Salim Yaqub

“OUR DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE”: AFRICAN AMERICANS, ARAB AMERICANS, AND THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLCIT, 1967–1979

Abstract
This article examines the evolution of African-American commentary and activism on the Arab-Israeli conflict from 1967 to 1979. It focuses in particular on the crystallization of a moderate black position that, while continuing to support the existence of a Jewish state in Palestine, increasingly questioned the pro-Israel orientation of US foreign policy. The article argues that the emergence of this perspective reflected a transformation in the politics of the Arab-Israeli dispute, both internationally and within the United States. Following the October War of 1973, the Arab states and the Palestine Liberation Organization, along with Arab-American groups, grew more amenable to an imagined settlement involving Israel’s withdrawal from all of the Arab territory occupied in the 1967 War and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The emergence of this pragmatic position, articulated simultaneously by Arabs and Arab Americans, opened up new political space for African-American moderates, making it possible for them to support Arab and Palestinian claims without opposing Israel’s existence. In the process, Arab Americans began playing more visible roles in national political discourse.

On 15 May 1967, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., announced that he would lead a pilgrimage of American Christians, most of them black, to the Holy Land. The trip, scheduled for the following November, had received encouragement from both the Israeli and the Jordanian governments; King’s delegation would perform religious ceremonies in Israeli- and Jordanian-held sectors of Jerusalem. It was only fitting that black Americans should undertake such a mission, one of King’s aides, the Reverend Andrew Young, told a reporter. “The River Jordan . . . occurs in many spirituals. And the whole story of the children of Israel has been constantly used as an analogy of the Negro’s struggle for freedom.”¹ If Young invoked a parallel kinship with the region’s Arab inhabitants, the sentiment went unrecorded. Jordan was a river; Israel, a people.

The next day, Egypt’s government requested that the United Nations withdraw its peacekeeping forces from portions of Egyptian territory, setting in motion a chain of events that culminated, three weeks later, in the third major Arab-Israeli war. Israel won a swift and stunning victory, seizing the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) from Jordan. In the smoldering aftermath of those hostilities, King and his comrades were forced to cancel their pilgrimage.² Discursively, however, African Americans grew increasingly enmeshed in Arab-Israeli politics. Over the summer of 1967, ascendant black radicals castigated Israel as a violent proxy of Western imperialism and racism. Black moderates like King rebuked the critics and reaffirmed their devotion to the Jewish state.³ Jewish partisans of Israel took solace from the moderates’ support, while stewing over the radicals’ denunciations.

Fast-forward a dozen years to the summer of 1979, and to another controversy involving African Americans and Israel. Andrew Young, now serving as the first black US Ambassador to the United Nations—and newly attuned to the politics of the Arab world—was compelled to resign his post after holding an unauthorized meeting with an official of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Young’s ouster caused an uproar among moderate black leaders, many of them, like Young himself, former associates of Dr. King. Believing Young had been forced out in order to appease Israel and its American supporters, the moderates cried foul.

Both of these instances of black American criticism of Israel, in 1967 and 1979, elicited anguished commentary, mostly from American Jews but sometimes from African Americans as well, about a tragic deterioration in relations between blacks and Jews—historically marginalized groups that had previously marched together in the civil rights movement. But there were fundamental differences between those two moments that escaped the notice, or at least the serious analysis, of commentators at the time and historians ever since. In 1967 (and, indeed, for some years thereafter), the anti-Israel criticism came almost entirely from the radical end of the black spectrum, and the critics not only condemned Israel’s behavior but also opposed its existence. In 1979, the criticism emanated from the African-American mainstream, from figures who upheld Israel’s legitimacy but believed that US policy had become unreasonably partial to Israel and insensitive to Arab, and especially Palestinian, claims and concerns.

There was another difference between those two moments, one of particular interest to readers of this journal. In the earlier instance, Arab Americans were only minimally visible. In the later one, they played a significant role in helping to articulate and amplify the new African-American critique of US Middle East policy. In so doing, they secured for themselves a modest place in national politics that, despite extraordinary challenges and setbacks, they have not since relinquished.

So what is new about the story I will be telling? At the most basic level, it provides a historical narrative of black/Arab-American interactions regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict—drawing on the full range of archival, scholarly, and journalistic sources—that has not, until now, been available to us.⁴ Beyond that, my article sheds new light on a subject that has received some scholarly attention: African- American perspectives on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Journalists, historians, and political scientists have chronicled the events described above, often with great sensitivity and insight.⁵ But they have neglected to do two things. First, they have not called attention to, or tried to explain, the fundamental differences between the earlier and the later cases of African-American criticism of Israel. Instead, they have treated such criticism as a more or less undifferentiated phenomenon that found significant expression at two separate historical moments.⁶ Second, scholars have not connected this transformation in African-American attitudes to the changing politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict, both among Middle Eastern actors and among Arab Americans.

This latter failure is crucial, for the political evolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict offers a key to understanding the evolution of African-American discourse on the issue. Over the dozen years following the 1967 War, and especially after 1973, the center of gravity of Arab and Arab-American politics shifted—away from a complete rejection of Israel’s existence and toward a willingness to coexist with the Jewish state, provided it returned all of the territory seized in the 1967 War and permitted the Palestinians to exercise national sovereignty on some portion of their ancestral homeland. The emergence of this pragmatic position, articulated simultaneously by Arabs and Arab Americans, opened up new political space for African-American moderates: it became possible for them to support Arab and Palestinian claims without opposing Israel’s existence. For most of the second half of the 1970s, relatively few black moderates chose to stand on this newly available ground. Following the Young controversy of 1979, many rushed to occupy it. In the process, Arab Americans gained a new purchase on national politics.

