A Shadow over Palestine

A Shadow over Palestine

The Imperial Life of Race in America

Keith P. Feldman

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis | London

The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges financial assistance for the publication of this book from the John C. Flanagan Dissertation Fellowship and the Graduate School at the University of Washington.

Poems by June Jordan are reprinted in chapter 5. All poems copyright 2005 by the June M. Jordan Literary Estate. Reprinted with permission. www.junejordan.com.

An earlier version of part of chapter 2 was published as “Representing Permanent War: Black Power’s Palestine and the End(s) of Civil Rights,” CR: New Centennial Review 8, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 193–231; copyright 2008 by Michigan State University; reprinted by permission. Another part of chapter 2 was previously published as “Towards an Afro-Arab Diasporic Culture: The Translational Practices of David Graham Du Bois,” ALIF: Journal of Comparative Poetics 31 (2011): 152–72; reprinted with permission.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Feldman, Keith P.

A shadow over Palestine : the imperial life of race in America / Keith P. Feldman.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 978-1-4529-4487-6

1. Middle East—Foreign relations—United States. 2. United States—Foreign relations—Middle East. 3. United States—Race relations. 4. Arab-Israeli conflict—Influence. I. Title.

DS63.2.U5F39 2015

327.73056—dc23

2014047486

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

Contents

Prologue: James Baldwin in the Holy Land

Introduction: Special Relationships

1. Specters of Genocide: Cold War Exceptions and the Contradictions of Liberalism

2. Black Power’s Palestine: Permanent War and the Global Freedom Struggle

3. Jewish Conversions: Color Blindness, Anti-Imperialism, and Jewish National Liberation

4. Arab American Awakening: Edward Said, Area Studies, and Palestine’s Contrapuntal Futures

5. Moving toward Home: Women of Color Feminisms and the Lebanon Conjuncture

Epilogue: On Shadows

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Prologue

James Baldwin in the Holy Land

AT THE END OF SEPTEMBER 1961, James Baldwin arrived in Tel Aviv as the guest of the Israeli government. Treated as what he called an “extremely well cared for parcel post package,” Baldwin spent his days being escorted around “this fragile handkerchief at the gate of the Middle East.” He was driven to the Negev desert in the south, the Dead Sea to the east, the Jerusalem hills, Tel Aviv’s famed cafés, Haifa’s art colony in the north, and a kibbutz near the Gaza Strip in the west. “Israel and I seem to like each other,” he wrote in a letter to his literary agent. “I am always worried about wearing out my welcome, and imagined I’d be gone by now: but no, they keep saying, Please don’t hurry.”¹

In Baldwin’s luggage were unfinished manuscripts for two of what would become some of his most influential works, prophesying a decade of widespread social upheaval. These manuscripts bore witness to Cold War America’s fantasies of Black incorporability into a U.S. racial formation understood as predicated on a mercurial white supremacy. One manuscript, largely complete, became the novel Another Country, which he finished soon thereafter in Istanbul—a city whose prominent location at the crossroads of Europe and Asia would come to shape Baldwin’s lifeworld for much of the forthcoming decade.² Another Country thematizes many things, not least being the daily enactments of a violently racialized heteropatriarchy whose deadliness would lead one of its main characters to suicide. “Rufus’s cadaver,” Baldwin would say later, “that’s the black cadaver in the American conscience. All of American society has been built in order to kill—not to deny the black man, or humiliate him, but kill him.”³ The other manuscript contained copious notes for “Down at the Cross,” an essay published in the New Yorker magazine in 1962 as “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” and then by Dial Press in 1963 as The Fire Next Time. In the months prior to his Israel tour, Baldwin had been ruminating on the growing visibility of the Nation of Islam; he publicly debated Malcolm X and interviewed Elijah Muhammad in his Chicago mansion. Baldwin was both terrified and exhilarated by the Nation’s capacity to produce a durable infrastructure to support Black social life while putting the nominally inclusionary elements of white supremacy in its crosshairs. “The universe,” writes Baldwin in the essay’s opening pages, “which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass, and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you.”⁴ Against this ontological exclusion, Baldwin saw in the Nation of Islam a capacity to name and organize a political imaginary that, at its most powerful, provided Black people in America a radically alternative epistemology.

But Baldwin was in Israel for neither of these projects. The New Yorker had forwarded him a substantial advance to write a book about Africa in the age of decolonization, and the Israel trip served as what Baldwin called its “prologue” (49). For many, the new Jewish state, founded in the ashes of the British mandate, exemplified the promise of political independence in an age of widespread decolonization. Yet a reading of the Israeli section of the draft manuscript “will make clearer than any of my letters can, how complex, once I got to Israel, the whole idea of Africa became” (52). So complex, it seems, that the book never came to fruition. As Baldwin recalled later, “When I was in Israel, it was as though I was in the middle of The Fire Next Time. I didn’t dare go from Israel to Africa, so I went to Turkey, just across the road.”⁵ As he notes to his editor, he feared how political decolonization’s framing of independence would disrupt Baldwin’s own sense of race, that the dawn of African self-determination would require conceiving of Black peoples outside the historically sedimented structures of oppression that had come to define modern Black subjectivity. The “confrontation” at the heart of his proposed narrative required moving against anything like “an exhibition, merely, of journalistic skill” (52). Instead, it demanded “an extremely, even dangerously personal way,” one that would “try to make the reader ask his own questions and make his own assessments” (52). Rather than rely on the positivistic investments of a journalism meant to transparently reflect a stable reality, Baldwin’s time in Israel required a different kind of writing practice, one hinged on readerly interpretation.

Since the Africa book never came to fruition, Baldwin ended up sending the New Yorker “Down at the Cross” instead. This was an essay he had promised to the rival Commentary magazine. Cavalierly submitting it to the New Yorker instead angered Commentary’s editor, Norman Podhoretz, so much so that Podhoretz ended up writing his own riposte, called “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” which, in the face of race radical critiques of Cold War liberalism’s contradictions, will come to hold its own pride of place in the canon of neoconservative thought.

Baldwin’s published writings on Israel make for especially evocative reading in the present. The letters from the end of 1961 signal the dawn of a new conjuncture. The “conundrums” Baldwin finds in Israel inspire critical reflection on the emergence, function, and effects of a new nation-state dedicated to ending the oppression of Euro-American modernity’s others. His letters likewise offer a thick enactment of relationality, a kind of gateway through which to consider how one might navigate a fractured Cold War terrain with eyes wide open to its racial connections, convergences, contradictions, and incommensurabilities. Baldwin writes:

In a curious way, since it really does function as a homeland, however beleaguered, you can’t walk five minutes without finding yourself at a border, can’t talk to anyone for five minutes without being reminded first of the mandate (British), then of the war—and of course the entire Arab situation, outside the country, and, above all, within, cause one to take a view of human life and right and wrong almost as stony as the land in which I presently find myself—well, to bring this thoroughly undisciplined sentence to a halt, the fact that Israel is a homeland for so many Jews (there are great faces here, in a way the whole world is here) causes me to feel my own homelessness more keenly than ever. (49)

From the vantage point through which Baldwin viewed the racialized exclusions of American Cold War liberalism, the overwrought, circuitous, and internally interruptive form of this “thoroughly undisciplined sentence” crystallizes precisely how overdetermined the question of Israel had become. Baldwin recognizes Anglo-American sovereignty’s persistent imprint in how the routine navigation of the region constantly confronted the pervasive bordered contours of political space. Daily interactions were infused with the continuing effects of a war whose definite article presumes a reader knows which war Baldwin means to reference. The war’s singular referent is quickly adumbrated by reflections on the simultaneous internalization and externalization of the “entire Arab situation” outside, and “above all, inside” Israel. We are invited to understand this “stony” view of human life and its sharp morality as the effect of the war’s continuous present, one that contorts the very grammar of its narration and solidified Baldwin’s own sense of “homelessness.” In the face of the Israeli state’s nation-building process, Baldwin reconciles himself with his own commitment to exile. If this was what home meant for modernity’s others, Baldwin will have none of it.

Baldwin’s interrogation of Israel is driven by a keen concern with the post–World War II articulation of race, nation, religion, and empire. The historical drama of anti-Semitism’s resolution in the form of a Jewish nation-state involved a “vast amount of political cynicism” (50), one predicated less on Jewish safety or national liberation than on what he would later call “the salvation of western interests.”⁶ Baldwin queries the salience of a national peoplehood structured less by Jewish religious tradition or Jewish ethnic belonging than by the twin pillars of an “evil that is in the world . . . which has victimized them so savagely and so long,” and the “resurrection of the Hebrew language” meant to bridge the “tremendous gap between a Jew from Russia or France or England or Australia and a Jew but lately arrived from the desert” (49). Can one rightfully forge a national identity out of the catastrophe of genocide and a singular national language, Baldwin asks pressingly? While the recently arrived Yemeni Jews produced what Baldwin sees as the most beautiful Jewish cultural forms—more so than their Ashkenazi counterparts—their treatment reveals a vicious social discrimination that “the nation of Israel cannot afford, and is far too intelligent, to encourage” (50). Recognition of this discrimination was intensified when Baldwin considered the status of Arabs more broadly, about which he feels “helplessly and painfully—most painfully—ambivalent”:

I cannot blame them for feeling dispossessed; and in a literal way, they have been. Furthermore, the Jews, who are surrounded by forty million hostile Muslims, are forced to control the very movements of Arabs within the state of Israel. One cannot blame the Jews for this necessity; one cannot blame the Arabs for resenting it. I would—indeed, in my own situation in America, I do, and it has cost me—costs me—a great and continuing effort not to hate the people who are responsible for the societal effort to limit and diminish me. (50)

Ten years later, in what was billed as a wide-ranging “rap on race” with the well-known anthropologist Margaret Mead, Baldwin returned to this relation between anti-Black and anti-Arab racisms. By then, there wasn’t much ambivalence at all, especially given the post-1967 entanglement of an expanded Israeli military occupation of Arab territories, an escalated U.S. military presence in Southeast Asia, and Palestinian liberation struggles enacting a global horizon especially resonant with Black liberation struggles in the United States. “You have got to remember,” notes Baldwin, “however bitter this may sound, no matter how bitter I may sound, that I have been, in America, the Arab at the hands of the Jews.”⁷ Mead—figured in the promotional materials and reviews for A Rap on Race as the “objective” and “scientific” counterweight to Baldwin’s “passion” and “poetry”—had no time for such a formulation, shutting the conversation down: “Oh, fiddlesticks! Tut, tut, tut,” she says. “You are now making a totally racist comment, just because there have been a bunch of Jewish shopkeepers in Harlem. . . . I suggest we drop this because it gets us nowhere and will get us nowhere. These are just a set of imperfectly realized analogies.”⁸

Were we to follow Mead and bracket as illogical, subjective, or racist the poignant insight into the relationality of race that Baldwin labors to name, we would silence crucial analytical terrain. Indeed, the audio recording of A Rap on Race did just that. Released simultaneously with its print version, the double LP excludes all the lengthy discussion of Israel, Palestine, Arabs, Jews, Yemeni Jews, and the associated questions of time and atonement that Baldwin brings to bear—even as it claims to capture the “as is” quality of an “atmosphere created by . . . freedom and informality.”⁹ Silencing this relational analytic foretells precisely the attenuated scope of the dawning U.S. commonsense interpretations about Israel and Palestine. Yet such “imperfectly realized analogies”—as if there could be any other kind—were central to its articulation. Remembering them, and listening to their affective complexity, is at the core of this book.

Introduction

Special Relationships

AFTER SIGNING THE UNITED STATES’ FIRST ARMS AGREEMENT with Israel at the end of 1962, U.S. president John F. Kennedy assured Israeli foreign minister Golda Meir that the United States had a “special relationship with Israel in the Middle East, really comparable only to that which it has with Britain over a wide range of world affairs.”¹ U.S. presidential administrations ever since have emphasized the unique qualities of this geostrategic, military, and economic relationship, as well as the “shared values” that these countries are purported to hold in common. After more than five decades, such a statement has achieved nearly unassailable common sense. It permeates the full spectrum of discourse of elected, appointed, and contracted policymakers, a wide range of scholarly fields, the multinational corporate world, and the journalistic opinion makers who populate the media landscape. That the United States, Israel, and, crucially, if more rarely enunciated, Israel’s forty-plus-year occupation of Palestinian Territories are all inextricably related is incontestable. The meanings and functions of that relationship, however, have been fiercely contested.

The drama of Cold War diplomatic transaction performed by heads of state is one domain in which the coordinates of this “special relationship” have been forged. Another domain is the thick culture work of artists, writers, activists, and scholars. It is this latter domain to which this book turns. In a context dominated so strongly by discourses of the state, the knowledges and insights produced through culture work need to be read closely, carefully, for their subtleties and surprises, their evocations and figurations. Doing so offers a critical purchase on the historical forces that have attempted to both shape and disqualify ways of understanding the inextricable entanglement of Israel and Palestine in the globalized ambit of U.S. imperialism.

A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America investigates an array of texts that mediated and repeatedly disputed the symbolic and material connections between the post–civil rights United States and Israel’s post-1967 occupation of Palestinian lands. In these chapters, I identify a conjuncture (roughly 1960 to 1985) when struggles over hegemony in the United States became entangled with transformed relations of rule in Israel and Palestine, that is, when U.S. civil rights and antiwar struggles, Zionist settler colonization and Israeli military and administrative occupation, and Palestinian narratives of dispossession, dispersion, and resistance were forged, felt, and thought together.² During this period, the U.S. state waged battles to maintain hegemony through nominal forms of political inclusion and the refashioning of counterinsurgency practiced at home and abroad. As recent scholarship on race and the Cold War evocatively shows, desegregation and state violence went hand in hand.³ I demonstrate how this coupling drew on material linkages to Israel as a military, economic, and geopolitical partner for the U.S. state, and to Zionism as a symbolic storehouse for the hegemonic articulation of liberal freedom and colonial violence. It also contended with transnational narratives of Palestinian liberation that figured resistance movements both real and imagined. In this way, Israel and Palestine entered and became sedimented in debates about purportedly “domestic” U.S. concerns.

While the flashpoint of the late 1960s marked an intensified moment for this coupling, the contradictions such a moment laid bare were already being glimpsed in the first part of the decade. They began to emerge in James Baldwin’s recognition of the transit between anti-Arab and anti-Black racisms in 1961. They were registered in Kennedy’s 1962 declaration of a “special relationship” to Meir, one that he made alongside his own diplomatic outreach to Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser.⁴ The extradition and high-profile trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1960–61 and increasingly visible American Jewish engagements with the Holocaust’s legacy were also crucially part of this historic mix,⁵ as were the waves of decolonization and nonalignment across North Africa and the Caribbean that served as inspiration for racial justice struggles in the United States.⁶

In the face of an impending military invasion by its neighbors, in June 1967 Israel embarked on what became a “permanently temporary” military and administrative occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights.⁷ A Shadow over Palestine situates these emergent relations of Israeli rule within the crucible of what the historian Jeremi Suri calls a “global 1968,”⁸ a moment when transnational and translocal liberation struggles crosshatched the globe. The contradictory historical narratives connecting the aftermath of June 1967 to Global 1968 are complex indeed. U.S. culture work about Israel and Palestine after 1967 mediated the racialized social formations in the United States that achieved cultural hegemony in the 1970s, even as it informed the antiracist imaginative geographies that persistently exceeded hegemony’s norms of reference. The civil rights movement’s culmination, in the widespread declaration of the limits of formal equality by communities of color, was paired with, and often articulated through, a dawning recognition of material and symbolic support for racialized structures of rule in Israel and Palestine. The convergence of these racialized “powers of inclusive exclusion” in the United States and Israel were deftly clarified and contested by artists, intellectuals, and organizations representing solidarity with Palestine.⁹

As part of a Global 1968, these cultural and political projects fashioned what the cultural historian Alex Lubin cogently calls “geographies of liberation.”¹⁰ Reactions to such political imaginaries intertwined June 1967 with cultural logics informing the emergence of U.S. neoconservative domestic and foreign policies and, later, neoliberal social and economic policies. The race-conscious focus of the 1960s to desegregate, decolonize, and reconstruct a multiracial American democracy were persistently adumbrated by various nationalist exceptionalisms in both U.S. and Israeli political cultures. By the late 1970s this crucible helped forge a convergence between the nascent U.S. culture wars and the maximalist Likud government in Israel; the naturalization of Jewish settlement activity on Palestinian lands; the shift in 1981 from Israeli military to civil administrations in the Occupied Territories; an explicit discursive collapsing of the “Arab,” the “Muslim,” and the “terrorist”; and Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

Political Economy and Permanent War

Identifying the conjuncture in this way highlights how transformed relations of rule in Israel and Palestine after 1967 played a signal role in mediating the shifting contours of U.S.-led racial capitalism. Briefly elaborated, following the widespread growth of U.S. hegemony in the global economy after World War II, by the latter part of the 1960s the rate of profit had generally slowed. The first years of the 1970s saw the slowdown reaching crisis proportions, with the U.S. and other economies stuck in a cycle of stagnant profit margins and inflated currencies. To shock the U.S. economy out of the crisis, in August 1971 the Nixon administration shifted the U.S. monetary system from the gold standard adopted after World War II to a dollar standard, forcing many other state-run economies to do the same. Soon after floating American currency in this way, the Nixon administration began lobbying Arab oil-producing states to raise the price of gasoline, a move Nixon expected to be beneficial for the United States and detrimental to potential global economic rivals like Japan and Western Europe. This aim was inadvertently achieved by the oil embargo initiated by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) during the October 1973 War involving Israel and its neighbors. The embargo flooded OPEC nations with a glut of petrodollars, many of which were then invested in private banks in the United States, while the spike in gas prices and fuel rationing brought home for many Americans the detrimental effects of the enmeshment of the United States, Israel, and the Arab world. Many of OPEC’s investments were siphoned into the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and redistributed as part of structural adjustment programs to developing nations in Latin America and the decolonizing nations in Africa and South Asia.¹¹

This rapid transformation in political economy has been understood as calibrating the material and symbolic shifts from the modern to the postmodern era, from the hegemony maintained by Fordist models of production to post-Fordist models of flexible accumulation, from Keynesian welfare state policies to post-Keynesian privatization and enhanced militarization policies. As the political theorist Timothy Mitchell puts it, “The shift in US relations with oil-producing states . . . allowed political forces on the right, opposed to the management of ‘the economy’ as a democratic mode of governing collective life, to reintroduce and expand the laws of ‘the market’ as an alternative technology of rule, providing a more effective means of placing parts of the common world beyond the reach of democratic contestation.”¹² Israel and Palestine provided a storehouse of symbolic and material “experiments” in what Fredric Jameson once called this “strange new landscape,” revealing the dawn of a racialized neoliberal project grounded in a neoconservative moral economy.¹³

In reconstructing this entangled history of the United States, Israel, and Palestine, I investigate how intensified state-sanctioned practices of coercion were rationalized through the multivalent figure of permanent war. Israel since its inception in 1948 had been in a permanent state of war, without either a formal constitution or internationally agreed-on territorial borders. It governed Arabs both prior to and after 1967 through military rule underwritten by legal regimes predicated on the routine enactment of emergency measures. In the United States, popular and political culture highlighted massive military actions in Southeast Asia, a growing practice of racialized law and order policing, revolutionary liberation movements sweeping across Africa, Latin America, and South Asia, and the extensive effects of the declared 1967 and 1973 wars between Arab states and Israel. At the same time, anticolonial writers and activists increasingly framed the violence of racism in American life as animated by a seemingly permanent war-making structure. To grasp and make critical the systemic contours of racism was to understand the long-standing racialized practices of threat-production adhering in the enduring violence of white supremacy and settler sovereignty. The analytic of permanent war made visible how durable, persistent, and intensified forms of state and state-sanctioned violence exceeded the juridical horizon of the civil rights consensus.¹⁴

The analytic of permanent war revealed contestations over historical knowledge. It exhibited what the anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler calls “an appreciation of historiography as a political force, of history writing as a political act, of historical narrative as a tool of the state and as a subversive weapon against it.”¹⁵ In an epistemic context unmoored from simple truths, indisputable facts, and shared grand narratives, culture work waged protracted battles over the writing and meaning of history, with war providing what Foucault describes as a “valid analysis of power relations.”¹⁶ I theorize how culture work that contended with Israeli rule as a permanently militarized modality of power in a post–civil rights age exemplifies this complex engagement with war as object and war as method.

Representations of Israel and Palestine, replete with thick affective and political resonances, thus saturated the broad terrain of U.S. imperial culture from the 1960s to the 1980s. From one vantage point, the Israeli national project’s symbolic storehouse was primed for such representations. It reflected narratives and images recognizable to an American nation in upheaval. In the first few decades after World War II, argues the historian Michelle Mart, “the Israel of the American imagination . . . embodied the hopes, ideals, and values of Cold War America.”¹⁷ Israel epitomized a rational vision of modernity that could mirror for Americans both the hardworking pioneers mastering a natural environment particularly reticent to human cultivation and the glass and steel architecture of late capitalist planning and urban development. Israel’s symbolic storehouse echoed U.S. national commitments to civilian safety with deep and lasting investments in the militarization of everyday life. For many on the American Left, Israel figured as the expression of a successful Jewish national liberation, one that manifested in the kibbutzim, moshavim, and Labor-dominated governments as a resonant socialist experiment in communal life and work. Israel was sacralized by the trauma of modern genocide, both through being framed as a morally righteous response to the failures of Western intervention during World War II and, perhaps more deeply, as a recompense for racial genocide as a quintessentially Euro-American phenomenon. Israel both named democratic inclusion as political necessity and served as a successful test case for liberal internationalist institutions like the United Nations to contour an enduring peace. There was, in short, a lot that Americans could love about Israel.¹⁸

Yet, from another vantage point, Israel’s permanent exclusions also revealed the failures of multiracial democracy as a post–civil rights political horizon.¹⁹ From this perspective (as Baldwin saw), Israel’s ideological and material infrastructure was articulated through Euro-American paradigms of self-determination, ones predicated on settler colonial orders that differentially valued land and labor.²⁰ This vantage point revealed the 1947–49 dispossession of more than 760,000 indigenous Palestinian Arabs and the quasi-legal regime that garnished the land and resources of these newly “present absentees”; the threadbare citizenship status afforded to Arab Israelis and the unequal access to state resources offered to Mizrahi Jews compared with their privileged Ashkenazi counterparts; the post-1967 pervasive regime of military and civil occupation of Palestinian territories alongside the widespread growth of illegal Jewish settlements; Israel’s deepening military and economic partnerships with South Africa’s apartheid regime; and Israel’s brutal 1982 invasion of Lebanon meant to eliminate any organized political form of Palestinian national liberation. From the “standpoint of its victims,” as Edward Said lucidly put it in 1979, there was much about Israel to resist.²¹

On U.S. Imperial Culture

Critically analyzing these competing grids of intelligibility has meant diving into the overlapping interdisciplinary scholarship on the “Arab-Israeli conflict” and its many aspects and permutations. It has also run the risk of epistemic drowning, for work on Israel and Palestine has been extensive. Recent scholars have investigated histories and critiques of Zionism, post-Zionism, and anti-Zionism in the fields of geography, labor, archaeology and anthropology, comparative literature and comparative religions, state and society formations, gender and nationalism.²² A substantial critical enterprise has centered U.S. statecraft and its historical and contemporary relation to Israel, focusing on presidential administrations, civil society groups, and nonprofit organizations.²³ The Holocaust has its own immense scholarly literature, from European, Jewish, and U.S. histories to comparative studies of genocide, trauma, and memory, to the intellectual histories of post-Enlightenment critical thought, to critical elaborations of Holocaust memory in the United States, Israel, and the decolonizing world.²⁴ Lastly, research by and about Palestinians has grown substantially in the last several decades, and critical (albeit smaller and, in some places, highly restricted) analytical spaces have begun to emerge for thick scholarly engagements with Palestinian histories, cultures, and politics beyond the frail (if also astoundingly durable) orientalist frameworks that derived their assumptions from research and scholarship in the Cold War era.²⁵

I draw from these overlapping bodies of knowledge to fashion an analytic that engages comparative U.S. ethnic studies and transnational American studies. While critical keywords animating scholarship in these fields—diaspora, genocide, national belonging, imperial violence, settler colonialism, and white supremacy, to say nothing of race and ethnicity—offer a rich conceptual tapestry for engaging Israel and Palestine, inquiries into the form, function, and effects raised by the vexing questions of Israel and Palestine were for a long time fairly limited. It is only in the last fifteen years or so that this lacuna has begun to be addressed, with a growing and influential body of scholarship in transnational American studies investigating the cultural and historical ligatures linking the United States and Middle East.²⁶

In drawing from and contributing to this work, I contend that the competing meanings given the “special relationships” between the United States, Israel, and Palestine are compellingly clarified by the analytical concept U.S. imperial culture. U.S. imperial culture names the crucible within which an enduring U.S. national ideology of territorial expansion and its attendant regimes of racial domination and war-making have been codified, reified, naturalized, and contested. The dominion of U.S. imperial culture produces and circulates knowledge to secure a purportedly stable opposition between the foreign and domestic that provides a symbolic architecture to secure consent for extraterritorial violence as essential for protecting the national home, even as the categories of foreign and domestic are persistently blurred and enfolded one into the other.²⁷ At the same time, U.S. imperial culture’s strongly normative epistemological frames aim to regulate what counts as proper knowledge, casting some forms of knowledge as truth and others as aberrational, subjective, or fictitious.

U.S. imperial culture forges space as a key site of racial, national, and imperial fashioning. Multiscalar analyses of race’s spatialization clarify where and how lifeworlds materialize and become known.²⁸ In this book, I show how shifting spatial imaginaries shaped both dominant and countervailing modes of understanding the geopolitical cartography linking the United States, Israel, and Palestine. Intranationally, this cartography took shape through simultaneous investment in and divestment from racial desegregation that produced a suburban infrastructure as a site of normative domesticity and urban spaces as sites of deindustrialization, capitalist renewal, and intensified militarization and incarceration.²⁹ Internationally, Cold War cartographies coded where and how markets amenable to U.S. capital investment and exploitation were to be located and understood, alongside and in conjunction with imperial warfare in Southeast Asia and Latin America.³⁰ The fluctuation of U.S. spatial imaginaries (segregation, the fluid linkages between ghettos and prisons, etc.) and the ethos of colonial rule to provide a rubric of “national security” were often routed precisely through the “case” of Israel and Palestine. In the chapters to come, I demonstrate how such relations were thought and figured, how they circulated and intervened in the cultural logics of their milieu.

Israel’s management, administration, and contestation of fluid and shifting national geographies offered the United States blueprints, lessons, and a storehouse of symbolic meaning.³¹ At once identified as “an outpost of the free world” in a “particularly dangerous neighborhood,” and as the battlefield for a revolutionary anticolonialism in the name of national liberation, the competing spatial imaginaries were intense indeed, with their own rich genealogies. Israel as a place of meaning making has long been a crucial reference for U.S. imperial culture. As holy land, it has served as an overdetermined reference point of sacred identification for European settlement in America since at least John Winthrop’s seventeenth-century “God’s new Israel” jeremiad.³² In the age of secular nationalisms, it figured as a sovereign spatial “fix” to the enduring problem of European anti-Semitism. And in the age of decolonization, it was a microcosm through which the production and management of militarized borders could be blessed by what Steven Salaita identifies as national “covenantal” discourses transiting between two settler societies.³³ The history of modern Israel’s multivalent spatial dynamics of inclusion and exclusion organized around racial and religious distinction offered a laboratory for how a self-avowed liberal democracy could manage difference. At the same time, the archipelago of Palestinian refugee camps in the region founded in the aftermath of the 1947–49 Nakba (or “catastrophe”) and expanded after the 1967 Naksa (“setback”) signaled the nonnormative spatial rubrics within which belonging could be enacted while serving as paradigmatic sites for cultures of resistance to be organized and imagined.³⁴ After 1967 and the ensuing military occupation of internationally recognized Palestinian Territories, such spatial questions gained even more complexity.

On Racial Relationality

Foregrounding Israel and Palestine in the ambit of U.S. imperial culture makes available a genealogy of race as central to its articulation. As numerous scholars in ethnic studies have shown, histories of Euro-American modernity have been marked by a dialectic of assimilation and elimination wherein race comes to serve as the protean site through which human difference is both perceived and hierarchically valued. Race is where orders of exploitation and elimination are codified, where domains of subjectivity and consciousness are fashioned and refashioned. Even as it is routinely encountered and addressed through national rubrics—indeed, even as it shapes the affective, geopolitical, and legal contours of the national—race’s freighted transnational legacies and wrenching spatial transformations reveal the porosity of the domestic and the foreign. Investigations of race open up those historical and social fields saturated by differential regimes of value, wherein, as Lisa Cacho incisively argues, “the production and ascription of human value are both violent and relational.”³⁵ In this sense, processes of racialization are always already relational insofar as they convert difference into relational hierarchies of domination and value.³⁶ Centering race also clarifies processes of subject constitution and deconstitution in their uneven, discrepant, and incommensurable circuits of translation and exchange.³⁷ Following David Theo Goldberg, who persuasively argues that “a comparativist account contrasts and compares; a relational account connects,” I employ a relational approach to race in order to analyze the dense weave of historical connections between race-making processes circulating beyond and beneath the scale of the nation-state.³⁸

The aftermath of the Holocaust, third world decolonization struggles, and freedom struggles in the United States collectively instantiated a historic rupture, producing what Robert Stam and Ella Shohat call a “seismic shift”³⁹ and Howard Winant calls the “racial break.”⁴⁰ In the United States, in the decades following World War II, overt white supremacy was formally delegitimized, while in Europe the paradigm of governing subject populations in distant territories was formally interceded. And, in the face of the Holocaust, a mammoth organizational, bureaucratic, and legal apparatus was built to encode liberal norms through which to practice international human rights.⁴¹ After the better part of four centuries, a global racial order built on and stabilized by a sovereign right to kill was decisively breached. The aftermath connected the racialization of Blackness, whiteness, and indigeneity—categories whose ascribed value have been blueprinted across the longue durée of Euro-American genocidal conquest and capitalist enslavement—to the racialization of Muslims, Jews, and Arabs. Other categories—such as terrorist, dictator, and criminal—garnered new meanings, even as their explicit relation to historical categories of race were muted but nevertheless functioned as legitimating frames for the violence of racism.⁴²

My approach offers a substantial corrective to how race has been deployed to understand the relations between the United States, Israel, and Palestine. First, much of the earlier scholarship has “domesticated” racial concepts by converting them into liberal nationalist notions of ethnicity or static notions of comparative ethno-racial groupings. These studies, typically addressing “Black–Jewish relations” as a subset of a larger “ethnic-relations” paradigm, often suggest that the linkages between the United States, Israel, and Palestine were primarily external or epiphenomenal to the ways that Jewish people were incorporated into American national life, emphasizing instead a national “domestic” drama of Black–Jewish cooperation and confrontation. This framework reduces a heterogeneous historical field of affiliations to Israel and Palestine to expressions of Black anti-Semitism or Jewish racism, which then become the linchpin in a narrative of the tragedy of Black radicalism’s dissolution of the civil rights promise. This declensionist tale has been told and retold since at least the late 1960s, exemplified in Nat Hentoff and Baldwin’s popular edited collection, Black Anti-Semitism and Jewish Racism (1969). It is a tale the present book aims both to historicize and to upend.

Further, while scholars have used variations on the “ethnic relations” paradigm to describe much about a national scene of civil rights struggles,⁴³ the paradigm often reifies an ahistorical notion of racism as individual prejudice and social discrimination and limits a critical analysis of race and racism. It naturalizes the nation as a liberal pluralist container of preconstituted ethno-racial groups by bracketing the durability of whiteness as a privileged category of national existence. It delimits transnational circuits of racialization, migration, and cultural exchange, and, in so doing, it externalizes the question of Israel and Palestine as something epiphenomenal to—as opposed to constitutive of—the meaning and function of race in the United States.

The narrative of decline in “Black–Jewish relations” obfuscates the central place of Arabs and Palestinians as part of this historical milieu. It reproduces the absence of Arabs and Palestinians as agents with history, culture, and political will, and is unable to reckon with the crucial processes of racialization of Arabs and Palestinians in the post–civil rights period. To address this absence, A Shadow over Palestine draws on and contributes to the field of Arab American studies, which, since at least 1967, has investigated the rich and heterogeneous transnational participation of Arabs and Palestinians in U.S. national life. Such work analyzes the relationship of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism to Euro-American foreign policy, military intervention, and regimes of violence that have operated both within and outside the United States. While some studies have drawn on the liberal pluralist ethnic-relations paradigm to narrate processes of Arab American assimilation and exclusion, much of this scholarship has taken up the more worldly and historical understanding of racism offered above.⁴⁴ A Shadow over Palestine contributes to this scholarship by historicizing the processes that subjected Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians to hierarchically defined categories of racial difference via rubrics of national security, linguistic difference, religious distinction, and political ideology. The book also centralizes the sustained labor of Arab intellectuals, poets, and organizations to diagnose, oppose, and transform the circuits of knowledge production underwriting such processes.

On Comparativity

Importantly, my analysis of the culture work that entangles the United States, Israel, and Palestine emerges immanently from within the archives of the conjuncture I identify. I draw from Stoler and Carole McGranahan’s signal insight to investigate how “the shifting references for what constitutes comparison are at once historical and political issues.” Comparison, they aver, is an “active political verb,” one that does work in and for imperial formations.⁴⁵ In this sense comparison predicates imperial culture. It makes visible race’s relational texture, how racial meanings circulate through empire’s material and discursive networks.

The culture work of this key period (1960–85) draws on a wide array of related if incommensurable narrative frameworks. These include a structure of settler invasion whose blueprint was drawn as much from a Jewish theological imaginary as it was from Anglophone concepts of sovereign violence;⁴⁶ the emergence of an ideological common sense that premises modern emancipation on the essential construction of coherent peoplehood;⁴⁷ a liberal civil rights regime built on nominal forms of minority incorporability that obscures and intensifies U.S. capitalism’s racialized forms of exploitation;⁴⁸ and the event of Nazi Genocide as crystallizing Euro-American modernity’s technologies of violence and the genocidal forms of reason that gave them legitimacy. The Nazi Genocide bequeathed a seemingly infinite storehouse of conceptual categories through which to articulate everything from international human rights regimes and the normative rubrics of genocide to the moral and ethical formulation of proper subjectivity, to the analytical lexicon of traumatic memory, sovereign violence, and political consciousness.

One major effect of these frames is that U.S. representations of Israel and Palestine have been produced in large measure through figures of comparison that, when clustered together, disclose a veritable archive of incommensurability. In the pages to come, I contend with statements like the following: Zionism is akin to movements for national liberation, or like diasporic political movements like Pan-Africanism, or an extension of Western civilization, or a special kind of colonialism, or a form of racism. The Israeli state is the last righteous response to Nazism, or Nazism’s tragic doppelgänger, or part of the third world, or an extension of the first. Nazism embodies a transhistorical anti-Semitism, or it shares totalitarian traits with communism, or it dramatizes the genocidal logic of European imperialism on European soil. Threats to Israeli national security are extensions of the Nazi project or are a threat to U.S. interests. American ghettoes are like Warsaw’s, or like Palestinian refugee camps, or like prisons, or like occupied territory. The topographical landscape of Israel and Palestine is like California’s, or vice versa, and cities like Los Angeles are like Tel Aviv, or like the battle-scarred West Bank or West Beirut. Israeli “sabras” are like Western Europeans or American pioneers, while Palestinians are like African Americans, or Native Americans, or Jews; Jews are like white people or African Americans; and African Americans are like Jews.

Is it any wonder, then, that the rhetoric, grammar, and syntax structuring the conjuncture of the United States, Israel, and Palestine are built around “special” relationships? In its formation as the dominant rhetorical figure to describe the connections between the United States and Israel, President Kennedy’s statement is shorthand for an expansive constellation of diffuse political stakes, historical arguments, and modes of identification, the incommensurability of which is obscured when the diplomatic language is taken as natural, a given, or simply a fact. That there are such stark discrepancies and contradictions between these figures is evidence enough that these all cannot be “true.” None of these figures is reducible to a relationship of identity or equivalence. As forms of comparison, they provide a translational bridge from one context to another, a “link through a resemblance,” in Jacques Derrida’s phrase, across “a frontier which is not thereby abolished.”⁴⁹ These and many other figures circulating in U.S. culture produced these relationships, and produced them as special, unique, sui generis, or exceptional.

Exceptional Relations

A Shadow over Palestine does not reconstruct the “true” linkage between the cataclysm of Nazi genocide, the Palestinian Nakba, and the manifold contestations around the contours of the post–World War II U.S. racial formation. Rather, it charts how a wide range of linkages were made, felt, and thought, and how they were mobilized and contested not only in culture work but also at the level of knowledge production and circulation.⁵⁰ My approach illuminates the specter of the Holocaust and its incommensurable relationships to the Palestinian Nakba in the very theoretical architecture that takes up this relationship. An evocative case in point is how political theories of the sovereign exception have proliferated in recent years alongside the expression and critique of American and Israeli national exceptionalisms.

In his oft-cited essay “Necropolitics,” the postcolonial political philosopher Achille Mbembe names the continuing colonial occupation in Palestine as the “most accomplished form” of terror expressed through the violence of the state of exception.⁵¹ Mbembe evinces links between Palestinian subjectivation predicated on the exposure to premature death, the political philosophy of the U.S. slave plantation, the Nazi extermination camp, and the broader interarticulation of what Paul Gilroy calls “modernity and infrahumanity.”⁵² While Mbembe moves dexterously between these sites, we misread his argument if we see a single invariant articulation of race, empire, and modernity culminating in a convergence of plantation, death camp, and occupied territory. To argue, as Giorgio Agamben does, that homo sacer, the life that can be killed with impunity, is an abstract paradigm through which to glimpse the violence of sovereign power, is to obfuscate the discrepant, nuanced, and contradictory historical processes that Mbembe’s analysis invites. Abstracting homo sacer, rather than locating its production in the historical weave of race in the modern world, short-circuits the productive complexity of relational analysis. It obscures, as the cultural theorist Alexander Weheliye notes, how “because black suffering figures in the domain of the mundane, it refuses the idiom of exception.”⁵³ Rather, to dwell genealogically in the historical vicissitudes and contingencies made available through a relational analysis is, as Lisa Lowe argues, to “both situate ‘difference’ within the modern apparatus of comparison and attempt to retrieve the fragments of mixture and convergence that are ‘lost’ through modern comparative procedures.”⁵⁴ In a different idiom, Said might have called such analytical work contrapuntal.⁵⁵

The early twentieth-century German jurist Carl Schmitt’s definition of the sovereign as “he who decides on the exception” drew on the expression of sovereignty under colonial modernity as its operative blueprint.⁵⁶ A “state of exception” in which the rights and protections granted by the state are indefinitely suspended during national emergencies authorized the rule of law’s very existence. For Schmitt, the state of exception demanded that the sovereign “decide between its elements” through the “elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.” Subjects for whom the sovereign’s law did not apply—“let them be called barbarians, uncivilized, atheists, aristocrats, even slaves”—occupy spaces both within and outside the borders of the nation-state.⁵⁷ Nazi jurists used Schmitt’s political theology to legitimate National Socialism’s legal apparatus by drawing on Euro-America’s recognizable lexicon of colonial racism, or what the Italian historian Enzo Traverso identifies as Nazism’s “roots in a theory and practice of extermination of ‘inferior races’ to which all the imperial Western powers subscribed.”⁵⁸ The origins of Nazi violence were “the unique synthesis of a vast range of modes of domination and extermination already tried out separately in the course of modern Western history.”⁵⁹ The Nazi regime turned to the racialized rhetoric of colonial difference, citing examples from Anglophone empires. Deploying colonial racism’s brutal relationality, Hitler famously claimed, “What India was for England, the eastern territories will be for us. . . . Our role in the East will be analogous to that of the English in India.” Elsewhere he writes, “The natives will have to be shot. . . . Our sole duty is to Germanize the country by the immigration of Germans, regarding the natives as Redskins.”⁶⁰

In the 1940s and 1950s Hannah Arendt, herself a refugee from Germany’s occupation of France, painstakingly documented the origins of Nazi anti-Semitism in European imperial projects. Arendt explicated the effects for the new state of Israel of being constituted through a category of human population without the right to have rights. In the process, she elucidated how political modernity’s founding documents, most notably the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, constructed a tenuous affiliation between the state and its subjects that would lead to Europe’s pandemic of stateless refugees and national minorities “forced to live outside the scope of all tangible law.”⁶¹ In the culmination of this line of argument in Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt notes:

It turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered territory—but this solved neither the problem of the minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people.⁶²

With the terror of European Jewish extermination in full view, Arendt’s essays like “We Refugees” (1943), “The Crisis of Zionism” (1943), and “Zionism Reconsidered” (1944) problematized the linkages between Zionism and Euro-American imperial projects that embraced a form of nation-state sovereignty hostile to the claims of indigenous peoples. “The Zionists,” wrote Arendt, “if they continue to ignore the Mediterranean peoples and watch out only for the big faraway powers, will appear only as their tools, the agents of foreign and hostile interests.”⁶³ In the early 1960s, as a journalist covering Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, Arendt contextualized Nazi genocide within a broader field of twentieth-century imperial culture. In many ways, as the historian Peter Novick has argued, Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem—published months after Baldwin’s “Down at the Cross” in the New Yorker—paved the way for a critical appraisal, sometimes silenced or subjugated, of the manners in which U.S. imperial culture remained predicated on comparative rationalizations of state and state-sanctioned racial violence.

This brief historicization of theory illustrates A Shadow over Palestine’s central question: How have artists, activists, intellectuals, state agents, and scholars in the United States written through, about, and against the historical shadowing of Palestine and Palestinians within Euro-American modernity? The figure that figures the other of political Zionism, its own self-definitional outside, is an animating lacuna of modern Euro-American thought. It is an absence that settler colonialism, racial liberalism, and genocide all persistently demand and produce, that they call into being and deterritorialize, that they banish and abandon. Held in a persistent shadow, Palestine secures the expression of imperial sovereignty, animating its “permanently temporary,” read exceptional, measures. The alterity against which Zionism is secured names a supplement that is not simply or solely an exclusion awaiting proper recognition into a stable field of reference. The will and desire toward incorporability and inclusion, toward generating a form of representation capable of securing something like human status to serve as a bulwark against regimes of violence, is built on the tenuous grounds of sociality that define Euro-American modernity. The forces that paradoxically draw on this shadow have been insufficient in interceding in Euro-American modernity’s durable race-making procedures. Palestine’s constitutive absence materializes geographically and has profound spatial repercussions. It materializes historiographically, in how archives are made and unmade and in the warrants that buttress claims about the content and form of those archives. It materializes epistemologically, in the grids of intelligibility that sustain how we know what we know. It infuses the very conceptual apparatus through which we come to understand the relation between knowledge, power, and coloniality. A Shadow over Palestine seeks to clarify how this absent presence came to bear so intensively on a particular historical conjuncture.

Chapter 1, “Specters of Genocide: Cold War Exceptions and the Contradictions of Liberalism,” situates the entanglement of Israel and Palestine in competing post-Holocaust discourses of racial expertise and Cold War geopolitics. To do so, it provides a genealogical account of the 1975 United Nations Resolution 3379, which condemned Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. This resolution overwhelmingly passed the UN General Assembly, bringing widespread attention to the racial dimensions of Zionism as an ideology and practice of settler colonialism aimed at the removal of indigenous Palestinians from the historical land of Palestine. Constructing an account of the resolution in this way surfaces three key elements otherwise lost in the commonsense narrative of the resolution. First is the historical emergence of the UN’s 1963 Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the document that provided the crucial precedent for Resolution 3379. The 1963 declaration engaged a tenacious epistemic ambivalence toward anti-Semitism that attempted to manage the post–World War II race–religion distinction as it pertained to Jews. Second, the chapter centralizes the work of the Syrian scholar and diplomat Fayez Sayegh and the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Palestine Research Center (PRC), uncovering a key moment in the intellectual history of theorizing racism’s relation to Zionist settler colonialism. From at least the early 1960s, race was already a well-developed heuristic through which the project of Palestinian national liberation advanced its analysis of power and history. Third, situating the resolution in this way emphasizes how U.S. Cold War liberalism was consolidated through articulations of expertise on the race question. Exemplifying this dynamic is the work of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the most important U.S. racial liberal thinkers, policymakers, and politicians of the period, who served as the U.S. representative to the United Nations at the time of the resolution. Moynihan’s work reveals how a dominant culture of American expertise around race matters consistently overwrote Arab and Palestinian racial critiques with the specter of a nebulous Soviet threat or a viral anti-Semitism.

