After the Obama administration voiced “dismay” earlier this month at the decision by the Jerusalem municipality to approve 900 new housing units in the Jewish neighborhood of Gilo, straddling the Green Line, former housing minister Meir Sheetrit quipped that the White House seems to think that Jerusalem has been the capital of Israel since Camp David, not King David.
Criticisms of Obama’s earlier Cairo speech – which urged Arabs and Muslims to accept the reality of the Holocaust but not the Jews’ historic claim to Jerusalem or the modern Zionist movement’s century-long connection to the Holy Land – are on point but are only half the story. America’s first African-American president not only suffers from historical amnesia regarding Israel’s pre-1948 roots, he is also oblivious to African and African-American debts to the Zionist movement.
The story begins in 1898 when Edward Wilmot Blyden – whose status as the founding father of the modern pan-African movement was recognized by Cheikh Anta Diop, George Padmore and Kwame Nkrumah – lauded Theodore Herzl’s launching of “that marvelous movement called Zionism” in Der Judenstaat (1896). Born into a free black family on Charlotte-Amalie, capitol of St. Thomas, Danish Virgin Islands, Blyden always prided himself on his ties to Amalie’s 400-strong Jewish community which produced such expatriate luminaries as Impressionist painter Camille Pisarro and whose rabbi taught him the rudiments of Hebrew.
Read Entire Story in Jerusalem Post
White House, Zionist movement, Jews’ historic claim to Jerusalem, Hebrew
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