How Iran AND Israel Treat BLACK People — The Truth Before You Pick A Side

Right now, your timeline is split in two.

Half the people, you know, are cheering for Israel.

The other half are defending Iran.

Everybody has picked a side.

Everybody has an opinion.

But I have one question that neither side wants you to ask.

How do they treat black people? Not in speeches, not in propaganda, not in what they say to the cameras.

How do they actually treat black people who live in their countries, walk their streets, their streets, and exist under their laws? Because I went deep on both Iran and Israel.

What I found should make every black person watching this rethink everything they have been told about this conflict because neither side, and I mean neither side, has clean hands.

Before we go further, subscribe to this channel.

This is part of our ongoing series covering the Iran war from the angle the mainstream media refuses to touch.

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And let’s get into it.

Let’s start with Iran.

And let’s start with something that most people, including most black Americans, have never heard.

Iran has a black population.

Not visitors, not tourists, not temporary workers.

There are AfroIranians, black people who have lived in Iran for centuries.

They are concentrated primarily in the southern provinces along the Persian Gulf in cities like Bandar Abbas, Hormos Gan, and in the regions bordering the Gulf of Oman.

Estimates vary, but researchers have placed the number anywhere from several hundred thousand to over 2 million people depending on how you define the community and how far back you trace the lineage.

And the origin of that community is slavery.

The Persian slave trade, which over overlapped heavily with the Arab slave trade, brought East African people to Iran over a period spanning more than a thousand years.

From the 7th century onward, enslaved Africans were transported from the coasts of what are now Kenya, Tanzania, Mosmbique, Ethiopia, and Sudan into the Persian Gulf region.

They were used as laborers, domestic servants, pearl divers, soldiers, and in agricultural work in some of the most brutal conditions imaginable.

If you watched our video on the Arab slave trade, and over 150,000 of you did, you already know that this was one of the longest and least discussed slave trades in human history.

It predated the transatlantic slave trade by centuries and continued well into the 20th century.

Iran did not formally abolish slavery until 1929.

Even after abolition, the social consequences never disappeared.

Today, AfroIranians live in a state of invisibility.

They are among the poorest communities in the country.

They hold almost no political power.

Their cultural traditions rooted in African music, spiritual practices, and oral history are marginalized.

They are rarely represented in Iranian media, education, or public life.

When researchers and journalists have attempted to document their existence, they have been met with resistance from Iranian authorities who would prefer the world did not know this community exists at all.

The racism Afroar Iranians face is structural and deeply embedded.

The Farsy language itself contains derogatory terms for black people that are still in common use.

Colorism is rampant across Iranian society with darker skin being associated with poverty, low social status, and undesirability.

AfroIranian women in particular face compounded discrimination, marginalized for their race, their gender, and their economic status simultaneously.

And here is something that connects directly to the war happening right now.

The southern provinces where most AfroIranians live are among the most neglected regions in the entire country.

While Thrron poured resources into its military and nuclear programs, these communities were left without adequate schools, hospitals, infrastructure, and economic opportunity.

The Iranian regime spent billions on missiles and proxy wars across the Middle East.

Meanwhile, the descendants of enslaved Africans living within their own borders were treated as if they did not exist.

Some AfroIranian activists have spoken publicly about this.

The response from the regime was predictable.

Surveillance, intimidation, and silence.

The protests that erupted across Iran in late 2025 and early 2026 included voices from these communities.

And when the government began killing protesters, thousands of them, you can be certain that the lives in those southern provinces were not the ones Thran was concerned about protecting.

So that is Iran, a country with a black population born from slavery, maintained in poverty, and erased from public consciousness.

A country that has never acknowledged, apologized for, or made any attempt to repair the damage done to its aphrodescendent community.

Now, let’s cross the border into Israel.

And buckle up, because this is where it gets even more disturbing.

Israel markets itself to the world as the only democracy in the Middle East, a homeland for the Jewish people, a nation built on the promise of belonging.

But if you are a black Jew in Israel, that promise has a very different meaning.

There are roughly 170,000 Ethiopian Jews living in Israel today, a community known as Beta Israel.

Their connection to Judaism stretches back thousands of years.

According to their own tradition, they descend from the tribe of Dan, one of the original 12 tribes of Israel.

They maintain Jewish practice, ritual, and identity for centuries in isolation in the Ethiopian highlands long before modern Israel existed.

In the 1980s and the 1990s, Israel launched dramatic operations.

Operation Moses, Operation Joshua, and Operation Solomon to airlift Ethiopian Jews out of Ethiopia and Sudan.

Thousands were brought to Israel in what was presented to the world as a heroic rescue.

A Jewish state bringing its lost people home.

But what happened after they arrived tells a very different story.

Ethiopian Jews were placed in absorption centers that functioned more like holding facilities.

They were subjected to a process of cultural erasure.

Their religious practices which had been maintained for millennia were deemed insufficient.

Ethiopian Jewish religious leaders were told their ordinations were not valid.

Community members were required to undergo symbolic conversion rituals, essentially being told that their uh Judaism was not Jewish enough for Israel.

