their ideological heirs—JNIM, Islamic State, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab—march south once more. They do not come as liberators. They come to burn churches, crucify pastors, rape Christian girls and force entire villages to choose between Islam and death.

This is not “resistance.” This is conquest dressed in religious clothing, the same supremacist ideology that fires rockets at Israeli school buses and beheads Nigerian farmers for praying to Jesus.

The jihadist belt now stretches from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, and its soldiers chant the same war cry against Jews in Jerusalem and Christians in Jos, against synagogues in the Negev and village churches in the Sahel. Their goal is the same: no independent Jewish state and no independent Christian Africa, only submission.

That is why every black Christian defending his village in Burkina Faso or northern Togo is fighting the same war Israel fights every day. That is why every Israeli soldier holding the line in Gaza or Lebanon is holding the line for African freedom, too.

Zionism and Pan-Africanism are not allies of convenience. They are the same movement, separated only by geography. Both say: An indigenous people has the absolute right to live freely on its ancestral land. Both say: Never again will we be stateless and defenseless. Both say: Our children will grow up speaking our languages, praying in our churches and synagogues, dancing to our drums and our klezmer—free.

Israel and black Christian Africa do not need the world’s permission to survive. We have walked through fire before. We know who we are. We are family. And family stands together.

Zionism is Pan-Africanism. Pan-Africanism is Zionism.  

Our enemies are the same. Our future will be the same—free, proud and unbreakable—or not at all.

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