The analysis of racism by the Palestine Research Center was central to the arguments put forth at the UN on behalf of Palestinians. In the immediate aftermath of the June 1967 War, the PRC’s work was adopted—without citation—and transformed to underscore the anticolonial dimensions of Black freedom struggles in the United States. Chapter 2, “Black Power’s Palestine: Permanent War and the Global Freedom Struggle,” tracks how activists used this anticolonial imagined geography to link race-conscious critiques of the incorporative modalities of U.S. imperialism to Palestinian national liberation. This work diverged from the tradition of Afro-diasporic Zionism that informed liberal and radical Black politics alike, and circulated alternative knowledge of the colonial conditions shaping Palestinian life. Between 1967 and 1975, the associations between the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party in the United States, and Algeria, Egypt, and the Palestinian national liberation movement reveal how representations of U.S. decolonization were intimately bound to the emergent legibility of pro-Palestinian politics. SNCC’s infamous 1967 “position paper” on Palestine, purportedly drafted within the organization but reproducing the PRC’s scholarship almost verbatim, becomes a crucial rhetorical performance in this regard. The Black Panther Party’s affiliation with the Palestine Liberation Organization at the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers placed this relationship in a broader decolonizing context. The chapter culminates in an extended analysis of the early work of David Graham Du Bois, the son of Shirley Graham Du Bois and stepson of W. E. B. Du Bois. David Du Bois worked as a journalist in Cairo before becoming editor of the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service. He wrote a quasi-autobiographical novel about African Americans in Egypt titled . . . And Bid Him Sing. Taken together, his work reveals the translational possibilities and limits posed by an Arab–African diasporic cultural imaginary.

The 1967 war catalyzed the anticolonial trajectory of Black freedom struggles and spurred increasingly robust associations with Palestinians and the Arab world. For many American Jews across the political spectrum, however, 1967 facilitated intensified identifications with Israel as a safe haven in a world still scarred by anti-Semitism. These identifications were all the more complex given increasingly vocal critiques of the paucity of American liberalism to secure substantive rights for nonwhite minorities. Chapter 3, “Jewish Conversions: Color Blindness, Anti-Imperialism, and Jewish National Liberation,” turns to a range of culture work embodying these vexed convergences. Against the backdrop of growing visibility for Jewish cultural and political organizations like the American Jewish Committee, this chapter interrogates how the suture between political Zionism and American Jewishness was contingently fashioned in the crucible of racial justice struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s. These struggles’ imagined geographies drew on a cognitive mapping of U.S. imperial culture that linked Jewish orientations toward Cold War liberalism with the intensification of U.S. state violence in urban U.S. settings and in Southeast Asia alike, as well as with the paradoxical military supremacy and existential vulnerability of the post-1967 Israeli state. Some prominent writers, like Norman Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer, and Saul Bellow, doubled down on the exceptionalist promise of American liberty and Israeli military supremacy to ensure Jewish security in a world where Jews were purportedly dangerously “exposed.” By contrast, radical and progressive Jewish New Left organizations (the Jewish Liberation Project, Jews for Urban Justice, etc.) and activists (Michael Lerner, Arthur Waskow, etc.) drew on Zionism’s own anti-imperialist lineage as a Jewish national liberation movement to figure the Jewish diaspora’s revolutionary potential and to imagine the possibilities of Israel as an integrated part of the Third World. Never far from any of this culture work were robust debates about the contours of Black freedom struggles; by the same token, routinely absented were investigations of the settler colonial investments in these expressions of Jewish national liberation.

For many Palestinians and other Arabs living in the United States, the popular political and media discourse framing the 1967 war as a miraculous victory by proxy was nothing short of devastating. While there had been a long history of Arabs attempting to make legible to American audiences both the presence of Palestinian Christians and Muslims concerned with the imposition of Anglo-American interests in the region, and with peoples of Arab descent as part of the fabric of American life, the 1967 war marked a watershed crisis for both projects. Chapter 4, “Arab American Awakening: Edward Said, Area Studies, and Palestine’s Contrapuntal Futures,” situates the development of Said’s Orientalism within this crisis. It turns to a slim 1968 essay Said wrote directly after the June war, “The Arab Portrayed,” alongside the growing knowledge production by a community of scholars of Arab descent. Said’s early argument precedes Orientalism as engaging an analysis of race and epistemology responsive to the shifting post-1967 racialization of Arabs in the United States. Situating Orientalism in this way desediments how the question of Palestine was being fashioned within changing literary studies paradigms; the rise of state-authorized surveillance of so-called ethnic Arabs alongside instrumentalist Cold War area studies; and the organized knowledge projects of scholars of Arab descent in the United States. It likewise illuminates how Said’s contrapuntal mode of analysis was attentive to the incommensurable connections between ideologies and practices of U.S. settler conquest, the human and political devastation of the Holocaust, and the dispossession and dehumanization of Arab communities in Southwest Asia and the United States alike. Said’s post-1967 writings confront the conjuncture’s categorical dismissal of a whole people—the Palestinians—by both reckoning with the symbolic, material, and ontological armature that gives such a dismissal its force while laying claim to the imaginative possibilities of Palestine as a horizon of ineluctable relationality. Palestine serves as a site that proffered Said a relational humanism whose ethic of alterity is matched only by its commitment to a nondominating and noncoercive decolonization.

By the early 1980s the hegemony of the New Right in the United States had substantially deepened relationships with an Israeli state whose mode of governance precluded any substantive self-determined expression of Palestinian national liberation. The anticolonial racial justice movements of the late 1960s were severely curtailed by technologies of U.S. state repression. Holocaust memory in the United States was increasingly sutured to narrow U.S. and Israeli Cold War geopolitical aims. And expressions of Palestinian solidarity were increasingly scrutinized while expressions of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racisms in popular culture were on the rise. In this context, where and how did an antiracist and anti-imperialist relation to Palestine surface? Chapter 5, “Moving Toward Home: Women of Color Feminisms and the Lebanon Conjuncture” turns to the Black poet, essayist, teacher, and activist June Jordan, whose published and unpublished work on the Middle East reveals and contests broad political shifts in the early 1980s. The chapter’s point of departure is the November 1982 UNICEF fund-raiser for the children of Lebanon in the aftermath of Israel’s invasion the previous summer. Called “Moving towards Home,” and featuring a dozen poets from the United States, Israel, Lebanon, and Palestine, the event registered the complexity of merging the poetic and the geopolitical. “Moving Toward Home”—the event and Jordan’s poem—occurred amid coalitional projects between Arab American and African American civil rights organizations in support of Palestinian self-determination and against the expansion of Cold War militarization. They also occurred amid intensive disputes among U.S. feminists in the late 1970s and early 1980s about the differentiated lived experiences of racism, Zionism, and anti-Semitism. White feminism’s hegemony was disrupted in especially robust ways by race-critical analytics that had Israel and Palestine in their ambit, all the more so after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. This chapter thus treats Jordan’s poetic and political expression of “becoming-Palestinian” in relation to vexed debates within Jewish, Black, and U.S. third world feminisms on how to conceptualize and enact emancipatory projects that could center antiracism as constitutive of a durable political futurity.

A final introductory note is in order. A Shadow over Palestine attempts to tell a better story about the present entanglement of the United States, Israel, and Palestine through a conjunctural analysis of its past. That is, it is from the vantage point of the political present that I reconstruct its prefiguration.⁶⁴ If ever there was a time to revisit and reframe this past—not only to recall the texture of its legitimation and the alibis for how things have become as they are but also to listen closely and remember those modes of critique, imagination, and relation envisioning how things might become otherwise—clearly that time has arrived.

1

Specters of Genocide

Cold War Exceptions and the Contradictions of Liberalism

ON NOVEMBER 10, 1975, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, determining that “zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.”¹ The resolution’s preambular paragraphs based this determination on the UN’s 1963 Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination; its 1973 condemnation of the “unholy alliance” between South African racism and Zionism; and the trio of 1975 declarations by the World Conference of the International Women’s Year in Mexico City, the Organization of African Unity, and the Conference of Ministers for Foreign Affairs of Non-Aligned Countries. The resolution was passed in the context of a broader set of debates regarding the contours of the UN’s “decade for action to combat racism and racial discrimination,” which the organization had embarked on just two years earlier.² Seventy-two member states voted in favor of the resolution, thirty-five voted against, and thirty-two abstained.³

In the days that followed, tens of thousands of people protested outside the UN office in New York City decrying the resolution’s passage.⁴ Both chambers of the U.S. Congress passed unanimous statements condemning it. The House of Representatives called on the U.S. delegation to withdraw support from the Decade for Action, excoriated the resolution, and suggested that “the campaign against Zionism brings the United Nations to a point of encouraging anti-Semitism, one of the oldest and most virulent forms of racism known to human history.”⁵ Dozens of the largest American newspapers published editorials denouncing the UN,⁶ with the New York Times castigating the “defection from morality of a handful of countries” that “enabled the Communist-Arab bloc to disgrace the world organization, and reduce the General Assembly’s authority virtually to zero.”⁷ A jointly authored letter published in the New York Times reprimanded the organization in similar tones, noting that “it may well mark the beginning of the end of the dream of a United Nations, founded ironically as an alliance against Nazism just thirty years ago.”⁸ Even the satirical news segment on NBC’s Saturday Night Live reported on the event: “The United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution equating Zionism with racism,” intoned faux–news anchor Chevy Chase. “Black entertainer Sammy Davis Jr., a convert to Judaism, was quoted as saying, ‘What a breakthrough! Now finally I can hate myself.’”⁹

Saturday Night Live’s humorous sleight of hand collapsed Zionism, Judaism, and religious belief, while racism was understood simply as individual anti-Black prejudice. In other words, SNL tidily exemplified the pervasive American racial common sense within which the resolution was understood. Yet the overwhelmingly successful passage of the resolution revealed how American hegemony over the meanings of race and racism was partial and provincial. In naming the legal and material operations of human distinction and social exclusion at work in Zionism, the international horizon of the resolution identified settler colonialism’s racial kernel in an era of Cold War retrenchment, the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam, and third world decolonization. The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service recognized as much, celebrating the passage of the resolution as vindicating a position the party had held since 1967. To the newspaper’s editors, the “hysterical reaction” in the United States to the resolution’s adoption exemplified “already existent racist attitudes among the majority population of this country toward mainly Third World countries as being incapable of governing themselves in accordance with fundamental democratic principles.”¹⁰ The newspaper commenced serializing a set of long-form scholarly essays on the racism experienced by Sephardic Jews in Israel, on the living conditions of Arab citizens within Israel, and on the emerging geopolitical alliance between Israel and South Africa.¹¹ The Arab Information Center placed an advertisement in the New York Times that included a letter by the self-described anti-Zionist Rabbi Elmer Berger. Berger claimed that “if ‘racism’ is a form of government or a structure of society in which national rights and responsibilities are officially legislated upon the basis of creed, color or ethnic derivation, then the Zionist character of much ‘Basic’ Israeli law qualifies.”¹² Abdelwahab Elmessiri, the Egyptian professor of English literature and Arab League adviser to the UN, noted in a New York Times op-ed, “from the perspective of an Afro-Asian, it is not difficult to see Israel as yet another manifestation of a racist form of colonialization [sic]—namely, settler colonialism.” Through a set of pointed connections, Elmessiri put critical pressure on the bearing of the Holocaust in the debate. He stated emphatically, “It is a moral myopia to try to solve Auschwitz by Deir Yassin (the 1948 massacre of 254 unarmed Arab villagers by Irgun and Stern Gang terrorists) and, in answer to the Occidental concentration camps, propose the dispersion of the Palestinians.”¹³

These linkages exemplify the unstable meanings of race, Zionism, and the Holocaust for U.S. imperial culture. They register both a terrain of increasing epistemic ambivalence and a will to manage and know an epochal reordering of postwar social relations in the service of U.S. interests. While many commentators described the UN resolution as simply equating Zionism and racism (or even shorthanded it into “Z=R”),¹⁴ the resolution’s emphasis on form invites an inquiry into the complex relational logics—and their ambiguous set of meanings—accruing to race and racism in this period. Is Zionism an expression of a normative secularism, part and parcel of the modern nation-state? Does it provide an eschatological horizon for political emancipation and transcendent destiny? Or does Zionism name settler colonialism’s durability in an era of decolonization? Does Zionism signal the Nazi genocide’s persistent legacy in shaping the terrain of discursive permissibility, or does it exemplify the broad Cold War meta-narratives of power politics? Such were the questions raised by Resolution 3379.

The prevailing view in the United States framed the resolution as patently “false” and “obscene,” as unleashing the possibility of a genocidal anti-Semitism, and as an attack on liberal democracy itself. Through an investment in an abstract formalism to understand race, this reaction prefigured hallmark elements of U.S. domestic color-blind ideology for the international stage. Such was the stuff of the Cold War, in which conceptions of U.S. “liberty” ascended to the sacralized position of civic religion blessed precisely by and through the entanglement of U.S. imperial culture with Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Importantly, the entanglement displaced the thick materialist account of settler colonial racism in Palestine from which the resolution was drawn—an account produced within the Palestinian national liberation movement and which handily won the day on the floor of the General Assembly. Scholars of Arab descent theorized race and racism both to explain the seemingly anomalous ways that Zionism developed historically through ideologies and practices of indigenous dispossession and to open up alternative modalities for narrating Palestinian history. Prevailing U.S. discourse of the period displaced this analysis with fears that Soviet-backed totalitarian regimes were deploying anti-Semitism as the ideological catalyst of an attack on liberal democratic freedoms. This displacement primed a shared U.S.–Israeli logic of national exceptionalism. Such a shared logic proclaimed that the meaning of Israel exemplified broader geopolitical dynamics demanding a siege mentality, that support for Israel was an expression of U.S. patriotism, and that the United States and Israel were uniquely positioned to contend with a purportedly hostile global environment.

In tracing this genealogy, I dwell on the texture of a debate that has often been glossed, simplified, or simply mischaracterized in the United States. In doing so, I unravel three key historical strands that crystallized in the event of the UN resolution. First was the 1963 Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the UN document providing the crucial precedent for Resolution 3379. This declaration revealed an epistemic ambivalence toward anti-Semitism that attempted to manage the postwar race/religion distinction as it pertained to Jews. Second, the work of Fayez Sayegh and the Palestine Research Center was crucial in theorizing racism’s relation to Israeli settler colonialism. I trace how from at least the early 1960s, race and racism were well-developed heuristics through which the project of Palestinian national liberation advanced analyses of power and history, ones that had a compelling (if also ambivalent) purchase in the UN. Third, there was the consolidation of a dominant strain of U.S. Cold War liberalism as it was articulated and enacted around the question of race. I scrutinize the work of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, arguably among the most influential U.S. thinkers, policymakers, and politicians for the consolidation of racial liberalism. While Moynihan’s impact on dominant notions of race and ethnicity has garnered substantial critical attention, few have connected his domestic framing of race matters to his international engagements with race during his appointment as the U.S. ambassador to the UN at the time of the Zionism resolution. His speech against the resolution was, according to one of neoconservatism’s leading historians, nothing less than “one of the proudest moments in American diplomatic history.”¹⁵ Moynihan’s work was symptomatic of a broader culture of American expertise around race matters that consistently overwrote the expression of Arab and Palestinian racial critiques with the specter of a nebulous Soviet threat or a viral anti-Semitism. Moynihan’s story at the UN is ultimately about the failure of the United States, at least in this moment, to manage the meaning and effectiveness of racial critique in the face of international antiracist mobilization.

Understanding Racial Liberalism

Racial liberalism names the ideas informing the U.S. state’s official commitment to the national integration of African Americans. Legal and discursive commitments to Black integration were seen to evidence U.S.-led liberal capitalism’s capacity to dispense freedom and serve as a moral guarantor for a globalizing Americanism.¹⁶ The management and representation of African American integration into an officially antiracist nation-state was understood as crucial in the Cold War fight against communism, part and parcel of an American civic religion of freedom. The U.S. state as an exemplary liberal democracy was seen as the privileged site through which to advance commitments for civic inclusion and the desegregation of space, resources, and life chances. Liberalism’s raciality garnered its decisive ideological force in the early Cold War period precisely through processes of regulation and normalization that recalibrated the contours of a proper national subject. Racial liberalism thus fused economic and political criteria to create an individuated subject of rights, one whose moral compass was guided by a rubric of civic inclusion within a secular public sphere, and pointed to the pluralist nation as the primary site of political identification.

Intertwined with its geopolitical investment in African American integration was the U.S. state’s commitment to Jewish national assimilability.¹⁷ Racial liberal ideas understood World War II’s Atlantic Front retrospectively as a war against racism. Anti-Semitism’s eradication exemplified not only an antiracist intervention into an order of white supremacy patently abhorrent after World War II but also an anticommunist intervention into the Soviet bloc treatment of Jews. Jewish assimilability in the United States indexed an exceptionalist narrative of liberal pluralism, an idea whose origins trace at least to the 1910s.¹⁸ Jews becoming “white” ethnics involved grafting Jewishness onto the secular Protestant ethos framing the notion of national “Judeo-Christian” values.¹⁹ Yet, Michael Rogin shows, as early as the 1920s, the vigorous enactment of Jewish non-Blackness via mainstream cultural performance—the embrace of blackface, the Jewish rearticulation of minstrelsy, and so forth—framed Jewish assimilability as predicated on a foundational white supremacist substructure.²⁰ By the 1950s and early 1960s, Jews participated in civil rights desegregation and voting rights struggles to demonstrate liberal inclusion as an American civic promise, performing pluralist commitments by fighting Jim Crow.²¹ At the same time, often inadvertently, Jewish integration fused conceptions of Jewishness and political Zionism, and sedimented into the dominant racial order the exclusion and devaluation of Palestinians and Arabs as proper political subjects. It obscured liberalism’s enduring historical investment in racial exclusion and recoded settler colonial violence in West Asia as Jewish national liberation.

A third aspect of racial liberalism was expressed in debates about the function and value of international governance institutions, and the United Nations in particular. The UN’s key predecessor, the League of Nations, explicitly advanced a Eurocentric notion of benevolent paternalism—one whose Mandate system asserted the racialized claim that “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world” would receive the “tutelage” of European powers to transition from colonial rule to national independence.²² Britain’s Mandate for Palestine (1922) reproduced the language of the Balfour Declaration (1917) promising that Britain would facilitate a “Jewish national home in Palestine” and was slated to expire after thirty years. The UN emerged in the wake of the League’s failure to prevent World War II and inherited much of its paternalism. In the immediate postwar years, the UN was a site to articulate a set of shared principles around the concept of human rights, the prevention and punishment of genocide, and an enactment of a peaceful transition into a decolonized world. These principles infused cosmopolitan statements like the UN’s 1946 resolution “to put an immediate end to religious and so-called racial persecution and discrimination,”²³ as well as the necessity, expressed in an important 1960 declaration, “to bringing to a speedy and unconditional end colonialism in all its forms and manifestations.”²⁴

Such global visions of liberal antiracism, human rights, and decolonization catalyzed what the historian Mark Mazower calls an “imperial internationalism.”²⁵ The UN could be leveraged to maintain Euro-American hegemony, articulating the political and deliberative horizons of decolonization. The UN framed decolonization as an orderly, peaceful operation guided by Euro-American-style cosmopolitanism, which it drew directly from the League of Nations worldview. This framing deepened, rather than challenged, what the cultural theorist Randall Williams calls the “international division of humanity.”²⁶

At the same time, a wide range of organizations wielded the UN’s formalized commitments to struggles for national liberation and decolonization in ways that exceeded the parameters of U.S. racial liberalism and the broader Euro-American project of which it was a part. These organizations made legible the legacies of settler colonialism and white supremacy that were uncontainable within U.S. civil rights discourse. Purportedly U.S. “domestic” constituencies advanced claims through the UN. The Civil Rights Congress’s 1951 petition charged Jim Crow’s pervasive anti-Black violence as a legacy of genocide fueling wars abroad.²⁷ The Organization of Afro-American Unity underscored precisely these concerns a decade later.²⁸ Similarly, third world projects such as the Non-Alignment Movement, the Organization of African Unity, and the Arab League leveraged the UN’s rhetoric and mechanisms. The persistent crisis of South African apartheid was registered at the UN as early as 1950, when the General Assembly passed a resolution condemning the South African policy of “racial segregation.”²⁹ The UN mobilized against the apartheid regime in the wake of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, founded the UN Center against Apartheid in 1976, supported broad-based boycott and institutionalized anti-apartheid struggles, and, in a series of 1973 resolutions, condemned the “unholy alliance between Portuguese colonialism, South African racism, Zionism and Israeli imperialism.”³⁰ From the UN’s inception the Palestine question was central to its fashioning of a postwar geopolitical order. The UN made a commitment to the partition of Palestine in 1947, recognized Israel’s founding in 1948, devised an institutional architecture to respond to the Palestinian refugee crisis in 1948, and founded the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East in 1950. Palestine’s presence at the UN persisted, including, in 1975, when the General Assembly established the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People and conferred the Palestinian Liberation Organization observer status.

Postwar racial liberalism was likewise saturated by the affective, political, and ideological residues of the genocide of six million Jews and five million gays and lesbians, mentally and physically disabled people, Jehovah’s witnesses, “gypsies,” political dissidents, and so-called antisocials. Where and how the event of the Holocaust was understood to evidence racial violence had dramatic effects on the frameworks that contained, managed, and directed the collective pathos wrought by this terror. It indelibly buttressed the way that Israel and Palestine were perceived in the United States. Not only were reckonings with the Holocaust mobilized as part of U.S. and Israeli political culture,³¹ but they weighed on the UN’s discourse addressing Zionism and racism.

“The Swastika Epidemic”

One of Resolution 3379’s key precedents grew out of the United Nation’s 1973 commitment to embark on a decade of action to “combat racism and racial discrimination.” This commitment was based on the UN’s Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD), which was codified in 1963, adopted as a convention in 1965, and entered into force in 1969. While CERD was mobilized for a wide range of ends and carried the imprimatur of being the first major treaty to codify the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the declaration’s origins lie in the vexed contentions around how to identify and combat anti-Semitism in a post-Holocaust world.

A brief history of the emergence of the declaration reveals how anti-Semitism became figured as an ahistorical virus, one whose agential force was cast beyond the bounds of reason. Anti-Semitism was often theorized through the metaphor of a viral disease permanently lurking within the social body, activated in individuals, and treatable through the subtle management of American social science. While Hannah Arendt and others critiqued this metaphor, frustrated that the concept of eternal anti-Semitism presumed that Jew hatred was “the natural consequences of an eternal problem,” it nevertheless had substantial traction among American Jewish defense organizations.³² At the same time, many believed that theorizing anti-Semitism required distinguishing between race and religion. This belief inserted a pervasive epistemic ambivalence into the UN debates themselves, whose effects were powerfully felt by 1975. An unstable chain of equivalences traveled analogically across the texture of the debates. Many thought that American social science could lend an epistemological certainty to treat an object—anti-Semitism—whose meaning refused to stay still.

As recent scholars have compellingly shown, anti-Semitism’s epistemic ambivalence has shaped the race/religion distinction across the longue durée of the modern colonial world system.³³ It was a very particular flashpoint that inspired action at the United Nations. On Christmas Eve 1959, two twenty-five-year-old men defaced the Roonstrasse Synagogue in the West German city of Cologne. The synagogue had served as a stark reminder of the Nazi violence, having been targeted during the November 1938 Night of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht. In September 1959, in a major reconciliation and healing ceremony, the synagogue was rededicated. It was defaced only a few months later, kicking off what became known widely as the “swastika epidemic” that swept across Western Europe and the United States. The American Jewish Committee (AJC) cataloged approximately two thousand incidents of anti-Semitism in forty countries, with eight hundred in West Germany alone.³⁴ Over nine weeks, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) found that some 643 anti-Semitic incidents occurred in the United States, from swastikas smeared on temples, community centers, homes, churches, sidewalks, college campuses, and automobiles to phone threats and bricks hurled through windows. Anti-Semitic slogans appeared on walls of schoolrooms and storefronts. The ADL reported incidents in New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and at least eighteen other cities. Of the 167 apprehended offenders, most were between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. Few belonged to what the ADL described as “neo-Nazi clubs,” though over twenty such clubs were discovered by the ADL during its investigation.³⁵ According to the historian Stuart Svonkin, the consensus among Jewish American organizations was that the “swastika epidemic” was not an organized expression of a cohesive political project. Rather, it revealed how quickly seemingly “latent” anti-Semitism could be enacted without much provocation. “Anti-semitism is so endemic and so near the surface,” intimated one commentator, “that it can be triggered overnight all over the world.”³⁶

As they narrated the “swastika epidemic” as an event, these organizations represented anti-Semitism as the carrier of a totalitarian threat to American society. In early January 1960, at the behest of the American Jewish Committee, the International League for the Rights of Man called on the UN’s Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities to condemn such acts. In a widely circulated pamphlet, “As the UN Probes Prejudice,” the AJC set forth an understanding of anti-Semitism through the broad logic of an “outbreak” (5), deploying an epidemiology model to frame how anti-Semitism’s “contagious nature defies geographic containment” (6). The AJC implored the UN subcommission to recognize the event as a “symptom of a crippling social disorder demanding profound study and long-range corrective treatment” (5). Anti-Semitism was nothing less than a “dangerous infection—easily spread and implanted in immature or warped minds, and always ready to flower into ugly violence at the drop of a cue” (14).

American social science was tasked with developing “antidotes” to this disease. Social science was seen as a knowledge regime especially well-suited to conceptualizing and preventing genocide, particularly through a social-psychological heuristic. Among the best-known expressions of this hope was the American Jewish Committee’s 1944 sponsorship of the major multiauthor, seven-volume Studies in Prejudice (1950). Produced through a partnership between Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Institute for Social Research and UC Berkeley’s Public Opinion Study Group, Studies in Prejudice claimed that American social science was particularly capable of diagnosing and combating anti-Semitism. Published in the years immediately following World War II, Studies in Prejudice shifted debates about anti-Semitism from Adorno’s, Horkheimer’s, and Arendt’s immanent critiques of Enlightenment reason to an instrumental Cold War theorization that coded anti-Semitism as an eternal, if also an individual, prejudice that could be activated if the conditions supported it. In this light, Cold War anti-Semitism marked the kernel of a viral transatlantic totalitarianism that warranted state intervention in the name of American freedom.

Studies in Prejudice was in fact a substantial revision of Horkheimer and Adorno’s proposed “Research Project on Anti-Semitism,” which they brought with them when they fled Europe. The project’s “intellectual assimilation” garnered the Horkheimer circle a broader audience in the United States.³⁷ Their partial embrace of American social science enabled the circle to gain material support for some of the most influential contributions of critical theory (most notably, Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno’s Minima Moralia). Studies in Prejudice moved away from previous critiques of the social totality that reckoned with the instrumentalization of reason and the forms of empiricism reifying social categories and masking social contradictions. Instead, the project drew on methods more properly recognizable to mainstream U.S. sociology, namely, a Positivist social science that treated “totalitarianism” as the primary object of critique. Anti-Semitism marked the leading edge of a totalitarian political formation figured as U.S. liberal democracy’s constitutive other. In this revision, anti-Semitism was framed as what members of the institute called a “rehearsal” for totalitarianism’s capacity to “annihilat[e] liberty and democracy,” one that functioned as the “spearhead of the totalitarian order.”³⁸ To link its case studies of 1920s Weimar Germany and the contemporary U.S. context, the Studies in Prejudice project encoded a logic of virality whose “biologization” of anti-Semitism was figured as latent in the subjects of liberal democracy and potentially activated should the conditions arise. Horkheimer and his coauthor Samuel Flowerman championed this position in the brief essay prefacing each of the seven volumes:

At this moment in world history anti-Semitism is not manifesting itself with the full and violent destructiveness of which we know it to be capable. Even a social disease has its periods of quiescence during which the social scientist, like the biologist or the physician, can study it in the search for more effective ways to prevent or reduce the virulence of the next outbreak. . . . What tissues in the life of our modern society remain cancerous, and despite our assumed enlightenment show the incongruous atavism of ancient peoples? And what within the individual organism responds to certain stimuli in our culture with attitudes and acts of destructive aggression? (21)

In this way, Horkheimer and Flowerman refracted complex debates about method, evidence, and audience through an array of U.S. national concerns by conceptualizing anti-Semitism as a latent virus in the social body. Their prefatory remarks were prominently featured in the AJC’s pamphlet produced in the wake of the “swastika epidemic.”

If anti-Semitism’s virality marked one of the decisive U.S. heuristics at the United Nations, the other was the UN’s own ambivalent framing of anti-Semitism vis-à-vis race, nation, and religion. The title used by the UN’s Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities to respond to the “swastika epidemic” foregrounds this ambivalence. The subcommission tasked itself with pursuing an inquiry into “anti-Semitism and other forms of religious and racial prejudice.” This ambivalent coupling of race and religion echoed a 1946 resolution from the UN’s first General Assembly. Rather than analytically clarifying the relationship between race and religion, the subcommission’s resolution intensified its undecidability and expressed alarm at a growing list of concerns, including “the manifestations of anti-Semitism and other forms of racial and national hatred and religious and racial prejudices of a similar nature” (4). The subcommission recommended the preparation of an international convention against religious and racial discrimination, a task that the UN’s Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Affairs Committee (known in brief as the “Third Committee”) took up in earnest in 1962. In its deliberations, the Third Committee quickly decided to delink race and religion and to draft instruments related first to the elimination of racial discrimination, followed later on by a complementary set of instruments to address religious intolerance.³⁹

A contemporaneous history of what became the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination suggests that this delinking of race and religion “had been brought about by political undercurrents which had very little to do with the merits of the problem. The opposition to coverage of religious as well as racial discrimination had come from some of the Arab delegations; it reflected the Arab-Israeli conflict.”⁴⁰ When the Third Committee began drafting the Declaration for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, there had been little express interest in enumerating what these various “forms” actually were. At the behest of Marietta Tree, the U.S. ambassador to the UN Commission on Human Rights, the U.S. delegation proposed an article that targeted anti-Semitism specifically. Tree was acting on a request from Rabbi Yitzhak Lewin. Lewin was a member of World Agudat Israel, an anti-Zionist Orthodox Jewish nongovernmental organization, who wanted to ensure that the origins of this declaration in the “worldwide outbreak” of anti-Semitism were registered in the instrument itself.⁴¹ The Soviet delegation responded by proposing that anti-Semitism be listed as one among a panoply of forms of racism, including “Zionism, nazism, neo-nazism and all other forms of the policy and ideology of colonialism, national and racial hatred and exclusiveness.”⁴² The Jordanian representative suggested the inclusion of “fascist, colonial, tribal, Zionist and similar practices.”⁴³ By the time debate closed, the subcommittee agreed on listing apartheid, segregation, separation, and the promotion of racial superiority and expansionism as forms of racial discrimination.

Ten years later, when Resolution 3379 was brought before the General Assembly, it was articulated atop an ambivalent epistemological edifice. The UN’s formal commitments to decolonization and national self-determination that preceded the pledge to end racial discrimination were sutured to a theory of anti-Semitism as a viral disease lurking dormant in the social body. As I demonstrate in the balance of this chapter, the prominent Arab scholar–activists who drove the resolution articulated an alternative analysis of Zionism’s differential distribution of human value and valuelessness—what they theorized as racism. This analysis garnered widespread support among decolonizing member states at the UN, even as it was delegitimized in the United States and Israel as immoral, obscene, false, and infected with anti-Semitism. An Arab critique of settler colonial racism was seen through the frames of U.S. racial liberalism to activate anti-Semitism and demand a Cold War anticommunist defense of liberal democracy.

The Anomaly of Settler Colonialism

Scholars of Arab descent committed to Palestinian national liberation theorized the emergence, contours, and effects of racism in shaping the social terrain in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Organizations like the Palestine Research Center, the Institute for Palestine Studies, and the Association of Arab American University Graduates produced a historically nuanced critique of Zionism as an extension of settler colonialism, one predicated on sharp racial distinctions not only between Arabs and Jews but also between northern European Jews and their trans-Mediterranean, Arab Jewish, and Black counterparts. These organizations negotiated the powerful specter of the Holocaust and routinely distinguished Zionism as a political project from Jewishness as an ethno-religious identification and set of faith practices.

An analysis of racism was important to the globalizing contours of Palestinian liberation struggles. The original Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Charter, for instance, signed in June 1964, was cast in the vernacular of third world anticolonialism. It included an article defining Zionism as a historical articulation of settler colonial racism. Zionism named a “colonialist movement in its inception, aggressive and expansionist in its goals, racist and segregationist in its configurations and fascist in its means and aims.” In the interest of resolving regional and international “tension and turmoil,” the charter invited “support and sustenance of the community of nations” for the Palestinian people. The 1968 revision to the charter both expanded and sharpened this conceptualization. Written in the wake of the 1967 war and accounting for the rise of armed struggle as a privileged movement tactic, it framed Zionism as “organically associated with international imperialism.” Struggles for the “liberation of the homeland” resonated from Palestine and its diaspora to the Pan-Arab domain of Nasserism, to the multiple sites of antiracist struggle in Latin America, South Africa, and Southeast Asia.⁴⁴ Such an internationalist framing kicked off what the historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin deftly calls the PLO’s “global offensive.”⁴⁵

Alongside the PLO’s formal political framework, in February 1965 the PLO founded the Markaz al-Abhath al-Filastini, the Palestine Research Center (PRC). Based in Beirut, the PRC was a major conduit for archiving, publishing, and distributing knowledge germane to Palestine’s national life and culture. Its directors were among the period’s leading writers on Palestine, including the historian Anis Sayegh, the attorney and researcher Sabri Jiryis, and the poet Mahmoud Darwish. Between 1965 and 1982 the PRC produced over four hundred monographs, pamphlets, and maps in Arabic, English, French, and Spanish, as well as the quarterly periodical Shu’un Filastiniya, or Palestine Affairs.⁴⁶ Early PRC publications covered topics ranging from the Palestine question in international law to issues of civil rights under occupation, U.S. policy toward an Arab–Israeli arms race, conditions of Arab life inside 1948 Israel, and memoirs of a prisoner inside an Israeli jail. One journalist likened the PRC’s library to “an ark containing the Palestinians’ heritage,” housing at its height approximately twenty-five thousand bound volumes alongside a broad swath of documentation germane to life in Palestine prior to 1948, from land deeds and photographs to cartographic documentation of every Arab village present at the time of Israel’s founding.⁴⁷ The PRC was looted during Israel’s invasion of West Beirut in September 1982, and the infrastructure was demolished by a fatal car bomb in early 1983.⁴⁸ According to Jiryis, most of the archival contents were returned to the PLO during a prisoner swap in November 1983 and deposited in a site in Nicosia, Cyprus.⁴⁹

The Palestine Research Center was initially run by Fayez Sayegh, then a political science professor at American University of Beirut (AUB), before it was turned over to his brother Anis. Fayez Sayegh was born in Kharaba, Syria, in 1922. He grew up in Palestine, before leaving in 1947 for the United States, where he received a PhD in philosophy with a minor in political science at Georgetown University, and held teaching positions at Yale, Stanford, Oxford, Macalester, and AUB.⁵⁰ Sayegh routinely published scholarly monographs on Palestine, Zionism, Arab nationalism, and the United Nations. He served in the Lebanese, Yemeni, and Kuwaiti delegations at the UN, before becoming the chief of the Arab States delegation. From 1968 until his death in 1980, he was the rapporteur of the special committee established under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

Many of the PRC’s publications had a critical bearing on the strategic production of knowledge by and about Palestinians, Arabs, and the historical conditions under which the Palestine question had emerged. The PRC’s first publication in its “Facts and Figures” series, published in September 1966, was a brief pamphlet titled “Do You Know? Twenty Basic Facts about the Palestine Problem,” a document that had profound repercussions in the United States.⁵¹ The long-form Palestine Monographs series opened with Sayegh’s own “Zionist Colonialism of Palestine,” published in English, French, and Arabic in September 1965. The central thrust of this pamphlet focuses on how the “fate of Palestine . . . represents an anomaly” in postwar history. “The fading-out of a cruel and shameful period of world history has coincided with the emergence, at the land-bridge between Asia and Africa, of a new offshoot of European Imperialism and a new variety of racist Colonialism.”⁵² Sayegh narrates the result of this anomaly in the tragedy of indigenous Palestinians losing both their land and their right to self-determination. He theorizes the logic of this dispossession as predicated on a theory of racism that is a “congenital, essential, and permanent” feature of the “Zionist settler-state” (21). Sayegh draws on an archive of settler state building to identify Zionism’s racial doctrines of self-segregation, exclusiveness, and supremacy. He traces Zionism’s development to the mid-1880s “scramble for Africa” and the articulation of a generalized European “credo of Nationalism” (1); through to the 1897 Basle Conference, where Theodor Herzl’s World Zionist Organization (WZO) was founded; and to the WZO’s institutionalization at the turn of the century in the Jewish Colonial Trust, the Colonization Commission, the Jewish National Fund, the Palestine Office, and the Palestine Land Development Company. Sayegh then tracks the alliance of the WZO to the British Empire in the midst of World War I, the 1917 Balfour Declaration, and the British Mandate under the League of Nations. From here, Sayegh renders what he perceives as U.S. imperial support for the project being articulated via the United Nations after 1948.

In a subsequent 1970 monograph for the Research Center, Sayegh elaborates on Zionism’s “principle of religio-racial exclusionism” that animates the settler colonial infrastructure of the “Palestine Problem.”⁵³ Palestinian indigenous dispossession and displacement, the “importation of alien colonists,” and the colonization of land and national resources form the core of this infrastructure (8). He expands the framework of “anomaly” of the Palestine problem noted earlier to recognize the “moral anomaly” of a post–World War II settlement for European Jews that produced another community of displaced persons, “forcibly dislodging a people from its rightful realm in order to make room for outsiders” (21). Sayegh notes a political anomaly in Palestinians’ individual and collective rights being at once articulated, guaranteed, and wholly unprotected by the United Nations. Yet the paramount anomaly remains the resolutely historical one: Zionism has “all the essential earmarks of a classical colonial venture” advanced alongside the “most extensive decolonization program ever implemented in the history of mankind” (21).

While Sayegh centers the effects of settler colonialism on the differential distribution of land, rights, and resources, and the dispersal and dispossession of indigenous Palestinians, Hasan Sa’b’s “Zionism and Racism” focuses on the construction within Zionist thought of the notion of a Jewish race.⁵⁴ Written for the PRC in 1965, the same year as Sayegh’s initial monograph, Sa’b foregrounds Jewish critics of Zionism and distinguishes between what he calls Zionist investment in “Race” as against “liberal Jews and assimilationists” who speak of “Man” (6–7). He reads across the canon of Zionist thinkers—Chaim Weizmann, Theodor Herzl, Moses Hess, Leon Pinsker, Ahad Ha’am—to clarify their formulation of a theory of a coherent, exclusivist, and nationalist Jewish “race.” “Their emphasis on Jewish exclusiveness, and the influence of European racialist doctrines,” Sa’b asserts, “led them to an emotional, an intellectual, and a religious identification of ‘nationalism’ with ‘racism’” (5). To contrast what he calls Israel’s “incarnation of a neo-racism,” Sa’b turns to arguments produced by American Jewish organizations like the American Council for Judaism that were critical of the Israeli state project. He highlights “outstanding Jewish thinkers (including Einstein, Cohen, Rosenwald, and Magnes)” who vigorously advocated for humanitarian and philanthropic support for Jews beyond “the racial, narrow-minded, chauvinistic, isolationist, and totalitarian nationalist elements of Zionism” (16). Sa’b foregrounds Albert Einstein’s mid-1940s critiques of a Jewish state formation.⁵⁵ The famed physicist declined an offer to become an early president of Israel, noting his fear for “the inner damage Judaism will sustain” in a state-building process that would inevitably require “borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power no matter how modest” (17). Sa’b draws on a lesser-known Jewish critic of Zionism, the philosophy professor Morris Cohen, who, in a published exchange with Horace Kallen in the midst of debates around the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, argued that American Zionist desires for a Jewish state emphasized a “tribalism” that ran counter to the modernizing forces of assimilation in the United States.⁵⁶ Sa’b excerpts the organized Jewish American Reform movement’s turn-of-the-century critique of state building as violating Judaism’s religious identity: “Zionism was a precious possession of the past. . . . As such it is a holy memory, but it is not our hope of the future. America is our Zion” (20). Contrasting the claim that Israel was a “humanitarian refuge” from anti-Semitism, Sa’b suggests instead that the state of Israel “discriminates between Jews and Arabs, between Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews, and even between Western and Eastern Israeli citizens” (16).

The Palestine Research Center’s anonymously authored pamphlet “Israeli Racism” was published in September 1975, just weeks before the opening debate at the United Nations. While it restated common elements from the PRC’s earlier analyses, the examination of Israel’s settler origins gives way to the examination of contemporary Israeli racial discrimination. The pamphlet highlights the state’s post-1948 institutionalization of differential treatment toward Israeli Arabs and “Oriental Jews.” It focuses on the Defence Emergency Regulations, codified by the British Mandate government in 1945 and used against Arab Israeli citizens as the basis to “restrict movement, place of residence, right to assembly . . . expropriate land, and to imprison Arab . . . citizens without charge for months or even years at a time” (9). The pamphlet documents how the average monthly income of a typical Arab family was less than half of a European Jewish family. Arab Israelis received an education of limited content and quality, while access to government services such as electricity and irrigation were substantively curtailed. Territorial covenants precluded certain lands from being rented or sold to Arabs. Oriental Jews were likewise shown to fare poorly in these areas. The pamphlet ends by pivoting to another arena of racism in Israel, namely, its ties to “the largest remaining bastion of settler-colonialism in the Third World, South Africa” (14). The Israel–South Africa connection was exemplified in their similar historical development and contemporary structure, their important trade and politico-military links, and the forms of resistance enacted by a common category of “dispossessed indigenous inhabitants” (16).

The specter of the Holocaust haunts these publications. They elaborate a genealogy of the emergence and practice of Israeli settler colonial racism in the face of a widespread American common sense that frames Israel as a paradigmatically humanitarian response to Nazi genocide. The rhetorical and analytical proximity of Zionism and Nazism, for instance, demonstrates a relationship that Sayegh’s “Zionist Colonialism” contends with only briefly. Sayegh ascertains a conceptual point of identification between Nazism and Zionism in their shared goal of the “elimination of the unwanted human element in question” (26). While Sayegh characterizes the Nazi methods for realizing a “Jew-free Germany” as “more ruthless and more inhuman” than those used for an “Arab-free Palestine,” the goals remain identical—the forcible removal of a racialized population (27). Sa’b likewise foregrounds the comparative traffic between these historical dynamics. The opening page of “Zionism and Racism” equates “the belief in a Jewish race” with “the belief in a German race,” asserting that both were myths, albeit ones with contemporary world-reordering effects (5). The “same intellectual climate” of European nationalism produced the concept of a chosen race equally absorbed by Zionism and Nazism, whose “racial consciousness led the two ideologies to the belief in a super-race or super-nation, which is endowed with a special historic destiny and called upon to fulfill a unique cultural mission” (9). Sa’b highlights Rabbi Elmer Berger’s query about the shared conceptual vocabulary of Zionism and Nazism: “Isn’t it a curious thing, and tragically ironic,” writes Berger in his 1946 book Jewish Dilemma, “that Zionists and extreme anti-Semites agree on the same solution—isolate the Jews in a country of their own” (23)? Sa’b closes by shifting the terms from that of commensuration—based on a logic of equation and analogy—to one of a more complex relationality. “The Zionists advocate one justice for the victims of Nazi persecution in Europe and another for the victims of Zionist persecution in Palestine. In rejecting Zionism, the peoples of the Middle East have condemned its racial approach to both the Jewish and the Arab peoples” (33). In doing so, Sa’b tenuously grasps hold of an alternative memory of the Holocaust in the service of a substantive anticolonialism in Palestine.

