In July 1965, the editorial of BaMa’arakha, a Hebrew-language journal published by the Sephardi Council in Jerusalem, reported that Golda Meir, then Foreign Minister, decried the council’s English-language publication. The problem with Israel’s Oriental Problem, the ‘offensive’ bulletin, was that it offered scathing criticism of the racism of Israel’s Ashkenazi elites and the state agencies under their control. Specifically, the bulletin focused on the systemic racism against Mizrahi Jews that was deliberate and designed to shut them out of the centers of political and economic power. The bulletin offers incisive analysis that preceded critical Mizrahi scholars by at least two decades, and moreover, made explicit comparisons between the embedded racism of the Zionist state and other forms of racial discrimination and violence: colonial (referencing the British Empire) and anti-blackness in the US. The council’s intention was to mobilize “opinion leaders” in the English-speaking world in the fight against Zionism’s racism and enlist Jews already active in the civil rights movement. While earlier issues focused on intra-Jewish racism, those published after the June 1967 war pivoted to discuss the Palestinian plight within the same analytical framework that highlighted race. This is surprising, considering that the public critique of Zionism as a form of racism became much more common a few years later, culminating in the UNGA resolution 3379 of November 10, 1975. Furthermore, the analyses offered over the duration of the publication belies stereotype of Mizrahi Jews as “Arab haters” and ardent supporters of Zionism and Ashkenazim as liberal advocates of universal rights. Interestingly, the council’s most prominent luminary, Elie Eliachar, advocated on the pages of the English-language bulletin that the solution to the Palestine problem must be in the hands of Palestinians themselves. Even more importantly, he insisted that Palestinian identity – and therefore the right to determine the future of Palestine – encompasses those living under all territories occupied by Israel, including those the state insisted on calling “Israeli-Arabs” and were its citizens. My paper will therefore contextualize the publication of this bulletin within the politics of decolonization, the American civil rights movement and the conundrum of American Jewishness between identification with Zionism, civil rights activism and the changing understanding of race.