[Although reviewer Cobban finds many faults in this book, her
essay shows how this volume is nevertheless a useful guide to this
relatively under-discussed chapter of 1960s and 1970s movement
history.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

DID PALESTINE DIVIDE ‘THE MOVEMENT’?: HOW ACTIVISTS IN THE 60S
AND 70S GRAPPLED WITH THE QUESTION OF PALESTINE  
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Helena Cobban
December 9, 2019
Mondoweiss
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_ Although reviewer Cobban finds many faults in this book, her essay
shows how this volume is nevertheless a useful guide to this
relatively under-discussed chapter of 1960s and 1970s movement
history. _

, Stanford University Press

 

_The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Divided the American Left_
Michael R. Fischbach
Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9781503611061

Michael Fischbach is a smart, committed historian who earlier made his
name by publishing meticulous (and very important) studies of the
U.N.’s own records of land ownership records in pre-1948 Palestine,
and then of the many ways the peace process had failed to address the
Palestinians’ numerous still outstanding property claims against
Israel. A few years ago, he turned his attention to another
little-served area of historical research: the way that the big
American social-reform movement(s) of the 1960s and early 1970s
grappled with the Palestine Question. The result has been two
significant volumes from Stanford University Press—“Black Power
and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color
[[link removed]],”
which came out earlier this year, and this new volume, “The Movement
and the Middle East,” which was issued more recently.

It feels strange to have reached the age when the activities you
engaged in as a young adult have now become the subject of academic
historical research! So I came to my reading of “The Movement and
the Middle East” [[link removed]]with a
huge degree of interest and found a wealth of engaging interview
material and documents about the interactions that various strands of
“the Movement” had with the Palestine Question, focusing on the
years after the 1967 Israeli-Arab war. Here, for example, you can find
an account of the visit that Nick Medvecky, a student attending Wayne
State University on the GI Bill and also a leftist journalist, made to
Palestinian guerrilla training camps in Lebanon and Jordan– and then
to Israel!– back in 1969. Medvecky had originally been invited to
visit Israel by “two Israeli military officers who were studying at
WSU”, who told him the Jewish Agency would cover his expenses. But
he tacked on the earlier legs of the trip himself, in response to a
suggestion from a member of the Organization of Arab Students at WSU.
(I got so interested in Medvecky’s trip that I found online versions
of the dispatches he sent back from it. You can read them here
[[link removed]].)

Thus, as early as 1969, the Israelis and their allies were reaching
out to shower benefits, free trips, and their version of propaganda on
politically active American students– even though some, like
Medvecky, were able to subvert that plan a little. In 1970, Medvecky
worked with a group of politically engaged returned Peace Corps
volunteers to organize a group tour that was originally planned to
revisit the countries he had made in 1969. Seventeen people (including
three who were Jewish) went on the 1970 tour—pre-figuring the
on-the-ground educational tours that groups like Eyewitness Palestine
continue to organize till today. When the Palestinian hosts on the
early legs of that trip learned that the group planned to visit Israel
and that Medvecky had been there the year before, they were horrified.
The group as a whole then expelled Medvecky. The three Jewish members
of the tour later issued a statement that began, “As revolutionaries
of Jewish heritage in the United States of America, we take this
opportunity to wholeheartedly support the Palestinian liberation
movement.” 

The book is full of vignettes like these, which underline that the
roots of the politically progressive Palestinian-rights activism we
see in today’s United States go very deep indeed. But I am sorry to
report that overall, I found the book disappointing, at a number of
levels. One shortcoming is the scarcity of coverage of the
contribution that Arab-American activists were making to the Movement
as a whole. Much of that material can, it is true,  be found in
Pamela Pennock’s “The Rise of the Arab-American Left: Activists,
Allies, and Their Fight Against Imperialism and Racism, 1960s-1980s
[[link removed]].”
But it would have been nice to have it given a lot more consideration
in this volume. 

“The Movement and the Middle East” also does very little to
systematically evaluate the role that differences over the Palestine
question played in helping to build, expand, or weaken this Movement.
Instead of providing any such evaluation, Fischbach ends the book with
this stark warning:

“Progressives fighting back against the agenda of President Donald
Trump and his allies would do well to consider the weakening of the
Left in the 1960s and 1970s due to its infighting about
Israel/Palestine as a cautionary tale.” 

It seems strange to take the relatively small phenomenon of the
infighting that occurred in the movement over Palestine and to heap on
it the entire blame for the weakening of the Left from the mid-1970s
on. The historical record strongly indicates that it played only a
small role in the Movement’s demise.