Settler Colonialism at the United Nations

Fayez Sayegh presented an argument at the United Nations in October and November 1975 that drew directly from the work of the Palestine Research Center. His argument mobilized the PRC’s analysis of the interplay between racialized settler colonialism in Palestine and the interlocking histories of Jewish genocide and state-sanctioned Palestinian dispossession. In his remarks before both the Committee on Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Affairs and the General Assembly, Sayegh presented a detailed, nuanced, and thoughtfully argued case. His remarks detail Zionism’s historic investment in population transfer—arrayed through structures facilitating immigration for Jews, on the one hand, and dispossession and expulsion of indigenous Arabs, on the other. He highlights the geopolitical linkages between the apartheid regime in South Africa and the Israeli government, noting how the states shared a common racial logic. And while he registers the proximity of Nazism and the Holocaust in the debates, Sayegh also strenuously disarticulates political Zionism from Judaism. An Arab Information Center–sponsored advertisement in the New York Times in the immediate wake of the resolution’s passage plainly drove home this point: “The United Nations Has Condemned Zionism; The United Nations Has Not Condemned Judaism.”⁵⁷

In his remarks at the UN, Sayegh describes the central aim of Zionism as a “total transformation” for Jews worldwide through “the detachment of Jews from their respective countries and their mass-transfer to Palestine, and the detachment of the indigenous Palestinian Arabs and their mass-transfer from Palestine” (8). In this way, Zionism enacted simultaneous “pumping-in and pumping-out” operations. Sayegh draws evidence of “pumping in” directly from Herzl, citing extensively from both his published works like Der Judenstaat and his diaries. He shows how Herzl theorized Zionism as an exclusive form of secular nationalism that drew on early twentieth-century nationalist and colonial thinking. Sayegh likewise demonstrates how the 1897 Basle Program was predicated on the “promotion . . . of the colonization of Palestine by Jewish agricultural and industrial workers.” The “pumping in” policy was expressed five decades later in the Law of Return and the Nationality Law, both of which granted automatic access to Israeli citizenship for Jews worldwide (9).

That being said, as Sayegh recalls, the mobilization of large-scale Jewish immigration to Palestine achieved only a modicum of its aims. In contrast, Zionism’s “pumping out” of indigenous Palestinian Arabs had been, in Sayegh’s estimation, “more efficiently conducted in practice and it has met with greater success” (9). Tactics of land, home, and other property acquisition were central to the Zionist project, as was an increasingly difficult set of obstacles for displaced Palestinians to return to their homes. Dispossession was articulated through differential racialization. Sayegh traces the historical production of a “color-line” that divided the “‘white’ Jews from Europe and America” from the “Oriental Jews and the Black Jews” (15). He illustrates how “their daily life is governed by multiform ‘distinctions,’ ‘exclusions’ or ‘restrictions’” (21) by citing numerous news articles describing the marginalization of Oriental Jews, the protests of the Israeli Black Panthers in 1971, and the legal challenges and deportation proceedings brought against Falashas and the Black Jews in 1972 who had immigrated from Chicago and Liberia. In regard to Palestinian Arabs, Sayegh recounts the de jure and de facto modes of discrimination, including the Keren Kayemeth Law of 1953, the Covenant of 1961 linking the state apparatus to the Jewish National Fund, and the Agricultural Settlement Law of 1967—all of which installed and maintained substantial restrictive covenants on Arab Palestinian access to land and resources.

The complex presence of a pervasive intra-European anti-Semitism informs the relational history that Sayegh attempts to narrate, phrased here as a “tragic irony”: “That former victims of racial discrimination elsewhere should have turned around and inflicted similar forms of discrimination against the remnants of the Palestinian Arab people is one of the more tragic ironies of contemporary history” (21). In closing his case in support of the resolution, Sayegh echoed the language of the racial discrimination declaration, stating plainly:

Zionism, essentially, vests certain rights—very important rights—in some people and denies them to others. . . . Therefore, in accordance with the authoritative United Nations definition, the discrimination which is inherent in Zionism is incontestably a form of racial discrimination for it is based on “descent” or “national origin” or “ethnic origin,” all of which are subsumed under the generic concept of “race.”⁵⁸

Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the Quandary of Race

Scholars of Arab descent addressing the United Nations persistently theorized the relationship between Zionism and racism. In doing so, they offered an analysis that disrupted U.S. state narratives. U.S. racial liberal frameworks routinely obfuscated the historical and structural dimensions of the Palestine question, redirecting a racial critique of Zionism into an argument about a viral anti-Semitism and framing its ideological contours within a Cold War lexicon of a shared U.S. and Israeli exceptionalism. Here, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s work at the UN gave voice to this Cold War exceptionalist framework. While Moynihan’s strategy during his brief eight-month stint (June 1975 to February 1976) was widely debated—was Moynihan too brash, too much a “brawler”?—the substance of his argument against Resolution 3379 was lauded as exemplifying a broad American consensus. U.S. Congressional representatives from across the political spectrum emphasized their support for Moynihan’s position. They entered his speech no less than three times into the Congressional Record the day after the resolution’s passage. Congress subsequently investigated the value of American participation in the UN as a legitimate body for the development of international norms and refused to pay a portion of U.S. dues to the UN in protest of the latter’s recognition of the PLO.

Moynihan’s response to Resolution 3379 illustrates a broader racial liberal common sense that Moynihan himself had been active in shaping for at least the previous decade, conjoining anxious investments in Black integration domestically to the projection of U.S. power internationally. Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (1963), for which he was a coauthor, and “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (1965), for which he was sole author, illustrate how racial liberalism was elaborated across a range of geographic and institutional sites. Beyond the Melting Pot consolidated a multiethnic whiteness whose “immigrant analogy” positioned Black people as always already deficient as compared with the properly assimilable European Jews; “The Negro Family” sought to fashion an interventionist policy apparatus committed to American equality that reified white heteropatriarchal kinship norms. The figure of the Black Muslim that haunts Beyond the Melting Pot and “The Negro Family” as liberal democracy’s inassimilable other prefigures the specter of a totalitarian terror that Israel and the United States will be uniquely positioned to contest. Indeed, such a discourse primed post-1965 domestic policy for a Cold War internationalism that became entangled with Israel’s processes of racialization and the military and administrative occupation of Palestinian territories in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In this way, Moynihan’s engagement with the UN resolution elaborated the contours of the proper liberal citizen subject in a Cold War world; set up the United States and Israel as indelibly linked bastions of the “Free World”; and stigmatized those ideas, practices, and people that troubled Zionist norms. Moynihan’s UN speech prefigured an emergent enmeshment with Israel in a globalized war against terrorism—framed as war for liberty against totalitarianism, with the “totalitarians” ensconced as an enemy race always already outside the domain of proper political subjecthood.

Moynihan’s ground-clearing 1963 work of comparative urban sociology, Beyond the Melting Pot, centered a nation-of-immigrants paradigm of whiteness. It reproduced a bootstraps narrative of pluralist success and tidily pathologized Blackness for lacking culture. Moynihan and Nathan Glazer (the book’s primary author and architect) theorized race to function conceptually like ethnicity, replacing the history of structural inequality from racial slavery and Jim Crow with a narrative of immigrant inclusion in American national life. African Americans were conceived as the “latest” in the wave of immigrants to the urban north. This “immigrant analogy,” as the legal scholar Ian Haney-López argues, “erased the enormous differences in historical experience between white immigrants and racial minorities, and gave new legitimacy to the belief that not structural disadvantage but inability, now cultural rather than innate, explained the social and material marginalization of racial minorities in the United States.”⁵⁹ The book privileged a normatively white national subject even as it functioned to authorize the subsequent consolidation of a color-blind ideology that bracketed the historical institutionalization of racial hierarchy generally and anti-Black racism specifically. In regard to substantive interventions to ameliorate racism’s institutionalization through race-conscious policy prescriptions, Beyond the Melting Pot provided the sociological warrant to suggest that such things constituted “reverse discrimination,” a claim made with increasing urgency by Glazer and Moynihan beginning in the late 1970s. Glazer and Moynihan’s text laid the groundwork for racial liberalism’s figuration of a theoretically pluralist nation of individuals as immigrants—articulated in reaction to the critiques of pluralism’s failures in practice enunciated by the New Left, Black Power movements, and critics of Israel.

Following quickly on the heels of Beyond the Melting Pot was Moynihan’s “Negro Family” (1965). Produced in the broader context of a liberal state–philanthropy nexus to proffer policy solutions to the “crisis of race relations,” “The Negro Family” conceived of the problem of African American integration in the United States through racialized gender tropes and adumbrated comparisons with the Jewish Holocaust.⁶⁰ Using the collapsed race/ethnicity paradigm expressed in Beyond the Melting Pot, “The Negro Family” asserted that “important differences in family patterns” have survived from the “age of the great European migration to the United States.”⁶¹ Those immigrants with “unusually strong family bonds . . . have characteristically progressed more rapidly.” “But there is one truly great discontinuity in family structure in the United States at the present time,” Moynihan noted: “that between the white world in general and that of the Negro American” (5). Such a claim naturalized ethnic whiteness through the “nation of immigrants” narrative while casting Black families as pathologically deviating from the national norm. In Moynihan’s estimation, the central problem of the modern Black family—its impoverished conditions, chronic male unemployment, and lack of formal education—originated in an emasculating “matriarchal structure.” Having woman-headed households “seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well” (29).

To advance this argument, Moynihan turns to an analytical juxtaposition between slavery in the United States and the Nazi concentration camp—two “total institutions.” This juxtaposition was popularized by Stanley Elkins in his “damage” theory of intergenerational trauma. Slavery, like the concentration camp, was seen to create irreparable psychic and social damage whose individualized effects Moynihan saw as still posing an impediment to American integration. Such “damage,” according to the report, was exacerbated by the crucial historical distinction between liberty and equality. While liberty was granted to African Americans upon emancipation, argues Moynihan, achievement of equality required the regulative work of state intervention. On this point, Moynihan echoes an argument that Glazer put forth in a 1964 contemporaneous essay called “Negroes and Jews: The New Challenge to Pluralism.” Substantive critiques of the formal equality that had in Glazer’s view so benefited Jews in the United States were putting pressure on the broader social architecture of liberal pluralism. Demands for equality of results in economic and educational terms were replacing demands for equality merely of opportunity. Moynihan recognized this as “the principle challenge of the next phase of the Negro revolution” (3).

“The Negro Family” argues that equality could most effectively be advanced through reparative work on Black manhood. The ideal for such reparation was most profoundly articulated in Moynihan’s abstract—raceless—notion of the Armed Forces. Moynihan argues that the expression of equality was to be found in preparation for military combat, where Black men could become proper masculine subjects. The importance of responding to demands for equality through state intervention could not be overstated in Moynihan’s estimation, precisely because of the growing influence of the Black Muslims. In tones reminiscent of Cold War liberalism’s broader anxieties around the Nation of Islam,⁶² Moynihan suggests that the Black Muslims provided an alternative and resolutely inassimilable domain through which to conceive of a “proper” notion of manhood—one “based on the total rejection of white society.” “In a word,” writes Moynihan, “the tangle of pathology is tightening.”

Racial Liberalism’s Global Horizon

Moynihan’s service in the Johnson and first Nixon presidential administrations solidified his credentials in conceiving and articulating domestic policies suitable for a Cold War racial liberal order. By the mid-1970s this work took on an overt international character, with Moynihan serving as the U.S. ambassador to India. In this position, Moynihan drew on and intensified his domestic disposition in ways that would reach a crescendo in the United Nations debates on Zionism and racism.

In “The United States in Opposition” (1975), an essay published in the American Jewish Committee’s Commentary Magazine in which Moynihan reflects on his post in Delhi, he laid out the contours of what an internationalization of Cold War liberalism would require. Norman Podhoretz, Commentary’s editor and Moynihan’s close confidant, heavily promoted “United States in Opposition” during a major press conference in February 1975—the only such event orchestrated for the publication of a Commentary essay. In the essay Moynihan argues that the United States was misusing its role in the rapidly decolonizing world, too readily assuaging claims for redress and reparations by the many newly independent nations. He asserts that the political philosophy undergirding third world political independence was in fact a British import. According to Moynihan, British parliamentary socialism had been both moral and equitable during Britain’s slow departure from its colonial possessions, but was now being translated into something both anti-American and practically unified, in the Non-Aligned Movement and the Group of 77. This bloc of decolonizing nations began to make collective demands through the UN, and American diplomats were, in Moynihan’s view, inadequately responding. The poverty present in third world countries, for instance, was, according to Moynihan, not an effect of a long history of Euro-American-centered racial capitalism—as many in the Group of 77 were suggesting—but was rather “of their own making and no one else’s, and no claim on anyone else arises in consequence.”⁶³ Moynihan’s ideological shift in ten years is notable. He had first traced U.S. Black poverty to a gendered pathology with roots in racial slavery—even advocating a commitment to equality of results; later he advised President Nixon that political expedience required “benign neglect” regarding U.S. racial conflict; and still later he opposed an internationalist structural argument to counteract the underdevelopment of the third world.⁶⁴ Ever racial liberalism’s defender, Moynihan argued that it was time for the United States to make the case strenuously and resolutely for liberty, as opposed to the equality demanded as part of the global process of decolonization. “International liberalism and its processes have enormous recent achievements to their credit. It is time for the United States to start saying so. . . . We are of the liberty party, and it might surprise us what energies might be released were we to unfurl those banners.”⁶⁵

Following his Commentary-sponsored press conference, Moynihan became something of a media darling. He was someone willing to speak America’s tough truths to the growing influence of the USSR in the third world, a figure well calibrated for the task of moving past the U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War. In March 1975 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger offered Moynihan the position of U.S. ambassador to the UN, and in June Moynihan was confirmed by the U.S. Senate. “We are in a propaganda war,” he would say at his confirmation hearings. “We have to respond with a comparable level of effort to that which is directed against us.”⁶⁶ Debate involving UN Resolution 3379 would become Moynihan’s primary battleground.

In this debate Moynihan’s most outspoken, and most overtly anti-Semitic, adversary was Idi Amin, then serving as chairman of the Organization of African Unity and president of Uganda. Amin flagrantly asserted in an October 1975 speech to the General Assembly that the United States was “colonized by the Zionists who hold all the tools of development and power.” Zionists, Amin argued, dominated

all the banking institutions, the major manufacturing and processing industries and the major means of communication; and have so much infiltrated the CIA that they are posing a great threat to nations and peoples which may be opposed to the atrocious Zionist movement. . . . I call for the expulsion of Israel from the United Nations and the extinction of Israel as a State.⁶⁷

In sidestepping the question of Zionism as a historically produced ideological construct—precisely what Resolution 3379 was claiming—and proffering instead a vicious conspiratorial anti-Semitism, Amin’s remarks provided precisely the kind of inflated rhetoric that the U.S. delegation seized on to make its case. Moynihan responded with vitriol. In learning of the General Assembly’s tacit support of Amin’s screed, Moynihan suggested that “there is blood in the water and the sharks grow frenzied.” He argued that the specter of communism and totalitarianism was growing, and the “free world” was in retreat. In response, the spirit of American liberalism could be the only defense: “Ours is a culture based on the primacy of the individual—the rights of the individual, the welfare of the individual, the claims of the individual against those of the state” (159–60). Critique of Zionism’s racial logic “reeked,” Moynihan later wrote in his post-UN memoir, “of the gas chamber and the concentration camp” (118). While Amin’s speech spurred Moynihan’s public denunciation on the floor of the General Assembly, the more Moynihan considered the situation, the more, he said, another smell wafted forth. “The charge against Zionism somehow emanated from Moscow. It reeked of the totalitarian mind, stank of the totalitarian state. So it was not at all from a concern for Israel as such that I came to be occupied above all with its survival” (168). The Cold War framing required a recommitted embrace of a muscular conception of liberty, albeit one that retained its historical complicity with racism. In this regard, his UN speech complements many of Moynihan’s earlier writings on ethnicity and “The Negro Family.” Again, as in the other frames enjoining the domestic American scene to Israel, Moynihan deployed the memory of the Holocaust. Moynihan plainly acknowledged his own ignorance about U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East, noting he took his cues from Kissinger at the State Department.

On the topic of Israel, Jewishness, and anti-Semitism, he likewise claimed ignorance, relying primarily on Norman Podhoretz as his “maven” on such matters.⁶⁸ Podhoretz worked closely with Moynihan to prepare the U.S. response and, as recalled in Moynihan’s post-UN memoir, provided the speech the exact language for its opening and closing sentences: “The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations, and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act” (197). Other sections of the speech, particularly those on Zionism as a national liberation movement, drew from the work of Bernard Lewis, who, Moynihan noted, “seemed to know most about the history of the subject.” Lewis had arrived at Princeton University from Britain in 1974 and soon found an outlet for his more polemical essays in Commentary. Podhoretz consulted directly with Lewis and synthesized his views for Moynihan, many of which had also been reflected in Lewis’s recent Commentary essay “Palestinians and the PLO: A Historical Approach.”⁶⁹

In denouncing the UN resolution, Moynihan avoided engaging any of Fayez Sayegh’s historical arguments, collapsing them instead into Amin’s hypostatized rhetoric as indicative of “a general assault by the majority of the nations in the world on the principles of liberal democracy.” He hastily discounted Sayegh’s argumentation, noting in his memoir that “the Arabs were at their worst, or best, as they might think: replete with charters and pacts and proclamations of long ago, leering with proofs of Jewish wickedness sniped from editorials of Israeli newspapers or the pronouncements of anti-Zionist Jews” (181). Instead, Moynihan proclaimed, the U.S. delegation focused primarily on the nominative question of defining racism. “I think we’ve got them another way. . . . The resolution doesn’t define what racism is,” Moynihan was quoted as saying in the strategy sessions that he held with his counsel, Leonard Garment, his research assistant Suzanne Weaver, and Podhoretz.

Garment laid out this line of argument in the Third Committee debate:

The language of this resolution distorts and perverts. It changes words with precise meanings into purveyors of confusion. It destroys the moral force of the concept of racism, making it nothing more than an epithet to be flung arbitrarily at one’s adversary. . . . By equating Zionism with racism, this resolution discredits the good faith of our joint efforts to fight actual racism. It discredits these efforts morally and it cripples them politically. (182–83)

While there was general consensus on the meaning of the term racial discrimination, the U.S. delegation argued, the UN had no working definition of the “incomparably more serious charge” of racism. Moynihan’s claims that General Assembly documents show “racism” as a concept was discussed only once, in December 1968, and in that context the key question was how racism related to Nazism. The possible contours of this relationship—along with racism’s relationship to colonialism, apartheid, and segregation—did indeed animate deliberations at the United Nations, going as far back as the first General Assembly’s resolution on “religious and so-called racial persecution and discrimination” in 1946. The U.S. delegation flattened such a genealogy into a simplified syllogism. If Nazism was a form of racism, and if Zionism was a form of racism, then ipso facto Zionism must be a form of Nazism, a statement that Moynihan called “complete lunacy.”⁷⁰ In his memoir Moynihan suggests that the term racism was imported into UN discourse by the U.S. delegation to the April 1968 International Convention on Human Rights in Tehran. The Kerner Commission report on the race riots of 1967 had been published only weeks before the convention. “The term racism, especially white racism, achieved a certain vogue,” writes Moynihan, who links the American delegation to Tehran to Kerner Commission participants. “For whatever reason, apart from this new word, the delegation brought little along with it” (175).

In his General Assembly speech, Moynihan relied on Webster’s Third New International Dictionary for conceptual clarity, tacitly delinking racism from broader historical analysis by focusing instead on semantics. The dictionary, Moynihan argues, defined racism as “the assumption that . . . traits and capacities are determined by biological race and that races differ decisively from one another.”⁷¹ This assumption is “usually coupled with a belief in the inherent superiority of a particular race and its right to domination over others” (96). Moynihan used the latter part of the definition to argue against the claim that Jews are a “particular race.” Contrary to the numerous citations furnished by Sayegh and the Palestine Research Center from Herzl, David Ben-Gurion, and others, Moynihan claimed that Zionism as a “strictly religious and political movement” never operated under such assumptions. “That Jews are a ‘race’ was invented not by Jews but by those who hated Jews. . . . It was a contemptible idea at the beginning, and no civilized person would be associated with it.” Zionism was rather a part of an “upsurge in national consciousness and aspiration,” a “national liberation movement” (97).

Moynihan lauds Zionism as akin to other national liberation movements in ways that echo nearly verbatim the argument Lewis makes in “The Anti-Zionist Resolution” published several months later in Foreign Affairs. According to this line of thinking, Zionism was exceptional in its open pluralistic ideology, in contrast to the more narrow nationalisms emanating from the Third World. Zionism “was not a movement of persons connected by historic membership in a genetic pool. . . . To the contrary, Zionists defined themselves merely as Jews, and declared to be Jewish anyone born of a Jewish mother or—and this is the absolutely crucial fact—anyone who converted to Judaism.” Israel was a multiracial and multireligious melting pot, whose polity was drawn from a “range of ‘racial stocks’” including “black Jews, brown Jews, white Jews, Jews from the Orient and Jews from the West” (97). While it was true that “most such persons could be said to have been ‘born’ Jews,” Moynihan concedes, “there are many Jews who are converts.” Further, “the population of Israel also includes large numbers of non-Jews, among them Arabs of both the Muslim and Christian religions and Christians of other national origins. Many of these persons are citizens of Israel, and those who are not can become citizens by legal procedures very much like those which obtain in a typical nation of Western Europe” (97). Nowhere does Moynihan address the “color-line” argument raised by Sayegh, let alone the PRC’s thick accounting of settler colonial racism. An exceptionalist abstract liberal pluralism was all that Moynihan had to offer.

Moynihan’s closing argument revealed his true ideological adversary to be the Soviet Union. The “lie” at the heart of the resolution would do “irreparable harm to the cause of human rights” (98). Moynihan traces the concept of human rights to the seventeenth-century emergence of political liberalism that defines the individual as distinct from the state, precisely the notion of liberty that his “United States in Opposition” essay strenuously advocated. As in those earlier arguments, vast swaths of the Third World were cast as susceptible to the totalitarian logic of the Soviet Union ready to twist the meaning of words beyond repair: “If we destroy the words that were given to us by past centuries, we will not have words to replace them, for philosophy today has no such words” (99).

Struggles over the content and meaning of all words leave their mark on history, in archives, in narratives themselves.⁷² Struggles over the meaning of words require uncovering and narration; they cannot be destroyed in any substantive material sense. Moynihan’s work at the UN attempted to delink racism from history. Its abstract formalism provided an international framework that resonated with the “color-blind” ideologies of U.S. neoconservatism. U.S. neoconservatism would draw from Moynihan’s strenuous embrace of an exceptional liberty as the proper geopolitical horizon in ways that attempted to extricate race from the structural violence that persisted in both the United States and Israel. In light of this genealogy, we can see how racial liberalism was incubated as a tacit disavowal of the broadly effective materialist critiques of Zionist settler colonialism brought by scholars of Arab descent committed to Palestinian liberation.

A Metaphor for Democracy?

“Israel a metaphor for democracy” proclaimed the headline to the July 6, 1976, Jerusalem Post report on Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s first trip to Israel.⁷³ Moynihan had just weeks earlier entered a crowded contest for one of New York’s U.S. Senate seats after resigning from his UN post the previous February. The position papers for his Senate campaign, drafted by Podhoretz and Weaver, foregrounded his deft social scientific approach to different ethnic communities in New York City, his willingness to take difficult stands in the face of international pressure, and his unflinching commitment to defend Israel as central to an expression of American civic religion. One campaign pamphlet featured an image of Moynihan at the United Nations, rising out of his seat behind a U.S. nameplate. “He spoke up for America . . . He’ll speak up for you,” it read.⁷⁴

In July 1976 Moynihan traveled to Jerusalem to receive an honorary doctorate from Hebrew University in recognition of his strenuous argument against UN Resolution 3379. In his acceptance speech on Mount Scopus, Moynihan maintained that Israel had “become a metaphor for democracy in the world. If the Israeli democracy, which persists in the face of the uttermost peril and difficulty, can be discredited, then it can clearly be established that democracy is not a political and cultural system which can survive in a perilous and difficult world.”⁷⁵ An essay published soon after his trip, “Totalitarian Terrorists,” echoes these sentiments. In it, Moynihan narrates how, while he was in Israel, and unbeknownst to him, the Israeli military executed a successful mission to rescue scores of passengers from a hijacked airliner in Entebbe, Uganda. The virality of anti-Semitism as the leading edge of totalitarianism merged with what one of Moynihan’s Israeli interlocutors called the “disease” of terrorism. “Does not the West know this—that the disease spreads?” Israel’s pointed and successful antiterrorism practice exemplified for Moynihan what a strenuous defense of liberty should look like, offering up a case study for war-weary Americans.⁷⁶ The Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism a few years later would fuse this Cold War framing of terrorism as a totalitarian threat to liberal democracies—a viral disease akin to anti-Semitism—that warranted the intensification of a racialized security apparatus.

In one of his last major campaign speeches, just weeks before election day 1976, Moynihan reiterated this idea by intertwining Israel and the United States as two “parties of liberty” intimately linked in buttressing the “free world” against the so-called scourge of totalitarianism.

It is above all because Israel is a democratic country that the United States owes Israel continued political support. But there is more to the case even than that. For Israel is not merely one democratic country among others. In its mortal peril, it has become a metaphor for the condition of democracy in the world today. The entire democratic world is under siege, just as Israel is under siege—the main difference being that Israel already recognizes the danger and the other democracies are only slowly waking to it. . . . To defend Israel is to defend liberty and democracy and therefore also to defend the United States.⁷⁷

Throughout the bicentennial period—when triumphalist reflections on U.S. notions of freedom and liberty pervaded American popular culture—Moynihan mapped a geopolitical cartography positioning Israel and the United States as metaphorical figures bound together by global siege and global insecurity. This cartography was at once inflected by the ideological coordinates of the Cold War and “infected” by an emergent notion of a so-called terrorist international for which it was seeking a viable cure.⁷⁸ Figuring Israel as a symbolic stand-in for liberty and democracy justified an expansive war against a totalitarian threat that laid the groundwork by the early 1980s for an articulation of a shared “war against international terrorism.”⁷⁹

At the same time that Moynihan was thickening U.S.-Israel geopolitical connections, Fayez Sayegh was busy founding the International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. EAFORD’s 1976 inaugural symposium in Tripoli, Libya, focused on the theme of “Zionism and racism.” Over five hundred participants from eighty countries attended the conference, and participants from nineteen countries presented a multidisciplinary range of academic papers. The conference proceedings include essays by Elmer Berger, Anis Al-Qasem, Stefan Goranov, Alfred M. Lilienthal, Sami Hadawi, Walter Lehn, Naseer Aruri, Richard P. Stevens, Gary Smith, Hatem I. Hussaini, and Mick Ashley. Zionism and apartheid were understood by many at the conference as “two sides of the same coin.”⁸⁰ Abdelwahab Elmessiri’s essay, “Distinctive Traits of Zionist Settler Colonialism,” echoed arguments developed by the Palestine Research Center and expressed at the United Nations. Elmessiri identified a form of population transfer predicated on territorial expansion and internal racial and cultural heterogeneity that was both independent from the sovereignty of its sponsors and dependent on their financial and military support. Edward W. Said’s contribution to the conference focused on the “intellectual origins of Zionism and imperialism” and prefigured substantive arguments he would elaborate in fuller form in Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, and Covering Islam. Here he avers that the “tragic blindness of Zionism lies in its having been born not only in the European oppression of Jews, but amongst and as part of the European oppression of black, yellow, brown, and red peoples.”⁸¹ By the end of his presentation, such a global racial logic becomes the conditions for shared struggle: “And if—as niggers, Arabs, wops, gooks, slope-eyes—we have been declared scientifically unfit for human rights, it is now time for us together to expose and destroy the whole system of confinement, dispossession, exploitation, and oppression that still holds us down and denies us our inalienable rights as human beings.”⁸²

Sayegh’s own presentation at the symposium was titled “Racism and Racial Discrimination Defined.” In it, Sayegh theorizes racism at its most abstract in order to identify its “genetic nature.”⁸³ At racism’s base was the “most crucial fact” of an affective investment in racial belonging as the grounds of identity. In this way, “mankind” was “essentially divided” into “unbridgeable racial groups” whose “inherently different characteristics” become the principles to array a matrix of purportedly inherent notions of superiority and inferiority. The “policy consequences” of this doctrine included practices of spatial segregation, social discrimination, and, most interestingly, a dynamic relationality between racist systems. “When they are within the same orbit,” writes Sayegh, “they are in a clashing relationship . . . Nazism versus zionism—the war of death between the two.” In contrast, as a way to frame the mutually reinforcing interactions of racist systems, Sayegh notes that “when they are apart, and not stepping on one another’s toes, then . . . there is a natural alliance between them, especially as they confront the rising tide of anti-racism throughout the world” (2). Such geographic distance allowed Sayegh to theorize the deepening ties between Apartheid South Africa and Israel. From arms shipments to trade agreements, by 1976 the two settler states had forged an enduring “natural alliance,” one that would paradoxically become central to internationalizing Palestine solidarity struggles.⁸⁴

The Twisting of History

It is not incidental that Resolution 3379 is the only General Assembly resolution to be formally revoked by the United Nations. On December 16, 1991, at the dawn of the post–Cold War period, in the wake of the first Gulf War, and at the behest of Israeli and U.S. diplomats who had been organizing to “right the wrong” since the mid-1980s, the General Assembly rescinded 3379 via a one-line declaration.⁸⁵ Israel conditioned its participation in the Madrid Peace Conference on 3379’s revocation. U.S. president George H. W. Bush addressed the General Assembly using the same logics of equation and Holocaust memory that Moynihan had used sixteen years earlier. Bush argued that “to equate Zionism with the intolerable sin of racism is to twist history and forget the terrible plight of Jews in World War II and, indeed, throughout history.”⁸⁶ Importantly, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of a unipolar world, the time was ripe for repealing the resolution. “History had been frozen by Communism,” Bush averred in his remarks to the assembly. The fall of the Soviet bloc had signaled “history’s resumption” through the triumph of free markets and liberal democracy. The United Nations should, according to Bush, move along into the new world order.

Yet dread over a UN-supported racial analysis continues to reverberate into the political present. The official U.S. delegation to the 2001 World Conference against Racism walked out over such an analysis and boycotted both the 2009 and 2011 conferences for the same reason. In 2012 U.S. president Barack Obama vowed that his administration would “always reject the notion that Zionism is racism.”⁸⁷ A racial critique of Zionism is often framed as exemplifying the resurgence of anti-Jewish racism, the specter of a “new Anti-Semitism,” even presaging another holocaust. Some have argued that a racial analysis of Zionism and Israeli state practice should be combated by, among other measures, using the antidiscrimination laws codified in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.⁸⁸

Reckoning with the relationship between racism and Zionism makes legible the post–World War II reconfigurations of racial meanings that attempted to settle race matters through a liberal democratic framework predicated on Palestinian exclusion, dispossession, and dehumanization. For these reasons, among others, it remains a tense issue in the United States. Racial liberalism’s investment in what Horace Kallen once called Zionism’s route to the “harmonious adjustment of the Jew to American life” was, one might say, a structural adjustment. It bound settler colonialism in Palestine to Jewish emancipation and assimilation, the management of a Holocaust memory, and a broad post–civil rights consensus. It offered, to paraphrase the cultural critic Chandan Reddy’s searing insight, freedom with violence.⁸⁹ Reckoning with such a genealogy reveals (as opposed to obfuscates) the relational dynamics of race at play in this historical entanglement. As I show in the chapters to come, these dynamics not only played out in the realm of official state geopolitics but also were robustly engaged in the circuits of cultural production linking Black freedom struggles, American Jewish reconfigurations, Arab American organizing and activism, and antiracist and anti-imperialist feminisms.

2

Black Power’s Palestine

Permanent War and the Global Freedom Struggle

In the past few weeks, the Arab-Israeli conflict exploded once again into all-out war as it did in 1956 and as it had done in 1948, when the State of Israel was created. What are the reasons for this prolonged conflict and permanent state of war which has existed between Arab nations and Israel? . . . Since we know that the white American press seldom, if ever, gives the true story about world events in which America is involved, then we are taking this opportunity to present the following documented facts on this problem. These facts not only affect the lives of our brothers in the Middle-East, Africa and Asia, but also pertain to our struggle here. We hope they will shed some light on the problem.

—Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “Third World Round-up: The Palestine Problem: Test Your Knowledge”

THUS OPENS “Third World Round-up: The Palestine Problem: Test Your Knowledge,” a two-page article composed of thirty-two “documented facts,” two archival photographs, and two cartoons. The article was published in August 1967 in the humble eight-page bimonthly newsletter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The sources for the article’s documented facts were uncited, though much of the article reproduces verbatim the Palestine Research Center’s first pamphlet, Do You Know? Twenty Basic Facts about the Palestine Problem, published in Beirut and likely distributed in the United States through the Arab Information Center.¹ Within days, prominent civil rights organizations denounced what was seen as a partisan “position paper,” national newspapers gave it front-page coverage, and in the heated historiographical battles to come, it exemplified what was seen as the “tragic pro-Arab” wedge between American Jews and Black freedom struggles.

The article sits at the center of an issue devoted to documenting police brutality in Houston, Atlanta, and Boston (“Cops Run Wild: Where Will They Strike Next?”); to reporting on the raid of SNCC’s regional office in San Francisco; to presenting a joint statement from SNCC and the Congress on Racial Equality contesting allegations of a conspiracy to kill the NAACP’s executive director; and to announcing the appointment of SNCC’s new leadership. In an otherwise innocuous column, SNCC’s leadership reported on the outcome of its momentous May 1967 conference. The civil rights organization best known for its massive voter registration campaigns had refashioned its political program toward a human rights commitment to “liberation struggles of all peoples against racism, exploitation, and oppression,” launched a Black antidraft initiative, and reframed itself as a “National Freedom Organization” based on political, economic, and cultural objectives to “deal with all aspects of the problems facing black people in America.”² At the same time, by interpreting the meaning of the June 1967 War against the grain of the widespread American narrative, SNCC’s “Third World Round-up” also inaugurated a special feature for the newsletter, one whose internationalist logic located its audience outside racial liberalism’s domesticating narrative: “Since we Afro-Americans are an integral part of The Third World (Africa, Asia, Latin America, American Indians and all persons of African descent), then it is indeed necessary for us to know and understand what our brothers are doing in their homelands.”³

SNCC’s article was part of a broad swath of post–civil rights cultural production, one that animated the Black freedom struggle’s international horizon through a complex and sustained engagement with Palestine. I call this cultural production Black Power’s Palestine. Black Power’s Palestine enunciated an epistemic imperative to clarify and contest the saturation of racial violence endemic to U.S. imperial culture and intensified by the fierce state repression of anticolonial movements in the United States and abroad. In exceeding a domestic civil rights framework, it engaged the Palestine problem to reveal racial and colonial violence’s spatial dispensation. In this chapter I take up three key iterations of Black Power’s Palestine: the SNCC article, which reframed how Palestine should be represented in the nascent post–civil rights moment; the transnational traffic between the Black Panther Party and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), particularly as it was registered in the Panthers’ remarkable newspaper; and David Graham Du Bois’s exploration of an Afro-Arab diaspora through his autobiographical novel, . . . And Bid Him Sing. Each elaborates a practice of cultural translation that makes evident the links between Black freedom struggles and struggles for Palestinian national liberation. Their respective historiographical interventions make claims on what is knowable, and how, about Palestine within the ambit of U.S. imperial culture. In reckoning with a world-system in transition, the spatial axes of Black freedom struggles at home and abroad converged in powerful and often unforeseen ways with the spatial imperatives of Palestine’s decolonization.

A Permanent State of War

SNCC’s figuration of permanent war reminded readers that juridical investments in desegregation did not curtail racial violence. In so doing, SNCC evoked an anticolonial through-line in the Black freedom movement that registered the animus of white supremacy as producing populations differentially vulnerable to premature death.⁴ In the preface to the 1953 edition of The Souls of Black Folk, for instance, the eminent Black philosopher, sociologist, and activist W. E. B. Du Bois revised his famous thesis about the “world problem of the color line.” “Back of the problem of race and color,” writes Du Bois, “lies a greater problem that both obscures and implements it.” This problem was articulated through the register of permanent war, one that violently maintained the material privileges of “so many civilized persons.” “War,” Du Bois continues, “tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.”⁵ More than a decade later, Huey P. Newton, cofounder of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, turned to the concept in his famous 1967 essay, “In Defense of Self-Defense”—published in the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service just days after the June war. “The laws and rules which officials inflict upon poor people prevent them from functioning harmoniously in society,” Newton argues. “We do not want war, but war can only be abolished through war. In order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to pick up the gun.”⁶ And in reflecting on the widespread uprisings across U.S. cities in the summer of 1967, Jack O’Dell, the editor of Freedomways and one of the freedom movement’s key strategists, pinpointed the intensification of state-sanctioned violence across a broad swath of U.S. imperial culture: “Whether expressed in the form of armed Tactical Units occupying the ghettos, a police mobilization to brutalize peace marchers, or a massive military build-up in Southeast Asia, the economic, political and psychological ascendancy of militarism is a primary factor shaping the character of national life in our country today.”⁷

In framing an article about the origins of the Arab–Israeli conflict as a genealogy of the “documented facts” of permanent war, SNCC revealed the broader obscuring of racialized state and state-sanctioned violence that were racial liberalism’s conditions of possibility. SNCC invites readers to take seriously the historical strategies used by artists, scholars, and activists to articulate substantive forms of freedom, equality, and self-determination beyond the brittle forms of rights-based discourse.⁸ The disembodied abstractions of rights, order, and the law could be grasped as a mutable set of contextually specific power relations that often did as much to secure as to challenge colonialism and racism. In so doing, SNCC’s engagement with Palestine joined the internationalist tradition of Black freedom struggles, one that emphasized the linkages between antiracist domestic struggles and those decolonizing struggles across the globe.⁹

It was hardly predetermined, however, whether or how the Black freedom movement in the United States would conceive of Palestinian national liberation as part of a struggle against racism and colonialism. The intellectual tradition that had for over a century confronted the white supremacist kernel of U.S. Empire often self-narrated its contours through the lexicon of Jewish Zionism. For some of the most influential thinkers in this tradition, from Edward Blyden to Marcus Garvey to Ras Makonnen, Du Bois to Paul Robeson to Kwame Nkrumah, Jewish Zionism provided a resonant analogy for a diasporic Black political consciousness rooted in ancient scripture and modern nationalism. For Du Bois and Robeson, as for a young Stokely Carmichael, Zionism offered a set of secular leftist economic and political commitments that could be deployed in a shared Black-Jewish struggle against U.S. capitalist hegemony and white supremacy. In the face of Nazi genocide, the enmeshment of an internationalist Black imaginary and Zionist commitments to a Jewish state became even tighter. Jewish settlement in Palestine became the determinative touchstone for Afro-Zionist responses to World War II, even when it ran counter to the impulses of an anti-imperialist Black radicalism.¹⁰

If reckoning with Palestinian national liberation was circumscribed by the historical convergences between Zionism and Black internationalism and the impassioned humanitarian response to Nazi genocide, it was further complicated by an emergent U.S. racial liberalism. As I elaborated in chapter 1, early Cold War anticommunism ensured that internationalist critiques of racial capitalism were bracketed or obscured by juridical investments in civil rights integration.

The scope of racial liberalism’s force in framing Palestine is registered in a striking photograph snapped at the 1948 New Year’s Day gala held at the Renaissance Ballroom in Harlem. In the private offices of the Renaissance’s owner, with a college bowl game on the television in the background, Paul Robeson shook hands with Ralph Bunche, one of the lead researchers on Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma and a prominent political scientist who played a key role in framing the Palestine question at the United Nations. Even such a mundane event merited photographic documentation, what with the gala’s festive atmosphere and Robeson and Bunche being two of Harlem’s best-known celebrities—the former as much for his career in drama and musical performance as for his political organizing, the latter for his recent ascent through the corridors of U.S. state power. Just a few weeks earlier, Bunche had been appointed the principal secretary of the UN Palestine Commission, an office tasked with supervising the formation of nascent Israeli and Palestinian governing councils under the UN’s tenuous 1947 Partition Plan. Bunche and Robeson, in the year following the photograph, would find themselves inextricably enmeshed in the regional war in Palestine. Before an audience of Jewish soldiers, Robeson would perform the songs of freedom he had sung earlier in the year in Trinidad’s vaunted Carib Theatre with “a political message of the most radical and profound kind.”¹¹ He would also find himself hounded by the House Un-American Activities Committee’s virulent anticommunism, marginalized by many African American organizations for his perceived embrace of the Soviet Union, and, by 1950, barred from leaving the United States.¹² Bunche would travel to the Middle East as a representative of the United Nations and become the head UN mediator in Palestine that September when Count Folk Bernadotte was assassinated by a Jewish splinter group led by future Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir. Bunche would go on to secure a fragile peace treaty between the newly founded Jewish state and Egypt in 1949, and in 1950 he would become the first African American to receive a Nobel prize.¹³

Tellingly, the negative for the 1948 photograph of Bunche and Robeson was never developed, printed, or published. According to Robeson biographer Edwin Hoyt, the editor of the Amsterdam News James Hicks was in the office at the Renaissance Hotel, and “he tore up that negative, before it could be ejected into an alien world that would not understand.”¹⁴ The meeting of two towering figures was refused representation in an early Cold War moment where the racial liberal Bunche could not be seen interacting with the race radical Robeson. The negative’s disposal reveals how, as early as 1948, a figure of leftist anticolonial internationalism could embrace the founding of the state of Israel as a struggle for Jewish national liberation; a burgeoning advocate of Cold War racial liberalism bore the challenging task of securing Israel as a hallmark of humanitarian intervention in the Holocaust’s wake; and Robeson and Bunche could not be seen embracing each other.

The 1950s offered glimpses of a reconceptualized relationship between the Black freedom movement, Israel, and Palestine, though these links were largely underelaborated and curtailed, especially given the movement’s Cold War anticommunist domestication.¹⁵ Nineteen fifty-five’s Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, and the 1956 Suez Crisis began to reveal the possibility of Afro-Arab culture- and class-based solidarities, with Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser playing an instrumental role in shaping a broad understanding of an anticolonial Pan-Arabism. While the Suez War clarified the pressing demands for Afro-Arab solidarity—fracturing the persistent Afro-Zionism of W. E. B. Du Bois’s thinking, for instance¹⁶—it was rare for intellectuals and activists in the Black freedom movement to articulate an imaginative geography of Israel and Palestine capable of making legible Arab Palestinian subjectivity. Aside from several prominent exceptions—including James Baldwin and Malcolm X—the colonial violence in Palestine prior to the June 1967 War was an image that the Black freedom movement never substantively captured. As the political scientist Michael W. Williams argues, “The harmony of interests between Zionism and world imperialism did not become apparent until the era of decolonization.”¹⁷ Such recognition, however, emerged from understanding how the era of decolonization was dramatically marked by the intensified colonization of Palestine and the rapid racial reorganization of U.S. national space.