With the notable exception of the Nation of Islam, prior to 1967 national African-American organizations showed only intermittent interest in the Arab-Israeli conflict. In the immediate post-World War II years, most black opinion leaders expressed strong support for the Zionist movement, often portraying it as a model for black American self-help, for African independence, or for the revitalization of the African diaspora. Following Israel’s creation in 1948, however, the controversies resulting from that development did not feature prominently in African-American public commentary. In the 1950s, political initiatives emanating from the Arab world, like the Algerian struggle for independence from French colonial rule or Egyptian President Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir’s vision of pan-Arab nationalism, sometimes won praise from black American leaders and commentators. Yet the anti-Zionist character of such movements received little attention in this celebratory discourse, which focused instead on Arabs’ participation in the emerging “Afro-Asian” bloc of peoples and nations. During the Suez War of 1956, when Britain, France, and Israel jointly attacked Egypt, African-American commentators were far more critical of the first two aggressors than of the third.⁷

All this changed following the 1967 War, which left Israel in occupation of large swaths of Arab territory and made the conflict an issue of much greater global concern. Like Americans generally, African Americans grew more attuned to the dispute, and it became customary for black organizations to take public positions on it. Over the next few years, this African-American commentary followed a distinct and almost unvarying pattern: whereas mainstream civil rights organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, and Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) staunchly defended Israel, radical groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party harshly condemned it.⁸

Mainstream organizations’ affinity for Israel sprang from many sources, among them a long-standing reverence for Jewish biblical history within African-American culture, genuine gratitude for American Jewish groups’ financial and moral support for civil rights struggles, and a fear that alienating Israel could lead to a drying up of that support. One also imagines that mainstream civil rights figures, like many other Americans, tended to internalize the sympathetic portrayals of Israel disseminated in US news media, popular culture, and political discourse.⁹

Black radicals’ anti-Israel perspective, by contrast, was rooted in an emerging “third world” orientation that privileged Arab and Palestinian claims over Zionist ones; in a sharply critical view of US foreign policy; in a growing admiration for the martyred Black Muslim leader Malcolm X, who in his final year of life had traveled in the Arab world and, in some measure, identified himself with it; and in recent efforts by SNCC and like-minded groups to assert their independence from white allies who, as it happened, were disproportionately Jewish.¹⁰

A striking feature of the new African-American discourse on the Middle East was the near absence of any middle ground. Black moderates went well beyond defending Israel’s right to exist; they acted as if the Jewish state could do no wrong and echoed the most celebratory pro-Israel tropes of the era. “A people persecuted down through the centuries has made a land to bloom,” wrote NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins shortly after the 1967 War. “It has built a bastion of democracy in an area which has known only autocracy.” Addressing a gathering of rabbis in upstate New York in March 1968, Dr. King sounded the same themes: “I see Israel . . . as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy.”¹¹

Although King and other pro-Israel civil rights leaders expressed concern for the wellbeing of Arab peoples, they did so in ways that circumvented critical scrutiny of Israeli behavior and that instead posited Zionism as a force for Arab uplift. In a September 1967 statement on the Arab-Israeli dispute, King observed that “the Arab world is in a state of imposed poverty and backwardness that must threaten peace and harmony” if left unchecked (italics in original). The principal culprits were US “oil interests” and “Arab feudal leaders” who “neglect the plight of their own peoples.” King’s rather implausible solution was for “Israel and progressive Arab forces” to cooperate with “the great powers” to address the region’s economic and social discontents. In May 1969 National Urban League president Whitney Young wrote glowingly of Israel’s efforts “to motivate its Arab population and open new opportunities for them.”¹² Young’s observation contained some truth, but it ignored the many forms of discrimination that Israel’s Palestinian citizens faced.¹³ It was also largely irrelevant to the disputes resulting from Israel’s creation in 1948 and from its occupation of Arab lands in 1967.

Black radicals, for their part, not only charged Israel with violent self-aggrandizement but portrayed it as an instrument of Western imperialism and racism. In August 1968 former SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael decried the “evil of Zionism” and claimed that “Israel is nothing but a finger of the United States of America.” One purpose of Israel’s “aggression” in the recent war, he said, “was to destroy the revolutionary governments of the Arab world.” The Black Panther Party agreed, declaring in its official newspaper in November 1968, “The Israeli Government is an imperialist, expansionist power in Palestine . . . and it has the same policy as the US Government has in the Middle East.”¹⁴ Occasionally, black radicals indulged in crude anti-Semitism.¹⁵ Such instances were infrequent, but they understandably provoked a great deal of criticism, not least from moderate black leaders.¹⁶

In hindsight, it is all too easy to dismiss this African-American commentary on the Middle East—in both its moderate and its radical incarnations—as simplistic and tendentious. We should remember, however, that the participants in the discourse were not primarily concerned with Middle Eastern affairs. They were actors in a domestic American drama filled with turmoil, anguish, and dizzying social change; people enduring extraordinary political and psychological pressures and, in some cases, facing grave personal peril.

