Mick Hartley

A surprising connection.

Simon Deng, a Christian from South Sudan, was taken into slavery at the age of nine when his village was attacked by Arab Sudanese soldiers – just one small chapter in the long and largely ignored history of Arab jihad against Black Africans across North Africa over the centuries. He now lives in the US.

On Oct. 7, 2023, I watched the news and was sick. Seeing the video of the attack on the music festival in Israel, everything welled up inside me. From the experience of my people, from my own experience, I knew exactly what had just happened and how those terrified hostages were going to suffer. Israelis had been raped, tortured, mutilated, and burned alive just like my people had been for centuries. I will never forget the fires and the burned bodies: They looked exactly like what I saw the day my village was destroyed.

What Hamas did was precisely like what Arab Sudan’s genocidal government did to my people. Since they invaded Africa in the seventh century, Arab Muslims had always been doing jihad. We will never really know many Blacks have died between then and today. It is one of those numbers which, because it is unknown, proves how huge the suffering must be.

Both Israel and my country, South Sudan, were born through jihad, one which began in 1948, the other in 1955. In 1948, the Arabs declared a jihad against the new State of Israel and tried to finish what Hitler had started. In 1955, the Black Christian people of southern Sudan revolted against the north because the Muslim government refused to give them autonomy or freedom of religion. In response, the government declared a jihad—but not on paper, as it would later in 1989. The Arabs killed possibly up to 1.5 million Black people in the south. Nobody knows the number they enslaved, since nobody really counted.

The Israelis, like the Black Sudanese, won the war but lost the peace, and the jihad continued. People in the West only learned about jihad and slavery in Sudan in the 1990s, during the Second Sudanese Civil War, which began in 1983, but it was going on throughout the first one, which ended in 1972. I was kidnapped in the 1960s, so this terror has been happening for my entire lifetime. All we know is that about 200,000 Black Christians like me were enslaved in the Second Civil War, which only stopped in 2005, and about 2 million were killed. Sadly, there are still many Africans owned as slaves today. Now I saw what was done to me and my people being done to Israelis.

Israel secretly helped the southern Sudanese fight the north. We would never have fought the Arabs to the negotiating table without them. Today, South Sudan is independent partially because Israel chose to help us win over our Arab colonizers—because that is what they are. The Jewish people, just like us, are native to our lands, which the Arabs conquered.

Recently, I went to Israel to show my solidarity with my Jewish brothers and sisters, and with the (enslaved) hostages. I walked twice from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and back along the highway to show that we Africans love and care about Israel. I picked strawberries on a kibbutz and met with Jewish hero Natan Sharansky—a freedom fighter who went to prison, like Dr. King, for trying to free his people.

Living in New York, I see protests against Israel. These manifestations of sympathy for evil should disgust all decent people. They disgust me because Hamas is made up of the same people, acting on the same colonizing and imperial motivations, who enslaved me and murdered 4 million of my Black brothers and sisters.