The American Pattern of Exclusion

One month after Robeson and Bunche’s 1948 interaction, twenty-three-year-old James Baldwin gained widespread fame when his first major essay was published in a national journal, the American Jewish Committee’s Commentary. Commentary would become one of the primary publications where racial liberalism would gain a staunch neoconservative tenor. Yet when it was founded in the mid-1940s, the journal prided itself on publishing a range of left-liberal material germane to its primarily Jewish American intellectual readership.

Baldwin’s “Harlem Ghetto: Winter 1948, the Vicious Circle of Frustration and Prejudice” appeared between the pages of a journalistic account of the contemporary “bloodshed in Palestine” and the reprinting of a mid-nineteenth-century poem, “Lament of the Children of Israel in Rome.” Baldwin’s essay depicts the racist conditions of existence in the chilly Harlem winter, though its juxtaposition to these other works implicitly places it in a broader geographic and historical context. The essay opens with a brief analysis of the effects of high rent, costly food, employment insecurity, and a downturn in wages. The tight enclosure of the racialized space of Harlem’s ghettos was “pervaded by a sense of congestion, rather like the insistent, maddening, claustrophobic pounding in the skull that comes from trying to breathe in a very small room with all the windows closed.”¹⁸ While “Negro identification” with the diasporic narrative of the “wandering Jew” entered routinely into the many church services that structured Black life in Harlem, it could not translate into amicable material relations. “Jews in Harlem are small tradesmen, rent collectors, real estate agents, and pawnbrokers; they operate in accordance with the American business tradition of exploiting Negroes, and they are therefore identified with oppression and are hated for it” (169). Baldwin confronted the discourse of racial liberalism by narrating the spatial forces at work in shaping the racialized antagonism between Jews and Black people in Harlem.

Just as a mountain of sociological investigations, committee reports, and plans for recreational centers have failed to change the face of Harlem or prevent Negro boys and girls from growing up and facing, individually and alone, the unendurable frustration of being always, everywhere, inferior—until finally the cancer attacks the mind and warps it—so there seems no hope for better Negro-Jewish relations without a change in the American pattern. (170)

Baldwin did not wait long for such a change to take place, performing his own exodus—to Paris—later that year.

Baldwin returned to these themes two decades later, in a prominent April 1967 essay published in the New York Times Magazine. “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White,” like “The Harlem Ghetto,” again maps the racialization of space at a time of heightened Israeli-Palestinian tension. “It is bitter to watch the Jewish storekeeper locking up his store for the night, and going home,” Baldwin writes. “Going, with your money in his pocket, to a clean neighborhood, miles from you, which you will not be allowed to enter.”¹⁹ If in 1948 Baldwin saw Jews living in Harlem’s midst, by 1967 Baldwin suggests that anti-Semitism emerged because not only had American Jews become assimilated into a national ideology of exclusion predicated on race—what he calls the “American pattern”—but in doing so they had been drawn into a spatially stratified structure of whiteness. Against the backdrop of the urban rebellions of the 1960s, Baldwin clarifies the differentially racialized practice of imagining social struggle, differentiating heroes and criminals across the color line: “When white men rise up against oppression they are heroes: when black men rise they have reverted to their native savagery. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was not described as a riot, nor were the participants maligned as hoodlums: the boys and girls in Watts and Harlem are thoroughly aware of this, and it certainly contributes to their attitudes toward the Jews” (138). The Holocaust-era analogy of Jewish resistance, replete with its stark implications of creeping fascism and genocide in the United States, was incommensurable with the differential forms of racialized exclusion that distinguished Jews and Blacks peoples. “If one is a Negro in Watts or Harlem,” Baldwin continues,

and knows why one is there, and knows that one has been sentenced to remain there for life, one can’t but look on the American state and the American people as one’s oppressors. For that, after all, is exactly what they are. They have corralled you where you are for their ease and their profit, and are doing all in their power to prevent you from finding out enough about yourself to be able to rejoice in the only life you have. (136–37)

Just as the ability to identify with the Jewish diaspora through scriptural reference was severely curtailed by the material realities of Black existence, the spatial logic of the ghetto as a corral for a criminalized underclass was made illegible in the context of racial liberalism.

Recent scholarship on the relationship between space and racialized criminality has elaborated the broader trends of the process Baldwin apprehended. Shaped by the residues of racial slavery, quasi-legal Jim Crow segregation, and ghettoized urban space, the late 1960s saw the emergence of what the sociologist Loïc Wacquant calls a “novel institutional complex formed by the remnants of the dark ghetto and the carceral apparatus,” whose “deadly symbiosis” produces a “single carceral continuum.”²⁰ Shifts in U.S. political economy, from an urban industry-based economy to a decentered service-based economy buttressed by a post-1965 boom in laboring-class immigration, made Black workers functionally redundant. Federal civil rights legislation and other juridical reforms did little substantively to alter a social geography built on centuries of institutionalized racism. In response, many ghettoized African Americans took to the streets, often sparking violent contestations with law enforcement and property owners. But “as the walls of the ghetto shook and threatened to crumble,” Wacquant writes, “the walls of the prison were correspondingly extended, enlarged and fortified, and ‘confinement of differentiation,’ aimed at keeping a group apart . . . gained primacy over ‘confinement of safety’ and ‘confinement of authority.’”²¹ De jure segregation was outlawed, but de facto segregation was entrenched through the symbiotic relationship between ghetto and prison. In this spatial relation, the ghetto becomes more like a prison—enclosing, policing, surveilling, and criminalizing a population—and the prison becomes more like a ghetto, “quarantin[ing] a polluting group from the urban body.”²²

By the mid-1960s an emergent U.S. third world Left explained this race-making transformation of space through the “colonial analogy,” a concept contesting the racial liberal attempts to render these processes of enclosure invisible, exceptional, or inevitable.²³ “Internal” or “domestic” colonialism became a way to understand the forces of postwar economic underdevelopment, sociospatial control, and racialization that operated in tension with U.S. nationalist formulations of race and space.²⁴ As early as 1962, Harold Cruse argued that “the revolutionary initiative passed to the colonial world and in the United States is passing to the Negro.”²⁵ In much of his work in the mid- to late 1960s, including 1967’s landmark Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Cruse saw in Black cultural politics the potential to translate into the U.S. context the organizational, philosophical, and rhetorical effectivity of anticolonial nationalism gleaned from third world liberation struggles.²⁶ In 1972’s Racial Oppression in America, the sociologist Robert Blauner confronted the facile arguments for pluralism and assimilation by framing his scholarly inquiry into the U.S. racial order through a theory of internal colonialism. Blauner marshaled evidence for his thesis from detailed analysis of the institutional racism reflected in the McCone Commission’s portrayal of the 1965 Watts rebellion and the trial of Huey Newton (in which Blauner was an expert witness for the defense). Jack O’Dell, who later led delegations of Black leaders in solidarity with Palestine to the West Bank, Egypt, and Lebanon, stressed in an early 1967 essay that Black proletarian life was shaped by a “special variety of colonialism.”²⁷

In mid-1968, Black Panther minister of information Eldridge Cleaver began his discussion of the “land question” by asserting plainly: “The first thing that has to be realized is that it is a reality when people say that there’s a ‘black colony’ and a ‘white mother country.’”²⁸ Cleaver argued that “Black Power must be viewed as a projection of sovereignty, an embryonic sovereignty that black people can focus on and through which they can make distinctions between themselves and others, between themselves and their enemies” (67). In a noteworthy twist, Cleaver then drew on the “parallel situation of the Jews at the time of the coming of Theodore Herzl.”

The Jewish people were prepared psychologically to take desperate and unprecedented action. They saw themselves faced with an immediate disastrous situation. Genocide was staring them in the face and this common threat galvanized them into common action. Psychologically, black people in America have precisely the same outlook as the Jews had then. (67–68)

Herzlian Zionism’s desires for a future autonomously governed land base offered Cleaver special resonance. Here, he revises a rich genealogy of Afro-Zionist narratives of liberation to add an anticolonial twist.

Among the most influential Black theorizations of colonialism was Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America.²⁹ The book was published in September 1967, in the midst of Carmichael’s wide-ranging tour of London, Cuba, Moscow, Beijing, Vietnam, Algeria, Cairo, Damascus, and Guinea, during which he met the likes of Shirley and David Graham Du Bois, Sékou Touré, Nkrumah, and the exiled South African singer Miriam Makeba.³⁰ Black Power was one of the first comprehensive U.S. applications of the work of Frantz Fanon for the U.S. context. Drawing on Wretched of the Earth, Carmichael and Hamilton argue that what they call “institutional racism” in the United States “has another name”: colonialism.³¹ Black people formed an internal colony in the United States, and Black liberation in the United States should emulate the decolonizing struggles under way across the third world. The book’s first chapter, “White Power: The Colonial Situation,” juxtaposes epigraphs from the Black sociologist Kenneth Clark, “The dark ghettos are social political, educational and—above all—economic colonies,” and the Jewish journalist I. F. Stone, “In an age of decolonization, it may be fruitful to regard the problem of the American negro as a unique case of colonialism, an instance of internal imperialism, an underdeveloped people in our very midst” (2–3).³² Carmichael and Hamilton suggest that the overarching mode of rule in the United States exposes Black people to economic, political, and social violence analogous to the treatment of those people living in colonial Africa. Countering Gunnar Myrdal’s thesis, Carmichael and Hamilton “put it another way.” “There is no ‘American dilemma’ because black people in this country form a colony, and it is not in the interest of the colonial power to liberate them” (5).³³

Carmichael and Hamilton continue: “Obviously, the analogy is not perfect” (5). There is no geographically distant “Mother Country” from which colonial sovereignty emanated, nor are raw materials produced in the colony and exported to the metropole. What concerns Carmichael and Hamilton, though, and what preoccupied Cruse, Blauner, O’Dell, Cleaver, Clark, and Stone, is “not rhetoric . . . or geography” but the “objective relationship” of Black people to the spatialized axes of racial violence (6). Such analytical qualifications for the colonial analogy appear throughout discussions of the relationship between U.S. race making and the structures of global capitalism, qualifications that rightly focus attention on the contextually specific particularities of dominance and subjection, anticolonial resistance and struggle in “actually existing colonialisms.”³⁴ To elide these determinate specificities is itself to perform an epistemological violence. Crucially, the accession of the internal colonial model as foundationally predicated on the Black–white binary obfuscates both the United States’ enduring settler colonial structure and the territorial claims to indigenous sovereignty, what the Native studies scholar Jodi Byrd calls the “incommensurability of the internal.”³⁵

An analogy can never be “perfect” in any simple sense, to be sure. With an analogy, one cannot escape difference, even as, in the queer studies scholar Jasbir Puar’s words, analogies “appear to compare objects when in actuality they compare relations.”³⁶ As a relational analytic, it carries the potential to keep these limitations in view. The substantive difference captured in an analogical pairing persistently rubs against the investment in comparison as a stable epistemic grid. The “likeness” or “parallel” of Zionism and Pan-Africanism, Warsaw and Watts, the ghetto and the prison, the Holocaust and racial slavery, the wandering Jew and the Black diaspora: these analogies juxtapose unique historical formations, ideological concepts, or geographies—relations, not objects—which are then linked together via the radically unstable “like” or “as.” This is analogy’s risk: at its core is a difference always on the verge of collapse into identity, socially produced under contextually specific conditions that are always on the verge of conflation. These indelible conditions are what hold an analogy together and produce its rhetorical effectivity.³⁷

Read against the grain, Carmichael and Hamilton’s colonial analogy builds on the many relational constructions at work in the post–World War II conjuncture, operating as a geographic figure to reveal the contradictions of racial liberalism’s exceptionalist discourse. It provided Black freedom movement scholars, artists, and activists a relational analytic to perform a contestatory remapping. The internal colonial framework illuminated both the failure of civil rights legislation to ameliorate material inequalities and the increasing permeation of state and state-sanctioned violence. Black Power’s Palestine helped clarify how the uneven development of deindustrializing urban space had its spatial correlates in other colonized sites in the third world including, significantly, Israel and Palestine.

“Shedding Some Light” on the Palestine Problem

SNCC’s “Third World Round-up” deployed an emergent cultural politics that Black power theorists embraced in the wake of the June 1967 War. The article reframed the question of Palestine as germane to Black liberation. This both clarified the divisions in the civil rights movement’s fracturing interracial coalition—exemplified in SNCC’s expulsion of its white (and often Jewish) membership in this moment—and enabled the Black freedom movement to relate Israel’s occupation to the rising “law and order” ghettoization and incarceration of African Americans.

The publication of “Third World Round-up” and its widespread condemnation emerged during the tumultuous spring and summer months of 1967. In a very short period of time, a confluence of events and their discursive residues renewed and revised an imaginative geography first broached in the interwar years—by the likes of Robeson, Bunche, Du Bois, and other Black leftists—that connected struggles for Black freedom in the United States with decolonizing movements around the world. In April Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” speech at New York City’s Riverside Church, for the first time depicting the “very obvious and almost facile connection” between struggles for racial equality at home and struggles against the unjust war being conducted by the United States in Vietnam.³⁸ Several days later, the New York Times Magazine published Baldwin’s “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White.” On May 2 Bobby Seale and thirty members of the Black Panther Party brandished guns and uniforms to stage a major protest at the California state capitol in Sacramento. The months of June, July, and August saw the widespread mimeographed circulation of Newton’s theorization “In Defense of Self Defense.”³⁹ At the end of August the National Conference for New Politics in Chicago continued the process of disarticulating inter-racial coalitions for social change.⁴⁰ In September Cruse published Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, a wide-ranging, multilayered critique of radicals and liberals.⁴¹ Throughout the summer, urban and suburban geographies were transformed by some 164 “civil disorders” in twenty-eight U.S. cities, including Cambridge, Maryland; Tampa, Florida; Buffalo, New York; Washington, D.C.; Muncie, Indiana; Albina, Oregon; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Detroit, Michigan; and Newark, New Jersey.⁴² FBI director J. Edgar Hoover ordered the Bureau’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) to target “black nationalist, hate-type organizations,”⁴³ launching a “secret war against Black Power activists . . . that featured the systematic, illegal harassment, imprisonment, and, at times, death, of black militants.”⁴⁴

On Sunday, June 11, 1967, what would be the last of the six days of the June war, the New York Times Magazine published “Martin Luther King Defines ‘Black Power.’” Partly responding to SNCC’s recent political shift and the Black Panther Party’s heightened visibility, and partly refuting Baldwin’s argument published in the same venue earlier that spring, King’s essay opens and closes with a succinct critique of the gradualist emphasis of mainstream racial liberalism: “The powerless . . . never experience opportunity—it is always arriving at a later time”; and “Power is not the white man’s birthright; it will not be legislated for us and delivered in neat government packages. It is a social force any group can utilize by accumulating its elements in a planned, deliberate campaign to organize it under its own control.”⁴⁵ King likewise signals the dangers of anti-Semitism. Unlike Baldwin, King’s narrative of Jewish ascendancy into political power “reveals a useful lesson” that involved drawing from “a tradition of education combined with social and political action.”⁴⁶ Yet it is unclear from the essay how readers were to understand the relationship between Black people “learning the techniques and arts of politics” and the performance of Israeli military dominance in the Middle East dramatized across U.S. news outlets. Given that the front page of the Times had six articles alone devoted to Israel’s overwhelming victory, including a map of the state’s burst borders and an accompanying headline stating, “Israel Rules Out Return to Frontiers,” it is striking that King’s essay was silent on the Jewish state.

It was all the more remarkable when, two months later, SNCC quite publicly took on the Palestine problem. SNCC spokesperson Ralph Featherstone noted how perilous such a practice could be: “Some people might interpret what we say as Anti-Semitic. But they can’t deny it is the Jews who are exploiting black people in the ghettos. And there is a parallel between this and the oppression of the Arabs by the Israelis.”⁴⁷ Responses to “Third World Round-up” have consistently avoided the article’s relational analytic. Nor has the article been taken on its merits, to consider either its “documented facts” or the knowledge such facts were meant to communicate and enable. Rather, most commentary has taken up whether or not the text deploys anti-Semitic tropes or how politically ill-advised the publication of such a piece was in the first place. The New York Times devoted an entire front-page article to “Third World Round-up,” titled “S.N.C.C. Charges Israel Atrocities: Black Power Group Attacks Zionism as Conquering Arabs by ‘Massacre.’”⁴⁸ The article traced SNCC’s activist shift from domestic coalition-building for voting rights to Black Power internationalism inspired by Fanon and Malcolm X, but did not examine whether such “charges” were warranted or accurate. Instead, it chastised SNCC for its “hate-filled” rhetoric and eulogized a prior time of solidarity. “It is a tragedy that the civil rights movement is being degraded by the injection of hatred and racism in reverse,” noted Arnold Forster, the general counsel of the Anti-Defamation League. Another ADL official framed the position in explicitly Cold War terms: “This newsletter follows the pro-Arab, Soviet and racist lines and smacks very heavily of anti-Semitism.” The American Jewish Congress’s Will Maslow agreed: “There is no room for racists in the fight against racism.” The next day, the New York Times printed a follow-up article recounting “angry statements” by “civil rights leaders” against SNCC’s “Israel Stand.”⁴⁹ These leaders ran the gamut of the fracturing civil rights coalition, including Maslow, Whitney M. Young of the National Urban League, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Rabbi Israel Miller of the American Zionist Council, Malcolm A. Tarlov of the Jewish War Veterans of the United States, a spokesperson from the Jewish Labor Committee, Bernard Katzen of the New York State Commission for Human Rights, and Martin Peretz, director of the National Conference for New Politics. King declined to comment specifically on SNCC’s article, saying only that he was “strongly opposed to anti-Semitism and ‘anything that does not signify my concern for humanity for the Jewish people.’”

The secondary literature on “Third World Round-up” typically situates it either in a larger declensionist narrative about the broken promise of Black–Jewish coalition or names it an anxious example of growing Black anti-Semitism. Rarely are its “documented facts” substantively treated. Robert Weisbord and Richard Kazarian perform a “content analysis” on the article, revealing that the “pronouncements suggest anti-Semitic along with anti-Zionist sentiments.”⁵⁰ SNCC historian Clayborne Carson recalls that taking a stand on Palestine had not been “carefully deliberated” when “a few SNCC members quickly prepared an article that seemed designed to provoke Jewish former supporters.”⁵¹ Gary E. Rubin avers that the article was “the most controversial attack by emerging African American groups on Israel,” particularly because “American Jews feared for Israel’s continued existence during the Six Day War.”⁵² Melani McAlister intimates that the article was researched and produced in a number of weeks.⁵³ Eric Sundquist suggests the newsletter was “ill-conceived.”⁵⁴ Matthew Quest, writing for the Palestine Solidarity Review in 2003, echoes the critique of the “colonial analogy” as he considers the anticapitalist analysis present in the article’s “anticolonialism” to be “ill-defined, smeared, injured, and could be called into question,” and points out that the article “suggests there are inherent Jewish ethnic characteristics.”⁵⁵ The Black Power historian Peniel Joseph sees in SNCC’s publication and steadfast defense of the article a “political irreverence . . . consistent with its evolving philosophy” that both “damaged its reputation in the United States” and “impressed Third World partisans.” The identification of “Palestine as a colony and its people as a community of color under siege,” Joseph writes, “produced an uncomfortable stalemate in which representatives of two long-standing minority groups attacked each other as racist and anti-Semitic.”⁵⁶

In his 2003 autobiography, Kwame Turé, né Stokely Carmichael, tells a different story of the emergence of “the Palestine problem.” According to Turé, who had just been replaced by H. Rap Brown as SNCC chairman when the newsletter appeared, the document originated in a reading group organized by “one courageous activist sister.”⁵⁷ Turé refuses to name this organizer, though other accounts suggest it was Ethel Minor, an activist involved in Latin American liberationist organizing and a member of the Nation of Islam.⁵⁸ The reading group was convened first in the wake of Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965 and proceeded to read and discuss one book a month over the next two years. The reading list, according to Turé, included “not just pro-Palestinian or anti-Zionist materials” but “Jewish writers who, from the perspective of the moral traditions of Jewish thought, opposed the militaristic expansionism of Zionist policies.”⁵⁹ They also read writings from “Herzl, Ben-Gurion, Begin, documents from the Stern Gang, etc., etc.” (558). The turning point for the reading group was realizing “the close military, economic, and political alliance between the Israeli government and the racist apartheid regime in South Africa” (558). “I have to say,” Turé declares, “discovering that the government of Israel was maintaining such a long, cozy, and warm relationship with the worst enemies of black people came as a real shock. A kind of betrayal. And, hey, we weren’t supposed to even talk about this? C’mon” (559). Turé claims that drafting “The Palestine Problem” with Minor was his last act as chairman, meant primarily to take the pulse of SNCC’s leadership through “the form of sharp questions against a background of incontestable historical facts” (559).⁶⁰ The systematic study was cut short, though. The newsletter was prematurely handed over to mainstream journalists. Turé concludes that,

had the process not been short-circuited, I’m sure the overwhelming sentiment would have been to make a statement, a moral statement, on justice for the Palestinian people while trying hard not to offend or alienate our Jewish friends on a personal level. Such a statement, one intended for public distribution, would almost certainly have been more nuanced. In properly diplomatic language, which the talking paper definitely was not. But you crazy if you think the language would have made any difference politically. This was an orchestrated declaration of war, Jack. (561)

Turé’s narrative notwithstanding, scholars have by and large not remarked on the fact that, in structure and substance, the “talking paper” may have originated outside SNCC altogether. The “Third World Round-up” draws directly from the Palestine Research Center’s September 1966 pamphlet “Do You Know? Twenty Basic Facts about the Palestine Problem.”⁶¹ This pamphlet was the first in the PRC’s “Facts and Figures” series; it was circulated through the Arab League’s New York office, and a version of it appeared in the Middle East Coordinating Committee’s own 1967 pamphlet, “Did You Know? . . . Facts about the Middle East.” Fully fifteen of the Palestine Research Center’s twenty “facts” appear verbatim (or nearly so) in the SNCC article. Near-identical items from an updated PLO-affiliated fact sheet were published in the immediate aftermath of the October 1973 War in the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service (under the editorial leadership of David Graham Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois’s stepson).

These textual, rhetorical, and empirical similarities matter. Recognizing the unacknowledged structure and source material for key elements of “Third World Round-up” is a pressing reminder of the substantive, if also fleeting, transnational textual circulation between the anticolonial horizon of Black freedom struggles and Palestinian knowledge production. While the PRC’s incisive historical and political critique of Zionism’s settler colonial racism was presented on the international stage of the United Nations, only to be obfuscated by a U.S. Cold War anticommunism, here it emerges in the guise of an epistemic imperative advanced in the rearticulation of Black freedom struggles.

There are anti-Semitic tropes in “Third World Round-up,” particularly around the specious claims about Jewish dominance in global financial markets—items that do not appear in the Palestine Research Center’s pamphlet. These moribund tropes are not to be gainsaid. At the same time, we miss the translational, conceptual, and representational density of “Third World Round-up” if we allow the presentation of knowledge about Palestine to be crowded out by anti-Semitic rhetoric. Dwelling with the epistemic imperatives structuring the article allows us to see a multigenre spatial imaginary through which to elaborate the historical present of Palestine’s colonial genealogy, informed by and deploying Palestinian knowledge production.

To describe Palestine and Israel, let alone the struggles for Black liberation in the United States, as an element of the “Third World” rearticulates a geography that draws on the discourse of colonialism and occupation. It is clear from the headnote that the article serves as a knowledge project meant to “shed some light” on the conditions of the decolonizing world in ways that “pertain to our struggle here.” The article’s “documented facts” suggest that such knowledge is based in objective historical reality, and when phrased in terms of a “test,” complete with interspersed headers repeating the phrase “Do you know,” these facts do complex rhetorical work. The article’s readership, directly addressed through the second person “you,” is presumptively unaware of these facts because of the “white American press” obfuscating the “true story about world events in which America is involved.” Each fact is phrased in terms of a question, but with the present-tense “do you know,” each fact demands that these “documented facts” are crucial for framing an understanding of the present post–June war conjuncture.

The questions are organized in rough chronological order, each “fact” isolated into its own distinct number. Israel’s post–June war occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula, and East Jerusalem is represented as the culmination of a trajectory begun at the 1897 conference in Basel, Switzerland, where “Zionism, a world-wide nationalistic Jewish movement,” formulated a program to “create for the Jewish People a home in Palestine according to Public law.” This program, according to the article, received “maximum help, support, and encouragement from Great Britain, the United States, and other white Western colonial governments.” With 1917’s Balfour Declaration, Britain subsequently “took control of Palestine,” creating a “world problem.” But, according to the article, there were very few “native” Jews in Palestine, and only fifty-six thousand Jews in total, most of whom had recently immigrated to the British colony. By 1947, when “Britain passed the Palestine problem on to the United Nations . . . Zionists owned no more than 6 per-cent of the total land area in Palestine” and Jews were a population roughly half the size of the Arab Palestinians. The “formal beginning of the Arab-Israeli War” commenced after the “formal end of British rule” on May 15, 1948, when “Arab States had to send in their poorly trained and ill equipped armies against the superior western trained and supported Israeli forces, in a vain effort to protect Arab lives, property and Arab rights to the land of Palestine.”

The substance of Question 16 received the most attention from the New York Times. SNCC (accurately) accused “Zionist terror gangs . . . deliberately slaughtered and mutilated women, children and men, thereby causing the unarmed Arabs to panic, flee and leave their homes.” Question 20 illustrates the polarizing vote in the UN for the 1947 Partition Plan, asserting, in all capital letters, that “ISRAEL WAS PLANTED AT THE CROSSROADS OF ASIA AND AFRICA WITHOUT THE FREE APPROVAL OF ANY MIDDLE-EASTERN, ASIAN OR AFRICAN COUNTRY!” Questions 25 and 26 provide evidence of racist practices within the post-1948 state of Israel, where Arabs are “segregate[d] . . . , live in ‘Security Zones,’ under Martial Law, are not allowed to travel freely within Israel, and are the victims of discrimination in education, jobs etc.” Further, “dark skinned Jews from the Middle-East and North Africa are also second-class citizens in Israel, [and] the color line puts them in inferior position to the white, European Jews.” The article’s last two questions bring to the fore the perceived relationship between Israel and African neocolonialism. Question 31 asserts that not only were “the famous European Jews, the Rothschilds” involved “in the original conspiracy with the British” to found Israel, but they “ALSO CONTROL MUCH OF AFRICA’S MINERAL WEALTH.” Question 32 contends that Israel has “gone into African countries, tried to exploit and control their economies, and sabotaged African liberation movements, along with any other African movements or projects opposed by the United States and other white western powers.”

Many of these “documented facts” have been corroborated by scholarly research, often by Israeli scholars.⁶² Others, like the claims about Israel’s counterrevolutionary incursions into Africa, stretch the historical archive. Still others, like the claim about the Rothschilds, are completely specious. The article is silent on the documents from which these facts were drawn—do they emerge from the systematic reading led by Ethel Minor, as suggested by Turé, were they hastily cobbled together at the last minute, or do they come from the Palestine Research Center’s pamphlet? This ambiguity left open the question of what constitutes “proper” knowledge of the Palestine problem. Given that circulation of such documentation was generally blocked in the United States, what was transformative about the SNCC article is its relentless assertion that what is being depicted is knowable at all, should be known, is required knowledge for apprehending the present. Against two interpretive frames—charting a telos of miraculous millennial return or the resolutely modern brilliance of Israeli military strategy against an inferior adversary—the article presents a counterhistory of permanent war. By constructing a genealogy of the June war in this way, “Third World Round-up” rendered the violence against Arab Palestinians, Arab Israelis, and Mizrahi Jews legible in a context of U.S. civil rights struggles. Doing so not only expedited coalitional fractures born out of the Black Power turn in domestic racial politics; it also fashioned an imaginative geography of occupation, confinement, and resistance across which the Black freedom movement would draw analogies, alliances, and allegiances that were deepened in the years to come.

The article’s visual elements make these relations especially clear. One such relation is registered in the tense juxtaposition between the genocidal Nazi Holocaust and the early decades of the state of Israel. An unsourced archival photograph of a dozen men kneeling with their hands on their heads and guns blazing behind them cautions otherwise. Its caption reads “Gaza Massacres, 1956,” a reference to the carnage at Khan Yunis during the opening moments of Israel’s 1956 incursion into the Sinai Peninsula. “Zionists lined up Arab victims and shot them in the back in cold blood,” the caption continues. “This is the Gaza Strip, Palestine, not Dachau, Germany.” Juxtaposing these two interpretive frames makes legible the continued haunting of the Holocaust, one that sees World War II’s genocidal violence echoed by the Israeli state. Dachau’s metonymic status condenses the systematized racial violence practiced across the Nazi concentration camps and intimates that the conditions under Israeli rule are, at times, some of its most pernicious effects.⁶³

The article’s most complex visual image is the SNCC artist Kofi Bailey’s cartoon suturing three forms of relation, linking a history of U.S. racial violence, imperial militarism in Vietnam and the Arab world, and Afro-Arab liberation. At the top of the image is a disembodied hand with a six-pointed Jewish Star of David overlaying a U.S. dollar sign. The meaning of this part of the image was ambiguous. Was it another anti-Semitic trope of Jewish financial domination, or did it signify U.S. material backing for the Israeli state? Much of the commentary reads it as the former, and, given the overdetermination of such figures, there is certainly cause to do so. However, given the image as a whole, it also points to the international enmeshment of the United States and the Israeli state. The hand grasps the middle of a rope dangling downward on both sides. At one end is the likeness of Egyptian president Nasser drawn from the chest up in a dark suit jacket, white shirt, and tie. During the high point of third world nonalignment, Nasser consistently advocated for Palestinian freedom from imperial rule as part of a larger Pan-Arab nationalism. His likeness condensed what McAlister calls “an emotionally explosive convergence of anticolonial defiance and global racial consciousness.”⁶⁴ At the rope’s other end, also depicted from the chest up in similar garb, is Muhammad Ali. The U.S. heavyweight boxing champion had recently converted to the Nation of Islam, and his concomitant antiwar stance had brought his professional boxing career under fire. In 1966 Ali had refused induction into the U.S. Army, stating famously, “No Viet Cong ever called me a nigger.” In June 1967 Ali was convicted of draft evasion, sentenced to prison pending numerous appeals (including to the U.S. Supreme Court, which unanimously overruled the conviction), and was barred from boxing for a number of years. This illustration of a double lynching imaginatively links the fates of Nasser and Ali, cast as they are as twinned victims of a common racial violence. In the background of the lynching is a disembodied dark-skinned arm bent at the elbow labeled “THIRD WORLD,” wielding a scimitar—itself commonly perceived as rooted in Persian history—labeled “LIBERATION MOVEMENT.” The force of third world struggle emanates from the Middle East, the image suggests, with transnational repercussions; its horizon sees the liberation of the Arab world, African Americans, and practicing Muslims from the intertwined imperial violence of the United States and Israel.

Taken as a whole, “Third World Round-up” offers a multigenre representation of the material, ideological, and epistemological links between struggles for Black liberation in the United States and the historically embedded colonial conditions in Palestine. It reveals such links on the terrain of a knowledge project confronting the limits of liberal inclusion as the ultimate horizon for freedom. Its “tragic” reception in a broad public sphere reveals how knowledge of Palestine that exceeded the normative confines of American common sense would be disciplined with fierce consequences. At the same time, it prefigured the public persona of Black Power’s Palestine. While the SNCC article left uncited the tangible touchpoints between Black freedom struggles and Palestine liberation struggles—at best, they were registered in the textual residues of the Palestine Research Center pamphlet left for others to reconstruct—other correspondences were much more durable and sustained.

“Culture Is a Weapon”

The contours of Black Power’s Palestine were further elaborated at the National Conference for New Politics, held in September 1967. The convention attempted to organize a New Left coalition that could “bridge the gap” between antiwar, antiracist, and Reform Democratic organizations, with the dual goals of intensifying local organizing efforts and creating a platform from which to engage in electoral politics.⁶⁵ Ramparts magazine called the convention “the biggest and most representative gathering of America’s Left in decades.”⁶⁶ In trying to forge such a broad articulation of interests, the conference drew over three thousand delegates and two hundred local and national organizations, from racial justice groups like SNCC, the Congress on Racial Equality, and Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference to the Students for a Democratic Society and the Socialist Workers Party. But it was the conference’s “showdown over Zionism” where, as the historian Matthew Frye Jacobson puts it, “identity politics was born.”⁶⁷

As a rebuttal to what some viewed as “white-dominated, liberal, paternalistic” efforts to include representatives of the Black Power movement, Black organizers formed a caucus. During the conference’s first full day, the caucus, led by SNCC representatives H. Rap Brown and James Forman, presented a list of demands that needed to be agreed on or else the conference’s Black membership would refuse participation and withdraw altogether. “We, as black people,” the list begins, “believe that the United States system is committed to the practice of genocide, social degradation, to the denial of political and social self-determination of black people, and cannot reform itself. There must be revolutionary change.”⁶⁸ The caucus demanded 50 percent representation on all convention committees and appealed to the broad conference body to support thirteen specific points. These included both domestic and international demands: the return of Harlem representative Adam Clayton Powell to his seat in the U.S. Congress; advocacy for “black control of black political groups in black communities”; the “rebuilding of the ghettos”; support for the Newark Black Power Conference resolutions (which called for, among other things, “the establishment of a national dialogue on the feasibility of establishing a separate homeland in the United States for Black people” );⁶⁹ widespread reparations for “the historic, physical, sexual, mental, and economic exploitation of black people”; and support for “all wars of national liberation around the world.”

Point 5 of the resolution received the most sustained debate. It condemned the “imperialist Zionist war” while underscoring that such a condemnation was not an expression of anti-Semitism but a dissent from the particular expression of state power. Condemning Israel’s incipient occupation of the Palestinian Territories and praising revolutionary responses to it fashioned a conceptual bridge between the “internal colonies” of Black America and Palestine. At the same time, it caused substantial concern for many delegates. Robert Scheer, one of the NCNP’s lead organizers, proposed an alternative: the conference would recognize the legitimacy of the Palestine Liberation Organization and call for Israel’s unconditional withdrawal to its June 4 borders. In the end, the resolution’s thirteen points were voted on as a package and were resoundingly supported. During the conference’s waning hours, after the resolution had passed, the SCLC convinced the leadership of the Black caucus to revise the language of point 5, shifting from condemning Zionism to condemning “the imperialistic Israeli government.”⁷⁰

Like SNCC’s leadership and the Black caucus at the NCNP, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense took on the June war, drawing rhetorically powerful links between U.S. internal colonialism and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and the Sinai. Unlike SNCC, though, which by 1967 had lost much of the popular support it had garnered during its campaign for voting rights in the U.S. South, the Black Panther Party’s geography of struggle was far more vibrant, located as it was at the scale of U.S. cities. Through multiple iterations of its survival programs, the Panthers, according to the historian Nikhil Pal Singh, “skillfully pursued a highly localized, spatial politics addressed directly to the denizens of a myriad of subnational, institutional spaces—the housing project, the school, the community organization, and the prison.”⁷¹ In the face of the emergent law and order state, the Panthers “embrac[ed] the prison—already a place of effective anti-citizenship—as the exemplary site and source of counter-nationalist theory and practice.”⁷² Much of the Panthers’ work was framed by the politics of permanent war. Cleaver, Newton, and others viewed the connections between racialization, internal colonialism, and the aftermath of genocide through a materialist political economic framework.⁷³ In this way, “the Panthers combined an urban-centered critique of U.S. capitalism and racism,” writes the historian Robert O. Self, “with a global perspective on postcolonial nationhood.”⁷⁴ While this geography was often “tenuous and sometimes hyperbolic,” writes Self, “the mix was powerful and generative . . . arguably one of the Party’s most compelling contributions to American political culture in the 1960s and 1970s.”⁷⁵ Contests over the “deadly symbiosis” of ghetto and prison radically limiting life chances for poor Black people in Oakland, New Haven, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City drew lines of flight, at times quite literally, to places like North Africa and the Caribbean. With the establishment of the Party’s offices in Algeria in July 1969, this imaginative geography of struggle gained a tangible international outpost, even if the functional duration of the office was relatively brief, and even as it marked the emergence of internal splits in the Party.

“There was a battle in Algiers in late July, with lighter skirmishes both old and new, and emerging signs of struggle which now lurk ready to boomerang around the world in the years (and months) to come.”⁷⁶ This is how Nathan Hare opened the inaugural issue of the Black Scholar, the first U.S.-based journal of Black studies.⁷⁷ In the summer of 1969 Algiers hosted the first annual Pan-African Cultural Festival. Held under the auspices of the Organization of African Unity, for twelve days the festival staged the infusion of transnational Black culture with the politics of third world decolonization. The festival featured dance, singing, musical performance, and theater troupes performing for thousands of attendees. Algerian president Houari Boumediene opened the festival by proclaiming, “Culture is a weapon in our struggle for liberation.”⁷⁸ Algiers provided the context for extensive conversations between Black people in the United States and Africa and Arab Palestinians, featuring, according to Hare, hundreds of delegates from thirty-one independent African countries and “representatives from six movements for African liberation, from Palestine to Angola-Mozambique and the Congo-Brazzaville.”⁷⁹ Building on Fanon’s critique of the Négritude movement, delegates debated the relationship between decolonizing nationalism and localized forms of cultural production. Among prominent U.S. attendees were the writers Don L. Lee, Maya Angelou, Ed Bullins, and Ted Joans, who as members of the Black Arts movement “defined political struggle as cultural struggle.”⁸⁰ The jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp gave a stunning performance, as did the pianist Oscar Peterson and the singers Marion Williams, Nina Simone, and Miriam Makeba.⁸¹

Even though it was one of the few delegations whose constituents resided outside continental Africa—Palestine’s delegation being another—the Black Panther Party contingent at the festival was substantial, including Charlie Cobb, Courtland Cox, David Hilliard, Raymond Hewitt, and Emory Douglas. Eldridge Cleaver, who had gained enormous fame in 1967 and 1968 as a quotable spokesperson for Black Power, not least for the popularity of his collection of essays, Soul on Ice, reemerged as a major public figure during the festival, having fled parole in California for Havana and then Algiers, to join his partner, Kathleen, for the festival and the birth of their first child, Maceo.⁸² The Panthers, together with an Algerian government representative, arranged for space in a downtown office building to house the Afro-American Information Center. The center was open for the duration of the festival, staffed by French-speaking interpreters brought from Paris by Julia Wright Hervé (the daughter of Richard Wright and one of the primary liaisons between the Panthers and the Algerian public). Stacks of the Black Panther newspapers were made available to the center’s visitors. Along with the Hotel Aletti, where many delegates stayed, the Afro-American Information Center served as a vibrant site for Panthers to communicate in person with representatives from many other delegations.

Emory Douglas, the party’s minister of culture, curated an exhibition at the center of the artwork he had produced for the Black Panther newspaper. Douglas took over the layout of the newspaper soon after the May 1967 Sacramento protest, creating “a visually dominant newspaper” that by 1969 had reached over one hundred thousand in weekly circulation and would peak around four hundred thousand in the early 1970s.⁸³ Like much of the Panthers’ politics, which used visual and performative registers to contest the violently repressive force of state power, Douglas’s work attempted to capture an “insurgent form of visibility” that dramatized the aesthetics of revolution. The Sacramento protest’s “guerrilla theater” found its pictorial echo in Douglas’s broadsides.⁸⁴ These representations of permanent war infused much of Douglas’s work from 1967 to 1973.⁸⁵ Using a mixed-media social realist approach that juxtaposed photographs, line drawings, caricature, cartoon, and quotes from the party’s leadership, Douglas’s art not only reveals the cacophony of weapons—guns, bombs, cages—deployed by various arms of the law and order state but also represents the average folk, often women and children, attempting to get by under such conditions via the survival programs that the Panthers were setting up to do so.⁸⁶ Douglas’s work “helped convert everyday life into art,” writes the historian Davarian L. Baldwin, “by making the black ghetto his ‘museum,’ with pictures plastered on barbershop walls, in alleyways, and on telephone poles.”⁸⁷

Douglas transported the strategy of displaying visual art to Algiers with remarkable effect. “From the moment he taped the first drawing on the Center’s bare walls,” recalls Kathleen Cleaver,

crowds of Algerians clustered on the sidewalk outside and stared through the windows. Soon large framed posters of Black Panther martyrs and brightly colored drawings showing Afro-Americans holding guns or fighting the police decorated all the walls and windows. The militant spirit the artwork conveyed transcended the language barrier and evoked enthusiastic reactions among the Algerian onlookers.⁸⁸

Among those onlookers were undoubtedly a number of prominent Palestinian political activists, as the Afro-American Information Center was “not far from the local office of Al Fatah.”⁸⁹ While Douglas’s visual representations of anticolonial struggle in the United States papered the walls of the Panthers’ office, Fatah’s information center “resound[ed],” in the words of one orientalizing description, “to the hypnotic beat of Arab war songs played over and over as visitors view[ed] paintings and photographs of commando heroes and trainees.”⁹⁰ The relationship of Palestinian revolutionary visual iconography to that of the Panthers should not be downplayed. Fatah, a reverse acronym standing for Harakat al-Tahrir a-Watani al-Filastini, literally, the Palestine National Liberation Movement, had been founded in 1959 by the Palestinian exiles Yasser Arafat, Salah Khalaf, and Khalil al-Wazir, each living in Kuwait as students. Unlike prior Palestinian political formations, which, according to the historian Rashid Khalidi, were ruled in large measure by “sober men in their fifties and sixties wearing suits and red tarbushes,” Fatah and some of its competing Palestinian nationalist groups were led by younger figures in their twenties and thirties whose origins in the lower middle class and the post-1948 refugee camps inspired a broader mass movement.⁹¹ Like the Black Panther Party, Fatah and its allied groups insisted on “direct, armed action.”⁹² Composed of feda’i, literally, “those who sacrifice themselves,” by the end of the 1960s these groups, like the Panthers, had captured an international audience for their expression of anticolonial struggle. Donning the Palestinian kafiya and the Kalashnikov rifle, the feda’i “dominated the Palestinian symbolic universe.”⁹³ By the summer of 1969 Fatah had become the most important political party in the PLO, whose chairmanship was given to Arafat. Fatah’s “Seven Points”—publicly supported by the Black Panthers—stressed that “the struggle of the Palestinian People, like that of the Vietnamese and other peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, is part of the historic process of the liberation of the oppressed peoples from colonialism and imperialism.”⁹⁴

Popular press coverage of the festival tells us little else of the interaction between Fatah and the Panthers—there apparently was a photo taken at this time of Cleaver and Arafat embracing.⁹⁵ However, given the shared visual iconographies produced by a younger generation wise to the aesthetics of revolution, it should not be surprising, that, according to Kathleen Cleaver, “a close bond grew between Fatah and the Panthers as soon as their arrival became public.” This “bond” structured how the Panthers provided space for the expression of Palestine’s liberation struggle.⁹⁶ Under the headline “Fat’h Speaks to Africa,” the Black Panther newspaper published the address by an unnamed PLO representative to the festival. “On the map, there are two kinds of classifications; a geographical one and a political one in which the world is divided into only two major continents. . . . Africa on this map is a cause more than it is a continent. We, therefore, came here as being a part of Africa the cause.” The address elaborated a shared history of European imperialism in Africa and Palestine. “They came to our country, as they came to yours. We tried to live with them in one state, under the banner of law and peace, but they insisted on a pure racist regime, the same as that of the white minority in Africa. They claim that by this they solve the Jewish question. But really they create a problem for our people without solving theirs.” A similar statement from Arafat ran in a December issue of newspaper.⁹⁷ In its editorial statements, the newspaper echoed Fatah’s anticolonialism: “Behind Israel with her arrogant contempt for the Arab peoples and her dream of establishing a religious Jewish state . . . stands the world’s most powerful and imperialist state, the U.S.A.”⁹⁸

Things Ain’t What They Used to Be

If Algiers served as a crucial node through which to relate Black and Palestinian anticolonial visions, then Cairo, Egypt, proved to be another, one that was thematized in a novel by someone whose own transnational circulation materialized the diasporic resonances his culture work sought to illuminate. David Graham Du Bois’s . . . And Bid Him Sing shifted the epistemic register of Black Power’s Palestine from the reproduction of “documented facts” about a distant, if inexorably related territory and history, to the narrative texture of lived contradictions.