“The Movement and the Middle East” suffers from a number of
structural problems. The most glaring of these was the decision to
split this material off into a volume quite separate from the material
Fischbach used in his “Black Power and Palestine.” Given the fact
that the Black Power campaign in its various forms, had a much longer
and deeper history in the United States than the various other
campaigns that came together with it in the mid-1960s to form what
Fischbach calls “the Movement”, excising the Movement’s
foundational civil rights/ Black Power component leaves, in his
telling, only a complex series of morsels behind. 

Fischbach evidently realizes this. He devotes only one of the book’s
twelve chapters to examining attitudes toward Palestine/Israel within
the specifically antiwar part of the movement; but there, given the
crucial role of Black leaders in building and sustaining the antiwar
campaign, he is forced to include significant amounts of material
about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In “Black Power and Palestine,”
he had already provided an intriguing, chapter-length account of the
cautious and pro-Israeli way in which Dr. King approached the
Palestine Question. In the chapter on the antiwar movement in his
latest book, he revisits Dr. King’s caution on Palestine with new
and intriguing evidence culled from the FBI’s now-available
surveillance tapes on King, writing that after the (Israeli-initiated)
outbreak of the June War of 1967 King,

“was deeply concerned that the June War was sidetracking the antiwar
movement and felt it gave President Lyndon Johnson some breathing
room, inasmuch as public attention was focused on the Middle East[…]
He also worried that the big peace march he was planning for August of
that year would need to be postponed or cancelled ‘until this
situation is cleared up,'[…] His aides opined that the Movement was
‘suffering badly’ because Jews who were prominently represented in
it, had become hawks when it came to the Middle East. [King’s aide
Stanley] Levison, Jewish himself, agreed that the war was a ‘real
monkey wrench’ in the Movement’s activities, saying that King’s
hopes of a big march were now unlikely to be realized. King cancelled
the proposed march a few days later.”

Another structural problem “The Movement and the Middle East”
suffers is its lack of any powerful organizing chronology, such as
would help the reader better understand the broad sweep of what was
happening in those years. Fischbach opens both his Prologue and
Chapter 1 with strong references to the outbreak of the 1967
Arab-Israeli war. But actually, both the two major strands of the
Movement—the Black Power strand and the antiwar strand—had
histories that went back considerably earlier than 1967. A reader
needs to be told, or reminded of, this upfront. What happened was (as
indicated in the King episode noted above) that the outbreak and
subsequent course of the June 1967 War caused reverberations within
both those pre-existing strands of the Movement, that were
particularly sizeable within the antiwar strand because of the leading
role that many Jewish intellectuals and organizers played within it.
Large-scale, public protests against the war—most of them centered
on or emanating from college campuses—had been a feature of U.S.
public life for a couple of years already before the Israelis stunned
the world in 1967 by preemptively striking their neighbors’ air
forces and then marching in to seize control of massive swathes of
their neighbors’ land. (At the time, of course, the vast majority of
the U.S. corporate media did not describe the war that way. They
described it more like, “plucky little Israel, when facing a
terrible threat from those really scary Arab countries around it,
somehow magically came out on top, just proving once again how
backward those Arabs really were…”)

Many of the Jewish leftists then active in the antiwar movement had
grown up in strongly Zionist homes. Fischbach provides numerous great,
illustrative quotes from Jewish activists from those days, including
this one, from the (now-pro-Palestinian) novelist Hilton Obenzinger:

“I stayed up one night during the [1967] war, upset about it, and in
the early dawn sat… to read the NY Times, weeping. Wasn’t Israel
sort of socialist? Weren’t they advanced, democratic and
progressive? Why did the Arabs want ‘to push the Jews into the
sea’?

My moment of awakening was in 1969 when Moshe Dayan went to Vietnam on
a fact-finding tour and offered complete support for the US war. This
was cognitive dissonance in a big way – and I either had to be
consistent with my principles or begin fudging them out of some sense
of ethnic loyalty.”