To a large degree, moreover, the polarization of African-American commentary reflected the state of play in the Middle East itself. In the early aftermath of the 1967 War, the Arab states were defiant in their defeat. They refused to recognize or negotiate with Israel and insisted on the immediate and unconditional return of their lost territory. The emergence at this time of an independent Palestinian movement, publicly committed to “liberating” all of Palestine by force, only heightened the mood of Arab militancy. The Israelis were equally adamant about retaining significant portions of the Arab land they had seized. They believed that the Arab states were too weak and incompetent to pose a serious challenge and would eventually see that they had no choice but to make peace on Israel’s terms. Behind the scenes, there was considerably more flexibility (especially on the Arab side) than the public posturing suggested. But African-American activists had only the public positions to go on, and these provided little basis for an imagined compromise.¹⁷

In this period, Arab Americans played only a limited role in shaping African-American discourse on the Middle East. National political organizing by Arab Americans was in its infancy, and Arab-American activists were first and foremost concerned with stirring their own communities to action. To the extent that they did exert an influence, it was to reinforce the polarization of black attitudes on the Middle East, mainly by making common cause with black radical critics of Israel. The most prominent national Arab-American organization in the late 1960s was the Association of Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG), formed in the months following the 1967 War. Consisting largely of Arab-born intellectuals and professionals, the AAUG embraced Palestinian militancy and radical Arab nationalism. It called for the dismantling of Israel (by force if necessary) and for the political and social transformation of the Arab world. Espousing the same general positions was the Organization of Arab Students in the United States and Canada (OAS), which had existed since the early 1950s. Though representing Arab nationals rather than Americans of Arab descent, the OAS had some Arab-American members and collaborated with the AAUG and other Arab-American groups.¹⁸

Both the AAUG and the OAS reached out to African-American critics of Zionism. In the summer of 1967, after SNCC came under attack from Jewish and moderate civil rights groups for its harsh denunciations of Israel, the OAS leapt to SNCC’s defense and passed a resolution noting “the underlying similarities between the continuing struggle of the Palestinian Arabs in Occupied Palestine against Zionist invasion and exploitation, and the ever-increasing resistance of the Afro-Americans in the United States to a power structure of inequality.” A year later, former SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael delivered the keynote speech at the OAS’s annual convention in Ann Arbor, MI. Addressing his own group’s national convention in Detroit in December 1969, AAUG president Ibrahim Abu-Lughod declared, “We stand united with our Black Brothers in the United States, South Africa, Rhodesia and in Mozambique and Angola . . . . We are heartened by the support of the Black community.” The AAUG’s 1970 national convention, in Evanston, IL, featured an address by the author and activist Shirley Graham Du Bois, widow of W. E. B. Du Bois. She spoke about economic and strategic ties between Israel and apartheid South Africa, an increasingly common theme in third world-oriented discourse at the time.¹⁹

Arab-American activists sometimes engaged with pro-Israel black leaders, but these efforts were often clumsy and ineffectual. In June 1970 the A. Philip Randolph Institute, an organization for black trade unionists, took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times containing “An Appeal by Black Americans For United States Support to Israel.” The moving spirit behind the ad was Bayard Rustin, executive director of the Institute and a major civil rights figure. Abu-Lughod, now a former AAUG president, and Margaret Pennar, public relations director of the AAUG’s New York chapter, wrote separately to Rustin to complain. “I have tried to figure out,” Abu-Lughod observed, “why would a Black American lend his good name to supporting the endeavor of a European settler state” to dominate its neighbors. “I have no doubts that you lent your good name to the statement with good intention; equally I have no doubt that you had nothing to do with its writing.” Pennar wrote: “We believe that if you had had access to all the facts underlying the Middle East tragedy you would not have signed your name to a statement of support for Israel. Possibly you might have been pressured to do so.”²⁰ While Abu-Lughod and Pennar clearly were trying to give Rustin an “out,” it was—at the very least—tactless of them to suggest that a man of Rustin’s experience and stature was serving merely as a mouthpiece for others. In fact, Rustin was personally and deeply committed to Israel, probably more so than any other black leader of the era.²¹

Also protesting Rustin’s ad was Muhammad “M. T.” Mehdi, the Iraqi-born head of the Action Committee on American-Arab relations, an advocacy group formed in 1964. Although Mehdi’s ideological perspective was more liberal than radical, his critique of Zionism and Israel was every bit as scathing as the AAUG’s—and his approach to Rustin equally maladroit. “We charge the [A. Philip Randolph] Institute with hypocrisy,” Mehdi wrote the civil rights leader, “employing a double standard and escalating war efforts in the Middle East. This is to gain the respect of the Zionist Jews and their financial support for the Institute.” When Rustin failed to respond, Mehdi wrote again to express the hope that such silence “is not a kind of discourtesy and discrimination directed at us just as the white Americans used to be discourteous and discriminating against black Americans.” An indignant Rustin finally replied that “this kind of ad hominem argument is not conducive to a meaningful discussion.”²²

In the early 1970s, the politics surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict, in both the Middle East and the United States, became somewhat more fluid. In early 1971 Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, offered to conclude a peace treaty with Israel if it relinquished all of the territory taken in 1967. Never before had an Arab head of state so publicly contemplated formal peace with Israel. Israel rejected the offer, and the administration of Richard M. Nixon did not seriously press Israel to modify its stance. Still, Sadat’s gesture laid the groundwork for the more conciliatory Arab positions that were to take hold a few years later.²³ In 1972–1973 the National Association of Arab Americans (NAAA) came into being. Consisting largely of second- and third-generation Lebanese Americans, the NAAA called for a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict entailing Israel’s withdrawal to the 1967 lines, Arab recognition of Israel, and a just (though as yet unspecified) accommodation of Palestinian national claims.²⁴ Among both Arabs and Arab Americans, the outlines of a possible compromise were starting to emerge.