One of the most disturbing scandals in modern Israeli history emerged in 2013 when it was acknowledged that Ethiopian Jewish women have been given long acting birth control injections in some cases without full informed consent and Israeli investigative journalists exposed the practice.

Health officials had been administering Depo Provera shots to Ethiopian women at transit camps before they entered the country and continuing the injections after arrival.

The birth rate among Ethiopian Jews in Israel dropped by 50% over a decade.

When the story broke, the Israeli Health Ministry issued a directive telling gynecologists to stop prescribing the contraceptive if there was any doubt that the women understood the treatment.

Let that sink in.

A nation that defines itself by the promise of never again was suppressing the birth rate of its black Jewish population.

It goes beyond reproductive rights.

Ethiopian Jews in Israel face systemic discrimination in virtually every measurable category.

They are disproportionately poor.

They face higher unemployment and their children are over represented in the lowest performing schools and underrepresented in universities.

Housing discrimination pushes them into segregated neighborhoods.

When Ethiopian Israeli youth have taken to the streets to protest, which they have multiple times, most notably in 2015 and 2019, they have been met with tear gas, rubber bullets, and mass arrests.

Police brutality against Ethiopian Israelis has become a defining issue for the community.

Video after video has surfaced of Israeli police beating, arresting, and harassing Ethiopian Jewish citizens.

In 2019, the shooting of an unarmed Ethiopian Israeli teenager by an offduty police officer sparked nationwide protests.

Thousands of Ethiopian Israelis took to the streets.

They blocked highways and they demanded justice.

The parallels to Black Lives Matter were impossible to ignore and they were not lost on black Americans watching from across the ocean.

Then there are the African asylum seekers.

Tens of thousands of migrants and refugees primarily from Aatray and Sudan entered Israel through the Sinai Peninsula in the 2000s and early 2010s, fleeing war, dictatorship, and persecution.

Israel’s response was not compassion.

The government built a massive detention facility in the Negv desert.

Senior Israeli politicians referred to African asylum seekers as infiltrators and as a cancer.

Legislation was passed to detain them indefinitely.

Deportation campaigns were launched, pressuring Africans to leave for third countries in Africa with cash payments and threats of imprisonment.

The message was unmistakable.

Jewish or not, refugee or not.

If you were black in Israel, you were a problem to be managed, not a person to be welcomed.

And now, in the middle of this war, Israel is asking the world to support its cause.

It is asking for solidarity.

It is asking black Americans, some of whom serve disproportionately in the US military, which is currently fighting alongside Israel, to view this as a fight for democracy and freedom.

But democracy for whom? Freedom for whom? If you are connecting these dots, hit that like button right now and drop a comment because this is the conversation they do not want us having.

So, here we are, the two nations at the center of the biggest military conflict in a generation, and neither of them can look black people in the eye with a clean conscience.

Iran built a black population through slavery and then pretended they don’t exist.

Israel rescued black Jews from Africa and then treated them as secondclass citizens in their own promised land.

Iran silences its aura Iranian community through neglect and suppression.

Israel polices its Ethiopian community through force and systemic exclusion.

And both of them right now today are asking for your support, your sympathy, your sons and daughters in uniform.

This is not about picking a side between Iran and Israel.

This is about recognizing that black people are not a priority for either side.

We never have been.

We are an afterthought in Iran’s domestic policy and a problem to be managed in Israel social hierarchy.

Our history in both nations is one of exploitation, eraser, and control.

And yet, black Americans make up a disproportionate share of the US military that is currently fighting in this conflict.

Black tax dollars are funding this war.

Black communities will bear the economic consequences of rising oil prices and inflation, and black voices are being told by both sides to pick a team and cheer.

The leaders we study on this channel saw through this decades ago.

Malcolm X refused to align with any nation that didn’t align with black liberation.

He viewed global conflicts through the lens of what they meant for black people, not what they meant for empires.

He would look at this war and ask one question.

What’s in it for us? And the answer, as it has been for every war in American history, is nothing.

I’m not here to tell you who’s right and who’s wrong in this war.

Smarter people than me are arguing about that and they can’t figure it out either.

But I am here to tell you this.

Before you wave a flag for either side, you deserve to know how that side treats people who look like you.

Not what they say in press conferences.

Not what their diplomats tweet.

How they treat black bodies in their streets, in their hospitals, in their housing, in their courts, and in their history books.

And now you know.

Iran erased its black population.

Israel marginalized its black citizens and both of them are currently engaged in a war that black American soldiers are fighting and diying in while black communities at home receive nothing in return.

That’s not opinion.

That’s documented history.

That’s data.

That’s the testimony of AfroIranians and Ethiopian Israelis who have been saying this for years while the world refused to listen.

Now you’ve heard them.

Share this video.

Send it to everyone in your group chat.

Send it to the person who’s been arguing online about which side to support.

Send it to anyone who thinks this war has nothing to do with black people because it has everything to do with us.

Subscribe, hit the like, drop a comment, and tell me, did you know about the AfroIranian community before today? Did you know what Israel did to Ethiopian Jewish women? I want to hear from you.

I’ll see you in the next one.