A third problem the book suffers—and I am not sure whether this is
structural or more purely esthetic—is that Fischbach provides almost
zero information about what subsequently became of any of the people
whose 1960s-era struggles over the Palestine Question he so
painstakingly records. Rather than being real-life, flesh-and-blood
participants in an ongoing national drama, his subjects are presented
as historical specimens, apparently trapped forever in the glowing
amber of the 1960s. But this, they certainly were not. Hilton
Obenzinger went on to become a thoughtful, steadfast supporter of
Palestinian rights. (Fischbach had even taken the quote above, with
footnoted attribution, from an interview with Obenzinger that was
published in Mondoweiss!) Then, there is Carl Gershman. Fischbach
devotes two sizeable chunks of his text to detailing the complex
cognitive acrobatics the young Gershman engaged in in the late 1960s
as he worked hard both to serve his employers in the Anti-Defamation
League and to being a mover and shaker in a succession of far-left
groupuscules. But it would have been really informative for readers to
be told (or reminded) that Gershman went on to found and head one of
the major pillars of Washington’s “soft-power” imperial project,
the National Endowment for Democracy. (Thus, he started out defending
and serving one small settler-colonial state with imperial ambitions
to playing a leading role in the machinery of the American empire…
Interesting, huh?) 

Many other former leftists went on, of course, to travel even further
and more speedily to the right than Carl Gershman. These were the
neoconservatives whose rapid lurch from former ultra-leftists to
freshly-minted ultra-rightists has been amply described in numerous
other books. (Soggier leftists like myself had our own theories about
that phenomenon, many of them referring to people with authoritarian
or narcissistic personalities. Be that as it may… ) But what is
notable is that this lurch happened on a broad scale in the late
1960s, and disproportionately—though not exclusively—affected
Jewish people. The emotions excited by the June War certainly played a
massive role in that. “The Movement and the Middle East” has a
helpful small section on the lurch into neoconservatism. It includes a
quote from neocon Seymour Martin Lipset who wrote, “Some see in the
[1967] Israeli defeat of the Arabs, the one example of an American
ally which has decisively defeated Communist allies in battle.” 

Fischbach notes that, “There was a significant Jewish shift away
from liberals and the Democratic Party and toward the Republican Party
in the four years since 1968, when the New Left was at its height.
Nixon received 35 percent of the Jewish vote in 1972, nearly triple
the amount he got in 1968.” He mentions the possibility that this
shift had some causes other than the difference—specifically, some
forms of anti-Black racial fears. But he also writes that some people
felt that “Nixon had proven himself to be a trustworthy ally of
Israel since becoming president in 1969.” Again, some more robust
chronological anchoring of the text would help readers sort out
possible causation issues here, since by the time of the 1972
elections Nixon had also made his breakthrough visit to China and had
negotiated a framework for a settlement with North Vietnam. So is it
not possible that voters, Jewish or otherwise, who were concerned
about the need to rein in the carnage of the Vietnam War were
supporting him (or choosing not to oppose him) on those grounds, too?

Back in the 1960s, leftist activists in the United States who wanted
to understand the Palestine Question faced two other challenges to
which Fischbach pays insufficient heed. One was that the
Palestinians’ own self-organizing and autonomous political action
did not erupt onto the Middle Eastern and world scenes until after the
victory the _fedayeen_ groups scored in the 1968 Battle of Karameh…
and even then, the political nature of the _fedayeen_ groups was
unclear and disunified. When considering events in Vietnam, it was
fairly straightforward for activists to see that what was happening
there was a decades-long struggle for national independence in which
the nationalist side was represented by a single disciplined
organization, the NLF. But Palestine? Was it even a thing? And who
were these Palestinian fighters? What was Fateh? What was the PFLP?
What were the myriad other smaller groups that separated from them?
What was the PLO? Few people within the Middle East were able to
answer these questions with much clarity, let alone those outside it.
The _fedayeen_ groups and even the PLO itself (which the _fedayeen_
took over in 1969) had publicity departments that were rudimentary at
best, chaotically counter-productive at worst. There were two fairly
widely known _fedayeen _leaders: Fateh’s hyper-active, gun-toting
Yasser Arafat and the PFLP’s super-charismatic George Habash. They
seemed plenty swashbuckling—especially the PFLP, when it carried out
daring hijackings of airliners in 1970 (though those did lead to the
Jordanian government’s brutal expulsion of all the _fedayeen_ in
1970.) But what did all those groups stand for? Few people inside the
United States knew.

Meantime—and I believe this is an important part of the broader
story—back in the 1960s and 1970s and for a good period thereafter,
most of the people in the United States who were prepared to challenge
the Israeli narrative were either Black… _or they were Republicans_.
There were various reasons for the Republican thing. Some of those
people had had dealings with the large U.S. oil-business complex in
the Arab Gulf countries, and had gotten to know Palestinian exiles who
worked in the oil complexes. Maybe some of those republicans had some
anti-Semitism in their thinking? But back in those days, there was
also a broad array of Republicans prepared to look at the Palestine
Question on its merits. There was still, after all, an active wing in
the GOP who were old-school, Midwestern liberals; the evangelicals
were still far from having taken over the whole party.