In African-American circles, too, discourse on the Middle East grew a bit less rigid. In 1972 Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm of New York, a progressive Democrat, ran for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, becoming the first black woman to do so within a major party. In a position paper on the Middle East issued that spring, Chisholm wrote: “While we must protect Israel’s very existence against outside threat by giving her whatever assistance she truly needs, we must also finally launch a new effort to resolve the root cause of this Middle East conflict, the Palestine dispute.” Although Chisholm did not spell how she would reconcile Israel’s existence with Palestinian national claims, her willingness to depart from pro-Israel orthodoxy and foreground the Palestinian issue gratified many Arab Americans. The AAUG Newsletter featured Chisholm in several articles that year, and in May she was the main speaker at the annual dinner of the Association’s Washington, DC, chapter. Middle East policy was not, however, a prominent issue in Chisholm’s campaign, and the candidate said little about it after ending her presidential bid. The thirteen-member Congressional Black Caucus of which she was a member remained, on the whole, firmly entrenched in the Democratic Party’s pro-Israel consensus.²⁵

The October War of 1973 profoundly transformed the politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict, both internationally and within the United States. Although Egypt and Syria suffered a military defeat, they scored a political success in persuading the international community that the regional status quo was untenable. After all, the war not only dangerously exacerbated US–Soviet tensions but also triggered an Arab oil embargo (and related spikes in the price of oil) that severely dislocated the global economy. Over the next few years, something approaching an international consensus emerged favoring Arab recognition of Israel in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Henry Kissinger, the US secretary of state from 1973 to 1977 (and an extraordinarily dominant figure in the nation’s foreign policy), disdained this international consensus, though the extent of his hostility was not obvious at first; for a while it appeared that Kissinger supported substantial Israeli withdrawals on all fronts. Against this encouraging diplomatic backdrop, Arab states became more explicit about their willingness to live in peace with Israel in the event of a restoration of the 1967 borders and an accommodation of Palestinian national claims. The PLO, too, began hinting that it would settle for a mini-state on the West Bank and Gaza. This evolution in the PLO’s position was slow and uneven, and difficult for casual observers to discern. By the spring of 1977, however, it was clear to informed observers that the mainstream leadership of the PLO was indeed prepared for such a compromise.²⁶

Within the United States, the October War and its aftermath had the effect of placing Arab actors in a somewhat more sympathetic light. Ever larger numbers of Americans came to see that substantial portions of the Arab world remained under Israeli occupation and that not all Arabs were calling for Israel’s liquidation. The use of the oil weapon, moreover, showed that pronounced fealty to Israel came at a cost. “Until 1973,” the journalist Robert Kaiser wrote in 1977, “the Arabs’ friends had trouble making the argument that the United States had practical interests in putting more distance between itself and Israel. Now, what might be called the OPEC [Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries] factor has made that argument more plausible to many Americans.”²⁷ In the years following the October War, there was growing support for the Arab position among ordinary Americans. Although opinion polls always revealed significantly greater sympathy for Israel than for the Arab states, the gap narrowed considerably in the mid-to-late 1970s.²⁸ For years, Senator James Abourezk of South Dakota, a Lebanese American, had been a lonely Arab-friendly voice on Capitol Hill. By 1978 he could quip, “It is becoming so trendy to be pro-Arab that I am thinking of switching sides.”²⁹

For Arab-American organizations, these transformations had two main effects. First, they prompted those organizations to become larger, more numerous, more assertive, and more visible. Second, they put a premium on moderation. Like the Arab actors themselves, many Arab Americans recognized that a rare diplomatic opportunity had presented itself, and they strove to place their activism on a more realistic footing. The pragmatic position that the NAAA had staked out prior to the October War became more prevalent among Arab Americans as a whole. Even within the AAUG, talk of a two-state settlement became acceptable, though the group’s official statements stopped short of endorsing it.³⁰