. . . And Bid Him Sing begins this way. It is the early 1960s. At a corner table at Cristos, a Cairo rendezvous for the city’s young intellectuals and writers, sits Bob Jones, a veteran African American journalist for the English-language daily Egyptian Gazette. Jones spots a vaguely familiar face across the room. It is Suliman Ibn Rashid, a “black American” and a “Moslem,” troubled by bone tuberculosis in his leg. Suliman had recently moved from Philadelphia to Cairo to study Arabic at the historic Al Azhar University, write poetry, support a friend’s small business venture, and do some political organizing.⁹⁹ Bob and Suliman chat a while, and before long, the conversation turns to Suliman’s frustration at the nontransferability of Pan-Africanism. African American notions of Blackness just do not translate in Cairo. The exchange ends, with Suliman and Bob intent on meeting again, and they bid farewell. Bob, the novel’s primary narrator, describes Suliman’s departure: “Waiting for the traffic light to turn green, I watched him go. He walked at a brisk pace, back straight, shoulders square, head held a little to the right; his short leg forcing a slight bobbing up and down of his body that his erect posture seemed to be trying to conceal” (39).

Thus closes the second chapter of . . . And Bid Him Sing. Part novel, part autobiography, part history, . . . And Bid Him Sing narrates Bob’s and Suliman’s various attempts at forging a durable Afro-Arab diasporic culture in Cairo. In alluding to Countee Cullen’s 1925 sonnet “Yet Do I Marvel,” which grapples with the tension between racial performance and literary form at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Graham Du Bois’s novel sounds out the productive dissonances of Black radicalism as it moves from the Nation of Islam mosques in Philadelphia to Cairo’s streets, cafés, apartments, and music halls. The novel provides narrative texture to Malcolm X’s famous 1964 visit to the city, before closing with the onset of the June 1967 War and its forcible disarticulation of this diasporic culture—a disarticulation, the novel suggests, caused by U.S. material and ideological support for Israel’s post-1967 practices of territorial expansion and occupation.

Published during a five-year stint in Oakland, California, much of the rest of Graham Du Bois’s life was spent splitting time between Cairo and Amherst, Massachusetts. While Shirley Graham Du Bois, who joined her son in Cairo in 1967, had made plain the statement that “Egypt is Africa” in response to Israeli military aggression in the Sinai, David Graham Du Bois’s novel poses this same formulation as problematic for African American exiles.¹⁰⁰ While his stepfather, W. E. B. Du Bois, had long theorized robust conceptions of Pan-Africanism as routed through the sub-Saharan continent, in . . . And Bid Him Sing, David Graham Du Bois thematizes various modes of translation practiced in a North African and Arab context. Such modes of translation are linguistic, transnational, and multigeneric, moving between English and Arabic, U.S. and third world grammars of Blackness, jazz and poetry, history, fiction, and autobiography. In this way, the novel dwells on, and extends, the practices of diaspora offered by Graham Du Bois’s closest kin that, through a mix of translation grounded in his own life experiences, brought into focus relationships between African Americans and Arabs in general, and Palestinians specifically.

Graham Du Bois’s contributions to Black Power’s Palestine moved beyond the colonial analogy. They sound out incommensurable links registered in the transnational circulation of U.S. literary culture and the figurations of racial struggle that it forged.¹⁰¹ To analyze the circuitries of Graham Du Bois’s practice of translation, I draw on Brent Hayes Edwards’s compelling theorization of diaspora. The term, Edwards explains, is “first of all a translation. . . . As such, it should serve as a reminder that there is . . . a complex historical overlay of a variety of kinds of population movement, narrated and imbued with value in different ways and to different ends.”¹⁰² Contesting the identitarian essentialism that often lurks in diaspora’s shadows, Edwards reveals how the practice of linguistic and cultural translation is constitutive of diaspora, particularly in the context of Black radical cultural production. Edwards continues with a simile particularly resonant with . . . And Bid Him Sing:

Like a table with legs of different lengths, or a tilted bookcase, diaspora can be discursively propped up into an artificially “even” or “balanced” state of racial belonging. But such props, of rhetoric, strategy, or organization, are always articulations of unity or globalism, ones that can be “mobilized” for a variety of purposes but can never be definitive: they are always prosthetic.¹⁰³

The generic and linguistic modes of translation at work in . . . And Bid Him Sing function as rhetorical props that suture the productive incommensurabilities between a shared sense of cultural affiliation among dispersed communities and an often-traumatic historical as much as geographic break with a shared and perceived point of origin. In its unstable oscillations between fiction, history, and autobiography, the novel’s troubled attempts at capturing what is “authentic” culture work activated a transnational imaginative geography sedimented in the text’s dense weave of historical traces. How fitting, then, that Suliman is perpetually hobbled by bone tuberculosis, leaving one leg significantly shorter than the other, “forcing a slight bobbing up and down of his body that his erect posture seemed to be trying to conceal” (39). By the close of the novel, Suliman has left Cairo for Istanbul and had a “terrible time with his leg,” even as he “wouldn’t stay off it . . . running around with a tough bunch of black GI deserters, antiwar, Black Power crowd” (224). It would not be long before he returns “home,” to the United States.

These historical traces have remained underelaborated. Neither Graham Du Bois nor his novel has received much scholarly attention. While there is a thick historiography linking the Black freedom movement, the African continent, and European metropoles like Paris, and while in recent years the dense weave of connections between Black internationalism and Asia have drawn significant interest, less critical attention has been paid to the Middle East, North Africa, and the Black diaspora.¹⁰⁴ What follows is a glimpse into one moment in a rich Afro-Arab diasporic culture, one whose spatial imaginary cuts transversally, if unevenly, across Cairo and Oakland, between U.S. struggles for racial justice and struggles staged in the Middle East for self-determination, independence, and decolonization.

Cairo and Oakland: Resituating an Afro-Arab Diaspora

In 1967 Shirley Graham Du Bois was trying to find a place to live. She and her husband had taken up residence in Accra, Ghana, in 1961, just two years prior to W. E. B. Du Bois’s death, and had developed close ties with Kwame Nkrumah, the prominent anticolonial activist turned president of the newly independent African nation. Working closely with Nkrumah, Shirley Graham Du Bois was a key interlocutor between prominent Black radicals, from Malcolm X to Carmichael to Maya Angelou; she headed up Ghana Television; and she frequently wrote for periodicals in Europe and the United States.¹⁰⁵ When, in February 1966, Nkrumah was ousted in a military coup, the seventy-year-old writer, organizer, and political adviser was compelled to leave Accra, spending months traveling to Guinea (Conakry), Tanzania, East Germany, France, Mexico, and Algeria.¹⁰⁶

It is in this context that Shirley Graham Du Bois decided on Cairo as her next residence, joining her son in an apartment on Nile Street in the Giza district. She wrote a friend in the fall of 1967:

[E]vents of the past six months in Africa and the USA make it impossible for me to consider establishing a home outside the area of intense struggle in which my people are now engaged. . . . It is clear that the liberation struggle in Africa (and this includes Egypt) has entered a new phase: the era of peoples’ armed struggle; and linked closely with this is the vanguard of revolution already launched in the United States by Afro-Americans.¹⁰⁷

Cairo had become a crucial transfer point for articulating forms of third world internationalism and Black liberation. The city hosted the 1961 Afro-Asian Women’s Conference (attended by Shirley Graham Du Bois), as well as the 1964 convening of the OAU, during which Malcolm X was granted observer status and enunciated his own global framing of antiracist struggle, charting a shift from one of civil rights to one of human rights. By the end of the decade, following Shirley Graham Du Bois’s brief speaking tour of the United States in 1970–71 (including an address to the Association of Arab American University Graduates annual conference), the Du Boises’ Nile Street apartment became a transfer point for U.S. activists.¹⁰⁸ From this vantage point, Shirley Graham Du Bois analyzed the forms of racial capitalism limning contestations between the United States, Africa, and the Middle East. In the fall of 1973 she described these relations as “the first massive confrontation foreseen by W. E. B. Du Bois when, at the beginning of this century, he enunciated his warning of ‘the color line.’ . . . Along that long line, stretching for a distance further than that from New York to San Francisco is ‘colored folk’ battling with the ‘white folk’ of Israel!”¹⁰⁹

This worldly entanglement of the race question with the question of Palestine animated much of the work of David Graham Du Bois. When he passed away in 2005, obituaries frequently focused on his role as the founder and former president of the W. E. B. Du Bois Foundation, an organization responsible for collecting and maintaining the archive supporting the recent renaissance in Du Bois studies. Indeed, the Nile street apartment held scores of boxes of W. E. B. Du Bois’s papers before they were acquired by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in the early 1970s. While such remembrances duly honor the important work of maintaining his stepfather’s legacy, a labor that has contributed to the rich transnational turn in Africana studies, David Graham Du Bois’s own engagement with the problem of the color line also had its own pertinent global contours.

After a year’s study at China’s Peking University in 1959, Graham Du Bois stopped in Cairo and ended up staying. “I fell in love with Egypt,” he later recalled. “I got here and discovered that everybody looked like me, and I looked like everybody else. I was accepted as a human being without any reference to the color of my skin. It was an overwhelming experience. I found myself invisible.”¹¹⁰ In 1960 he took up teaching American literature at Cairo University, and in 1961 he began working for the English-language daily the Egyptian Gazette and the Middle East News and Features Service Agency, a position that he held for the next twelve years. As a journalist, he covered such topics as the campaigns for voting rights in the U.S. South, the urban uprisings across U.S. cities, and the rise of the Black Power movement. He also served as an announcer on Radio Cairo’s shortwave transmissions to the United States, Mexico, and Canada. This was precisely the kind of journalism a diasporic movement required, one that intimately and routinely related what he called the “Black Revolution” in the United States to an African context.¹¹¹

Graham Du Bois’s presence at the Egyptian Gazette ensured that Malcolm X’s visit to Cairo in 1964 received significant local coverage. Malcolm had met Shirley Graham Du Bois in Accra earlier in the year, and she orchestrated a meeting between him and Nkrumah, before connecting him with her son. David Graham Du Bois collaborated closely with Malcolm in ways narrated almost verbatim in . . . And Bid Him Sing. Malcolm’s writings were often reprinted in the Egyptian Gazette. The newspaper printed “Zionist Logic,” an essay about Israel’s “new kind of colonialism” as a form of neo-imperialism, that Malcolm wrote after his visit to Gaza. Malcolm attended the OAU conference in his capacity as chairman of the newly formed Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), a nonreligious organization modeled on the year-old OAU, and one that marked Malcolm’s break with Elijah Muhammad after the former’s trip to Mecca. Graham Du Bois orchestrated the reproduction of Malcolm’s major OAU speech, distributing it to various conference delegations as well as a range of news outlets. In this “Appeal to African Heads of State,” Malcolm strenuously related racial justice struggles in the United States to liberation struggles in Africa. “Our problem is your problem,” stated Malcolm. “It is not a Negro problem, nor an American problem. This is a world problem; a problem for humanity. It is not a problem of civil rights but a problem of human rights.”¹¹²

In June 1972 David Graham Du Bois left Cairo for the United States intent on securing a publisher for the novel that he had drafted during these years. He stopped first in New York, where Toni Morrison, a young editor at Random House, took interest in the manuscript. When nothing materialized, he moved briefly to Chicago before settling in Oakland, California. There, he affiliated with the Black Panther Party, “a community-rooted movement,” he said, “of sound ideology, wide experience and unquestioned devotion that had miraculously weathered the stormy confrontation with units of the armed might of America’s ruling elite.”¹¹³ He also took a visiting lectureship at the University of California, Berkeley’s beleaguered School of Criminology, where he taught a course “attempt[ing] to develop new definitions of crime, the criminal and criminal behavior as applied to peoples engaged in the struggle for self-determination and freedom.”¹¹⁴

In the fall of 1973, after publishing a three-part essay on the Black freedom movement in the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, Graham Du Bois was tapped by Huey Newton to be the newspaper’s editor in chief. He held this position until 1977, a moment when the newspaper had grown to a national circulation of around four hundred thousand.¹¹⁵ As editor, Graham Du Bois brought his journalism’s routine juxtaposition of Afro-Arab political coalitions, Palestinian advocacy, and U.S. racial struggles into conversations about Bay Area–based questions of everyday survival in the face of state repression. The October 1973 War between Egypt and Israel filled the paper’s pages, with coverage focusing on the conditions of Palestinian life under occupation and the forms of exclusion that ensnared Palestinians in vulnerable refugee camps in Jordan. These stories were routinely juxtaposed with coverage of issues like the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon, the revelation that COINTELPRO had targeted a wide variety of dissident groups, and the so-called energy crisis brought on by the Arab oil embargo that had driven gasoline prices far higher than everyday working folk could afford. As the last major U.S. military operations were concluding in Vietnam, as crisis-driven domestic “law and order” policies of President Nixon and California governor Ronald Reagan began to expand, the revelation that the U.S. Air Force was airlifting tanks, ammunition, artillery, and other supplies into the Suez to support the Israeli military on African soil was cogently captured in the Black Panther cover story titled “Mid-East War: Nixon’s New Vietnam.”¹¹⁶

In May 1974 the newspaper ran a major position paper on the Middle East that Graham Du Bois drafted with Newton. In a memorandum to Newton, Graham Du Bois called the statement “brilliant,” a document whose “basic humanism devastates arguments against its proposals from both sides.”¹¹⁷ Upon its publication, Graham Du Bois facilitated its circulation to the UN, the OAU, the PLO, and the president of the American Jewish Congress, though how the document was received is unclear. Under the headline “The Issue Isn’t Territory, but Human Rights,” the statement mixed a knowledgeable commitment to the civil rights of Arabs in Israel with a long-term, anticapitalist revolutionary horizon, even as a two-state resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict was seen as a necessary stage in such a trajectory. It likewise critiqued the region’s oil-rich leadership, suggesting that imperialism manifested itself in the “governments of Iran and Saudi Arabia, wholesalers of the fabulous oil riches that their people never see, and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.” The statement boldly suggested that, contrary to the anticolonial engagements with the Middle East after 1967, “the war against Israel is diversionary. The struggle for human dignity and liberation of the Arab peoples must take place within the Arab countries.”¹¹⁸ Such a position was rearticulated as late as one of the Black Panther’s last published issues, in July 1980, describing Newton’s trip to Lebanon and his meetings with Arafat.¹¹⁹

Translation in . . . And Bid Him Sing

During his sojourn in Oakland, Graham Du Bois polished his quasi-autobiographical novel, a project he had all but completed while in Cairo. Published in book form by the Bay Area’s Ramparts Press, the novel was also serialized over seventeen months in sixty-three single-page segments in the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service. It narrates the relationship between Bob Jones, a journalist whose biographical details mirror Graham Du Bois’s, and Suliman Ibn Rashid.¹²⁰ Suliman is known in his neighborhood as someone who “was from America, but that he vehemently, angrily, denied that he was an American” (10). For Suliman, local Cairenes’ failure to cultivate a racialized political consciousness posed a roadblock to the broader liberationist force he had found in American Islam. Much of the novel thus charts Suliman’s attempts at coming to terms with this disjuncture.

The novel’s first chapters grapple with the racial and linguistic disjunctures that Suliman experiences in his interactions in Cairo:

He was a black American, that curious thing most had come to know about almost exclusively through the antics and achievements of Mohammed Ali Clay, as they insisted on calling him. . . . When he spoke of them as Africans he was made painfully aware that the idea that they were Africans had apparently never occurred to most of them; that they only thought of themselves as Egyptians. His annoyance would rapidly turn into anger, so that often what had begun as leisurely, polite conversation ended with him fighting to control an outburst which he could not have pulled off in his limited Arabic anyway. (10–11)

“Black Americanness” is figured in the widely circulated media images of Ali, the heavyweight boxing champion. Ali’s performance, Suliman concedes, became a lens through which to read a U.S. racial landscape whose conditions were untranslatable in the context of Egyptian nationalism and Nasser’s version of Pan-Arabism. Suliman’s contained outbursts, restricted as much by his lack of familiarity with spoken Arabic as by his concern over his interlocutors’ circumscribed notion of Blackness, find an outlet in Suliman’s English-language poetry. The Arabic language fails him, so Suliman switches forms.

A politics of racial performance animate a critical scene at the heart of the novel, one that exemplifies the larger strategies at play in the text. Here Graham Du Bois stages a contingent Afro-Arab cultural politics formed in, and through, modes of linguistic and generic translation that unstably oscillate between fiction, poetry, and history, with all their attendant limits on display. Bob arranges for Suliman to recite his poetry at a Cairo cabaret, a reading meant to “provid[e] a source of authentic Afro-American culture for the people of Egypt” (95). This claim to “authenticity” links cultural performance to an embrace of diasporic verisimilitude articulated through aesthetic practice. Suliman’s performance goes one step further, as Graham Du Bois embeds traces of “authentic” historical figures into the narrative itself. The fictional poet is backed by the Cairo Jazz Combo, featuring the Chicago-born Mohammed X-3, an African American member of the Nation of Islam, on saxophone, and is translated and recited by Salah Jahin.

Mohammed X-3 is a thinly-veiled stand-in for Malik Osman Karim Yaqoub, sometimes known as Mac X Spears or Osman Kerim, who, according to a profile written by Graham Du Bois for the Egyptian Gazette in 1965, “aimed to make Cairo jazz-conscious.”¹²¹ A contemporaneous article about the Kansas City–born Kerim in the U.S.-based Variety magazine (also penned by Graham Du Bois), described how a “1-man U.S. progressive jazz wave hits Cairo and flips those Arab cats.”¹²² In both essays, Kerim emphasized the cross-border interactivity of his music, stressing how “progressive jazz[,] which is spontaneous improvisation on simple themes, is not strange to Egyptian ears. . . . Oriental and Western modes in music are quite compatible.”¹²³ Kerim had a nightly gig at Cairo’s club “The Shagara,” had written and recorded a song titled “Yayeesh Nasser” (Long Live Nasser), and, according to Graham Du Bois, had twice appeared on a popular televised variety show. In addition, Kerim had hoped to institutionalize this form of compatibility in a Cairo-based jazz conservatory staffed by “the many black jazz geniuses who are either unemployed or underemployed in the States—especially of the Moslem religion.”¹²⁴ While Kerim’s stay in Cairo was relatively brief—no conservatory of this type was founded, and Kerim returned to the United States soon thereafter—the poet Salah Jahin’s presence was far more profound. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Jahin emerged as a major conduit of modern colloquial Egyptian Arabic art, fusing contemporary poetic forms with colloquial/vernacular spoken rhythms while founding the modern Egyptian cartoon school. Jahin became known as much for his nationalist lyrics as for his popularized cartoon strips published in Al-Ahram. These strips became immensely popular for their caricatured representations of everyday life.

The novel’s blend of performance and history moves quickly between genres (jazz, poetry, narrative) and language (Arabic and English), revealing the novel’s attempt at imagining a vernacular Afro-Arab aesthetic interface. The night’s opening numbers clarify the relations Suliman is intent on staging. Suliman gives his reading to a mixed audience attuned to the anticolonial struggles across Africa, South Asia, and Palestine. Those who could understand English include “young black students from West and East Africa, young African diplomats from Southern Africa, some Pakistanis and Indian students from South Africa. They included some Palestinian students and several Egyptians” (103). Also present is a group of “white Americans” from the “embassy of Babylon” sitting in the front row (92). Their presence serves as the bridge across which Suliman articulates an internationalist anticolonial affiliation. The jazz combo begins by playing a quick-paced version of Duke Ellington’s popularized blues song, “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be.” Then Suliman comes to the stage and links the colloquial space of the Cairo nightclub to the struggles against U.S. state repression. He “look[s] steadily into the faces of the cluster of white Americans” as he dedicates the evening “to the martyrs of the black people of the United States of America who have been shot down by police, national guard and army bullets . . . while expressing their righteous indignation in rebellion against the white man’s hate and racism in America” (97). The spectators are largely quiet, but when Jahin translates the dedication into Arabic, the “entire audience joined in producing a warm, full-blooded and sustained sound of assent” (98).

Suliman’s first poem depicts Abdin, a “popular district in the center of Cairo,” and expresses “the poet’s surprise, delight and wonder at repeatedly running into faces and figures that might have been friends, relatives, brothers and sisters he’d known ‘over there’” (99). The Afro-Arab kinship felt in Abdin is mirrored in an evocative relational musical accompaniment: “The three Egyptian members of the combo . . . [ran] through a medley of snatches of popular jazz classics over which Mohammed was improvising on the Arabic musical scale the haunting melody of a popular Egyptian love song” (99). When Suliman finishes, “the applause was hesitant”; only the English speakers in the audience “clapped warmly” (99). Jahin’s Arabic translation, however, again garners widespread enthusiasm, accompanied as it is by the jazz combo “revers[ing] itself,” with Mohammed riffing on a familiar blues melody and the others taking up the Egyptian love song at a swinging pace: “People smiled at one another and the excited chatter that followed seemed to indicate that at last the audience knew what the evening was all about” (99–100). This pattern of translation follows throughout the evening, with the predominantly Arabic-speaking audience drawn to the “music of [Suliman’s] voice, its rhythm accentuated by uncontrollable movements of his body, the changing expressions of his face, the burning intensity in his eyes” (100).

These stereotyped nonlinguistic attributes point toward Suliman’s performance as the inarticulate but fiercely committed Black male, even as they are contrasted with Jahin’s translation of “clear pictures and emotions” (101). When Jahin leaves the stage during the second half of the show, Suliman directly addresses the group of white American embassy representatives sitting in the front row with a diatribe against the long history of racist practices in the United States. An “angry, passionate, sometimes crude denunciation of racism in America” leaves the wider audience in “uncomprehending fascination” (102). A poem on the “agony and spiritual death of slavery” is followed by several poems “each more violent in its language, more condemnatory than the last” (103). “It was almost as if no one was in this packed hall but Suliman and his oppressors, represented by this small group seated directly in front of him” (103). At the performance’s conclusion, the audience erupts in applause, many “unmindful that it had missed some of the words, desirous only of expressing its solidarity with Suliman” (104).

Through a sexualized Black male cast as an “authentic” figure of race radicalism, this performance captures a durable Afro-Arab political solidarity that garners Suliman significant publicity in Cairo. He becomes a “minor celebrity” when he publishes a poem inspired by Malcolm’s assassination, and represents the public face of Afro-American Promotions, Inc. and the Cairo branch of Malcolm’s Organization of Afro-American Unity (179). His “open allegiance to Egypt and the Arab cause” brings him respect among younger Egyptian intellectuals as they “were growing conscious of their debt to those blacks in America who were beginning to cause havoc for the U.S. power structure” (179–80).

But just as Suliman’s first book of poetry is published and the Cairo chapter of the OAAU starts to get off the ground, the first inkling of war between Egypt and Israel begins to disarticulate the community that had formed around such diasporic culture work. Suliman’s increasing difficulty with his injured leg registers the demise of this community on his own body. On behalf of OAAU Cairo, Suliman and Bob send a telegram to Nasser expressing the sense of allegiance to the Arab cause of “black Americans in Cairo in the name of the twenty-two million blacks in America whom Washington does not and cannot represent” (186). During the first day of the June war, a crowd of international students studying at Al-Azhar, “mostly black, mostly from Moslem countries of the continent . . . some Indian students from South Africa . . . and a group of Pakistanis and Indonesians,” stage a widely attended pro-Egypt demonstration in which Suliman becomes a leading figure (190). Under the pressures of war making with Israel, however, whose growing support by the United States was cannily perceived in Egypt, U.S. citizenship became a marker of enemy alien status, and the Egyptian government, like those in Jordan, Syria, and other Arab countries, ordered all Americans to evacuate. Bob receives an exemption for his journalistic work with the Egyptian Gazette (as had David Graham Du Bois), but Suliman is taken into custody because, as he says, his name was “on the list they got from the fuckin’ American Embassy” (206). Before long, those carrying U.S. passports are corralled into a downtown hotel to await their departure.¹²⁵

“The only innocent Americans are black Americans,” Suliman argues in vain as he awaits deportation. “But these fools are listening to whitey, who tells ’em all Americans are the same. They don’t know that all whitey wants is to get us back inside Babylon to shut us up so he can keep on fuckin’ with us!” (220). Since Suliman’s arrival in Egypt, he had refused identification with the United States and instead embraced a diasporic Black consciousness that had finally begun to reach a broader Arab public. Yet before long, Suliman and other members of his circle are bussed to Alexandria and shipped off to Greece. The novel ends with a letter from Suliman’s confidante, Mika, sent from Istanbul in October that concentrates on Suliman’s demise. He had returned to the United States, Mika reports, “because of his leg,” having spent several months “deliberately trying to run himself into his grave” (223). Mika includes in a postscript that he “didn’t do any writing while he was here. I guess there were too many Americans around, or something” (224). The uneven circulation of Blackness problematized throughout reverberates in the novel’s closing gesture, only now the problem is whiteness: “Besides,” writes Mika, “he kept saying the Turks looked just like white folks!” (224).

This marks the tragic end of the novel, and of David Graham Du Bois’s own fictional output. As history or autobiography, there is much that exceeds the frame of the story of Suliman’s demise. Absent here is the Afro-Arab solidarity that, according to contemporaneous writings by Shirley and David Graham Du Bois, was strengthened in Cairo after the June war. In the late 1960s both wrote extensively about this cultural shift, a shift that by 1973 had solidified into a transnational repudiation of Israel’s presence in the Sinai. In about 1977 David Graham Du Bois returned to Cairo to care for his ailing mother, and in the late 1970s he cultivated an important relationship with the Association of Arab American University Graduates. Then, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he shuttled between Cairo and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he taught courses on journalism and African American studies, cultivated his parents’ papers, and worked on a memoir that has yet to be published.¹²⁶

Broken Taboos

In the arc of Black freedom struggles, Black Power’s Palestine explicitly critiqued the racial liberal consensus, counterposing the dominant nationalist logics of inclusion with an anticolonialism routed through the Palestine question. Anticolonial affiliations with Palestinian national liberation offered grounds from which to critique the normative violence that marked lacerating civil rights contradictions. All the more remarkable was how, by the end of the 1970s, the coordinates of Black Power’s Palestine were overlaid by a new politics of relation.

In a wide-ranging interview published in the New York Times in July 1979, President Jimmy Carter likened what he called the “Palestinian issue” to the “civil rights movement here in the United States.”¹²⁷ While Carter did not elaborate on the substance of this comparison—noting only that a Palestinian right of return to the West Bank was a reasonable rights-based issue to consider, especially given, in his words, that “relatively limited numbers” of Palestinians would exercise that right—the comparison itself was resoundingly attacked. Much of the anguish over the comparison equated the “Palestinian issue” with the PLO and the PLO with terrorism, in contrast to the civil rights movement as a morally righteous and resolutely nonviolent movement. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a junior senator from New York, entered a statement into the Congressional Record, asserting that “any comparison—no matter how oblique—between Dr. Martin Luther King and Yasir Arafat affronts our own history.”¹²⁸

Soon thereafter, Andrew Young, the highest-ranked African American federal appointee as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was forced to step down when it was revealed he had been in conversations with the PLO’s UN representative, Zehdi Terzi. Young had deep roots in the Black freedom movement, having worked closely with King and the Southern Christian Leadership Council. He joined the Congressional Black Caucus as a congressional representative from Atlanta in the mid-1970s, before accepting President Carter’s 1977 appointment to be UN representative. In the summer of 1979 Young met with representatives from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Kuwait to discuss the findings of the most recent report of the UN Committee on Palestinian Rights, to be submitted when Young began his term as chair of the UN Security Council later in the year. While the resolution that was to come from the report would have recognized the right of Israel to exist—a position Young readily supported—it also called for the creation of a Palestinian state, which Young knew he would have to veto. Because of this, Young asked Terzi to postpone the report’s submission, and Terzi agreed. When the new session started in August, the report was tabled indefinitely.

However, after a series of highly publicized leaks about the meeting, Young submitted his letter of resignation because of pressure from the State Department and, eventually, from Carter himself. Political engagement with the PLO, regardless of the substance of that engagement, was inadmissible.¹²⁹ To James Baldwin, Young’s forced resignation was a travesty. In a brief open letter published in the Nation, Baldwin excoriates those who refuse to see the intertwined relationships between Jews and Palestinians in the context of a long legacy of racial genocide, from 1492’s Reconquista in Andalusia and the conquest in the Americas, through the slave trade, up through the Holocaust and Anglophone imperialism. “There is absolutely—repeat: absolutely—no hope of establishing peace in what Europe so arrogantly calls the Middle East (how in the world would Europe know? having so dismally failed to find a passage to India) without dealing with the Palestinians. . . . My friend, Mr. Andrew Young, out of tremendous love and courage, and with a silent, irreproachable, indescribable nobility, has attempted to ward off a holocaust, and I proclaim him a hero, betrayed by cowards.”¹³⁰ Prominent leaders from organizations that in 1967 had distanced themselves from SNCC’s “Third World Round-up,” including the NAACP, the National Urban League, and the SCLC, all made efforts to open dialogues with Terzi, other members of the PLO, as well as with Arab American groups like the Association of Arab American University Graduates. A statement signed by over two hundred Black politicians laid out the central importance of independent Black American voices in U.S. foreign policy: “Neither Jews, Italians, Germans, Irish, Chinese, British, French or any other ethnically or nationally identifiable group has any more right to be involved in the development and conduct of U.S. foreign policy than Americans of African descent.”¹³¹ In the weeks that followed, Jesse Jackson, Joseph Lowery, Walter Fauntroy, Jack O’Dell, Huey P. Newton, and other prominent Black leaders traveled to Lebanon to meet with Arafat and tour the network of long-standing Palestinian refugee camps.

While in the immediate aftermath of the June 1967 War, SNCC and the Black Panther Party were castigated by civil rights leaders for offering public analysis of Zionism’s relationship to racism and imperialism and for relating such an analysis to the internal colonial conditions for Black people in the United States, in 1979, in the wake of the Young affair, such a structural critique was muted. Black leaders offered instead a framework of racial inclusion in which Black foreign policy was seen as incorporable by the state as the expression of another ethno-racial interest group in a pluralist society. At the same time, U.S. and Israeli linkages to the apartheid regime in South Africa mattered in ways unforeseen in 1967. By 1979 those linkages had both developed significantly and become increasingly evident in public discourse. The Congressional Black Caucus was among the key groups researching this, and Young played an important role in circulating this knowledge. Much of the rhetoric circulating in the news coverage of Young’s resignation included allusions to his work on racial conflicts in southern Africa as well as Israel’s sustained military alliance with Pretoria.

Given the contemporary framing of “prolonged conflict and permanent war,” Black Power’s Palestine leaves us with a series of critical questions about historiography, representation, and racial justice movements in the present. Its various iterations opened up these questions in the United States, but they are hardly answered definitively. As exemplified by the Young affair, the coordinates shift. The notion of “tragedy” used in 1967 to describe SNCC’s article is apt, but in a sense more proper to David Graham Du Bois’s novel. Perhaps the narrative logic of tragedy, as explored by the anthropologist David Scott in conceiving the global terrain and broad historical sweep of movements for Black freedom, helps us reorient “our understanding of the politics and ethics of the postcolonial present.” The tragic narrative of colonial enlightenment is “a permanent legacy that has set the conditions in which we make of ourselves what we make and which therefore demands constant renegotiation and readjustment.”¹³² The translational practices of Black Power’s Palestine have clearly made such historic demands, ones whose significant repercussions resonate into the present.

3

Jewish Conversions

Color Blindness, Anti-Imperialism, and Jewish National Liberation

Anti-Semitism is an insidious disease. It can linger in the body politic almost invisibly for years without erupting. Its effects can be long delayed. Moreover, unless expunged it grows. Of all the ills of the world, anti-Semitism is the least likely to die a natural death.

—Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, The New Anti-Semitism

IN THE MID-1970S the metaphor of anti-Semitism as disease shaped the conceptual categories of prominent U.S. organizations tasked with tracking and understanding discrimination against Jews. For Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the most troublesome site where the “disease” had taken root was the so-called Radical Left, a segment of the antiwar and civil rights movements that had, in the ADL’s estimation, expressed an unconditional solidarity to those “most radical and nationalistic blacks.”¹ According to Forster and Epstein, the concept of race around which Black freedom struggles had mobilized was “the most vulnerable aspect of American society at home,” especially when it was paired with the “anti-imperialist struggle of the third world.” Framing race in this way meant that “just as the Jewish community was viewed as part of the enemy at home, the Jewish nation, Israel, was cast in the same role abroad” (11). With memories of the Holocaust recast and intensified in the wake of the June 1967 War, in this line of thought it seemed as if nothing less than the future of Jewish existence itself was on the line. They write, “Just as Israel’s survival depends in substantial measure on support from Jews in the United States and elsewhere, Jews in the Diaspora have come to feel that their own security and the only hope for their survival as a people, in a world from which anti-Semitism has never disappeared, depends in large measure on the survival of Israel” (17). These geographical parallelisms are animated by an imagined link between the perceived security for American Jews provided by a liberal tradition of civic inclusion and the militarization of security that provided the foundation for Israeli state sovereignty.

Forster and Epstein’s rapid traffic in synecdoche and similitude in their 1974 work The New Anti-Semitism exemplifies an important expression of U.S. imperial culture in the post–civil rights period. This chapter investigates the texture of this expression. In both assenting hegemonic claims about an exceptional American Empire and impassioned dissents from precisely such claims, the sense of an existential threat to the Jewish state and, by extension, to Jews globally, catalyzed a broadly felt affective attachment to Israel among American Jews. As I show, this suturing of political Zionism and American Jewishness was contingently fashioned, often reactively, in the crucible of late-1960s and early-1970s racial justice struggles. The shifting cartography of these struggles connected Jewish orientations toward Cold War liberalism with the intensification of U.S. state violence in urban U.S. settings and in Southeast Asia alike, as well as to Israel’s paradoxical military supremacy and perceived existential vulnerability.² From this angle, the vast and heterogeneous historiography of American Jewish outlooks toward liberalism is less relevant than are those historical flashpoints where the exceptionalist paradigm of American liberal democracy framed the problem of minority difference.³ This framing clarifies how questions of Jewish assimilation and U.S. national belonging routinely intersected critiques of the U.S. racial state and its relationships to settler colonization in Palestine.⁴

Jewish Incorporability, American Exceptions

Throughout the early post–World War II period, the purported supremacy of American philosophical commitments to liberal pluralism emerged as an enduring infrastructure through which to combat what Gunnar Myrdal presciently called the “American Dilemma.” That narrative typically celebrated individual autonomy, and while membership in particular racial or ethnic groups was often seen to determine an individual’s habits, cultural mores, or place of residence, such group differences were rendered incorporable epiphenomena by their being relegated to the historical past and/or the private sphere. Analyses of liberalism’s institutionalization of structural violence were routinely displaced by explanations of prejudice and discrimination rooted in psychology and individual pathology, a problem of the “American heart.”⁵

The uptake of the “Jewish question” as part of a tradition of American liberal pluralism often oscillated between intranational and supranational expressions of emancipation. The United States’ capacity to effectively incorporate Jewish difference epitomized the “universal” values of American pluralism, especially after World War II. The incorporability of Jewish difference was often hailed as an exceptional U.S. national capacity, in contrast to European histories of Jewish minority exclusion. The narrative of Jews becoming American ethnics was, at least in one sense, a story of American secularism’s triumphant exceptionalism, a model for the model minority.⁶ At the same time, the irreducibility of Jewish particularity meant that national incorporability was always partial and incomplete. Jewish difference expressed through a genealogy of diasporic thought and practice, for instance, exceeded the incorporative capacities of a secularizing U.S. national imaginary.⁷ The key post-Holocaust iterations of the Jewish question in the United States—are Jews white, white ethnics, or both? Are Jews secure in the United States? What role does Israel play in guaranteeing Jewish freedom?—frequently limned debates about the contours of social movement, civil rights and human rights struggles, domestic and foreign policy positions, and perceptions of Israel’s place in a hostile world.⁸ The stakes of these debates were intensified as African American claims for racial justice revealed the inadequacies of a form of liberal pluralism that had nevertheless contingently propped up Jewish national standing in the United States.⁹

It is hardly incidental, then, that for much of the twentieth century, the largest American Jewish civil rights organization, the American Jewish Committee (AJC), was professedly non-Zionist. From its inception in 1906, the AJC advocated for an exceptionalist paradigm of American liberal inclusion as the most effective way to achieve Jewish security. While the organization recognized the Balfour Declaration’s commitment to a Jewish national home in Palestine and supported aliyah (Jewish immigration to Palestine), it remained avowedly agnostic on how a potential independent state should be structured.¹⁰ This non-Zionist U.S. exceptionalism was expressed evocatively by the prominent American Jewish political philosopher Morris Cohen. In 1919 Cohen took to the pages of the New Republic to contest the potential exclusionary logic encoded in the Balfour Declaration and its uptake in the ensuing Mandate system. Under the title “Zionism: Tribalism or Liberalism,” Cohen writes the following:

Concerning questions of race and religion, even more than those of politics, scientific knowledge is pitifully small and men’s convictions are accordingly most intense. But the discussion of Zionism is beset with the additional difficulty that clear and honest thinking is subtly hindered by the fact that really plain speaking is almost unattainable. An exceptionally long history of struggle and suffering has left many sore and sensitive spots in the body of Israel, and the thoughtful non-Jew feels the necessity of excessive caution lest he touch any of these tender spots; while the Jew, no matter how emancipated, cannot completely overcome the effects of a traditional attitude which may put group loyalty above devotion to the simple truth. . . . In normal times mankind is protected from the clamor of zealous enthusiasts by its profound inertia and by the equally emphatic denials which every zealous group sooner or later provokes; so that those who care for impartial truth can generally wait with some confidence for a favorable time when the still, small voice of reason can make itself heard. But in abnormal days, when small but determinedly loud groups are mistaken for vast multitudes and are causing irreparable harm, one cannot wait for slow time to bring its withering refutations.¹¹

With these remarks, Cohen emphasized the elemental epistemic concerns raised by an enlightenment discourse of reason and science that provided the grounds for “impartial” truth. The temporality of “abnormal days” following World War I did not allow the luxury of “slow time” through which to craft a proper stable knowledge about the Jewish question’s relation to religion, race, and Zionism. As a way to mitigate this epistemic ambivalence, Cohen asserted that the geopolitical project to locate a Jewish national home in Palestine ran counter to the ideals of American liberal democracy. Attempts to “solve” the Jewish problem through nationalist territorializing land claims forcibly refused a broader “salvation” of Jew and non-Jew. He writes, “A national Jewish Palestine must necessarily mean a state founded on a peculiar race, a tribal religion, and a mystic belief in a peculiar soil.”¹² As an alternative, Cohen turned to an exceptionalist discourse about the United States as ethno-racial melting pot. He lauds “liberal America,” a place that “has traditionally stood for separation of Church and State, the free mixing of races, and the fact that men can change their habitation and language and still advance the process of civilization.”¹³ Cohen thus argued that the secularization of the U.S. state and the incorporative impetus of a seemingly race-neutral national community were core normative commitments of American liberalism, to be embraced by American Jews for their emancipatory capacities.

To be sure, American liberalism’s abstract principles never substantively contravened the widespread effects of contemporaneous expressions of what Michael Omi and Howard Winant call racial dictatorship: anti-Black racism of Jim Crow segregation, the state-sanctioned and extralegal violence toward Mexican Americans in the Southwest and Native Americans throughout the United States, the racialized logics of immigration premised on Asian exclusion, or the formative U.S. military occupations in the Caribbean, the Philippines, and the Pacific. American liberalism’s propensity for racial violence was the absent presence occluded by Cohen’s lauding of Jewish assimilation as an alternative to Zionist territorialization.

Cohen’s essay has generally fallen through historiography’s cracks. I first found it in Hasan Sa’b’s 1965 monograph “Zionism and Racism,” written for the Palestine Research Center.¹⁴ Better known is the immediate rebuttal Cohen’s argument received. Horace Kallen, the pragmatist philosopher who in 1919 advanced cultural pluralism as a theory of civic nationalism, and whose work marked a foundational moment in twentieth-century theories of American ethnicity, responded to Cohen in the New Republic. He asserted that Zionism’s territorializing aims were not contradictory to, but rather commensurate with, the ideals of American liberal pluralism. In Kallen’s view, building a Jewish national home in Palestine would normalize the relationship between Jews and other immigrant communities in the United States. “The Jew in America or elsewhere will not be free to ‘adjust himself harmoniously’ with the non-Jew,” writes Kallen, “until he also becomes unambiguous. The reestablishment of the Jewish homeland will make it so and it is thus an essential element in the ‘harmonious adjustment of the Jew to American life.’”¹⁵ Kallen replaces Cohen’s exceptionalist paradigm of national incorporability with the exceptionalist paradigm of cultural pluralism to underwrite a project of settler nation building—one that in Kallen’s view held the key to an “unambiguous” modern Jewish subject. He attempts to resolve anti-Semitism through a framework of liberal democracy whose practical articulation was predicated on indigenous Palestinian exclusion, dispossession, and dehumanization.

Arguments in critical counterpoint to Cohen’s notions of secular incorporation and Kallen’s cultural pluralism were advanced by Reform Jewish religious organizations, especially prior to World War II. Many of these organizations opposed Zionism’s investment in a political state for the Jews. For more than five decades, beginning with the Pittsburgh Platform in 1885, for example, organized Reform Judaism emphasized the need to define Jews as explicitly a religious community plainly assimilable into a national polity whose founding legal documents guaranteed freedom of religion while legitimating modalities of racial exclusion. In 1937 a revised set of guiding principles for the Reform movement underscored “the obligation of all Jewry to aid in [Palestine’s] upbuilding as a Jewish homeland.”¹⁶ Yet throughout the mid-1940s spirited debates abounded within the Reform Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) about the rightful way to express support for the Zionist project in Palestine. These debates included the small but vocal American Council for Judaism, a group of Reform-ordained rabbis who in the 1940s took explicitly anti-Zionist positions to counter the drift in the UAHC in support of the potential partition of Palestine.¹⁷ It was only after World War II, as the historian Emily Alice Katz shows, that Reform Jewish organizations promulgated widespread pedagogies meant to suture the Israeli national project to American Jewish life.¹⁸

As for the American Jewish Committee, its president Jacob Blaustein celebrated the 1948 founding of Israel with thick American resonances—“a pioneer land . . . a melting pot” in the midst of “another 1776.” He nevertheless underscored the AJC’s professed non-Zionism. Jews, no matter where they resided, should be able to claim citizenship rights and have “full freedom for religious and cultural development.”¹⁹ The AJC leadership expressed concern that Israel’s founding would inspire coerced Jewish emigration from the United States. Its leaders were troubled by how members of the Yishuv and the nascent state had represented Jewish exile as an abnormal condition to be resolved through settlement in Palestine. In 1950 Blaustein received a public commitment from Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion underscoring the liberal ethos of the new state’s relation to potential Jewish immigrants: “The essence of halutziut [lit. pioneering] is free choice.” When Ben-Gurion prominently broke that pledge in 1960, asserting that Jews “living in free and prosperous lands [faced] a slow and imperceptible decline into the abyss of assimilation,” the AJC swiftly repudiated his remarks, and received a careful clarification and apology in response.²⁰ Tellingly, after 1967, abiding by the spirit of the so-called “Blaustein-Ben Gurion Exchange” was far less pressing. As the historian Charles Liebman notes, the AJC “sent no protests . . . when Israel called for mass aliya from the West after 1967.”²¹ The tenor of the AJC’s work shifted dramatically after the war, becoming much more attuned to mobilizing American Jewish support for Israel.²²

Instant Zionism

The AJC’s 1967 shift, alongside similar shifts in the ADL, the UAHC, and many others, marked a departure from a bevy of orientations toward the Jewish question. In the wake of the June 1967 and October 1973 Wars, Norman Podhoretz, then the editor of the AJC-affiliated journal Commentary Magazine, diagnosed this shift in especially evocative ways, describing it as nothing less than the mass conversion of American Jews to Zionism. The hegemonizing impulse of Podhoretz’s high-profile argument is worth close consideration. Writing in the New York Times Magazine in February 1974, Podhoretz asserted that, following the founding of the state in 1948, the long-standing ideologies of anti-Zionism, non-Zionism, and “indifferentism” were outmoded. The only practical formulation that these ideologies could articulate was to advocate Israel’s total “dissolution.” For Podhoretz, this position readily dovetailed with an ominous undifferentiated Arab threat whose “murderous intentions,” while not of late “overheard by Americans,” were nevertheless being put into practice via the “oil weapon and the Soviet-American détente.” For American Jews, the fear of a menacing murderous Arab threat was deepened by the “residual effect” of Europe’s genocidal destruction of the Jews. The Holocaust “lodged . . . in the souls of Jews everywhere” a pledge to resist “the massacre of yet another Jewish community.” Yet, in Podhoretz’s estimation, “instant Zionism’s” most robust catalyst was not the soul-shifting conversion of Holocaust memory but the “hidden apocalyptic terror” of anti-Semitism as an “irresistible will . . . to make this planet entirely Judenrein.” Not even the “last remaining major community of Jews, the ones in the United States,” would be safe.²³ Much like the ADL, and not far removed from the discourse mobilized after the so-called swastika epidemic of 1960, Podhoretz figures anti-Semitism as a near-permanent inexpungible virus, a transhistorical force endowed with its own intentionality.