Bottom line for some White (especially Jewish) people in the movement
was they probably felt they had to consider whether, regarding
Palestine, they wanted to align themselves with a bunch of Midwestern
Republicans on that issue, or whether they should stick to the more
comfortable and allegedly more lefty tradition of siding with Israel.

So, back to that key month of June 1967 with which Fischbach opens his
book. He identified two transformative things that happened that
month: the Arab-Israeli war and the launching in San Francisco of the
Summer of Love, which was—in his telling—an iconic moment in the
emergence of the Movement. Yes, the Movement did have a strong strand
of sexual liberation/libertinism in it, along with a more serious
strand of women’s liberation, the antiwar strand, and the Black
Power/ civil rights strand. In all those ways, it had a large effect
on the culture of the United States. But whether it had much serious,
lasting effect on the country’s politics is a different question,
and one that Fischbach never really addresses. Today, looking back
from 50 years later, we could say that on all those fronts, there has
been serious pushback from supporters of the conservative status quo.
The campaigns for sexual liberation and women’s liberation won the
federally guaranteed right to abortion in 1974, but that has been the
target of very serious pushback ever since. (Though in the realm of
sexual liberation, the whole movement for LGBTQ rights has made
advances in the past 15 years that few of us could have dreamed of
back in 1970.) The antiwar campaign succeeded for around two decades
in infecting the United States’ body politic with a war-aversion
that military people came to call the “Vietnam syndrome.” But in
1991, Pres. G.H. W. Bush and Colin Powell started to push back
seriously with their launching of Operation Desert Storm. The rest of
the ‘90s saw a series of U.S./NATO military adventures in various
places; and then the events of 2001 unleashed a massive tsunami of
American bellophilia that we are still having to live with today. As
for the Black Power movement, it had already won its most signal
victory—the Voting Rights Act—back in 1965 and it then won a few
more in the years that followed; but for nearly all the past 30 years
African-American communities have been subjected to hostile
gerrymandering, voter suppression, and large cutbacks in basic social
services.

So how much of a real political phenomenon, as opposed to a treasured
set of memories of our youthful engagements, was the Movement? And
what are the key lessons that today’s social-justice activists can
take from its record? In his Epilogue, Fischbach argues (as noted
above) that today’s progressives should seek to avoid the kinds of
split over Palestine that plagued the Movement back in the 1960s and
‘70s; and he claims—bizarrely, in my view—that Middle Eastern
politics “present progressive Americans with the same kinds of
challenges they did in the 1960s.” I would argue (as I did here
[[link removed]], some
months ago) that the exact opposite is the case. Things are much more
clear cut today regarding Israel and Palestine. Israel has lurched
deeply to the right over the past 50 years and is more clearly aligned
with the rightwing forces in this country than ever before.
Palestinian-Americans and their allies are a real force in many parts
of the American discourse. No-one today can seriously claim there is
anything socialist about Israel’s society or politics… Yes, there
is still a non-trivial wing of the Democratic Party here that
continues to swear strong (and nicely funded) fealty to Israel. Yes,
we can certainly expect Zionist billionaires like Sheldon Adelson to
pour huge amounts of money into creating splits, distrust, and
fabricated allegations of anti-Semitism inside the Democratic Party,
just as they have been doing inside Britain’s Labour Party. But how
many actual American political progressives are torn at all these days
on issues to do with Israel? Compared with the 1960s and 1970s, very,
very few.

“The Movement and the Middle East” turned out to be a frustrating
volume. It contains a wealth of engaging anecdotes and some very
valuable documentation. But at the level of the broad historical
narrative or the possible lessons for today? That work has yet to be
done.

_Helena Cobban is the President of Just World Educational (JWE), a
non-profit organization, and the CEO of Just World Books. She has had
a lengthy career as a journalist, writer, and researcher on
international affairs, including 17 years as a columnist on global
issues for _The Christian Science Monitor._ Of the seven books she’s
published on international affairs, four have been on Middle Eastern
topics. This new series of commentaries she’s writing,
“Story/Backstory”, will have an expanded audio component published
in JWE’s podcast series. They represent her own opinion and
judgments, not those of any organization._

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