As for African Americans, after 1973 they remained divided over the Middle East, but the divisions became more complex and the overall tenor of black commentary was increasingly critical of Israeli policies. Radical activists stepped up their attacks on the Zionist state, spurred on by a deterioration in relations between Israel and several sub-Saharan African countries, by a deepening alliance between Israel and apartheid South Africa (see below), and by the continuing prominence of the Palestinian movement within the politics of third world solidarity. Among mainstream blacks, opinions became more varied. Bayard Rustin and his allies continued to advocate unstinting US support for Israel, and several African-American commentators accused oil-rich Arab states of engaging in economic blackmail—a standard theme of Zionist polemics at the time. But other opinion leaders began questioning pro-Israel orthodoxies. In late 1973 the Reverend Jesse Jackson, leading a tenants’ protest in Chicago against the rising cost of home heating oil, scoffed at the notion that “the Arabs are holding people hostage for a Middle East position.” The real villains were the oil companies, which exploited the energy crisis for their own benefit. A February 1975 editorial in the Chicago Daily Defender, a black newspaper that ordinarily championed Israel’s cause, showed that the economic argument against the status quo was having its effect. “There are some facts, hard as they may seem, which must be faced,” the editorial noted. Renewed Arab-Israeli hostilities were bound to trigger another oil embargo, causing an economic crisis that fell especially hard on African Americans and other disadvantaged minorities. “If the danger of war again in the Middle East is to be averted, a pullback by Israeli forces from the territory previously occupied by the Palestinians is essential.” Some mainstream columnists warned that, should war resume, African-American soldiers might be sent to fight in the region.³¹

By now, another diplomatic development was challenging pro-Israel sentiment within the black community: an increasingly conspicuous association between Israel and South Africa. Since the beginning of the decade, partly in a bid for African-American support, AAUG figures had portrayed Israel as fundamentally hostile to Africa’s indigenous populations. They noted that the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel continued to occupy, was part of Africa; they insisted that the “settler regimes” of Israel, South Africa, and Rhodesia were expressions of the same colonial and racist impulses; and they alleged that Israel and South Africa shared close economic and strategic ties. In the early 1970s, many black radicals embraced this narrative, but it found little support among mainstream African-American commentators, who often praised Israel’s record of technical assistance to sub-Saharan African nations and generally ignored the allegations about Israel’s ties to South Africa. In fact, Israeli-South African relations defied easy characterization at this time. They had been tense for much of the 1960s but had begun to improve after 1967, as Israel’s status as an occupying power increasingly isolated that nation in international forums. Signs of new cooperation and old hostility coexisted in a confusing mix.³²

From the mid-1970s on, however, the picture was all too clear: Israel, to compensate for the loss of diplomatic support from black African states, was indeed forging a close diplomatic, economic, and strategic partnership with South Africa. In 1974 Israel sent an ambassador to Pretoria (a move previously avoided for fear of alienating black African governments), and two years later it hosted a high-profile visit by South Africa’s prime minister, John Vorster. Over the same period Israel ended all support for anti-South African resolutions in the United Nations, concluded a set of wide-ranging trade agreements with South Africa, and began providing the apartheid regime with sophisticated weapons systems and military materiel, possibly including nuclear-weapons technology. In September 1979 a US reconnaissance satellite detected a mysterious flash in the South Atlantic, prompting speculation by US intelligence agencies, subsequently leaked to the news media, that Israel and South Africa had jointly tested a nuclear bomb.³³

Mainstream African-American commentators could not ignore these developments, though their public discussion of them was initially cautious and restrained. In 1977, activists with close ties to the Congressional Black Caucus formed TransAfrica, an organization devoted to influencing U.S. policies toward Africa. At its founding meeting, the group issued a statement criticizing several Western countries for aiding South Africa; with some trepidation, it included Israel on the list. That same year the syndicated columnist Carl Rowan, who in the mid-1960s had headed the United States Information Agency (and thus was about as Establishment as they came), noted that Israel was supplying South Africa with arms and possibly even nuclear-weapons assistance. “The US,” he wrote, “ought to announce regularly what it knows about which countries are ‘playing footsie’ with South Africa.” Even Rustin expressed concern about Israeli-South African relations, though his intervention seemed less about voicing genuine disquiet than about eliciting reassuring explanations from Israeli officials that could be disseminated in the black press.³⁴ The mainstream critique of Israeli-South African ties would, as we shall see, grow much more forceful in the wake of the Andrew Young affair.

For radical activists—African- and Arab-American alike—reports of Israel’s strengthening ties to South Africa brought grim vindication. The two groups intensified their attacks on the Zionism/apartheid nexus, sometimes in cooperation with one another. In May 1978 the OAS joined forces with the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP) to stage a 3,000-person protest march in Washington, DC. After denouncing Zionist racism in front of the Israeli embassy, the demonstrators marched to the South African embassy to rally against apartheid. Stokely Carmichael, now a major figure in the A-APRP, and Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale took part in the demonstration. A year later a slightly smaller group of African- and Arab-American activists (again including Carmichael) returned to the Israeli and South African embassies to renew the denunciations.³⁵

In the second half of the decade, then, it was increasingly evident that African Americans as a whole were growing more skeptical of Israeli positions and claims, a development with clear relevance to Arab-American political activism. If the 1973 War and its aftermath had constituted one major opportunity for such activism, then the evolution of black attitudes now presented another. The most successful effort to exploit the latter opening came in the form of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign (PHRC), an offshoot of the AAUG launched in 1977 by James Zogby. As its name suggested, the PHRC advocated on behalf of the human and political rights of Palestinians, especially those living under Israeli occupation. A principal strategy of the campaign was to enlist support from non-Arab-American activists in churches, the peace movement, and civil rights groups. The PHRC quickly brought Arab Americans into partnership with influential black leaders and activists. By 1978 the group’s sponsors included the Black Power activist Angela Davis, Congressman John Conyers of Michigan, Josephine Butler of the DC Statehood Commission, Freedomways editor Jack O’Dell, and a number of Detroit City Council members. Congressman Conyers was a keynote speaker at the first PHRC national convention, held that year in Washington, DC.³⁶ In February 1979 the PHRC issued a public appeal to President Jimmy Carter to investigate allegations of Israeli torture of Palestinian prisoners. One of the main signatories of the appeal was the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, a former president of the SCLC and a prominent figure in the civil rights movement.³⁷

