The killing of Eyad al-Hallaq in Jerusalem was unsettling, as was the horrific images of George Floyd in Minneapolis gasping for air.
Both of them civilians, both killed by police. Their tragic and outrageous deaths are part of a long history of violence.
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But the similarities end there, and after observing the path social media took this weekend, maybe it needs to be said clearly: The attempt to draw parallels between Jerusalem and Minneapolis are manipulative, and in many ways irresponsible.
Joint Arab List MK Aida Touma-Sliman implored "whoever is shocked by the murder in the US, to look closely – a whole nation is choking under occupation without being able to breathe."
Leading pundits worked hard to frame the shooting of al-Hallaq as an example of systemic racism in Israel, and many even blamed the public security minister by proxy.
Others expertly determined that it was "murder", and a few self-branding mavens were quick to use the hashtag #ArabLivesMatter, the local version of #BlackLivesMatter.
That's not only self-righteous populism but a manipulative way to use conscience. The shooting in Jerusalem, as horrible as it was, did not take place on racial background, but in the context of a nationalist conflict, which unfortunately creates terror. Just this week there were those who told us an intifada was the natural and desired result of all the talk about extending sovereignty. That is the reason for police presence in Jerusalem, and that is the background for the tension.
It is precisely this background that the comparison between al-Hallaq and Floyd tries to hide, and it is an integral part of the efforts to blur semantics in the Jewish-Arab conflict.
It's easy to frame it in terms of racism, and it's clear why the Left goes there. Because when you paint the conflict with terms of racism and apartheid, it's clear who is bad and who is good, who is cruel and who is the victim, who needs to be punished and who deserves compensation.
The comparison between Minneapolis and Jerusalem gives its presenters a semblance of sophistication, but it's part of a known rhetorical method to reduce the discussion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to escape its complexity.
Joint Arab List Chairman MK Ayman Odeh did not wait for the unfortunate shooting of al-Hallaq to tweet, in English, a statement of solidarity between the Palestinian struggle and the protests in Minneapolis.
The advantages of the analogy are clear: It attempts to show that Palestinians, like blacks, are innocent victims of an evil regime; and their struggle is part of the resistance to colonialism. Zionism – like apartheid, slavery and racism – is just another flank in Western imperialism, the theory goes.
There's no point in arguing with racism and colonialism.
To a considerable extent, this tactic harms the black struggle. The pathos-laden statements of solidarity hide a calculated effort to appropriate the legacy of civil rights movements and to flaunt their values in order to hide the Palestinian responsibility for violence.
To take a leaf out of the books of those who deploy the term "whitewashing" as a code name to accuse Israel of "laundering" the occupation, perhaps we can now coin a neologism and term this the "blackwashing" of Palestinian terror by anti-Israel activists comparing between the riots in the US to the conflict in the Middle East.
Above all, the speed with which the Israeli Left uses the tragedy and turns it into a parallel of racist crime in the US shows that even 25 years after Oslo, the Left's representatives and spokespersons still run away from debating the complex and unique substance of the regional violence.
Al-Hallaq is not the local Floyd, and that in no way makes his death less tragic.
