The anti-Israel agenda of the woman who co-authored the 2016 Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) Policy Platform has resurfaced amid the social unrest in the U.S.
By United with Israel Staff
In 2016, Rachel Gilmer helped assemble and draft the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) Policy Platform, adopting an anti-Israel position and endorsing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) agenda, which seeks the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state.
That same year, Gilmer declared on Twitter, “Zionism is white supremacy.”
Her M4BL platform reflected this attitude and included the false accusation that Israel committed “genocide” against Palestinians, which remains a popular modern-day blood libel.
When an Israeli newspaper confronted Gilmer about the accusation and asked if she consulted any “Jewish allies,” she told the publication, “Using the word genocide wasn’t a haphazard piece of work.” Gilmer then listed several virulently anti-Israel organizations with which she consulted, including IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace.
Gilmer is herself Jewish and was a member of a Zionist youth group called Young Judea during her teen years.
She eventually rejected her past, shaping not only M4BL’s anti-Israel agenda, but also serving as co-director of a group called Dream Defenders, which claims that “the state violence [minorities] experience [in the United States] is directly tied to the violence facing Black and Brown communities in Palestine and around the world.”
Part of the group’s mission is to promote a negative image of the Jewish state, relying heavily on the “apartheid” myth that is popular in anti-Israel circles.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Dream Defenders brings an annual delegation of American activists to Israel, including the Judea and Samaria region, with a tour led in 2016 “by a guide who identified himself with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which is recognized as a terrorist organization by the United States and many other countries.”
That same year, Gilmer wore a t-shirt supporting the PFLP, with a quote from the terror group’s deceased leader Ghassan Kanafani stating, “Don’t die without being a rival,” the watchdog group Canary Mission reported.
Canary Mission also noted that Dream Defenders produced an educational series for sixth to eleventh graders called “Blacked Out History: Rebellion Curriculum Toolkit,” which “glorifies the PFLP” and “preaches violence under the euphemism of ‘struggle.'”
“The curriculum mentions various violent PFLP strategies such as ‘hijackings, assassinations, car bombings, suicide bombings, paramilitary operations against civilian and military targets’ and concludes ‘[t]hey want to be free from global imperialism. They want liberation. They want equal rights. Just like the Dream Defenders.'”
According to the ADL, “Dream Defenders continue[s] to promote gross inaccuracies about Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including claims that Israel is committing genocide and ethnic cleansing, and claims describing Israel as a colonial entity or apartheid state.”
“Equating America’s history of racism to issues surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is misleading and defending terror organizations is unconscionable under any circumstances,” the ADL concluded.