A few months later, the AAUG launched its own initiative to cultivate African-American support. In June 1979 it arranged for a delegation of black journalists and activists, generally left/liberal in outlook, to visit Lebanon and tour Palestinian refugee camps and Lebanese communities that had borne the brunt of Israeli raids. Heading the delegation was Jack O’Dell, who in addition to editing Freedomways served as the international affairs director for Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity), Jesse Jackson’s Chicago-based social justice organization. Jackson’s wife Jacqueline Jackson, a senior officer in PUSH, was part of the delegation. The AAUG Newsletter reported that Ms. Jackson, after attending some children’s events, “spoke of her pain and embarrassment in realizing how much of the children’s suffering had been inflicted through weapons and policies originating in the United States.” In early July Jesse Jackson, perhaps influenced by his wife’s experience in Lebanon, called on the United States to alter its “blind and arrogant” policies toward the Middle East. “There will be no lasting peace in the Middle East,” he said, “until a homeland for the Palestinian people is given the same weight of importance as our concerns for the sovereignty of the national territory of the Lebanese people and a homeland for the Jews.”³⁸

As the preceding narrative shows, by the summer of 1979 significant segments of the African-American mainstream had taken positions critical of Israel’s behavior but not opposed to its existence; Arab Americans had staked out similar political terrain and made modest efforts to cultivate black support. Consequently, when Andrew Young was forced to step down as UN Ambassador in August, the resulting controversy drew a more potent and coordinated response from those two communities than it could have otherwise.

A former civil rights leader and congressman, Ambassador Young was a freewheeling and outspoken figure who often chafed against the restrictions of his diplomatic post. In late July he held a secret, unauthorized meeting in New York with Zehdi Terzi, the PLO’s observer to the UN, to discuss procedures in the UN Security Council.³⁹ The Israeli government caught wind of the meeting and protested to the US State Department, charging that Young had violated former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s 1975 pledge that the United States would not negotiate with the PLO as long as it refused to recognize Israel. Young had already informed the State Department about the meeting but had described it as a purely social encounter. When, in mid-August, it emerged that the meeting had been substantive, the current secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, angrily demanded Young’s resignation, which the ambassador submitted. President Carter agonized over the situation. Young was a close friend and ally, an embodiment of his administration’s commitment to black Americans. Yet the ambassador had alienated many American Jews, whose support Carter would need in his 1980 reelection bid, as well as losing the confidence of Secretary Vance. Carter accepted the resignation on 15 August. “It is absolutely ridiculous,” he lamented in his diary, “that we pledged under Kissinger . . . that we would not negotiate with the PLO.” Young was willing to use the same adjective in public. The ban on dealing with the PLO, he said in a television interview days later, “is kind of ridiculous.”⁴⁰

Young’s downfall provoked a surge of anger throughout the black community. To all appearances, the highest-ranking African American in the Carter administration had been humiliated and expelled in order to assuage Israeli sensibilities. Long-smoldering grievances against organized American Jewry—over busing, affirmative action, support for Israel, and other issues—burst into flame. Several of the more established black leaders rushed to contain the reaction. On 16 August Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the NAACP, Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin, and other leaders issued a statement expressing dismay over Young’s ouster. The group insisted, however, that its quarrel was with the State Department, which in their view had applied the anti-PLO policy inconsistently, not with Israel or American Jews.⁴¹ Hooks expressed the hope that the controversy would “not lead to any incitement or exacerbation in tensions between the black and Jewish communities.”⁴² But another set of civil rights veterans, including Jesse Jackson, SCLC president Joseph Lowery, and Washington, DC, delegate to Congress Walter Fauntroy, kept the dispute alive by interrogating the policy Young had violated. Why wouldn’t the United States talk to the PLO? Weren’t the Palestinians key to a viable Arab-Israeli settlement? Wasn’t it obvious that the PLO was their representative? Over the next several weeks, these and similar questions proved far more audible within mainstream black discourse than the soothing words of Hooks, King, and Rustin. Exasperation with perceived Israeli intransigence, and with American Jews who abetted it, became the dominant mood.

On 20 August the SCLC, which Young had served as executive director in the 1960s, came out in favor of a Palestinian “homeland” living side-by-side with Israel; Operation PUSH and even the NAACP shortly followed suit. The SCLC’s Lowery held his own meeting with Zehdi Terzi and pronounced it “fruitful.” A separate meeting between Lowery and Yehuda Blum, Israel’s UN ambassador, was far less successful, and the atmosphere subsequently worsened when Blum told reporters that black Americans were “[u]nderstandably. . . less knowledgeable about the Middle East conflict than other parties.” Blum’s remarks, which Lowery called “arrogant and paternalistic,” infuriated black leaders and only deepened their sense of estrangement from the Israeli government. While they continued to voice support for Israel’s existence, their criticisms of its policies grew increasingly barbed. “[T]o be pro-Palestinian does not mean I am anti-Israel,” said Wyatt Tee Walker, a former SCLC leader and pastor of Harlem’s Canaan Baptist Church, but “[a]ll you have to do is go to a Palestinian refugee camp one time and you will know that the Palestinians are the niggers of the Mideast.”⁴³