Podhoretz’s “Now, Instant Zionism” obscures heterogeneous historical expressions, manifestations, and critiques of Jewish Zionism, rendering singular what had for so long been variegated. Nevertheless, the essay’s hegemonizing impulse bears out in striking congruities across American Jewish cultural production of the period. Crucial distinctions in this culture work should not be gainsaid, to be sure; the heated antagonistic intra-Jewish rhetoric between them is incontestable, as the historian Michael Staub, among others, has demonstrated.²⁴ Yet despite their differences, at the knotty entanglement of the early 1970s, Jewish neoconservatives and Jewish radicals shared deep-seated anxieties about Arab and Palestinian critiques of Zionism, especially those critiques, often elaborated by the Black Power movement, that narrated the continuities between settler colonization, the Palestinian Nakba, and Israel’s post-1967 occupation. For some, Zionism as a Jewish liberation movement was buttressed by ideals of the muscular Jew expressing Jewish nationhood, a necessary reaction to the timeless “virus” of anti-Semitism. Others were influenced by the long history of socialist Zionism, one whose narrative centered the pioneering utopianism of Jewish settlement in Palestine and a war of liberation against the last vestiges of British imperialism. At the crossroads of U.S. racial politics, then, Zionism as an anti-imperialist expression of national liberation met Zionism as an exceptional expression of liberal democracy in a Cold War world. While disagreements between them raged about how to countenance Black freedom struggles, these ideologies nevertheless shared a subjugated investment in the structured absence of Palestine and Palestinians that Black Power’s Palestine had begun to make legible. It is to the emergence of this knotty entanglement that I now turn.

The “Preface to Neoconservatism”

In 1961, soon after taking over as Commentary editor, Norman Podhoretz approached James Baldwin to write an essay on the popularity of the Black Muslims in Chicago and New York. Baldwin readily agreed. After a year of being out of touch with each other, Podhoretz contacted Baldwin, only to learn that he had submitted his essay to the rival New Yorker magazine. At the core of Baldwin’s essay, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” was an inquiry into the psychological and affective dimensions of Black life in the United States that in his estimation posed an insurmountable obstacle to liberal integration. For Baldwin, this integrationist thinking was an insufficient palliative among whites that did little to redress centuries of structural racism. “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” Baldwin famously asked.²⁵

In his 1967 memoir, and reiterated as recently as 2013, Podhoretz describes his “fury” at seeing, upon the publication of Baldwin’s essay, “what a precious item had been stolen from me.”²⁶ His anger intensified, Podhoretz notes, because “a good many people in the publishing world who would have been outraged if any other writer had acted in similar fashion were ready to forgive or ‘understand’ Baldwin because he was a Negro” (341). The perceived theft was sanctioned by a liberal-minded white guilt that in Podhoretz’s view had become commonplace and that Baldwin was “such a great connoisseur of.” When the two writers met in New York to discuss the situation, Podhoretz lashed out at Baldwin with an argument whose crux performed a paradigmatic white ethnic disavowal of structural racism:

Neither I nor my ancestors had ever wronged the Negroes; on the contrary, I had grown up in an “integrated” slum neighborhood where it was the Negroes who persecuted the whites and not the other way round. I told him several stories about my childhood relations with Negroes and about the resentment and hatred with which my experience had left me. (342)

Baldwin urged Podhoretz to write down these stories. The result, “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” Podhoretz penned over several days and published in the February 1963 issue of Commentary. What became in the historian Michael Gerson’s words the “preface to neoconservative thinking” reveals an ambivalent white and Jewish dismay at the civil rights commitment to racial integration. The subject position from which Podhoretz speaks—as Jewish and/or white—exemplified the early-1960s racial landscape for Ashkenazi-descended American Jews. Furthermore, the essay’s confessional qualities catalyzed readings of “My Negro Problem” as a touchstone for studies of whiteness, Black–Jewish relations, and neoconservatism alike, anthologized and commented on routinely.²⁷ Effaced in many of these critical assessments, however, is how the essay both diagnosed and contributed to a shift in U.S. imperial culture that would have important repercussions for considering Israel and Palestine.

“We have it on the authority of James Baldwin that all Negroes hate whites,” Podhoretz writes early in the essay. “I am trying to suggest that on their side all whites—all American whites, that is—are sick in their feelings about Negroes.”²⁸ Podhoretz surmises that Baldwin’s major claim was that there was a hatred embedded in the heart of Black life in the United States and symbolized by the Black Muslims made the goal of integration impossible (100). The sentiment, according to Podhoretz, was mutual among whites. In the working-class Brooklyn of Podhoretz’s childhood, having many different ethnic communities living in proximity hardly translated into amity. He recalls with evocative detail being verbally and physically abused by Black youth. The psychological result for Podhoretz was that Black people were to be at turns both hated and desired precisely because they were perceived as “free, independent, reckless, brave, masculine, erotic, and . . . most important of all, they were tough, beautifully, enviably tough” (97). Podhoretz’s youthful fetishization of Black masculinity as object to be desired, feared, and hated was transposed from street corner beatings to his adult appreciation of Black male “physical grace and beauty” performed on the dance floor and the sports field. The essay’s objectifying forms of gendered racialization center on the Black body to encode desire and envy, and to elicit in almost a mirror image the prefiguration of the tough Jew that would become central to the neoconservative political imaginary in the years to come.

Gendered racialization further frames Podhoretz’s analysis of Black history. It was hard for Podhoretz to discern a history of Black people worthy enough of a robust identification in the present because of the “stigmas” of “his past, his color” (101). These obstacles were contrasted with the impetus for Jewish survival in the wake of the Holocaust, one catalyzed by Jewish “memory of past glory and a dream of imminent redemption” (101). Since Black people were irreconcilably cut off from a historic past and a redemptive future, the only hope for removing the stigmas of racism would not be integration but a form of racial amalgamation that Podhoretz calls “miscegenation” (101). The “fact of color” is the single largest impediment to “solving the Negro problem” and can be achieved only through “the wholesale merging of the two races” (101). The essay closes with Podhoretz wondering how he would respond if one of his own daughters “wanted to marry one.” “I would rail and rave and rant and tear my hair. And then I hope I would have the courage to curse myself for raving and ranting, and to give her my blessing” (101). Even while he retreated from what he frames as the seemingly utopian claim of complete racial amalgamation, noting subsequently that “(as Ralph Ellison bitingly remarked to me) the babies born of such marriages would still be considered black,”²⁹ interracial progeny nevertheless serves as a stand-in for an adequate reckoning with the problem of structural racism in a national context predicated on white supremacy. Miscegenation amounts to the only racial horizon worth imagining.³⁰

Color-Blind Toughness

“My Negro Problem—and Ours” fashions the figure of the tough Jew defending liberal pluralism against the gendered and racialized claims of Black life.³¹ Ten years later, expressions of Jewish vulnerability would appear all the more pressing. In 1971 the ascendance of race-conscious critiques of American liberalism revealed how, in Podhoretz’s view, Jews in the world were less secure, more isolated, and more vulnerable. Podhoretz sketched out the “certain anxiety” Jews had to confront in a post–civil rights world. He writes how a condition of relative normalcy had been achieved for American Jews by being incorporated into the “American pattern” of immigrant success through “merit-based” avenues to economic mobility in federal hiring, and the forced removal of anti-Semitic quotas in elite university enrollments. Yet two “traumatic events” called this condition into question. These events broke the public “taboo” on anti-Semitic discourse most threateningly by “forces of the radical Left” and fashioned the need for a militant toughness articulated as early as “My Negro Problem” as crucial to responding to the perceived crisis of Jewish security worldwide.

The first trauma, writes Podhoretz, occurred in 1967. It was “not so much the war itself—which was a triumphal event and not a traumatic one—as the period leading up to the war and the period following its conclusion.”³² The rhetoric leading up to the war, of Israel’s “inhabitants pushed, as the Arabs were so vociferously promising, into the sea,” signaled the very real possibility of a second “annihilation” of Jews in the twentieth century, and not only in Israel but in the United States as well. A new “feeling,” prefiguring the conversion narrative of “instant Zionism,” overcame Jews in response:

The feeling was one of literal identification, a literal embodiment of the idea that kol yisrael arevim zeh ba-zeh, every Jew is part of every other. Here, if we wish to use the language of mysticism, were words that were truly made flesh, and the American flesh into which they were transmuted experienced along with them—in many cases for the very first time—an ineradicable and inexpungible sense of Jewish vulnerability. (6)

For Podhoretz, claiming a singular “literal” identification after 1967 resolved the problem of the Jewish diaspora—converting distinctions of the soul and the flesh into a singular Jewish American political body. An intensified Jewish corporeality gave Podhoretz the body so starkly lacking in “My Negro Problem.”

The second “trauma,” in Podhoretz’s view, epitomized what he called the “black revolution,” namely, the unrest over the Ocean Hill–Brownsville teachers strike. In the summer of 1967 New York City’s central board of education launched an experiment in local control of school boards. They gave the largely African American Ocean Hill–Brownsville section of Brooklyn the opportunity to choose its own school leadership. The local school board claimed the right to hire and fire its teachers, many of whom were Jewish. The ensuing clash pitted the mostly white and majority-Jewish United Federation of Teachers against the Black school board. In May 1968, when a Jewish school teacher was told he was fired, the teacher’s union called a series of strikes, culminating in a citywide halt that fall. For thirty-six days, over one million students were out of school. The widespread circulation of an anonymous anti-Zionist pamphlet critical of Israeli state violence in the June war and the on-air recitation of an anti-Semitic poem written by one of Ocean Hill’s Black students further fueled what became framed as an irreconcilable Black–Jewish conflagration.³³ For Podhoretz, the strike epitomized a short-sighted movement that saw substantive change only “at the extreme edges of the movement for community control” (8). This too was a mode of discrimination on both philosophical and practical levels. Liberalism’s presumed commitment to the neutrality of state institutions and the law meant that hiring and admissions policies considering proportional representation as a way to correct for historical injustices were de facto discriminating against Jews.

In response to this feeling of vulnerability, Podhoretz argued that Jews in the United States needed to be hypervigilant, to “resist any who would in any way and to any degree and for any reason whatsoever attempt to do us harm, any who would diminish us or destroy us, any who would challenge our right and our duty to look after our families, any who would deny us the right to pursue our own interests or frustrate us in our duty to do so” (6). The position of Jews in the United States had moved from one of relative normality to one of impassioned crisis demanding resistance on all fronts. “We would from now on stand our ground, wherever that ground might be.” Such a fight had a permanent character for Podhoretz, “no matter how roundly we are abused as reactionary, or paranoid, or parochial” (6). For the tough Jew there was no alternative.

Nathan Glazer, a longtime contributor to Commentary and coauthor with Daniel Patrick Moynihan of the influential Beyond the Melting Pot (1963), extended Podhoretz’s argument. By the early 1970s the formal equality that had in Glazer’s view substantively benefited Jews in the United States was being challenged by the race-conscious critiques of American liberal pluralism. The demand for equality of outcomes in economic and educational terms was denaturalizing the keystone of American meritocracy, namely, a universal equality of opportunity. Glazer narrated his own conversion to this position as a process of deradicalization. While the younger Trotskyist Glazer was a self-styled “mild radical,” by 1970 he had witnessed the institutions of the U.S. state that provided civic stability and catalyzed progress—universities, government bureaucracies, the law itself—making major concessions to the New Left.³⁴ The investments in meritocracy put in place in large measure to redress de facto anti-Semitism after World War II were, from a different angle, one of the New Left’s main targets, as they reproduced racially stratified institutions. In 1975 Glazer published a fully elaborated critique of race-conscious reforms, Affirmative Discrimination. Here he argues that the nation’s founding universalist principles have progressed in ways that “ever widen the circle of those eligible for inclusion in the American polity with full access to political rights. The circle now embraces . . . all humanity, without tests of race, color, national origin, religion, or language.”³⁵ Because universalist inclusion had ostensibly been achieved, from Glazer’s perspective the race-conscious remedies for structural racism reified precisely those racial categories that a color-blind commitment to inclusion eschewed. Such remedies likewise drew on statistical measures that collapsed distinct ethnic white groups into a single racial category. “That is not the way ‘whites’ see themselves, or indeed are, in social reality. Some may be ‘whites,’ pure and simple. But almost all have some specific ethnic or religious identification.” Echoing the narrative of white ethnic disavowal of racism that prompted “My Negro Problem,” Glazer intimates that “there is little reason for them to feel they should bear the burden of the redress of a past in which they had no or little part.”³⁶

Glazer critiqued affirmative action with the same argument that a few years later underwrote the U.S. Supreme Court’s rollback of affirmative action in higher education. In the pages of Commentary, he also linked the defense of color-blind meritocracy to existential fears for Israel’s survival. In “The Exposed American Jew” (1975), Glazer maintains that while American Jews had escaped the tumultuous 1960s and early 1970s remarkably unscathed, a confluence of new developments left them especially vulnerable.³⁷ Affirmative action’s adoption as a way to achieve social equality put Jews in a precarious situation, as their achievements had been predicated largely on individual merit and thus fell outside any racial category of classes in need. According to Glazer, Jews were only 3 percent of the national population, but occupied as much as 20 percent of the teaching and administrative positions. At the same time, an expanding social scientific and popular literature about race had carved out discursive space for a “new ethnic frankness” to account for the differential effects of social discrimination.

Most importantly, Glazer called on Jews to mobilize the broader American public to support Israel unconditionally, here figured as a country “threatened with elimination as a sovereign nation and its people threatened—how can anyone doubt it?—by massacre” (27). Glazer narrates how the tide of American public opinion toward Israel had recently begun to turn. One of the lasting (and in Glazer’s estimation, misguided) insights of the antiwar movement was that “the United States is imperialistic and counterrevolutionary, and that any nation which receives American support must be imperialistic itself” (30). Glazer argues to the contrary: “Israel is an open, democratic society with an almost unparalleled measure of social justice and with a remarkably good treatment of its Arab minority, even though this minority must inevitably be considered closely allied to the movements and states that are attempting to destroy Israel” (28). At the same time that support for a liberal democratic Israeli national project tokenizes Israel’s purportedly benevolent and self-sacrificing treatment of Arabs inside the 1948 borders, it also must remain silent on the matter of military occupation and the growing Jewish settlement movement in the West Bank and Gaza. To mitigate the potentially dire effects of the Jews’ new exposure, Glazer offers “American freedom” as the liberal exceptionalist principle from which to derive an effective Jewish defense program. “One of the chief Jewish responses to this new and uncomfortable position must be to reeducate themselves and others in the principle that individuals and nations alike both have a right to freedom” (30).

As a reactionary defense of transcendent American values of individual liberty, Podhoretz and Glazer thus expressed hostility toward policy-driven structural interventions like affirmative action and welfare, a posture warranted all the more, in this narrative, by the Cold War challenge of Soviet tyranny and the specter of the Holocaust. In advancing free market ideologies of individual meritocracy as the properly American alternative to policies figured as “reverse racism” or “affirmative discrimination,” they framed ameliorative approaches as having adverse effects on precisely those Jews whose faith in meritocracy had enabled them to serve as model subjects of American professional managerialism. Structural interventions to address racialized disparities were understood as reverse discrimination that would negatively affect American Jews. Guided by the primary question “Is it good for the Jews?,” Podhoretz and Glazer participated in forging a politics of what the legal scholar Ian Haney-López calls “reactionary colorblindness”—with meritocracy and race neutrality seen as the enabling philosophical tenets for the inclusion of Jews in American national life. Such work obscured the structures of U.S. racial capitalism and Israeli settler colonialism, whose effects were not only intensifying in this period but being identified and contested by organizations, activists, and scholars embracing Palestinian critiques of Zionist colonization and Israeli military and administrative occupation. Structural critiques of American racism demonstrated how racial capitalism’s pervasive violence was neither impeded nor alleviated by nominal and even juridical civic inclusion but persistently saturated American institutions. This narrative was often coupled with a discourse of joint Israeli–U.S. exceptionalism underwriting the Israeli state as a foundational Jewish democracy, coding Israel’s existentially driven security measures as the unfortunate price paid for defending liberal democracy in a hostile world.

The Iron of Jewish Power

The corporealization of Jewish flesh into a masculinized tough Jew equipped to fight for Jewish freedom in both the United States and Israel was typified by the rise of Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League (JDL). Kahane’s book Never Again! (1969) provided the JDL’s “program for survival.” The JDL styled itself a “Jewish Power” organization akin to the Black Panther Party; while Kahane expressed abhorrence for the Panthers’ support for the Palestinians, the JDL nevertheless mimicked both the organization’s performative political practice and its willingness to assert an ethno-nationalist violence as a legitimate tactic of self-defense. Some in Commentary’s milieu, like the AJC’s longtime director of information and research services Milton Himmelfarb, found the JDL’s actions and outlook contrary to Jewish American interests. Kahane himself found the religiosity of the “Jewish Establishment” exemplified by the AJC thinned out by assimilation into the purported secularism of American life. Nevertheless, the JDL extended the geographic coordinates of a sharp Jewish militancy.

The JDL first gained widespread notoriety following an action in May 1969. JDL members barricaded the well-known New York synagogue Congregation Emanu-el against the planned appearance of James Forman, former executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, then the spokesperson for the Black National Economic Conference (BNEC).³⁸ Forman was slated to present the “Black Manifesto,” a document that he drafted and the conference adopted. The “Black Manifesto” contends that since Black people “have been forced to live as colonized people inside the United States,” churches and synagogues should be called to account for reparations.³⁹ Articulating a reparations claim as a practice to redress internal colonialism put substantive pressure on the liberal lineaments of racial capitalism. Kahane narrated Forman’s demand as epitomizing “years of growing violence and Jew-hatred that had erupted among a significant section of the Black community.” For Kahane, Forman’s proposal was of a piece with Black radical organizations’ outward expression of Palestinian solidarity and the Ocean Hill–Brownsville teachers’ strike. In Kahane’s estimation, the response of the “Jewish Establishment” to these events was dreadfully inadequate.⁴⁰ “Coupled with their ghetto complexes and fearful neuroses was a liberal guilt feeling and inability to place Jewish interests over universal ones” (103).

Forman never ended up speaking at the congregation. The JDL framed his nonappearance as an early victory, the result of a masculinist defense against the demand for reparations. A June 1969 full-page New York Times advertisement headlined “Is This Any Way for Nice Jewish Boys to Behave?” shows six men in sunglasses wielding bats and pipes standing guard in front of the synagogue.⁴¹ “Maybe in times of crisis. [sic] Jewish boys should not be that nice. Maybe—just maybe—nice people build their own road to Auschwitz.” The “propositions” advanced by the JDL (all articulated in the negative) read like a more pointed version of Glazer’s and Podhoretz’s linkage of reactionary color blindness and Jewish self-defense. The JDL advocated that Jews “should not be victims of the quota systems and reverse discrimination”; they “should not become victims of totalitarian revolutionaries of the Radical Left”; and they “should not be forced to pay a penny to extortionists for crimes they never committed.” Following the action against the BNEC, Kahane and the JDL began to receive significant mainstream press coverage. They staged dozens of actions on behalf of Soviet Jewry, in the process getting arrested numerous times. Under the catchphrase “Every Jew a .22,” the JDL established a summer camp to teach Jewish youth how to engage in combat.

In 1971 Kahane moved to Israel and began advocating avowedly antidemocratic policies meant to ensure the “purity” of Jewish blood. For Kahane, there was a fundamental incompatibility between Zionism as a practice of Jewish exclusiveness and Western democracy as an expression of liberal pluralism. Kahane’s interpretation of “never again,” the JDL’s slogan, was that only Jewish militancy could prevent another holocaust: “never again would there be that same lack of reaction, that same indifference, that same fear” (5). Kahane established the Kach, or “thus,” movement, inspired by the slogan “rak kach” used by the hard-right Irgun movement of the 1940s, to advocate for total separation of Jews from gentiles worldwide, including within a post–civil rights United States and across the uneven political terrain of Greater Israel. Kahane envisioned sanctions on Jews marrying non-Jews, strenuously pursued Jewish settlement in the West Bank, and advocated the removal of Arabs from all of historic Palestine. He routinely cited his mentor, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, whose “Iron Wall” ideology known as Revisionism was grounded in what one scholar has called an “edifice of racial supremacy.”⁴² “Zionist colonization,” wrote Jabotinsky in 1923, “can continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population—an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.”⁴³ Kahane saw Jabotinsky’s investment in the total dispossession and removal of indigenous Arabs as the only legitimate practice of Zionism, one fundamentally at odds with any commitment to “Western democracy.” “There’s no question,” Kahane stated, “of setting up a democracy in Israel, because democracy means equal rights for all, irrespective of racial or religious origins.”⁴⁴ Kach and other Kahanist groups were marginalized in the Israeli government—in the mid-1980s they were legally banned from participating in the political process for their overt racism. Nevertheless, influential leaders in the Israeli Knesset embraced the Revisionist commitment to Jewish settlement in strategic locales throughout the West Bank and Gaza while continuing to confiscate Palestinian territories.

Sammler and the Spectacle

Against the backdrop of a perceived crisis in Cold War liberalism, Podhoretz, Glazer, and Kahane’s writings in this period fused a domestic U.S. context riven by racial discord to a post–June war Israel whose masculinist embodiment of Jewish toughness against the perceived threat of annihilation was cause for celebration, if not emulation. The texture of this empassioned mix was vividly rendered in Saul Bellow’s National Book Award–winning novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet, narrated through the worldview of Artur Sammler, a Polish Holocaust survivor who had immigrated to New York after World War II and traveled to the battlegrounds of the June war. Originally published in the Atlantic Monthly at the end of 1969, Mr. Sammler’s Planet thematizes the anxious nexus of racial, national, and sexual conversions that defined the early years of the post–civil rights era.⁴⁵ The novel quickly achieved canonical status as a crucial work of post-Holocaust American fiction and for this reason has long warranted sustained scrutiny. It crystallizes in novel form ambivalences around the modalities of representation and knowledge production that render Palestine in the cultural milieu of the post–civil rights period.

The literary critic Ellen Pifer argues in an extensive study of Bellow’s literary corpus that Sammler was a watershed text in the writer’s own political trajectory toward neoconservatism.⁴⁶ “Those loyal to the ideals of liberalism were sympathetic” to the novel, wrote the historian Allen Guttman in 1973, while “those inspired by the visions of the ‘New Left’ were antagonized.”⁴⁷ Commentary’s review of the novel was especially laudatory, calling it “a beautiful defense of our common humanity against all the bogus idealism as well as the frank savagery that nowadays rejects it as ‘corn.’”⁴⁸ By contrast, in Edward Said’s estimation, for Bellow “the doors of humanism had been left open to every sort of unruly individualism, disreputable modishness, and uncanonized learning, with the result that true humanism had been violated, if not altogether discredited.”⁴⁹ Bellow’s sense of a violated humanism was epitomized in the iconic scene in Sammler, where, in Said’s evocative summary, a “nameless African American bus passenger pull[s] down his trousers and display[s] his pudenda to the saintly, and humanistic, Mr. Sammler.”⁵⁰ Said references one of the most memorable moments of Bellow’s oeuvre, one that has generated an extraordinary quantity of interpretation.⁵¹ The scene exemplifies Irving Kristol’s definitional figure of a neoconservative—a liberal being mugged by reality—with “reality” a stand-in for a ribald form of hypersexualized Black masculinity. It likewise bound together the vexed relation of post-Holocaust Jewish survival to a racial liberal present under pressure from Black radical critique. For the novel, the question of Jewish survival in the midst of Western Civilization’s demise by the counterculture is condensed in the image of the Black phallus and the body to which it is attached. Yet while Podhoretz desired the “toughness,” “freedom,” and “superior grace and beauty” of Black men, and the “Jewish Power” of the JDL performed in mimic-fashion the Black Panther Party’s racial militancy, Artur Sammler figures as an ambivalent visual witness.

The novel stitches the June war to Sammler’s embodied experience of survival in Eastern Europe—he crawls out of a mass grave, he shoots an unarmed man for his clothing—only to be thrown into the racial and sexual excesses of New York City. In doing so, the novel ironizes Israeli toughness. Israel comes to figure less as civilization’s moral salvation than as a site of its kitschy objectification. This irony is embodied in Sammler’s Russian-turned-Israeli-turned-American son-in-law Eisen, or “iron.” Eisen, who had been injured during his service in the Russian army, moved to Israel soon after 1948 and became an artist. “I came to the Eretz a broken man,” Eisen tells Sammler. “But I wouldn’t die. I couldn’t shut my eyes—not before I did something like a human being, something important, beautiful.”⁵² Eisen had for some time worked as a painter, but after the June war his medium changed to sculpture, and he brings many of his newest pieces to New York in a “heavy green baize bag.” They are “crude-looking, partly bronze but also pale yellow, tinged with sulfides like fool’s gold” (170). In Sammler’s estimation they are the “usual” kinds of Israeli kitsch: “Stars of David, branched candelabra, scrolls and rams’ horns, inscriptions flaming away in Hebrew: Nahamu! Comfort ye! Or God’s command to Joshua: Hazak! [Strengthen thyself!]” (170). These objects are laden with metaphor, Eisen reminds his father-in-law. “Nothing is literal in my work.” For Sammler, these objects are ugly materializations of the tough Jew—rough and rugged and strong, but tinged with fool’s gold and so overburdened with meaning as to border on the farcical.

The end of the novel stages the collision between the text’s two overdetermined symbols—the Black pickpocket and Eisen with his sculptures. Sammler approaches a large crowd, which Eisen is in, with his heaving bag of carvings. The crowd looks on as the pickpocket fights with Sammler’s friend Feffer. Feffer had tracked down the pickpocket, snapped photographs of him in the act of thievery to give to the police, and the pickpocket had attempted to seize his camera. No one in the crowd would intervene: “They were expecting gratification, oh! at last! of teased, cheated, famished needs” (289). When Sammler pleads with the crowd to step in, he “felt extremely foreign—voice, accent, syntax, manner, face, mind, everything, foreign” (286). Given Sammler’s age, his “lack of physical force . . . he had to turn to someone else—to an Eisen!” (289). But in requesting Eisen’s forceful intervention, Sammler unwittingly unleashes an excess of physical violence, as Eisen strikes the pickpocket twice in the face with his bag of Israeli kitsch. “The blood ran in points on his cheek. The terrible metal had cut him through the baize” (291). “You can’t hit a man like this just once,” Eisen exclaims defensively (291). “If in—in. No? If out—out. Yes?” (292). Sammler hurries off, distressed and dismayed by Eisen’s simplistic morality and callous use of force against the very man who had confronted him at the novel’s outset. “How much Sammler sympathized with him—how much he would have done to prevent such atrocious blows!” (294).

Sammler’s ambivalent witnessing of Eisen’s brutality in New York City mirrors his own witnessing of the atrocities of the June war, one that registers a deep—if also unacknowledged—contrapuntal resonance between the war’s mass Arab casualties and embodied Holocaust memory. When the first inklings of war begin, Sammler “refused to sit in Manhattan watching television” and travels to Israel (142). (Bellow had himself been sent to Israel to report on the war for Newsday, and elements of his dispatches inform the texture of the novel.)⁵³ Yet once Sammler arrives, the war’s action is experienced only as distant spectacle. Sammler views a tank battle from a far-off hilltop in the north: “He had seen. It was almost as if he had attended—among other spectators” (164). His vista is overrun by Italian paparazzi and a Swiss correspondent whose “chest hung with cameras” (165). But the action of war is so distant, it can be perceived only in “tiny war sounds” (165). Later, after the military violence had subsided, Sammler visits newly conquered Gaza, and the scale of description shifts rapidly to dwell on the minute details of “the dead, the unburied Arab bodies” (250).

There were dug positions, emplacements, trenches, and in them, too, there were hundreds of corpses. The odor was like damp cardboard. The clothes of the dead, greenish-brown sweaters, tunics, shirts were strained by the swelling, the gases, the fluids. Swollen gigantic arms, legs, roasted in the sun. . . . In the sun the faces softened, blackened, melted, and flowed away. The flesh sank to the skull, the cartilage of the nose warping, the lips shrinking, eyes dissolving, fluids filling the follows and shining on the skin. . . . The suffocating wet cardboard fumes they gave off. In the superhot, the crack light, the glassy persistency and distortion of the desert light, these swollen shapes were the main things to be seen. (251–53)

Sammler’s unsatisfying distance is here replaced with the overwhelming sights and smells of the war’s Arab victims whose embodiment is figured in their abject decomposition. Sammler’s visual practice of witnessing does not translate into overt identification with the victims, even though the protagonist himself had crawled out of a similar trench-turned-mass-grave twenty-five years earlier. Instead, the scene is left at the level of an abstract drama, a tragic spectacle of war’s necessary brutality, whose function was to prop up the discombobulated Sammler. The novel’s protagonist “had his own need for these sights, for which he mastered the trembling of his legs or the wish to cry which flashed through him” (253). In this sense, the scene functions primarily to satisfy Sammler’s need for self-mastery in a world descending into barbarity.

At the time of its publication, the novel’s thematization of a spectacular form of Israeli violence that decimates its Arab antagonists made for an ambivalent understanding of Bellow’s views on Israel. Eisen’s stark morality and farcical practices of beauty, the resonance of mass Arab casualties to Jews in the European trenches, and the yoking of spectacularized Black masculinity to the visual drama of the June war made difficult an easy allegorizing between the novel and Bellow’s political views. Sammler could triangulate post-1967 gendered racialization, Holocaust memory, and Israeli state violence in ways that invited readers to reckon with their structured ambivalence, an ambivalence that exceeded the reified frameworks that the novel also thematized. Bellow’s first major work of nonfiction, To Jerusalem and Back (1976), steadied such ambivalence. The extended essay was, in the critic Andrew Furman’s estimate, Bellow’s “attempt to revise and polish his, at times, elusive vision of Israel.”⁵⁴ The battlefield scene in To Jerusalem and Back repeats language drawn directly from Sammler and Bellow’s own Newsday journalism. This imagery’s repetition reveals the persistent haunting spectacularization of Arab abjection and its resonance with post-Holocaust memory. Palestinian perspectives were represented only through pro-Israel discourse—a pattern in To Jerusalem and Back—and reiterated Bellow’s own representations of what he called in a different context “corpse-making” (dead and decaying Arab bodies). Active Palestinian subjects in history remained obscured. The book concludes with reflections on the dawning civil war in Lebanon with precisely such foreshortening. To understand Bellow’s Middle East is ultimately to come to grips with a transhistorical “cycle-of-violence” narrative. “In ancient times the walls of captured cities in the Middle East were sometimes hung with the skins of the vanquished. That custom has died out. But the eagerness to kill for political ends—or to justify killing by such ends—is as keen now as it ever was” (182). Against the backdrop of a perpetually war-torn region whose barbarity knows no end ascends Israel, if not as an exemplar of civilized Western liberalism, then at least as the West’s bulwark against the timeless tribalism of intra-Arab violence.

Anti-Imperialism as Settler Colonialism

What would come to be understood as U.S. imperial culture’s dominant neoconservative narrative was shaped by the gendered racialization of Israeli militancy represented as central to maintaining Jewish security in the United States. This narrative figured Jewish civic inclusion as part of a Cold War geopolitics invested in regulating a proper ethno-racial minority subject conducive to the lineaments of American capitalism. At the same time, expressions of American Zionism refused to reckon substantively with Black Power’s Palestine, whose disavowal of critiques of settler colonialism converted Arab and Palestinian political claims into racialized fears of Arab terror and dehumanization. In a world of totalitarian tyranny, the narrative ran, the exceptional spirit of American freedom and liberty would guide the way forward. These assenting deployments of a Cold War imaginary were central to the development of neoconservatism’s racial thinking of the 1970s.

Importantly, however, Jewish Left critiques of U.S. imperial culture were also triangulated with Black Power’s Palestine and the emergent postoccupation structures of rule in Israel and Palestine. Accounting for this shared orientation among otherwise bitter ideological antagonists requires recalling how Zionism had often historically been framed as an anticolonial and anti-imperialist movement for Jewish self-determination. As the historian Gabriel Piterberg compellingly elucidates, Zionism was “both a Central-European national movement and a movement of European settlers [seeking] to carve out for itself a national patrimony with a colony in the east.”⁵⁵ This coalescence of nationalism and desires for territorial settlement resonated with a long-held American mythos linking manifest destiny and national independence struggles against imperial Britain.⁵⁶ During the early Cold War, this mythos was expressed through figuring Israel’s 1948 founding as an anticolonial national liberation project. As the literary critic Amy Kaplan maintains, Leon Uris’s hugely popular novel Exodus (1958) and Otto Preminger’s cinematic epic of the same name (1960) fashioned a remarkably effective American narrative of Israel’s founding as an exemplary instance of anticolonialism suitable for U.S. Cold War geopolitics. Demonstrating how Exodus figured the Zionist struggle for national liberation against British imperialism as one oriented toward a broad American audience, Kaplan reveals the effects of the persistent structure of disavowal of Zionism’s settler colonial foundations. Such a narrative degraded Arabs and Palestinians, producing inhuman obstacles to the expression of a morally upstanding liberal modernity capably refracting America’s own exceptional promise.⁵⁷ By the end of the 1960s the Israeli military’s remarkably swift victory in the June war further catalyzed the fusion of U.S.–Israel geopolitical imaginaries. The Israeli military, as Melani McAlister notes, offered an American public increasingly disheartened by the U.S. war in Vietnam an incontestable victory to celebrate and exemplify.⁵⁸

For a Jewish Left forged in antiwar, anticapitalist, and antiracist struggles, a broad American exceptionalism of this sort had little traction. After 1967, avowedly Jewish radical publications routinely espoused a discourse of anti-imperialism as part of a critique of the forms of American racist and capitalist oppression. In publications like Commentary, chided Michael Lerner in a 1970 analysis of the Jewish New Left at Berkeley, “one can read the latest thoughts of the American ruling class, its best apologia for continued American imperialism and suppression of students and other protestors.”⁵⁹ Jewish radicals criticized the suture between the massive intensification of U.S. state violence in Southeast Asia and the emergence of a repressive domestic law-and-order state; they identified the so-called Jewish establishment as aligned with the expansion of racialized state violence; they protested the paucity of a nominally inclusionary U.S. racial liberalism; and they formulated a solidarity politics with oppressed minorities as offering openings toward a different kind of radical democratic future.

At the same time, Jewish radical expressions of anti-imperialism also routinely narrated the exclusionary Jewish settlement of Palestine as the legitimate, at times even the radical, historical expression of Jewish national liberation, often figuring a romanticized desire for the socialist utopianism of the early twentieth-century kibbutz. Exile was often (though, importantly, not uniformly) belittled as an aberrant condition; the specter of the Holocaust served as an enduring sign of the precarity of Jewish existence; and aliya was routinely advocated as paramount for achieving Jewish radical aims. In this way, Jewish radical critics of U.S. imperialism drew on Zionism’s settler colonial mythos, fashioning disavowals and tacit silences around the forms and practices of Palestinian dispossession, exclusion, and resistance. After World War II and especially after 1967, it proved especially vexing for Jewish radical imaginaries to disentangle Jewish national liberation from Israeli settler colonialism.

Jewish Secularism, Jewish Socialism

In its early formation, the widely circulated magazine Jewish Life (founded in 1946 and retitled Jewish Currents in 1958), was a thinly veiled outlet for the cultural wing of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). In the magazine, socialist Jews elaborated a non-Zionist political imaginary that described Israel’s “inalienable right to exist” as central to a politics of secular Jewish progressivism. As one exemplary statement put it, Jewish secularism meant strategic nonalignment between capitalist and socialist systems, committed struggles for social welfare, social security, and social justice and against racism and anti-Semitism. Jewish secularism also meant supporting “struggles against colonialism and neo-colonialism in Africa, Asia and Latin America,” which importantly included an “affirmation that Israel is here to stay.”⁶⁰ While the World Zionist Organization and some in Israel called on Jews in the diaspora to orient their politics solely toward the Israeli state, a committed non-Zionism of the sort expressed in Jewish Life and Jewish Currents recognized Jews as a “people on a world scale,” not solely a “single nation” susceptible to the “national nihilism” that had driven Zionism’s tactical alliances with imperialist powers like Britain and the United States.

Morris U. Schappes, one of the magazine’s lead writers and, after 1958, its managing editor, routinely criticized Zionism’s historical emergence as fundamentally counter to progressive desires for the future liberation of the working class. As a bourgeois nationalist ideology, wrote Schappes, Zionism only ever reflected the interests of a specific stratum of Jewish middle-class professionals allied with the ruling elite; thus, since the end of the nineteenth century, Zionism had of necessity undertaken what Schappes calls an “unswerving strategy of alliance with oppressive and imperialist ruling classes.”⁶¹ Louis Harap, another of the journal’s longtime editors and writers, agreed, investigating Zionism’s fundamental and enduring contradiction: a socialist-oriented communal structure in Palestine whose “conquest of Labor” approach to Jewish settlement in Palestine prohibited incorporation of indigenous Arabs into the structure of its economy. This exclusion constituted nothing less than a failure, in Harap’s words, of the “acid test for socialist internationalism in the region.”⁶²

Such concerns about Zionism were never so intractable as to call into question the importance of Israel as a state-building project whose capacity to channel the liberatory energies of the Jewish people, could serve as an anti-imperialist force in the region. Contributors to Jewish Life and Jewish Currents contrasted the tepid support in the late 1940s within the United States and Britain for Jewish independence with the Soviet support for the partition of Palestine. The magazine emphasized how Soviet military support (via Czechoslovakia) was essential in the Jewish fight against British imperialism. Further, the November 1947 speech by Soviet Permanent Representative to the UN Andrei Gromyko signaled the Soviet commitment to the self-determining character of Jewish and Arab peoples. Ideally, such self-determination should be expressed in a single binational state, Gromyko argued. However, partitioning the territory between Jews and Arabs would be warranted if the national antagonisms between them proved unresolvable.

After its founding, Israel served authors in Jewish Currents as a pragmatic focal point for narrating a resolutely anti-imperialist struggle of Jewish national liberation. A July 1948 editorial underscored as much, quoting from the former head of the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization in Mandate Palestine, that “British and American imperialism are like the two edges of a scissors. Sometimes they work together; sometimes apart. But their point is directed at us.” In contrast to these shared imperial forces, “American Jewry can carry out obligations to Israel only by a clear-cut anti-imperialist fight.”⁶³ On the ideological level, this fight included advancing a persistent critique of the American Jewish Committee’s alignment with U.S. imperialism—understood here as impeding the expression of Jewish national liberation via the AJC’s consistent support of American racial liberalism, and its adherence to the U.S. State Department’s own historical ambivalence about a Zionist state in Palestine. In 1950, on the second anniversary of Israel’s founding, Jewish Life celebrated “the masses of Israel, who so heroically gave their lives in anti-imperialist struggle to achieve freedom and independence.” Such a struggle was hardly over, though, as the state’s nascent citizenry was “confronted with the increasing colonialization of their country” by U.S. and British geopolitics exemplified most prominently in the Ben Gurion government subordinating Israel’s sovereignty to “Anglo-American imperialist aims” to enfold Israel into “imperialist, cold war plans.”⁶⁴

In the immediate wake of the June war, Jewish Currents departed from its Soviet predilection because of Soviet denunciations of Israeli aggression and the magazine’s support for Israel’s right to preemptive self-defense. Nevertheless, its resolutely non-Zionist outlook provided Schappes the space to critique what he called the American peace movement’s “disoriented” celebration of Israeli militancy while pushing back against those, like SNCC field secretary Julius Lester, who claimed that “any Jew who does not question Israel’s very existence nullifies any meaning his opposition to the war in Vietnam may have.” Taking Lester’s dichotomy as a false choice, Schappes pointed out that the Jewish Cultural Clubs and Societies’ program to end the war in Vietnam was entirely consistent with an anti-imperialist approach to the Middle East. Included in this program were a commitment to a region “freed from the tentacles of oil-colonialism and the Cold War” and an Israeli policy of “neutrality in the East-West conflict” that would enable the state to “become a part of the Middle East struggle against imperialism.”⁶⁵ Harap centered his analysis on the perceived “threat to the life of Israel,” its “right to live.” It was true, in Harap’s opinion, that “in general Israel’s foreign policy has been allied to the West and that she is therefore aligned in a basic way with the policies of the neo-colonialist powers.” However, since “her very survival was imminently threatened,” the state was justified military in defending itself against a perceived threat of annihilation by Arab leaders whose own liberationist rhetoric was, in Harap’s estimation, more reactionary than anti-imperialist.⁶⁶

In early statements and publications, the magazine’s authors elaborated how structural racism’s differential effects were predicated on a white supremacy woven into America’s post-Emancipation fabric. For instance, in May 1964, Schappes served as a discussant for a series of panels on Negro-Jewish relations in the United States sponsored by the journal Jewish Social Studies. Here he unreservedly proclaimed that “the abolition of white privileges is a continuation of the old abolitionist struggle against slavery.”⁶⁷ Schappes invites Jews to “combat attitudes of white supremacy” as a mode of taking responsibility for, and then abolishing, the privileges that white people have claimed for themselves via Black people’s “brutalization, degradation and deculturation” (58). At the same time, Schappes also calls on Black leaders to recognize the deleterious effects of anti-Semitism as a “blind alley” (64) and “a diversion from the problem” (65). The need for white ethnics, and Jews in particular, to work toward abolishing the structured privileges accruing to certain groups in a climate saturated by white supremacy was pressing indeed. Avoiding engagements in such work would pose fundamental detriments to the Black freedom movement. “As the struggle goes into more intense forms,” Schappes presaged in 1964, “the Negro people will brook no brakes and will turn against allies, no matter what their services or past record, who seem to retard the struggle” (65).

