The Black Panthers (Hebrew: הפנתרים השחורים, romanized: HaPanterim HaShchorim) were an Israeli protest movement of second-generation Jewish immigrants from North Africa and Middle Eastern countries.

The movement was founded early in 1971 by young people in the Musrara neighborhood of Jerusalem, in reaction to discrimination against Mizrahi Jews, which existed since the establishment of the state.

[1] The movement's founders protested "ignorance from the establishment for the hard social problems", and wanted to fight for a different future.

All of the initial ten members were children of Moroccan immigrants,[2] around ages 18–20, and most had dropped out of elementary school and spent some time in juvenile delinquent institutions.

They were influenced by the Community Work Division of the Jerusalem municipality, who introduced them to the mass media as an outlet for expressing their demands for change.

[3] The Black Panthers felt that discrimination against Mizrahi Jews could be seen in the different attitude of the Ashkenazi establishment towards the immigrants from the Soviet Union.

[4][5] After 1949, Musrara went from being a wealthy Arab neighborhood to a neglected area with a dangerous no-man's land full of mines, on the border of Israel and Jordan's West Bank.

The government began planning to rebuild the neighborhood with high-rise apartment complexes for Soviet immigrants, meaning that the North African Jewish residents would be displaced.

[7] Charlie Biton, Saadia Marciano, Roni Orovitz, Reuven Abergel, Meir Levi[8] and Kochavi Shemesh[2] were prominent members of the Party in its early days.

[11] The Panthers ignored this decision and proceeded with the demonstration without a permit, gathering in front of Jerusalem's City Hall on March 2, 1971, to protest the distress of poverty, the gap between poor and rich in Israel, and the ethnic tensions within Jewish Israeli society.

They passed out a leaflet calling for actions to stop class and ethnic discrimination within Jewish Israeli society and for the release of the arrested organizers.

Reuven Abergel has since been active in the struggle for social justice and peace in Israel and the Palestinian territories as a member of various groups and movements.

The young Black Panther activists raised public consciousness to the "Oriental question", which subsequently played a role in Israeli political debate in the 1970s and 1980s, contributing to Likud success in that period.

Although inequalities remain, many Mizrahi Jews have over the years entered the mainstream of Israeli political, military, cultural and economic life, including Moroccan-born Amir Peretz and David Levy, Iraqi-born Shlomo Hillel, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer and Yitzhak Mordechai and Iranian-born Shaul Mofaz and Moshe Katzav.

In 2007, the Israel State Archives released documents revealing that Ya'akov Elbaz, one of the Black Panthers who had met with Golda Meir, was a police informant.

[17] Elbaz joined the Party shortly after the first demonstration and had a prominent presence because he supplied large sums of money and strongly advocated for violence.

Kochavi Shemesh, another member of the Party, said that Elbaz was one of the leaders who promoted violent struggle, provided Molotov cocktails, and was a provocateur on behalf of the police.

The groups were united by migrant identities and adopted grassroots strategies and interethnic solidarity in order to resist racist social structures.