Critiques once voiced in muted tones now rang out with sharper clarity. Some black leaders warned that excessive partiality to Israel might provoke another Arab oil embargo that harmed African Americans disproportionately. “If things get tight,” Lowery declared, “it would be like America catching a cold and black folks developing pneumonia.” Others cautioned that the festering Middle East dispute could exact a still heavier toll on their constituents. “[S]hould the United States become drawn into a war in the Middle East,” predicted Fauntroy, “black Americans will once more be called upon to sacrifice their lives.” (Months later, Jesse Jackson would vividly combine these two scenarios: “Blacks have a vital interest in peace in the Middle East because in a hot war we will die first and in a cold war over oil, we will be unemployed and freeze first.”)⁴⁴

The Israeli-South African relationship also came in for much sharper scrutiny and criticism. On 22 August, leaders of the main civil rights organizations met in New York to discuss the Young crisis. According to The New York Times, several of them “condemned Israel’s economic ties to South Africa, ending what for many had amounted to a longtime reluctance to broach the subject.” In an open letter to President Carter on the Young affair, TransAfrica not only detailed Israel’s extensive military cooperation with South Africa but echoed one of the more stringent anti-Zionist critiques: “Africans have now come to share the opinion that so often has been advanced by Arab spokesmen, that Israel and South Africa represent examples of a similar phenomenon, ‘settler colonialism’ or arrogant, aggressive racialism. Americans should have enough influence with Israel to change and negate the growing reality of this charge.”⁴⁵

In late September and early October, Lowery and Jackson led separate delegations to visit the Middle East. Jackson’s trip, which was more extensive than Lowery’s, and headed by a younger, more charismatic, and more media-savvy figure, attracted greater attention. Trailed by American television crews, Jackson addressed a prayer breakfast in East Jerusalem, led West Bank Palestinians in his trademark “I am . . . somebody” chant, visited a war-damaged refugee camp in South Lebanon, and, in a move that left many pro-Israel Americans embittered for years, held three friendly meetings with Yasir Arafat in Beirut. Jackson did urge the PLO chairman to make a conciliatory gesture to Israel. Arafat replied that the PLO sought to establish an independent state “in any part of Palestine from which Israel will withdraw,” implying that Israel could exist in the remainder. This was a familiar PLO position, first unveiled in the summer of 1974.⁴⁶ Pro-Israel commentators, including black leaders like Bayard Rustin, scoffed that Jackson had achieved nothing new. Worse still, they charged, Jackson had undermined the movement’s commitment to nonviolence by cavorting with a notorious terrorist.⁴⁷

Arab-American activists, by contrast, enthusiastically endorsed the pro-Palestinian black initiatives and did what they could to exploit the new opportunity. Fortuitously, the weekend on which the PHRC held a national conference in Washington coincided with the interval between Lowery’s return from the Middle East and Jackson’s departure for it. Both leaders were invited to address the conference, and they did so in rousing speeches that further identified the struggle for racial justice at home with the quest for an equitable settlement in Palestine. The AAUG had offered to help cover the travel costs of Lowery, Jackson, and their delegations, but the offer was declined. Instead, a number of AAUG members in Chicago joined with other Arabs and Arab Americans to raise several thousand dollars for Jackson’s Operation PUSH. In Washington, when Fauntroy’s call for dialogue with the PLO provoked attacks from Jewish groups, the NAAA praised the DC delegate for breaking the “stranglehold” on public discussion of the Palestine issue. Jackson, Lowery, and Fauntroy were featured speakers at the AAUG’s annual convention in Washington that November. Such conspicuous Arab-American outreach drew the predictable accusation that the black leaders were being used for purposes they didn’t fully comprehend. Lowery would have none of it. Addressing the PHRC convention upon his return from the Middle East (and channeling the pop singer Bill Withers), Lowery declared: “If war comes, an armed forces disproportionately composed of blacks will be called upon to die. If we’re being used to fight that, then use me, baby, till you use me up.”⁴⁸

In fact, each community had powerful incentives to embrace the other. For Arab Americans, the sudden involvement of prominent civil rights veterans presented a rare opportunity to promote the Palestinian cause within the United States. “There is no way to know just where the current flurry of activity will lead,” observed the September 1 issue of Political Focus, an NAAA newsletter, “but a ‘sea change’ has taken place, and there will be no return to status quo ante.” In the coming weeks, Arab-American groups launched a vigorous campaign to woo African Americans. “We have sent telegrams to every black leader we could identify saying we want to initiate dialogue to talk about issues of concern to both groups,” Palestine American Congress chairman Jawad George told the New York Times in late October. “We have received some response, mainly from individuals but also from some local organizations. And no one has sent letters back . . . saying they do not want to talk to us.”⁴⁹