By the early 1970s the structural critique of white supremacy converged with the existential anxiety around Israel’s “right to live.” Black Power’s Palestine had achieved a broad currency that necessitated substantive responses from the Jewish Left. In February 1971 Jewish Currents released a pamphlet, “The Black Panthers, Jews, and Israel,” which collected a series of articles printed in recent issues of the magazine.⁶⁸ In an open letter to Huey P. Newton, Nobel Prize–winning scientist and antiwar advocate George Wald underscored how Jews in Israel are the “remnants of the biggest massacre in history . . . refugees with no other place to go” (13). The seemingly permanent precarity of Israel’s existence in the face of impending “massacre” had injurious effects on the state’s capacity to realize its properly socialist ideals. “Now all the things that most Israelis oppose are being forced upon them by the constant threat of massacre” (14). For Schappes, progressive Jewish support for the Black Panthers was an “unconditional duty,” even as, in practice, such a duty ran up against obstacles when “the Panther position on Israel allies it with those who call for its destruction” (20). Contrary to the analysis offered in the pages of the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, Israel was not a creation of Western imperialism, Schappes underscored; rather, it emerged from the “numerous non-Zionist Jewish refugees from Hitlerism” and was tangibly supported by “the anti-imperialist, democratic and socialist forces expressing themselves in the United Nations” (17). Rabbi Albert Axelrad, then director of the Hillel at Brandeis University, echoed Schappes’s caution against refusing engagement with the Panthers. Instead, Axelrad embraced the Talmudic and historical traditions of a Judaic “allergy to injustice.” He held out the importance of understanding the Panthers, not as a homogeneous singular entity, but as a “paradigmatic” reflection of a broader racialized constituency articulating survival strategies amid the saturation of state violence (52). “The violence of the government and of society, which provoked the Panthers’ posture, must be exposed and eliminated” (53). It was crucial, in Axelrad’s estimation, for Jews to ally with militant groups in their “domestic struggles for liberation and self-determination,” especially as those groups claimed the right to resort to what he calls “defensive violence” (52). The Talmudic concept of milchemet chova (defensive war as mandatory) warranted the ethical practice of violence by the Panthers and other militants against any “perversion of justice” (53). In a striking analogy, the same precept legitimated Israel’s use of violence in 1948 and 1967.

Jewish radical support for the Panthers at a moment of intense state repression did not automatically require supporting the Panthers’ pronounced identification with the Palestine Liberation Organization, which Axelrad saw as plainly “unacceptable.” For Axelrad, Black Power’s Palestine was merely rhetorical and distinct from real material conditions of liberation struggles in the United States. At the same time, Axelrad saw the Panthers’ positioning not as viral anti-Semitism but as a “glib, mistaken notion of class identification in which the Palestinians are seen as the only oppressed, dominated people in the area” (55). This move sought to discipline Black Power’s Palestine by disconnecting what were framed as the proper material struggles against racial violence in the United States from the ill-considered and largely rhetorical affiliations with the Palestinians. Robert E. Goldburg, the rabbi at Congregation Mishkan Israel in Hamden, Connecticut, and a member of the Coalition for the Defense of the Panthers, performed a similar analytical move. He used his April 1970 sermon, also published by Jewish Currents, to address the important role that Jews should play in contending with the imperial violence out of which, and in struggle against, organizations like the Panthers had emerged. “What we have done to Vietnam is coming home to haunt us. . . . The Panthers have dramatized our sins, our indifference and neglect.” Goldburg parsed the distinction between the righteousness of the Panthers domestic struggle and the wrongheadedness of their largely rhetorical alliance with the PLO. For Goldburg, the Panthers’ spokespeople’s distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism was “incorrect and muddled,” especially considering that the “Jewish minority has endured its own holocaust, as a culmination of 2,000 years of martyrdom, and feels rightly and correctly a sense of commitment to the nation and the people of Israel.” Nevertheless, such a positioning was understood as merely a “quarrel” with the Panthers, one to argue out as part of a shared commitment to social justice.⁶⁹

Zionism’s Becoming Third World

While Jewish Currents emphasized a secular, non-Zionist anti-imperialism, younger activists in the Jewish Left drew significantly on Zionism as a proper movement of Jewish self-determination, often recalibrating its elements to figure alliances with anticolonial movements worldwide. The Jewish Radicalism anthology (1973), edited by Jack Nusan Porter and Peter Dreirer, exemplified this dynamic. The anthology offered what the editors call a “literary snapshot” of an outpouring of post-1967 print culture (student-run newspapers, manifestos, zines, etc.), in order to grasp hold of an emergent formation that might not otherwise recognize itself as such.⁷⁰

One exemplary expression of such an outlook was fashioned by the Jewish Liberation Project (JLP), an organization that emerged in the late 1960s. The JLP concluded an early position paper with the phrase “Long Live a Socialist and Anti-Imperialist Middle East!” In recasting radical Zionism as an anti-imperialist Jewish liberation struggle, the JLP retained (even as it repressed) what Piterberg calls Zionism’s foundational myth, namely, an investment in the negation of exile, the return to the land, and the return to history, while struggling against U.S. capitalism and assimilation.⁷¹ In the United States, the self-determined expression of Jewish peoplehood was curtailed by an oppressive capitalist structure that positioned Jews as a cushion between the largely white capitalist ruling class and a range of oppressed racial minorities. The Jewish establishment was complicit in this process, figured, in a subtextual reference to Malcolm X, as “house Jews,” imputing to the broader American Jewish community “assimilation and an anti-Jewish life style.” Claiming a socialist Zionism as shaping its program, the JLP figured Zionism as a revolutionary Jewish national liberation movement that catalyzed a people whose bonds were forged out of “distinctive ethnic identity, communal institutions, and cultural life.”⁷² Jewish liberation was an autonomous revolutionary project, independent of other autonomous revolutionary struggles.

While the organization refused to articulate support for Israeli government policies, the existence of Israel as a Jewish state was “an absolute necessity for the liberation of the Jews.”⁷³ Since the Jew is “nowhere regarded as a native, he remains an alien everywhere.” Exile and diaspora, from this perspective, required a territorial solution. Israel appeared as “a historical necessity to end the dispersed, abnormal, marginal existence of the Jews in the galut,” one that served to “create a historically normal existence.”⁷⁴ Aviva Cantor Zuckoff, cofounder of the Jewish Liberation Project, emphasized exile’s “inherently oppressive nature,” one that “places Jews at the mercy of the ruling elite.” Israel’s “destiny,” Zuckoff’s argument ran, was “bound up with the elimination of imperialism” insofar as imperialism “intensifies antagonisms between nations and peoples and imperils the life of the Jewish nation.”⁷⁵ Israeli identification with the third world was paramount, if for no other reason than as a way to sustain Jewish existence.

Another early organizer of the JLP, Itzhak Epstein, attended the United Front Against Fascism conference in July 1969, an event in Oakland organized by the Black Panther Party that coincided with the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers. In preparing for the conference, JLP formulated the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism as twinned forms of an incipient fascism of the American power structure. They wrote in a prepared statement, “The Star of David and black skin are both the objects of reactionary wrath.”⁷⁶ In returning from the event, however, Epstein took the Panthers’ pro-Palestinian politics as a sign of enmity toward his “people’s national aspirations.” They had allied themselves with “those who want to commit genocide against us. Whatever justice there is in the Panthers’ own struggle, I must view them from now on as my enemies” (69).

Tsvi Bisk articulated a complementary “radical-zionist strategy for the 1970s” in the Jewish Liberation Journal’s last issue of 1969, one that likewise offered an unsparing critique of those Jewish organizations affirming the concerns of Black radicalism. For Bisk, the discourse of Black anti-Semitism revealed the specter of genocidal Jewish insecurity. In response to those who say, “We must understand the sociological conditions that make these statements possible,” Bisk responded plainly, “Fuck sociological conditions! . . . To a Jew swastikas and anti-Semitic rhetoric means that someone out there has an oven, and fuck me where I breathe if I am going to allow a sociological analysis to inhibit my ability to defend myself when confronted with these symbols.”⁷⁷ Bisk asserted the pressing necessity of driving a wedge between the Black freedom movement and the Arab cause. While Jewish national liberation is essential, and is centrally concerned with the survival of a Jewish state, Bisk averred that Black liberation has little to do with Arab–Israeli struggles. “The blacks have no real political interest (other than a temporary tactical one) in supporting the Arabs.” She echoed Epstein in her unsparing refusal to countenance Black identification with Palestine: “If you insist on acting as our enemy we will be forced to fight you as our enemy.”⁷⁸

Here, Bisk’s comments also resonate with a widely read and cited short essay, published in a February 1969 issue of the Village Voice, “To Uncle Tom and Other Jews,” in which M. Jay Rosenberg, then an undergraduate at Brandeis University, reasserts what he calls “pride” in Zionism vis-à-vis the Black liberation struggles.⁷⁹ For Rosenberg, the only way for the Jew to be an ally in such struggles is to “find himself” in the “inspiration” that is “the miracle of Israel, a national liberation deferred for two thousand years.”⁸⁰ Investing in Zionism as a project of Jewish national liberation, one centered on Israel as its proper territorial expression, meant that the Panthers’ affiliation with the Palestinian struggle cast them as enemies: “And thus from this point on, I will support no movement that does not accept my people’s struggle.”⁸¹

The Committee for a Progressive Middle East (CPME), formed in the late 1960s by Michael Lerner and others on the Jewish Left, also framed its analysis in terms of capitalist imperialism, the common enemy to Israel and the Palestinians, though the anxiety (or vitriol) expressed toward Black identifications with Palestinians was much more muted. In its own founding statement on the Middle East, the CPME focused on the cycle of capitalist oppression circuited between the United States and “Arab Lands,” going back to the origins of Zionist settlement in Palestine. As in other expressions of the Jewish Left, the statement emphasized the revolutionary promise of the early settlement movement. The early twentieth-century Jewish settlers “were socialists, supporters of the Russian Revolution, and were in the process of setting up collectively owned and governed communes (kibbutzim) that could provide a model for their Arab friends who were still oppressed in feudal conditions.”⁸² This narrative rendered “inevitable” how, in the pre-state period, “Arab landlords,” facing a challenge to their legitimacy, “would try to stir up anti-Jewish sentiment amongst their followers” (484). The CPME suggested that in 1947–49 the perceived need for Arab reactionary leaders to maintain their legitimacy and “divert attention of their people from their real problems” was the animating force between the Arab, Zionist, and Israeli forces.

In the years that followed, according to the CPME statement, Israel’s necessary ties to the West served as a reaction to the “actual material threat” posed by the bourgeois leadership in the Arab world, even as such ties posed increasingly insurmountable challenges to the Jewish state becoming “a real indigenous third-world country” (485). Those ties, as necessary as they were, underwrote capitalism as the foundational system through which “racist notions” in Israel were used to “justify its class structure . . . [which would] militate against Arabs and Jews from Arab lands” (486). The CPME’s socialist impulse called for the elimination of Israeli capitalism and support for “the national liberation struggles of the Vietnamese, Arabs and other third-world peoples” (486). While the statement submits that in retrospect it might have been wise “to establish the Jewish homeland in some other, less populated area,” in the present “Israelis have become natives of the area.” As Jewish people there, they have a right to national self-determination and “will fight for their survival with as must [sic] determination as the Vietnamese fight for their own” (486). In his own nascent reflections on the CPME, Michael Lerner delineated a critical distinction between an anti-Zionism invested in the destruction of Israel and one whose “fundamental impulses” alert us to the problems of a “state which is enthusiastically supported by Goldwater and Reagan and which has failed to endorse the struggle of the Vietnamese against American imperialism.”⁸³ Insofar as anti-Zionism could elucidate a critique of the Israeli state, the CPME underscored its promise, even as its anticapitalist politics drew from the utopian promise of the kibbutzim to naturalize what was narrated as the unfortunate truth of settler colonization and Palestinian dispossession.

Conversion Narratives and Revolutionary Diaspora

Like the CPME on the West Coast, organizations like Jews for Urban Justice (JUJ) on the East Coast figured the Jewish establishment as deeply imbricated in U.S. imperialism. Its synagogues were seen less as sanctuaries for Judaic spiritual practice or resources for communal support than as institutions of a blossoming bourgeoisie increasingly inoculated from and complicit with a sedimented structural racism. The vociferous anticommunism of some of the establishment’s media outlets translated into apologetic justifications for intensified U.S. military presence in Southeast Asia and the embrace of the Nixonian language of law and order. As a critical counterpoint, JUJ, founded in 1966 to stage fair housing protests in the Washington, D.C., area, was described as “the diaspora of the Diaspora.”⁸⁴ While itself a small organization, JUJ nevertheless expressed, in the historian Michael Staub’s words, “yearnings that were much more widely felt and with which mainstream Jewish leaders were struggling as well.”⁸⁵ Its last project was the “Jewish Campaign for the People’s Peace Treaty” in 1971, which articulated a Jewish stance against the U.S. War in Vietnam. “Jewishness at its best is a whole life process,” stated one of the campaign’s flyers, “and the war is part of our daily lives. . . . So if we’re committed to being Jewish, then dealing with the war is part of being Jewish” (182–83).

Arthur Waskow and Sharon Rose were among members of Jews for Urban Justice who made trips to Israel after 1967, meeting with Israeli Leftists and Palestinian representatives across the political spectrum. In the wake of their trips, JUJ fashioned a Jewish anti-imperialist platform in the spirit of the nonaligned countries. They conceived of Israel not as a Jewish national home but rather as a state inhabited by a native “Israeli people.” Echoing the CPME’s indigenization of Israel, in November 1970, JUJ drafted a five-point position paper for “peace and justice in the Middle East” founded on mutual commitments to self-determination for Palestinian and Israeli peoples. It also advocated a nonintervention policy for the Israeli, Soviet, and U.S. militaries, and opposed “acts of genocide, whether it be in the forms of cultural, physical, or psychological oppression.”⁸⁶ An open letter to the New York Review of Books signed by prominent Jewish members of the New Left gave JUJ’s position wide circulation, emphasizing, irrespective of prior history, the contemporary existence of both Palestinian and Israeli peoples. In this thinking, 1948 became the de facto starting point for analysis and action. Intent on the “full liberation” of both peoples—liberation, that is, “from war, from the Imperial designs from the great powers, from exploitation of their labor and resources”—crucially involved refuting historical claims that Israel was an “extension of Western imperialism” (77). “Although the Israeli government has allied itself with the Western Empires,” notes the letter, “an Israeli people exists and they will not disappear, except through genocide” (78). At the same time, the letter acknowledges the need for Israel to be “prepared to negotiate with the whole range of Palestinian leadership on how to withdraw Israeli troops from the West Bank and Gaza” (79). Finally, it calls for “the American Jewish community and the American anti-war and radical movements” to study closely the situation with a keen eye on the “Imperial adventures of their own governments and huge corporations” (78). In enunciating its position, JUJ erased the powerful connection between the “Israeli people” and Zionism’s sacralized settler colonial logic, fashioning an anti-imperialist politics with its own foreshortened history.

Arthur Waskow’s own prolific writings of the period narrated the convergence of Black radicalism and anti-Zionism as an insuperable roadblock to his efforts at forging a broad New Left coalition. Rather than retreat into a militant defense of Jewishness in the guise of liberal pluralism, Waskow fused contemporary social justice struggles with Jewish principles as precisely what defined the best of diasporic Judaism. In his writings of the period, he aimed to solve the contradiction among a generation of post-1967 Jews who supported the existence of Israel and had “assimilated” into a post–civil rights America that had seen, in Waskow’s words, the “melting pot . . . cracked forever” by the failures of racial integration.⁸⁷

Waskow had been a lead organizer of the August 1967 National Conference for New Politics (NCNP) in Chicago. There, as I note in chapter 2, a Black caucus effectively passed a thirteen-point resolution that, among other demands, included a condemnation of June’s “Zionist imperialist war.” Waskow’s response to the caucus had been publicly criticized in a lengthy New Yorker article for trafficking in “paternalistic white racism that would startle a South African plantation owner” by endorsing all the demands “regardless of the substance of the individual proposals.” Waskow proffered his own retort in the pages of the New York Review of Books.⁸⁸ He had, he said, opposed the resolution to adopt the thirteen points, vigorously lobbied others to oppose the resolution, and offered his own resolution that “specifically differs from the 13 points on the Middle East, wars of national liberation, and how to organize among whites, and that ignores the ‘Newark resolutions’ which the 13 Points blindly endorsed.”⁸⁹ When he had the opportunity to speak before the convention he “referred to the acceptance of the 13 Points as an act of self-castration by the white liberals present who were seeking, by this ill-conceived operation, to become radicals.”⁹⁰

In his 1971 book The Bush Is Burning! Radical Judaism Faces the Pharaohs of the Modern Superstate, Waskow narrates the NCNP confrontation as another moment of conversion. The fragmentation at the conference incited him to diagnose the crossroads for American Jews using an especially evocative extended analogy:

As if the encounter of the Black and Jewish peoples was not sufficiently troublesome in itself—it coincided with another scenario—an international one—that often seemed to those engaged analogous, and that strengthened or deepened in the various respondents the different learnings they had absorbed at home. Imagine the whole encounter over again, but this time in Giant dress, and in hostility and danger the equivalent of about forty years further along the vicious spiral—and this time conducted on the nation-state level. With the Israeli government—once flexible and creative and insurgent, but by the late ’60s rigid and institutionalized, auditioning for the role of the American Jewish Establishment; Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular seeming to play the part of the Blacks; and the American Empire abroad adopting the role of the American Empire at home. (93)

Given this analysis of “future-history,” interwoven as it was with a U.S. imperial culture shaping racial politics both within and outside its borders, Waskow cast his lot with the radical Jews. He narrates how he discovered in the District of Columbia a more practically effective, if smaller-scale, outlet for his politics, one that embraced Judaism as a liberation theology predicated on social justice. Waskow’s elaboration exemplifies the conversion narrative that shaped much post-1967 American Jewish writing. For some, the post-1967 moment signified a transvaluation of the diaspora that crystallized American Jewish identification to Israel and bound the security of Jews globally to the existence of a Jewish state in Israel. In contrast, Waskow’s Bush Is Burning! narrates what he calls a “revivification” of a form of Judaism whose “fusion of religious and political feeling” (23) could animate a liberationist horizon. This was religion as a “form of insurgency” (14), and the Freedom Seder served as its most evocative illustration.

The Freedom Seder and a Revolutionary Diaspora

For Passover 1969 Arthur Waskow and Jews for Urban Justice produced an entire haggadah. Perhaps JUJ’s most high-profile social action, the Freedom Seder is clearly informed by Waskow’s experience at the NCNP. Waskow framed the haggadah as a response to the one-year anniversary of Martin Luther King’s April 1968 assassination and the subsequent “uprising of Black Washington against the blank-eyed pyramid-builders of our own time.”⁹¹ In the face of increasingly repressive state violence in the District of Columbia, Waskow fashioned a political imaginary aimed at liberation from an “America of pyramids.”

The first seder to use the new haggadah was held in the basement of Lincoln Memorial Congregational Temple, an African American church in Washington, D.C. The service was conducted by Rabbi Balfour Brickner (then head of the Hebrew Congregations of New York and director of the Commission on Interfaith Relations for Reform Judaism), who was joined by the well-known antiwar activist Reverend Philip Berrigan. Eight hundred people attended the event. The seder gained significant publicity, garnering national and local newspaper coverage; the WBAI radio station provided a live feed for its New York listeners, and the Canadian Broadcasting Company filmed the event for a documentary.⁹² The following year, JUJ and Waskow organized numerous Freedom Seders across the Northeast. One, on the campus of Cornell University, drew several thousand participants and featured the return of Philip Berrigan’s brother, Reverend Daniel Berrigan, who was a Jesuit priest and peace activist prominent in the draft-resistance movement who had recently “gone underground” to protest his federal jail sentence. A large seder in Washington included a march that literally performed a politics of nonalignment by shuttling between the White House and the Soviet embassy. A much more intimate gathering in New Haven, Connecticut, coincided with preparations by Yale University faculty, staff, and students to join a May Day demand for the release of all political prisoners, in particular a group of Black Panthers soon to stand trial.

The Exodus narrative at the heart of the Passover haggadah held open a future internationalism especially attractive to the JUJ. It offered, in Staub’s words, a “utopian statement . . . and not a precise program for action.”⁹³ Waskow considered the genre of the haggadah itself to be liberatory, inviting readers to “grapple with contemporary issues of liberation” while serving as a “liberating rather than a hierarchical ceremony” (19). The Freedom Seder privileged Black emancipation as a central strain of modern radicalism, one prominently juxtaposed with twentieth-century struggles against genocide. In this way the Freedom Seder theorizes a broad “multiparticularist” vision of diaspora whose relationality invited links to seemingly discrepant stories of liberation and confrontation. It offered a “liturgy . . . that asserted the liberation of the Jewish People alongside the liberation of other peoples—not theirs as against ours, or ours as against theirs” (19–20). “Multiparticularism” named a connective politics of adjacency to replace a zero-sum politics of competition. Waskow’s retelling of the story of freedom pays particular attention to the revolutionary impetus of Thomas Jefferson, Nat Turner, John Brown, William Lloyd Garrison, and Abraham Lincoln, and emphasizes the words of Eldridge Cleaver and King alongside the testimony of Emmanuel Ringelblum from the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of the early 1940s. Its citational strategy juxtaposed histories otherwise cordoned off from one another. In doing so, the haggadah provided a compelling genre to move between the universally human and the particularly Jewish.

One passage in the Freedom Seder exemplified the haggadah’s logic of relationality by performing a litany that refused narrow spatiotemporal containment:

How much then are we in duty bound to struggle, work, share, give, think, plan, feel, organize, sit-in, speak out, dream, hope, and be on behalf of Mankind! For we must end the genocide [in Vietnam]* [sic], stop the bloody wars that are killing men and women as we sit here, disarm the nations of the deadly weapons that threaten to destroy us all, end the poisoning of our planet, make sure that no one starves, stop police brutality in many countries, free the poets from their jails, educate us all to understand their poetry, liberate us all to explore our inner ecstasies, and encourage and aid us to love one another and share in the human fraternity. All these!

* Insert any that is current—such as “Biafra,” “Black America,” “Russia,” “Poland,” etc.—depending on the situation. (26)

One critic lambasted this passage by chastising its relational approach: “Of all peoples in a world that has lived through Auschwitz, Jews ought to be the last to accept mindlessly the propagandistic black-militant usage of ‘genocide,’ yet for Waskow that terrible term seems an . . . appropriate rubric.”⁹⁴ Yet the seder’s logic of relationality was animated by an ethical orientation toward various sites and social issues on behalf of worldly struggles against genocide. Its presentism embraces a connective political imaginary, one that aimed to articulate itself across discrepant sites of genocide and refused the dominant exceptionalist framing of the Holocaust as the sacralized paradigm par excellence.

In an appendix, “Free Associations,” Waskow includes a wide range of “songs, poems, and proclamations” that have “come freely and vagrantly to mind” (42). In this sense, the text performs its own excess by including “transient” excerpts and inviting the seder to be moved into unforeseeable locales for unforeseen purposes. One such vagrant excerpt is a poem from Marilyn Lowen, who writes, “This PASSOVER / we beseech thee O Lord / Deliver us back into Egypt / that we may join with our / brothers.” Lowen captures the desire by Jews for Urban Justice to trouble Israel’s narrative telos by returning to exile as a way for the state to emerge as an “anti-imperialist Israel at home in the Third World” (59).

Waskow’s theorization of the Jewish diaspora as exemplified by the Freedom Seder opened up a third space for the Jews of “Zion”—a deterritorialized world community—to advance claims for nonviolent liberation and self-determination. On the one hand, the American Jewish establishment were secular apologists for U.S. imperial violence in Southeast Asia, law and order policing, and a reactionary curtailment of social justice. This bourgeois order was in thrall to the pharaohs of American Empire. On the other hand, the “Ideological Hard Left” named a political position ultimately in thrall to a version of the Palestinian nationalist movement committed to what Waskow anxiously called the “abolition of the Israeli state” and the denial of self-determination for the “Israeli people” (56). To envision an “anti-imperialist Israel at home in the Third World,” Waskow disarticulates Zion from Israel. Israel comes to name a political entity encumbered with all the contradictions of sovereign power; Zion, by contrast, names the persistent imaginative kernel of the Jewish diaspora.

In a brief 1970 column in the New York Times, Waskow raised the question of the function and future of the Jewish diaspora in the United States. The wake of the June war, and especially the claiming of the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem, marked a moment unprecedented in two thousand years of Jewish history. At last, writes Waskow, “the Diaspora is no longer a necessary evil.” Waskow makes legible a wide array of diasporic practices that exceeded or ran counter to the telos of state formation. He highlights the tradition of prophetic Judaism whose vocation, like that of the biblical prophet Jonah, is to warn “America to give up the war against Indochina, H-bombs, racism, and pollution of the earth.” He highlights the revival of Hassidism’s ecstatic tradition alongside the internationalist socialism of the Labor Bund, small study-groups and living-room congregations. The turn to a radical Judaism is an expression of an insurgent politics for a revolutionary Jewish diaspora that refuses Zionism’s state-centered telos: “if older Jews can make nothing of the new insurgencies younger ones can make nothing Jewish of anything else.”⁹⁵

As a counterbalance to the telos of Israel as a political state, Waskow returns diaspora Judaism not to Jerusalem but to Egypt. Egypt’s Exodus resonance becomes a crucial intertext through which to imagine a permanent, liminal “long road from the Burning Bush to Sinai,” one that required the Mosaic struggles of “upheaval, agony, regret, as well as joy and triumph” (173). Such struggles leave permanently unresolved the tension between revelation and law. They maintain a wayward openness held out by the Freedom Seder’s appendix of “vagrant” associations and its footnote signaling the timeliness of an ethical commitment to move against genocide writ large. Against the territorializing claims of American liberal inclusion, the Freedom Seder stages how some post-1967 American Jews refused the desires of national incorporation into an imperial state by fashioning an appositional mode of liberation as a reflection of and in solidarity with the long arc of black freedom struggles.

Exilic Conversions and Decolonization

What, then, was Waskow’s revolutionary diasporism if not a refusal of Zionism’s negation of exile? It marked a movement between revelation and law whose open-endedness refused the territorialization of Judaic thought and the exceptionalist ascriptions of American liberal pluralism. Its openness as a praxis of adjacent as opposed to competing liberation struggles ensured that the loggerheads in which other Jewish radicals found themselves might be avoided. Mobilizing a permanent exodus in this way allayed the teleological narrative resolution in the Israeli state, even as practically and politically, the indigenization of Jewish democracy—and hence a reproduction of the exclusions of Israel as a settler state—served as its necessary point of departure.

Waskow’s revolutionary diaspora aimed to rekindle a sense of Zion in the theological vein, one with its own crucial resonances in the archive of Black freedom struggles. At the same time, the intercessionary theological return to wandering in the service of liberation, like much of the anti-imperialist Jewish Left, also tacitly obscured the settler structure of the Israeli people’s own becoming-native, one that persevered beyond the temporal markers of the Holocaust and the June war. In this sense, Waskow’s writings clarify the vicissitudes of American Jewish attachment to Israel as a settler state in the crucible of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Triumphalist color-blind meritocracy, anti-imperialism, recommitted ethno-nationalism, and a revolutionary diasporic ethic were all fashioned in this crucible, haunted by the past-present of Holocaust memory and, even in their silences, all confronting the absent presence of Palestinian subjects endowed with a complex personhood. The politics of comparison run deep in this archive, with imaginative modes of racial relationality providing form and substance to the contradictions of Israel as a liberal settler state whose military supremacy and existential vulnerability were increasingly drawn into the frame of U.S. imperial culture.

What, then, was the texture of a post–civil rights Jewish response to the structural conditions of Palestinian dispossession? Some scholars have turned to the Jewish anti-Zionism of Rabbi Elmer Berger,⁹⁶ or the organization called Breira, Hebrew for “Alternative,” founded in 1973 in express counterpoint to the Israeli Labor Party’s slogan “ain breira,” “there is no alternative,” a purported justification for military occupation. Breira focused its organizing and advocacy on what would become thought of as a two-state solution, which included Israeli territorial concessions granted in negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization.⁹⁷ The emergence of New Jewish Agenda in 1980 has likewise provided a robust point of departure, an organization whose slogan was “a Jewish voice among progressives and a progressive voice among Jews.”⁹⁸ Here, though, I turn to the language of the Jesuit priest and peace activist Daniel Berrigan, who, in a much-discussed keynote address to the 1973 annual convention of the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG), figured himself in America as the quintessential Jew. Having recently completed serving a prison sentence for acts of resistance against the U.S. war in Vietnam, Berrigan addressed the conference from the perspective of an exile—an American insider in perpetual opposition to institutionalized forms of religious and state power, and the forms of expert knowledge production that buttress them: “I am a western Christian,” he says, “in resistance against my government and my church. That position, as I read it, makes me something very much like a Jew.”⁹⁹

The AAUG conference focused on a comparative analysis of settler regimes in Africa and the Arab world and their “illusions of endurance.” It was held in the midst of the October Arab–Israeli War, where the question of how to forestall the perpetuation of state-sanctioned kinetic violence was a pressing one. From this angle of conversion, Berrigan refuses the academic and governmental valuation of “expertise,” noting that the craft of experts in a “consuming and killing culture” is to “fiddle while the world burns” (223). Rather, the moral position of the Jew, in Berrigan’s hands, demands a foundational critique of militarism and dispossession in the explication of injustice, including, especially, in the context of Israel. From this oppositional exilic position, Berrigan narrates how during the first twenty-five years of the state’s formal existence, “the wandering Jew became the settler Jew; the settler ethos became the imperial adventure” (228).

The effect of this geopolitical conversion was that the moral and ethical imperative of Jewish compassion acceded to the tragedy of a settler state that of necessity “should legislate armaments and yet more armaments . . . evictions, uprootings, destruction of goods, imprisonment and terrorism . . . [and] a law of expanding violence” (229). What is to be done in this moribund context of expanding settler violence? Berrigan draws inspiration from Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, and Mahatma Gandhi: to imagine a nonviolent movement for Palestinians to claim en masse the right of return, to claim it in Israel’s harbors and in its embassies and the embassies of the global powers, and to claim it relationally by “welcoming Jews to a community of compassion” (233). Here, Berrigan figures a paradigmatically Jewish notion of exile as one not foundationally committed to the resolution of Jewish exodus but rather as inhabiting a comportment that invites Palestinian conviviality through the express accession to indigenous Palestinian claims. That is, Berrigan glimpses a comportment that American Jewish political imaginaries had so often foreclosed—an exilic practice of decolonization.

Following Daniel Berrigan at the podium at the AAUG convention was another theorist of exile and decolonization—Edward W. Said. It is to Said and the AAUG that I now turn.

4

Arab American Awakening

Edward Said, Area Studies, and Palestine’s Contrapuntal Futures

Until 1967, I didn’t think about myself as anything other than a person going about his work. . . . I was in New York when the Six Day War broke out and was completely shattered. The world as I understood it ended at that moment. I had been in the States for years but it was only now that I began to be in touch with other Arabs. By 1970 I was completely immersed in politics and the Palestinian resistance movement.

—Edward W. Said, quoted in Tariq Ali, “Remembering Edward Said, 1935–2003”

LOOKING BACK, like so many Arabs and Palestinians in the United States, Edward W. Said would say that the June war of 1967 marked a world-shattering breach. The Naksa, or “setback” of the June war contorted and intensified the catastrophic effects of displacement and dispossession, called the Nakba, that Palestinian Arabs experienced two decades earlier. Between 1947 and 1949, over four hundred Arab Palestinian towns and villages were razed and renamed.¹ Nearly 800,000 people were dispersed into a dozen refugee camps around the region and were prohibited from returning; some sought refuge and respite in the United States, Europe, Egypt, and the Gulf States.² For the 150,000 Arabs who remained in the new state of Israel, a legal architecture predicated on military rule legitimated vast restrictions on access to land, resources, and medical and educational infrastructure. The immediate aftermath of the June 1967 War intensified the effects of the Nakba. The onset of the Israeli military occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Sinai Peninsula in the south, and the Golan Heights in the north, expanded the tiered system of rule that maintained a demographic commitment to democracy for Jews and a geographic territorial advantage in the interest of national security. What followed were an expanded regime of differential treatment and an immediate intensification of land expropriation, including, importantly, the creation of Jewish settlements—“facts on the ground”—in strategic locations in what quickly became known as the Occupied Palestinian Territories.³

Mass media reports in the United States framed this as a proxy victory for Americans. The events of the 1967 war were routinely narrated as a story of enlightened Western civilization besting the barbarous inscrutable East yet again, of David’s overwhelming victory in the face of Goliath’s threat of existential annihilation, a swift and definitive statement of Israel’s military strength. By contrast, many Arabs in the United States experienced the June war as a travesty, a shock, or, in Said’s terms, a “thunderbolt,” sparking for many what some scholars have described as an “Arab American awakening.”⁴ Soon after the war, Said, a scholar of comparative literature born in Jerusalem in 1935, was contacted by Palestinian professor of political science Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (born in Jaffa in 1929). Said had met Abu-Lughod as an undergraduate a dozen years earlier, and the two had developed a close friendship. Abu-Lughod was editing a special issue of the Arab League’s monthly magazine, Arab World, meant to analyze the June war from an Arab perspective for an English-speaking audience, and he invited Said to contribute, even though, aside from a brief article on Nasser in his college newspaper,⁵ the specialist in the modern British novel had never written publicly about the region. The essay Said authored was “The Arab Portrayed,” published in the Fall 1968 issue of Arab World, and reprinted once, a year later, in a collection of essays also edited by Abu-Lughod.⁶ Reflecting on its immediate reception, the Arab American sociologist Elaine Hagopian described the essay as “not only sensitive and brilliant, but it represented what all of us of Arab origin felt.”⁷ “The Arab Portrayed” has since receded into the ephemera of a massive bibliography. Yet a situated rereading is revelatory. The slim work became, in Said’s words, “the origin of my book,”⁸ the one published ten years later, the one dedicated to Ibrahim and Janet Abu-Lughod, the one inarguably shaping both scholarly and popular debates about the relationship between knowledge and power, the function of cultural hegemony for empire, the role of criticism and public intellectual life, and, most pressingly, the place of Israel and Palestine in U.S. imperial culture. Orientalism was published as a trade book in 1978 to great fanfare. It was read, reviewed, and debated in the popular press and in scholarly journals alike. It almost immediately disrupted canons, inaugurated academic fields, and put Eurocentrism and its uptake by imperial states and their agents on notice.

To trace Orientalism’s beginnings back to its kernel in “The Arab Portrayed” is not only to consider the book’s “seditious life,” as Gyan Prakash once put it, but also to demonstrate how this notable precursor analyzes, intervenes in, and is responsive to the shifting racialization of Arabs in the United States.⁹ In what follows, rather than extract an analytical framework from Orientalism to illuminate the power effects of another discursive formation, or embed Orientalism’s insights in my own conceptual architecture, I read Said’s work symptomatically, situating a key (if underelaborated) moment in Orientalism as part of a growing transnational analysis of race and empire by scholars of Arab descent in the United States. Locating Said’s intervention alongside strands of analysis developed by the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG) confronts the period’s categorical dismissal of the Palestinians as a heterogeneous people. It allows us to render critical the symbolic, material, and ontological armature that gave such a dismissal its force while fashioning Palestine as a figure of ineluctable relationality, a site that Said crafted through a form of humanism whose ethic of alterity is matched only by its political commitment to a practice of nondominating and noncoercive decolonization.¹⁰

Worldly Theorizing

The lines of inquiry and critique opened up by Said’s expansive oeuvre, and especially by Orientalism, mark nothing less than an epistemic shift in the U.S. academy. As a collective knowledge project, the field of ethnic studies (as well as many others) cannot but labor in a complex relation to Said’s work. Orientalism has complemented the field’s sustained critique of the institutionalization of an objectifying knowledge of racial “otherness” produced in the service of Euro-American empire. The field’s insurgent commitments to justice likewise find an enduring inspiration in Said’s abiding humanism. Said’s own praxis models an activist scholarship with a wide-ranging public intellectual face, one wagering against the quietude of a scholarly withdrawal from the field of representation, one grounded in a deeply humanist liberation for those deemed less than human not simply or solely by the Herrenvolk nationalisms of white supremacy but also by elite knowledge producers themselves. When Said revisited the aims and impact of Orientalism in the mid-1980s, he recognized the book’s deep (if implicit) affinity with an epistemic shift in university knowledge production. The book addressed

similar issues raised by the experiences of feminism or women’s studies, black or ethnic studies, socialist and anti-imperialist studies, all of which take for their point of departure the right of formerly un- or mis-represented human groups to speak for and represent themselves in domains defined, politically and intellectually, as normally excluding them, usurping their signifying and representing functions, overriding their historical reality.¹¹

Said thus situates Orientalism in the historic breach in U.S. universities through which interventions into its world-ordering Eurocentrism were being mobilized. The area studies models to make the difference of the Cold War periphery knowable to U.S. state interest had by this moment stabilized in a particular imperial hegemony. Ethnic studies in this sense was thus what Immanuel Wallerstein calls one of the “unintended consequences” of area studies. Ethnic studies articulated claims on the university to produce and circulate forms of knowledge by and for peoples in the United States for whom area studies frameworks signified racialized notions of development, modernization, and benevolent intervention, to say nothing of their instrumentalization to justify U.S. imperial violence across the third world.¹²

Yet the specific uptake of Orientalism into U.S. ethnic studies has of necessity required the argument to travel.¹³ Its sustained critique of Euro-American imperial culture devastates the purported apolitical claims of scholarly neutrality, yet its assiduous anti-essentialism critically departs from the identitarian nationalisms shaping early formations of the U.S. third world Left. Some saw Orientalism’s uptake as exacerbating, as opposed to resolving or contesting, knotty theoretical concerns sedimented in those academic disciplinary domains heretofore predicated on normative exclusions. While a genealogy of Eurocentrism’s dominating mode resonated with the early insurgent aims of a third world college, for some, its singular mapping of domination through the canon of Euro-American humanist critique left little room to conceptualize the agency, let alone the theorizing, of colonized peoples, or for that matter, the internal contradictions of orientalism itself.¹⁴ The spatiotemporal coordinates of the text’s theorization of race, centered as they are on a largely Southwest Asian cartography, do not map easily onto the analytical currents of social movement that bring ethnic studies into the U.S. university. Nor, as an array of scholars of postcolonial feminism argues, does the book provide a situated account of orientalism’s articulation to either gender or sexuality.¹⁵

As a consequence, there are uneasy silences in the book’s explanatory framework. Absent are Eurocentrism’s origins in the differential racialization of Muslims and Jews during the Reconquista, and the imprint of such race making and gender making on the conquest of the Americas.¹⁶ The book does not address the epochal role of transatlantic slavery and its abolition—or the traditions of insurrection animating freedom struggles beyond the ambit of the property relation—that shaped British, French, and U.S. knowledge regimes.¹⁷ For a book that centers the Napoleonic project of colonial domination in Egypt as profoundly encyclopedic, its silence around the Haitian Revolution is stark. And shifting the analytical gaze from British, French, and (to a lesser extent) U.S. imperial interests in the “Near East” to its interests in the “Far East” would require a more complex engagement with the race-making processes of transpacific labor migration and the pervasive violence of twentieth-century U.S. warfare from the Philippines to Southeast Asia to Korea and Japan.¹⁸ Indeed, while the book closes by taking up orientalism’s “latest phase” in the United States, this section’s focus rarely moves beyond a critical investigation of the emergence and function of Middle East Area studies frameworks after World War II. Earlier manifestations of orientalism in the United States, or outside the production of elite knowledges, are beyond the scope of the text.¹⁹ Under the heading “Criticism,” the ethnic studies historian Ronald Takaki jotted down on his own copy that the book “left out Africans”; its “monolithic” and “one dimensional” representations of orientalist objects of knowledge could not account for the “complicated contradictions” of a figure like Shakespeare’s Caliban; and the field of representation was “top down, not from below,” even while the analysis emphasized race—it is based on “white sources”—and “overlooked class.”²⁰

While Said subsequently pursued some of these vectors of relationality—most methodically in Culture and Imperialism (Orientalism’s self-described sequel)—what is of interest here is how a genealogy of Orientalism warrants reading its emergence in the shifting complexity of race and knowledge in the nascent post–civil rights, postoccupation, and post-structuralist moment. For Said, the life-shattering event of June 1967 occurred in a messy context indeed. It initiated a critical investigation of the institutional apparatus whose effects were imprinted in the “smoldering extracts” of anti-Arab racism littering the popular media.²¹ But it also invited a critical interrogation of the powers of meaning making, a project that Said would underscore required simultaneous investigation. The intervention of French post-structuralism punctured the thin sheen of empiricist conceptions of a natural or authentic agential subject grounding so much social scientific scholarship in area studies. Said engaged this linguistic turn with depth, curiosity, and a critical dose of wariness. It demanded recognizing the formative role of ambiguity in meaning making—wherein the lack, absence, or exclusion in the cut of meaning left the trace of a radical indeterminacy. Michel Foucault’s archaeological perspective invited a critical mode that tracked modernity’s discursive productivity, its will to classify, order, distribute, specify. The Althusserian critique positioned the subject’s formation in relation to the state’s arsenal of repression and ideology, and ideology’s own reified reality production in the form of popular mythologies. It is not inconsequential that Said was among the first scholars involved in the elaboration and circulation of these concepts in the U.S. academy in the early 1970s, publishing two important early articles on Foucault²² and reviewing for the New York Times English-language translations of early essays by Roland Barthes.²³

Said took the simultaneous transformations in U.S. theorizing, intensified Palestinian suffering, and a broad field of anti-Arab racism as an invitation to “rethink what I was doing, and try to make more connections in my life between things that had been either suppressed, or denied, or hidden.”²⁴ Such reevaluation animated a second trajectory in Said’s writing. In an essay titled “Beginnings,” published in 1968 and anchoring his first major postdissertation project Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), Said meditates on the variegated processes, meanings, and effects of the act of beginning. He conceptualizes origins as an a priori fiction, albeit a necessary one, and one that is intended and willed into the world. Beginnings project a specific intention to produce meaning, even as the result of what is begun is indeterminate and unclear from the outset. “Words,” Said writes, “stand at the beginning, are the beginning, of a series of substitutions.”²⁵ From there, Said advances an elaboration of Foucault’s concepts of “adjacency, complementarity, and correlation” to comprehend how discourse both condenses and traverses a wide range of meanings, covering a vast field of linguistic territory even as it delimits modes and methods of representation (209). These are “anti-dynastic” concepts, Said argues, distributed horizontally and discontinuously, edging one against the next. “Instead of a source we have the intentional beginning, instead of a story a construction” (66).

Post-structuralism taken up in this way enabled Said (and many others in the U.S. academy) to interrogate how knowledge claims garner their truth-value, the symbolic architecture that gives them meaning, and the force relations that enunciate them. Such insights were ethically warranted and politically necessary, and Orientalism bears this profound theoretical imprint. Importantly, though, theory also had to retain a purchase on the social, material, and communal worlds that conditioned its production. Said’s work registers a wariness of the near monasticism of theory’s uptake in the United States. Its rarified vocabulary and permanent deferral of an engagement with a general audience left the field of politics open to all manner of crude reductionism and petty nationalism.