For African-American organizations, branching out to Middle Eastern issues opened prospects for raising funds from Arab and Arab-American donors, for attracting Arab and Arab-American investment in underserved black communities, and for pursuing business opportunities in the Arab world—all attractive scenarios at a time of deepening economic recession. In a September 1979 meeting in Chicago with Arab and Arab-American businessmen, Jackson reportedly warned that black organizations would drop the Palestine issue if Arab funds failed to flow into black communities. “We will learn to recite the alphabet without three letters, P-L-O,” he was quoted as saying. Jackson and some of the meeting participants denied that the Reverend had issued such a threat. But Leon Finney, executive director of The Woodlawn Organization, another community organization in Chicago, acknowledged to the Chicago Tribune that his own pitch to Arab donors had entailed a clear quid pro quo: “If we’re going to help you establish a homeland you should help us rebuild our community. That’s what I told them.” Elsewhere in the country, and presumably with similar considerations in mind, other civil rights groups increased their involvement in Middle Eastern affairs. The SCLC launched a series of workshops, held in ten cities across the nation, to raise awareness of Middle East issues in the black community. The NAACP organized a seminar, attended by fifty black businesspeople, to explore commercial opportunities in that region.⁵⁰

Another set of Americans appears to have benefited from the new African-American interest in the Middle East: thirteen employees of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. On 4 November militant Iranian students overran the embassy compound and took more than sixty American citizens hostage, an action quickly endorsed by Iran’s new revolutionary government. Days later, hoping to ingratiate himself with the Carter administration (and thereby persuade it, at last, to set aside Kissinger’s ban on talking to the PLO), Yasir Arafat sent a PLO delegation to Tehran to appeal for the hostages’ release. At first, Arafat’s initiative seemed to go badly. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Iranian government’s spiritual leader, angrily insisted that the fate of the American captives was not up for discussion, with the PLO or anyone else. The students holding the hostages echoed this position. Backpedaling, the PLO announced that its delegation was in Iran not to mediate over the hostages but simply to demonstrate solidarity with the Islamic Republic. Yet the delegation stayed on in Tehran and quietly urged Iranian leaders to make a conciliatory gesture, advice Arafat underscored in phone calls from Beirut.⁵¹

In mid-November, the PLO mission achieved a modest success when Khomeini authorized the release of thirteen black and female hostages. (The remaining American captives would be held until January 1981.) Khomeini explained the partial release by declaring that “blacks for a long time have lived under oppression and pressure in America” and that “Islam reserves special rights for women.” According to the Washington Post, the African Americans may have owed their freedom to a more particular set of circumstances: “the PLO first suggested the release of the blacks in recognition of its own rapprochement with American blacks following Andrew Young’s resignation as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations last summer.”⁵²

Although the Young controversy soon died down, it left an enduring mark on black politics. From now on, African Americans would participate far more vocally in the national discourse on the Middle East, taking positions generally more sympathetic to Arabs and Palestinians than those found in the U.S. mainstream. It became customary for African-American figures to participate in Arab-American conventions. When James Abourezk, now an ex-senator, formed the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) in the spring of 1980, Congressman Conyers and Delegate Fauntroy attended the organizational meeting. Over the coming years, a small but outspoken contingent of black members of Congress—Conyers, Fauntroy, Mervyn Dymally, Gus Savage, Cynthia McKinney, and others—would push for more Arab-friendly U.S. policies, often in close coordination with Arab-American organizations. The distinguished psychologist Kenneth Clark was on to something when he said, in the heady days following Young’s resignation, that the crisis had prompted black Americans to issue “our Declaration of Independence.”⁵³

African Americans’ growing presence in national debates over the Middle East enabled Arab Americans, in turn, to become fuller participants in national politics. This pattern was especially evident in Jesse Jackson’s two runs for the Democratic presidential nomination, in 1984 and 1988. In both years, Arab Americans were a significant and visible component of Jackson’s “Rainbow Coalition”; in 1984 they were, after African Americans, the largest ethnically defined donor group for the Jackson campaign. In his speech to the 1984 Democratic National Convention, Jackson observed that “Arab Americans . . . know the pain and hurt of racial and religious rejection. They must not continue to be made pariahs.” Jim Zogby served as one of Jackson’s deputy campaign managers in 1984 and as the Jackson campaign’s national co-chair in 1988. At the 1984 Democratic Convention, Zogby delivered a nominating speech for the candidate. In 1988 he introduced, for debate at that year’s convention, a platform plank favoring Palestinian statehood. By prearrangement, Zogby withdrew the measure before it could come to a vote, but the fact that it was debated at all was a significant milestone. To some extent, the Jackson campaign’s cultivation of Arab-American support would serve as a model for similar outreach by Barack Obama’s vastly more successful—though also far more cautious and conventional—presidential campaign in 2008.⁵⁴

In the years following the 1967 War, Arab Americans’ and African Americans’ activism on the Arab- Israeli conflict powerfully influenced the manner in which each community positioned itself nationally. Through their mutual interaction, the two groups drew each other, and themselves, a bit closer to the center of national discourse on Middle East issues. A key driver of this process was a profound transformation in the politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict, resulting in the emergence, by the second half of the 1970s, of a plausible scenario for resolving what had previously seemed an intractable dispute. The scenario in question—a full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and a two-state settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute—did not come to pass, for reasons lying beyond the purview of this study. What I hope the article has demonstrated, however, is the importance of placing domestic activism on US foreign policy, in the Middle East or in any other part of the world, in a more dynamic international and transnational context. Only by attending closely to the shifting currents of politics abroad, and to their tributary influences on American activism, can we fully discern the changing landscape of possibility at home.

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