In this sense, Said’s work clarifies the convergence of forces against which the question of Palestine was persistently broached. On the one hand, Palestinians, rendered otherwise absent from frameworks of history, agency, and subjectivity via dominant Zionist and Holocaust narratives, had begun claiming a national, historical, and representational reality. Palestinians were demanding admittance “into one’s consciousness as a human quality,” as Said presciently puts it in “The Arab Portrayed” (5). Yet U.S. literary theory’s attempt to emancipate itself from questions of subjectivity and agency had approached social reality in a “mystical mode” that had inadvertently ceded the domain of the political to state interests.²⁶ The result was a form of criticism whose rarified argumentation maintained specialized silos and scholarly commitments to noninterference. It created a talismanic quality to its modes of address, which functioned in tandem with state agents to narrow both the scope and the audience for representation. Unmoored from the messy, fleshly materiality of race and power, such theory was symptomatic of what Said called in 1982 the “Age of Reagan,”²⁷ whose devastating effect exposed Palestine to another form of epistemological transfer, this time theorized out of existence.²⁸ Much of Said’s work recasts this problem by reclaiming an oppositional stance for the intellectual, one whose worldly and secular compass challenged not only those whose knowledge production served the interests of imperial domination but also those whose hermetic modes of critique verged on militant orthodoxy.²⁹

Among the domains where Said opposed theory’s monasticism was in the constructivist turn in race theory. Against reductive accounts of a delegitimized biologistic notion of race, or the ontological essentialisms that yoked one’s actions to one’s supposed unchanging being, a range of scholars in the 1980s theorized race’s “reality” as a reflection of socially produced meanings inscribed in signifiers of racial difference.³⁰ Post-structuralism’s antifoundationalist insights did much to return the question of race to the social field of power, discourse, and ideology; its impact on critical investigations of race was—and remains—wide-ranging. The 1985 double issue of the journal Critical Inquiry on “‘race,’ writing, and difference” was symptomatic of this line of argument, and Said’s contribution to this issue was especially incisive. Wary that the material violence of race would be obfuscated by an ahistorical textualism, or that the abstraction of difference would bracket the violence of imperial power, Said situated his analysis of difference in the context of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. When engaged from this perspective, “difference” operated on multiple registers with profound human effects. Difference named an opposition to both homogenization and “rigidly enforced and policed separation.”³¹ It also highlighted the Palestinian argument addressed to Israel and the Arab states, that “no one has an inherent right to use difference as an instrument to relegate the rights of others to an inferior or lesser status” (41). Said leveraged difference to analyze the specious narrative of Israeli exceptionalism and political Zionism’s fantasy of total separation. The conditions of such a critique, Said suggested, emerged precisely from “an awareness of the supervening actuality of ‘mixing,’ of crossing over, of stepping beyond boundaries” (43). In this way, Said sought to wrest difference from the riptide of textualism, routing it instead toward a worldly nondominating vision. “The logic of the present,” he writes emphatically, “is a logic either of unacceptable stagnation or annihilation—that, at least, seems certain to me. Different logics are necessary” (57).

Contrapuntal Variations

One of Said’s decisive elaborations of difference as signifying nondominating relationality is found in his critical concept of contrapuntalism. Contrapuntalism is a methodological approach and a reading practice elaborated most fully in Culture and Imperialism. In this self-described “sequel” to Orientalism, Said tracked how modern Western culture’s most canonized works of literature reflect the imprint of imperial modalities, sometimes obscured, as in Albert Camus, or fully in view as in Joseph Conrad. Lodged within them is an imaginative geography of dominance structured by hierarchical conceptions of space, place, subjectivity, and economic mobility. These novels reveal just how crucial imperialism has been to what it means to be modern; indeed, Said claims, “without empire, I would go so far as saying, there is no European novel as we know it.”³² The second half of Culture and Imperialism analyzes narratives of resistance produced in the broad sweep of the decolonizing world. The writings of Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, C. L. R. James, Léopold Senghor, Claude McKay, Chinua Achebe, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, George Antonious, and more recently the postcolonial critics Partha Chatterjee and Ranajit Guha offered what Said terms “adversarial internationalization in an age of continued imperial structures” (69). In making this argument, Said made legible an archive spanning both the West’s most treasured artifacts—those that had made the West recognizable to itself and had legitimated an imperial common sense—and those that had routinely challenged the West’s claims to dominance through new forms, new modes of consciousness, and new ways of seeing.

Said borrowed the term contrapuntalism from the vocabulary of Western classical music to theorize a reading practice adequate to the complexity of this world-belting archive. A contrapuntal methodology enabled Said to make legible what he calls “intertwined and overlapping histories” (16) to do the crucial work to “think through and interpret together experiences that are discrepant, each with its particular agenda and pace of development, its own internal formations, its internal coherence and system of external relationships, all of them co-existing together” (32). In interviews and numerous written works, Said cited Glenn Gould’s influence on this methodological formulation. Indeed, Said’s first essay devoted to music criticism, published in 1983, centers on what Said calls Gould’s “contrapuntal vision.”³³ Gould’s performance of Bach’s fugues provided a framework to think about the complex interlocking of discrepant formal and thematic elements. “In the same way,” Said (himself an accomplished pianist) continues, “we can read and interpret English novels, for example, whose engagement (usually suppressed for the most part) with the West Indies or India, say, is shaped and perhaps even determined by the specific history of colonization, resistance, and finally native nationalism” (51).

Importantly, the term has at least two other valences in Said’s work. The first elucidates an ethical comportment to approaching the question of historico-political subject formation. In Said’s first essay specifically taking on the question of Palestine, “The Palestinian Experience,” written in 1968–69, contrapuntalism bears significant analytical weight. There Said narrated what an ethical commitment to difference must look like in the context of Palestine struggles. The essay describes how from Said’s own experience, Israelis and Americans seem to share a baseline adherence to the idea that maintaining Israel’s status quo is required to ensure what he calls “the Jewish rhythm of life” (35; emphasis in original). In trying to understand what such an evocative musical metaphor means in practice, Said suggests one of two possible interpretations: the first is that the phrase “stands for a fear that the Holocaust could be repeated, which makes of Israel . . . what the English would call a funk-hole for every still-dispersed Jew” (35). Figuring the Jewish state in this way conceives of the globe as a permanent battlefield and Israel the necessary shelter for a perennially vulnerable Jewish diaspora. This position was widely embraced in the years immediately after the 1967 war. The other interpretation suggests that preserving the Jewish rhythm of life is a way to evade the “no less real truth that the Jewish rhythm has supplanted a more inclusive one, the Palestinian, which has and would allow Christian, Moslem, and Jew to live in counterpoint with each other” (35; emphasis added). Here counterpoint signifies, if all too briefly, a nondominating and noncoercive connection across difference, a commitment to a Palestinian ethos of inclusive heterogeneity with deep historical and regional roots.

Importantly, this ethical relation required substantive inquiry into both the ways that political subjects coconstitute one another, and how connective histories are formulated and narrated. In a position that he elaborated in the context of the October 1973 War, and to which I return at the end of the chapter, Said claimed strenuously that the Jew and the Arab were figures of inextricable historical and political entanglement. Delivered as a keynote address to the 1973 Association of Arab American University Graduates convention, alongside Rev. Daniel Berrigan and the Israeli human rights activist Israel Shahak, Said’s “Arab and Jew” made the evocative claim that for the Jew and the Arab, “each is the other.” Such an entanglement was the result of a situation in which “Palestinian Arabs and Diaspora Jews were victims of power and historical circumstances that made violence or the total absence of any meaningful engagement the only two alternatives.”³⁴ To fully register such a position meant laboring forthrightly in the long shadow of the Holocaust. While such a position was only glimpsed in the 1973 speech, in a 1997 essay, “Bases for Coexistence,” Said underscored this imperative reflection on historical entanglement as an ethical obligation. Any lasting commitment to coexistence required Arabs and Jews to contend with the Holocaust in all its complex gravity and excess of meaning. “We must think our histories together,” Said implored, “however difficult that may be, in order for there to be a common future.”³⁵ Such “thinking together” required a relational approach, Said averred, built on an ethical commitment to forge connection against the paucity either of shallow comparison or of hasty equation. In Israel and Palestine, he argues, “mass extermination and mass dispossession are connected” (208). The critical task is to make legible those connections, to live with them beyond the confines of state narratives or those of disavowal or forgetting. One must be “true to the differences between Jew and Palestinian, but true also to the common history of different struggle and unequal survival that links them” (208). This variation on a critical contrapuntal theme invited a relational engagement with the Holocaust, one that, at least in the immediate context of the post-1967 moment, many American Jews and American Arabs were hesitant to take up.³⁶

The final variation on contrapuntalism appears in Said’s evocative writings on exile. Notably, Said named the breach of 1967 as a catalyst for himself to “think and write contrapuntally.”³⁷ In “Between Worlds,” an essay written as he completed his book-length memoir, Said intimates that his own post-1967 shift in historical and political consciousness—his engagement with exile—is embodied in his own individual identity produced in that space “between worlds,” one that required that he “use the disparate halves of my experience, as an Arab and as an American, to work with and also against each other” (562). This more personal conception of counterpoint emerged in the context of a broader collaborative struggle to bring the effects of racism and imperialism in Palestine into view in the United States. That is to say, Said was not working in isolation. Rather, he was surrounded by and in conversation with a community (albeit one at times small, embattled, and crosshatched by dissensus) of Arab and Arab American scholars, many of whom were claiming a critical relation to their surroundings.

Given these three valences for the term, Orientalism’s emergence in a social and intellectual history of a nascent Arab American studies should be read contrapuntally, locating the text within the “overlapping experiences and intertwined histories” of U.S. imperial culture. Doing so reveals much about Orientalism’s place in a broader field of struggle over race, representation, and knowledge production. The task that Said and many of his AAUG interlocutors took on after 1967, he said, was “to make the case for Palestinian presence, to say that there was a Palestinian people and that, like all others, it had a history, a society, and, most important, a right to self-determination.”³⁸ The AAUG’s commitment to organized political activity, humanistic scholarship, and the public enactment of Palestinian presence complemented Said’s own practice and is thus quite clearly part of Orientalism’s emergence, even as such commitments are often hidden in the text itself. Nor can one separate these commitments from the other aspects of Said’s variegated culture work, including his critical engagement with post-structuralist conceptions of language and the human, and his robust theorization of exile as an intellectual and a historical position. Each aspect of Said’s thought is intertwined in his response to the 1967 war, a response that departed from, as well as critiqued, what Timothy Brennan calls Said’s “willing and untroubled assimilation” in the United States.³⁹ “It is,” notes Ranajit Guha, “as if the dissonance of life call[ed] for a new dialogue between life and literature in the light of the experience of exile.”⁴⁰

Of course, Arabs have had a long and tenuous relationship with U.S. imperial culture’s race-making processes.⁴¹ While such processes are reflected in the weighty catalog of biased journalism and demeaning popular cultural stereotypes, the signal insight from “The Arab Portrayed” and elaborated in Orientalism is that testifying to this abysmal litany requires a broad investigation of the historical production and sedimentation of race in its various structural and institutional settings.

The (Connecting) Link Between

Framing the dissonance between Arab and American as “between worlds” has another genealogy that Said never substantively engaged, yet its presence indelibly marks the contingent relation to national incorporability that Brennan and Guha reference. This genealogy is registered in the Arabic term hamzat al-wasl, a grammatical concept found in descriptions of the cultural and political activity of Amin al-Rihani, one of the most prominent Arab critics of Zionism in the United States prior to World War II. Like Said, Rihani was a prodigious and ardently secular writer and activist. He routinely spoke about Palestine’s perilous future, on college campuses, before Congress, and at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Rihani also held private meetings with figures of political prominence, including Teddy Roosevelt in 1917, Secretary of State Henry Stimson in 1929, and President Herbert Hoover in 1931.⁴² These activities alongside his literary and historical works were part of Rihani’s larger commitment to be, in the words of the Arabic literary historian George Saydah, “the hamzat al-wasl between East and West.” The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic defines this concept as a grammatical term denoting both a conjunction and the spoken “glottal stop” used to make the conjunction heard. Unlike the hamzat al-qat, which signifies a word meant to stand on its own, uncoupled from the words surrounding it, hamzat al-wasl signals the fusion of an end, a gap, and a continuation. It is the silence following the end of an articulation that performs the connective work of linking it to another articulation. In the context of a specific utterance, the hamzat al-wasl becomes, according to Hans Wehr, the “(connecting) link between.”⁴³ The ambivalence raised through the use of parenthesis and ellipses is suggestive: What would it mean to have a linkage that did not connect, or did something other than connect? What kinds of grammatical, political, and historical formations would this link be found in between?

Arab incorporability into frameworks of U.S. national belonging has long been understood as tenuous and probationary, precariously located within the contradictions of a normative if also flexible structure of whiteness. It is figured suggestively by the anthropologist Suad Joseph in her notion of the “Arab-”: “not quite free, not quite white, not quite male, not quite persons in the civil body of the nation.”⁴⁴ U.S. orientalism has long framed Arab American subjects as both deviant and desirous, inscrutable yet infinitely knowable. Recent scholarship has clarified how the historically contingent relationship between race and U.S. imperial culture provides a crucial lens for analyzing Arab and Arab American life. While such scholarship has grown as a consequence of the early twenty-first-century “war on terror,” the formative scholarship of this sort, focusing specifically on anti-Arab racism, took the first Gulf War as its point of departure.⁴⁵ The racialized discourses of Ronald Reagan’s first war against international terrorism in the early 1980s set the stage for George H. W. Bush’s first Gulf War and Bill Clinton’s devastating sanctions regime against Iraq in the 1990s, which scholars like Nabeel Abraham saw as inextricably linked to the proliferation of anti-Arab hate crimes, government surveillance, employment discrimination, negative media representations, demeaning political discourses, and the pervasive stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood cinema.

Given the prevalence of phenotype as a hegemonic signifier of racial difference, combined with a U.S. federal census regime that had, since 1978, classified peoples of Middle Eastern and North African descent as white, scholars interested in making visible the seemingly systemic aspects of anti-Arab discrimination have innovated key analytics. Some scholars crafted the term political racism as a way to frame the demonization and discrimination of Arab Americans predicated either on their express or presumed opposition to U.S. foreign policy.⁴⁶ Others have developed the framework of “cultural racism” to analyze how differences that travel under the sign of “culture”—religious practice, language, presuppositions around morality and kinship structures—become the avenues for calibrating social hierarchy.⁴⁷ Nadine Naber has recently theorized how the imperial racism to which Arabs in the United States and in the Middle East have been exposed has linked cultural racisms to “nation-based racism,” where the commitments to a national liberation struggle that run counter to U.S. hegemony are used to justify intensified exposure to a coercive state structure that calibrates security as a preemptive measure.⁴⁸

For many of the scholars of Arab descent that came to forge the AAUG, the promise of liberal inclusion was unfulfilled. A sense of belonging connected them to Arab homelands often in the crosshairs of ascendant U.S. imperial interests. Civil rights reforms created potential avenues to seek federal discrimination protections, though such cases were often “invisible” because Arabs were not considered a legally “protected class.” Likewise, while the narrative of Black civil rights struggles offered powerful inspiration and sometimes openings to cross-racial solidarities and support, the impact of the June war of necessity internationalized and complicated the civil rights framework. Additionally, with the passage of the 1965 Hart–Celler immigration reform act, the juridical domains of civil rights and immigration reform globalized liberal logics of “formal equality.” The Hart–Celler Act legislated a new set of what the historian Mae Ngai calls “inclusionary” quotas that were evenly distributed across the globe. Nonetheless, this liberalization underscored the “exclusionary” racialized framework for conceiving of the globe’s population. Hart–Celler kept with the racial logic that had shaped U.S. immigration policy for much of the century insofar as it maintained the primacy of the nation’s “ethno-racial mapping” by retaining a numerical ceiling for immigration from specific countries, rehashing in the language of liberal reform the racialization of national identity. The Act, writes Ngai, “furthered the trend begun in the 1920s that placed questions of territoriality, border control, and abstract categories of status at the center of immigration law.”⁴⁹ In this way, the increase in Arab immigration dovetailed with the intensification of border security, policing, and racial profiling, and these all functioned as crucial tools in managing the national population.

Expanded Arab and Muslim immigration was framed by a dominant U.S. national narrative that figured Muslim religious practice as exceeding the underlying Christian tenets of the nation, and Arab ethnic identity as signifying imperial enmity.⁵⁰ In the late 1960s and 1970s the popularized racialization of Arab nationalism transmuted into the overdetermined discourse of “Muslim terror” alongside U.S. interventionist foreign policy articulated to the Israeli state. This period was marked by a highly charged concatenation of intranational and international race-making practices, setting the stage for the intensification of anti-Arab racisms in the 1990s and the 2000s. In this period, the figures of the Arab immigrant, the Islamic fundamentalist, the “terrorist,” the Palestinian, and the “non-Western” were routinely fused. Edward Said, in the immediate aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, wrote convincingly of the instrumentalist cultural racism produced by the mass media, academic scholarship, and policy circles, that generated so-called expert knowledge about Islam. The purportedly premodern, or even antimodern Islamic world, with its “irrationality” and “inscrutability,” its propensity for “fundamentalism” and “terrorism,” posed a danger to U.S. national security and thus required observation, regulation, and intervention.⁵¹ For Said, the modes of mass media coverage of dramatic geopolitical events like the June 1967 War, the October 1973 War, the 1973–75 oil crisis, the revolution in Iran, and the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979–80 all helped solidify this racialized conception of “Arab-Islamic culture.”

Punctuating the U.S. media landscape were high-profile acts of violence in solidarity with Palestine, from Sirhan Sirhan’s assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 to Leila Khaled and “Skyjack Sunday” in 1970, Black September and the “Munich Massacre” in 1972, and Entebbe in 1976. The expression of Palestinian national aspirations through dramatic public performances of violence became so much a priori evidence of Islam’s—and Palestinians’—essential propensity to violence, readily conscripted into imperial racism’s articulation of cultural and nation-based racisms. This analytical collapse was further sedimented in the suturing of U.S. neoconservatism—whose early iterations focused on the unbridgeable fissures between Black people and Jews in the domestic sphere—to Israeli discourses on terrorism. This ideological fusion was registered most clearly in Terrorism: How the West Can Win (1986), a collection of essays edited by the Israeli “terrorism expert” and future leader of the Likud Party Benjamin Netanyahu, with contributions from neoconservative stalwarts like Norman Podhoretz, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan alongside Israeli military icons Moshe Arens, Yitzhak Rabin, and Netanyahu himself. Said, in a review of the collection, adroitly termed this the discursive production of the “essential terrorist.” “Do we really believe,” asks Said, “that Arabs and Moslems have terrorism in their genes?”⁵²

In the Crosshairs of Area Studies

The AAUG also emerged in close counterpoint to American academic scholarship that claimed disinterestedness in the political landscape even as it was organized under the rubric of U.S. national strategic necessity. Reckoning with this counterpoint clarifies how the articulation of knowledges that the AAUG would come to produce are, in Wallerstein’s terms, part of area studies’ “unintended consequences.” Its founding occurred proximate to the Twenty-Seventh Conference of the International Congress of Orientalists (ICO), a convention held in mid-August 1967, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Registration for the ICO conference totaled nearly 2,500, and the meeting was the first for the ICO in the United States; indeed, with the exception of earlier meetings in New Delhi and Algiers, the Ann Arbor event was the first that the ICO convened outside Europe.⁵³ As is clear from the comments delivered during the conference’s inaugural session, scholars were tasked with forcefully delinking the political from the intellectual, power from knowledge, and the prescriptive from the analytical. ICO officers declared quite simply that “the International Congress of Orientalists is not a political forum” (24), that “an international scholarly organization can fulfill its purpose only by adhering steadfastly to scholarship and remaining free of politics” (33). The president of the Congress, W. Norman Brown, explicitly requested that political issues be avoided at the sessions: “The Organizing Committee considers that the tradition of the Congress not to take a stand on non-scholarly subjects has been a wise one and is one which the present Congress should continue to observe” (33–34). The presumptive bracketing of the “scholarly” from the worldliness of geopolitics, at a meeting held only months after the June war, to say nothing of the major riots that had roiled Detroit only weeks earlier, expressed precisely the investments of an imperial episteme in the fetishization of abstract neutrality.

Yet, as the ICO president would also elaborate, the particular contours of U.S. scholarship on “the Orient” was deeply imbricated in Cold War politics, making scholars in the United States uniquely positioned to conduct pertinent research on the Middle East. The proliferation of area studies programs was bolstered by legislation passed in 1958 by the U.S. Congress. Originally enacted as an emergency measure, the National Defense Education Act, or NDEA, was crafted as a response to Soviet successes in the space race.⁵⁴ The express purpose of NDEA was to “give assistance in various forms to individuals, and to States and their subdivisions, in order to ensure trained manpower of sufficient quality and quantity to meet the national defense needs of the United States.” The specter of Sputnik I and II, both launched in 1957, was used as a rationale to overhaul the funding of education in the United States under the aegis of national security. The NDEA sought to produce experts in strategically useful forms of knowledge not only in the subjects of mathe-matics and science—subjects deemed crucial to competing in the space race—but also in the humanities. Title VI of the NDEA, “Language Development,” focused on funding university-based language and area centers to support the study of modern foreign languages, as well as the “history, economics, geography, and so on [sic]” of foreign regions of interest. The rapid proliferation of Title VI centers, and their analogs funded by private foundations, was predicated on an imaginative geography drawn through the framework of national security, where the globe could be carved into distinct units that, using the abstract principles of statistical analysis and political economy, could be studied by the U.S. state.

Since the ICO was meeting for the first time in the United States, Brown traced an institutional history of the development of “‘language and area’ programs.” Brown celebrated these programs as a national strategic response to the enormous social and political upheavals in the wake of World War II. These programs, Brown recounted, were funded “with the cooperation at first of private agencies, later of the federal government through the Office of Education” (32). He noted that there was varying opinion early on among the programs’ developers about the “need to combine the modern and ‘practical,’ the technical and the utilitarian, with the traditional and humanistic, the classical and cultural, the philosophic and aesthetic.” A consensus developed that “such a combination was the best approach to the study of foreign areas.” Such a form of study of the “Orient” was “peculiarly cultivated in the United States,” a form Brown figured as “a coin with both sides well modeled and burnished, neither of which can exist without the other” (32). In this way, Brown signaled area studies’ profoundly political and strategic development and deployment of knowledge. Yet the institutional and material context, and their corresponding national and geopolitical interests informing such knowledge production, were presumed to not interfere in the production of “objective” knowledge.

AAUG: A Nascent Arab American Studies

The above story of the emergence of U.S. area studies is a well-traveled one. Its basic contours bear emphasizing precisely because they clarify how the nascent formation of Arab American studies was shaped in response to the epistemic imperatives of national security, ones expressed all the more emphatically amid the “world-shattering” moment following the 1967 war. For many Arab Americans, the widespread national sentiment surrounding the war, that Americans were victors by proxy, was devastating and deeply alienating. Scholars of Arab descent saw in this “thunderbolt” the need to develop analyses that ran counter to area studies frameworks, a necessity that was underscored further during the post-1973 oil crisis and the U.S. economic downturn.

During the ICO meeting, the Syrian sociologist Rashid Bashshur invited several academics of Arab origin to his home for an informal meeting to discuss the possibility of developing a scholarly organization that could effectively respond to the postwar expression of anti-Arab racism. Bashshur’s invitees were particularly concerned with what kinds of knowledge could be produced in this context. An outline for the AAUG was drawn up that evening. The AAUG was to “operate as an educational and cultural association [whose] activities would and should have significant political implications and consequences.”⁵⁵ They sketched out five goals for the organization: to contribute intellectual and professional skills for the transformation of the Arab world; to develop an alternative, “scientific and accurate,” scholarly literature about Arabs in the United States and the Arab world; to build a national organization devoted to making Arabs in the United States less vulnerable to racist police and surveillance practices; to model a viable Pan-Arab nationalism; and to serve as a vehicle for the overall improvement in the relationship between the United States and the Arab world.⁵⁶ A charter document was drawn up to support these goals, and signatories included Bashshur, the engineering professor Adnan Aswad, the Arab studies scholar Hassan Haddad, the attorney Abdeen Jabara, the historian and political scientist Hisham Sharabi, and the political scientist Michael Suleiman. The AAUG was officially established at a meeting arranged by Bashshur and Jabara in Chicago at the end of the 1967, in the shadow of the first annual conference of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA). Among the AAUG’s early and influential members was Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, who was a driving force behind the organization in the years to come and who recruited notable scholars of Arab descent, including Edward Said, to participate in the organization.

The AAUG’s archive of published works—its dozens of books, pamphlets, newsletters, advertisements, and so forth—reveals a nascent version of Arab American studies that labored in the shadow of area studies’ epistemes and rapidly transforming post-1967 processes of racialization. One strand of knowledge production investigated how U.S. imperial statecraft and Israeli military occupation in the Middle East had significant tangible repercussions in the United States. In doing so, part of the AAUG’s knowledge production informed what would be recognized today as a transnational analysis of race and empire. Investigations of what would come to be called anti-Arab racism in the United States were, in the formative years of the AAUG, concerned with U.S. foreign policy in the region, a sense of nonbelonging brought on by the proliferation of negative media and educational representation, employment discrimination, and state surveillance and harassment of Arab Americans based on their political views.

One of the AAUG’s guiding principles was that the American public was on the whole composed of what Abdeen Jabara termed “basically fair minded people,” but that a mix of anti-Arab misrepresentation, false information, and demeaning stereotypes shaped their consent to harmful U.S. policies. The AAUG could serve as a “professional association to counter the stereotypes and misinformation.” At the same time, the AAUG could also provide what Jabara called the “true facts about what had happened to the Palestinians.” The organization often publicly centered a strain of Palestinian nationalism committed to the revolutionary transformation of Jewish-Arab relations in historic Palestine. While some in the organization, like M. Cherif Bassiouni, saw this practice as a “non-starter,”⁵⁷ the organization was capacious enough to maintain and grow despite such political differences. The association could deepen the research and provide a platform from which to circulate knowledge about Palestinians and the broader Arab world, to make publicly audible a “voice that had heretofore been silent.”⁵⁸ As Baha Abu-Laban, a longtime member, put it in recent reflections, the early organizers were “sensitized to the need to challenge racism as a result of the struggles of African Americans for civil rights.”⁵⁹ At the same time, the possible coalitional linkages opened up by an antiracist commitment were not always viewed as strengthening the organization. As Bashshur put it in his 2007 reflections, “I thought that seeking support from other disenfranchised groups and communities would dilute our efforts, detract from our primary objectives and reduce the potential for success. Worse yet, it would dismiss the legitimacy of our perspective in mainstream American public opinion.”⁶⁰ Just as analysis of the origins and aims of anti-Arab stereotypes was not preordained in the organization, neither were strategies as to how to collectively combat them. Intra-organizational differences surrounded questions of scholarly neutrality, the privileging of the Palestine question, and the strategic need to build coalitions with other aggrieved communities.

Such differences did not preclude the AAUG from becoming a prolific vehicle for producing and circulating knowledge. It routinely published a newsletter and brief “information papers,” most often regarding Palestine and Palestinians—including one authored by Jabara on the Zionism as racism debates at the United Nations. It also published a wide range of monographs, often drawing from scholars’ presentations delivered at the AAUG’s annual conventions. In the mid-1970s it produced two documentary films suitable for private screenings. The first, Palestine Is the Issue, produced by Allen and Jeanne Camp, bore witness to a colonial narrative that, in the words of the organization, “recounts the demographic transformation of Palestine in one generation from a settled and productive Arab country to the settler state of Zionist Israel.” The second film, Palestinians: Holding On, focused on Palestinians living inside 1948 Israel.

In 1979 the organization founded the academic journal Arab Studies Quarterly. Said and Abu-Lughod were ASQ’s first general editors, and collaboratively they penned the brief statement of purpose published in the journal’s inaugural issue. Meant to “fill the gap” by asking about “what is not present” in contemporary studies of Arabs and the Arab world, the journal challenged the dominant area studies mode of scholarship that was “always reproducing the actual dissymmetry between the underdeveloped Oriental world and the incomparably powerful Occidental world that represented the Arabs in certain definite ways and not in others.”⁶¹ ASQ functioned explicitly as a vehicle for a different kind of knowledge project. “All [ASQ] argues,” Abu-Lughod and Said continue, “is that the Arabs can be studied . . . as a cultural, historical, social, and material experience, which is not by definition reducible to a function of ‘the Middle East,’ the conflict with Zionism, or the Great Powers.”⁶²

Throughout the early 1970s the AAUG leadership published letters and op-eds in national newspapers arguing that the case of Palestine warranted an analysis of how Israeli racism and colonialism contributed to “a general climate of anti-Arab racialism” in the United States.⁶³ The AAUG also placed periodic print advertisements in the New York Times. The first of these ads, run in November 1969, responded to President Richard Nixon’s avowed hope to be a “peacemaker” by demanding that he declare support for a single secular democratic state for the “five million Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Palestinians.”⁶⁴ (This position drew the ire of some for equating Jews with a religious denomination.) Another advertisement ran a few months later, under the banner headline “Silenced Majority in the Middle East,” and offered assistance to U.S. journalists invited to report on Israel. It suggested potential lines of investigative reporting, including the incarceration of Palestinian freedom fighters, collective punishment, “captivity” in Gaza, the transfer of Palestinian lands and bulldozing of Palestinian homes, and the condition of Arab Jews and other ethnic minorities inside Israel.⁶⁵

Along with sustaining an active publishing stream focusing on Israel and Palestine, and foregrounding alternative state and society research on questions of Arab state development, infrastructure, and education, the AAUG researched Arabic-speaking communities in the United States. Scholarship on these communities sometimes reproduced a normative model of ethnic assimilation, which was framed as a humanizing project to reclaim a sense of belonging to a multiethnic American polity. Sometimes this work took up a critique of the racially structured hierarchies crosshatching Arab American life and history. Such work aimed to clarify for both scholarly communities and broader American publics the heterogeneous lifeworlds of Arab America.⁶⁶ In a programmatic survey of scholarship in what was called, in 1974, Arab American studies, Barbara Aswad diagnosed the state of the field this way:

In comparison with other ethnic groups in the U.S., the Arab-American community has received little study. In part this is due, no doubt, to its relatively small size, which is estimated to be about one and one half to two millions. Recently however, there has been an ethnic revival in the urban areas of the U.S. It became obvious in the late ’60s and early ’70s that many members of ethnic groups had not “melted,” had not lost their pride and cultural values, and that some had been forced to be ashamed of their foreign origin in public, and lived in a form of dual existence. The politics of ethnicity, always a part of the American class and political structure, also became more publically discussed in the 1960s. In large part this was due to the success of the Black expressions of identity and unity, but in the case of the Middle Eastern Arab communities, it was also in response to the conflicts in the Mid-East, and to the U.S. policies in relation to those conflicts. The heavy governmental support of the expanding settler state of Israel, and the inability to find expression of the Arab side through the mass media caused a growing alienation from U.S. policies and a new feeling of cultural and political awareness.⁶⁷

Aswad cast a nascent Arab American studies as a richly relational project. Her overview clarifies how a broader context of ethnic revival and critiques of assimilation, inspired by the Black freedom struggle, generated interest in articulating Arab American identity claims. At the same time, such articulations were explicitly counterpoised with the U.S. state’s investment in Israeli settler colonialism and the exclusion of Arab perspectives from popular media outlets.

The AAUG’s first national convention, organized by Abu-Lughod and held in December 1968 in Washington, D.C., focused on the question of Arab American identity and history in consonant relational tones. The publication of seven papers delivered at the conference was suggestively titled “Studies in Assimilation.” The special relationship between U.S. imperial culture and the Arab world, which pivoted around Zionism and Israel, required rethinking assimilation, enculturation, and national citizenship. In the wake of the June war, it became clear for some scholars that a U.S. liberal democratic conception of national identity and national belonging was no longer an adequate framework for understanding probationary forms of ethno-racial inclusion. The AAUG’s inaugural president, Fauzi Najjar, asserted as much in his opening address:

Never before have Americans of Arab background experienced the sense of alienation and bewilderment that they did in the summer of 1967. Most of us who lived through those tragic moments had for a while completely lost our bearings in what seemed to be an endless nightmare. The crisis was not simply a military victory—swift and stunning as it may have been—rather, it was the consequence of a sudden awareness that a serious breakdown had indeed occurred in the political, ideological and moral outlook of this nation—a nation we have adopted and loved.⁶⁸

Assimilation’s promise of national belonging had been definitively breached, with the probationary privileges of whiteness sundered. Abu-Lughod highlighted the transnational dimension of this post-1967 shift in his prefatory remarks to the “Studies in Assimilation” collection: “Although equally concerned with their commitment to their new environment, [a younger generation of Arab-Americans] have not perceived a contradiction between their [commitment to building a home in America] and expression of a serious concern for the original homeland.”⁶⁹ In the collection’s opening essay, the religious historian Abdo Elkholy took up this transnational dimension to dwell on the incomplete process of Arab Americans “find[ing] themselves fully accepted in the stream of the American social structure” while having lost a sense of the “traditional values of the original culture.”⁷⁰ Elkholy argued that the visceral reaction to the “occupation of Palestine by international Zionism” was a catalyst to return to an understanding of Arab roots. He concluded by positioning AAUG scholars not as part of the liberal process of assimilation into the American norm but as constituting the possible avant-garde of an anti-imperialist struggle against Zionism (11). “The Arab elites in the United States,” writes Elkholy, “can counter the fallacious claim of the Israeli democracy. They can substantiate its racial discrimination in education, religious freedom, and civil rights” (16).

At the second conference in 1969—focusing on the conditions and possibilities of Palestinian revolution—Abu-Lughod, then the AAUG’s president, underscored the antiracist and anti-imperialist stakes of a critique of assimilation:

It is much easier to melt in this great melting pot, easier to get co-opted with pay, and implicitly, though not very consciously, to collaborate with our opponents in inflicting the maximum punishment on our communities. . . . Those of us who are here tonight . . . have signified our intention to traverse the more difficult path, to combat Israel’s racism in all its manifestations and on all fronts. (n.p.)

Such a break with assimilation was all the more intensified because of the U.S.–Israel relationship. “The estrangement between Arab and American communities seems to be unending,” intoned Abu-Lughod, “the more so because the fate of Israel’s empire and that of imperial interests of the United States seems to be assuming greater coalescence” (n.p.). This specifically named U.S. context was the site of “the more difficult path,” for Israel’s racism had “manifested” in U.S. social, political, and epistemological structures.

By 1970 the number of conference attendees had grown to five hundred, and the number of presenters had grown to fifty, with prominent speeches by the likes of Eqbal Ahmad, Noam Chomsky, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Maxime Rodinson, and Said. By this point, the organization’s political emphases were articulated through an anticolonial Pan-Arab nationalism that centered support for the Palestinian Revolutionary Movement. These positions were articulated in the language of national liberation adopted by the AAUG at several of the early conferences and were published in the conference proceedings. They analytically linked Zionism with imperialism, colonialism, racism, exclusion, and expansionism; they committed to combating these oppressive regimes “in whatever form it expresses itself and to wage a relentless war against reactionary, corrupt, and oppressive domestic systems.”⁷¹ The “combined forces” of Zionism and imperialism, sometimes expressed in these documents as simply “imperialism-Zionism,” denied Palestinians the right to self-determination.⁷²

Given these dire conditions, the AAUG endorsed “the current necessary recourse of the Palestinian People to a war of national liberation of their historic homeland and their aspiration to liberate all sections of the Palestinian community from all manifestations of racial and national prejudice and other forms of human oppression.”⁷³ This position engaged not only questions of territory and borders but also the very epistemic assumptions that made occupation possible. Its tenor and structure drew on notable UN human rights documents like the Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which internationalized antiracist struggles. Such “relentless war” was likewise staged in a broader internationalist framework of solidarity and coalition. Another conference resolution states, “Just as the Palestinian Revolution has publicly supported the just cause of the people of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Black Community in the U.S., the Association registers its gratitude for the continuing support of these communities to the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian People.”⁷⁴ The 1973 AAUG conference took up this internationalist geography as a scholarly framework, investigating “settler regimes in Africa and the Arab World” and explicating the ideological and material linkages between the apartheid regime in South Africa and the occupation of Palestinian territories. The anticolonial political horizon was evocatively captured in the conference proceedings’ subtitle: “the illusion of endurance.”⁷⁵

By the mid-1970s, it had become clear to members of the AAUG that Arabs in the United States were being represented in the knowledge projects such as the large-scale, state-run surveillance program known as “Operation Boulder,” a practice that scholars in AAUG made central in their research and public education. The Nixon administration used the events at the 1972 Munich Olympics as an opportunity to intensify the practices of policing, surveillance, and intimidation of specifically Arab and Muslim populations within the United States that the government had first begun in the wake of the June war. Such tactics had been calibrated and refined through operations like COINTELPRO, the FBI’s “secret war against Black Power activists,”⁷⁶ and while the latter was purportedly shut down in 1971, many of its residual tactics shaped Operation Boulder. The operation was coordinated across several government agencies, including the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Central Intelligence Agency, U.S. Customs, the Internal Revenue Service, and the State Department. President Nixon directed the operation to investigate “any alien who is ethnically Arab, who was born in an Arab country, and whose parents were born in an Arab country regardless of their present nationality or residence.”⁷⁷ The ostensible reason was to secure the United States from the perceived threat of “Arab terrorism.” The externally determined ethnic ascription of “Arabness” was itself grounds for regulation and surveillance. As one commentator at the time noted, there were noteworthy precedents to this practice of widespread racial profiling conducted under the auspices of “security,” most notably the internment camps that imprisoned over one hundred thousand Japanese and Japanese American citizens in the early 1940s.⁷⁸

A primary target of Operation Boulder was the AAUG, especially its cofounder—and by 1972, its president—the attorney and civil rights activist Abdeen Jabara. Jabara’s FBI file was first opened in 1966 when he signed on as legal counsel for the Organization of Arab Students. When in 1968 he joined the defense team for Robert F. Kennedy’s alleged assassin, Palestinian American Sirhan Sirhan, Jabara gained a much higher profile.⁷⁹ Even after Jabara was determined by the FBI not to pose a risk to national security, his support for Palestinians in court and his public critique of Zionism and U.S. foreign policy were used as justifications for the maintenance of a broad network of surveillance, from wiretapping to undercover informants.

A few weeks after Operation Boulder was disclosed, the AAUG ran a full-page advertisement in the New York Times. The headline read: “Is the Nixon Administration Playing Politics with Civil Liberties?” The advertisement went on to say that “Arab-Americans, long assimilated into the mainstream of American culture, are stunned by their Government’s arbitrary challenge to their status of equality with other U.S. citizens.” The state’s withdrawal of its probationary privileges disrupted any smooth narrative of ethnic Arab incorporation. The ad continued, “Anti-Arab racism in the U.S. has been on the increase. Is it now being accorded official sanction?”⁸⁰ Sociologists active in AAUG, including M. Cherif Bassiouni and Elaine Hagopian, immediately conducted extensive research on the program; Bassiouni’s findings were circulated in an AAUG monograph, while Hagopian’s were printed in the Journal of Palestine Studies.⁸¹ Over three years, Operation Boulder produced dossiers on over 150,000 people, including photographs, fingerprints, and documentation of political beliefs, emphasizing any political activity “of an anti-Zionist character.”⁸² Agents used visa violations to justify numerous deportations and unwarranted arrests, and intelligence generated by the program was shared with Israeli intelligence services.⁸³ It was shut down in 1975 because, according to one State Department official, “it cost a lot of sweat and overtime. It was a tremendous extra workload and a source of heartburn.”⁸⁴ It nevertheless sanctioned the already popularized recalcitrant figure of the Arab as alien and terrorist, in but not of the nation.

In the wake of Operation Boulder’s disclosure and the intensification of anti-Arab stereotyping in the news media, the 1974 AAUG conference returned to an investigation of the conditions of Arab life in the United States. Rather than analyze relative patterns of ethnic assimilation, or senses of belonging and nonbelonging, the 1974 conference featured research on the dominant structures and representations that racialized Arabs. “Arab” shifted from ethnic adjectival supplement to the United States (Arab American) to a proper noun in relation to the United States: “Arabs in America.” Baha Abu-Laban and Faith Zeadey analyzed anti-Arab prejudice in the media, educational curricula, and local labor organizing as the “product of several interactive and mutually reinforcing elements in the institutional structure of American society.” This structural understanding of anti-Arab prejudice opened up the possibility of thinking relationally across racialized systems of oppression. Abu-Laban and Zeadey noted that while “Arab Americans face essentially the same difficulties as do other minority groups,” distinctive is the “cardinal significance” of the Arab–Israeli conflict in the United States, one that of necessity demanded transnational analyses of race and empire.⁸⁵

At the end of the 1970s the AAUG explored the possibility of coalitions with Black civil rights groups. In the spring of 1979 the organization approached the longtime Black organizer and strategist Jack O’Dell of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) coalition, to consider sponsoring delegations to tour the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut and meet with the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Samih Farsoun was the AAUG’s point person and, with O’Dell and Jacqueline Jackson, assembled a civil rights and peace delegation that included at least a dozen other veterans of the Black freedom movement.⁸⁶ After Andrew Young, the U.S. ambassador to the UN and Black freedom struggle veteran, had to resign from his post for having met with Zehdi Terzi, Farsoun drafted a “proposal for Black and Arab dialogue in the United States,” and the AAUG embarked on what it called the “Black America Project.”⁸⁷ Farsoun was subsequently instrumental in arranging for delegations to Palestine and Lebanon in September 1979, one led by Dr. Joseph Lowery and another in October, led by Rev. Jesse Jackson.⁸⁸ An additional outcome of this outreach was the development of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, an organization that, in 1980, partnered with Jack O’Dell to published Afro-Americans Stand Up for Middle East Peace.⁸⁹

Theorizing Arab racialization as linked to U.S. foreign policy was only one strand of AAUG’s knowledge project. Such an analysis was not uniform within the organization, as recent reflections make clear.⁹⁰ Neither were practices of coalition building. Some members in the organization feared losing the trust of the American public and were wary that political alignment with Palestinian resistance or Black freedom struggles in the United States would impinge on scientific objectivity or neutrality. Likewise, since the group emphasized critical knowledge production, explicitly juridical levers on justice and American democracy were often outside the purview of the organization’s reach. Instead, the AAUG focused on producing more accurate portrayals of state and society dynamics in Arab countries and investigating the historical and contemporary conditions of Palestinian life.

Shadows and Beginnings: “The Arab Portrayed”

It is precisely in these shadows of fractured assimilation narratives, area studies epistemes, and anticolonial imaginaries, then, that we can situate the emergence of a nascent Arab American studies, one that was a crucial counterpoint to Said’s Orientalism. His scholarship and political activism in the 1970s emerged in conversation with the AAUG. Said served in leadership roles in the organization, first as vice president of the AAUG’s board and then as an at-large member. He frequently gave lectures at the AAUG’s annual conferences and coedited the proceedings of the fourth convention, “The Arabs Today: Alternatives for Tomorrow.” He and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod cofounded the association’s journal, Arab Studies Quarterly, in 1979.

This context sets into relief the relational analysis of race and empire that Said crafted in “The Arab Portrayed.” While Said noted that “The Arab Portrayed” was the origin of Orientalism, the differences between an almost ephemeral early draft written at Abu-Lughod’s behest for the Arab World’s special issue on the 1967 war, and its fully elaborated realization a decade later are notable indeed. Between the two, Said revises the substance, arc, and architecture of the argument. Yet a single paragraph moves almost verbatim between them. It likewise appears in a brief essay titled “Arab and Jew” that Said published in the New York Times in the heat of the October 1973 War, and was part of a longer version that he presented to the AAUG conference days later. How to account for this textual recurrence? What to make of its repetition? Under close scrutiny, this repetition with a difference exemplifies Said’s relational imaginary forged in and for a particular conjuncture and, in recasting it three different times, submits this relational imaginary to iterative experimentation and revision.

The paragraph in question appears first in “The Arab Portrayed” just after a claim that, in “the mind’s syntax . . . , the Arab, if thought of singly is a creature without dimension.”⁹¹ Evacuating the figure of the Arab from the spatial density of language was a result, Said argues, of rendering Jewish suffering after World War II the benchmark against which the experience of all human atrocity was to be measured. There was precious little room—no room, indeed—to articulate the grave consequences of Arab suffering at the hands of an Israeli conquest seemingly inoculated from critique by the catastrophic history of Jewish suffering. Said draws from Sartre to grasp a “complex truth” illegible and unsustainable in the United States, that “two bodies of live history sat next to each other in the Near East, each inert to the other except as a pure antagonist” (5). The analytical and political question that followed from such a formidable compression becomes how to activate an ethical relation between Jew and Arab beyond the confines of its violent reduction. Said continues with the following paragraph:

If the Arab occupies space in the mind at all, it is of negative value. He is seen as the disrupter of Israel’s continuing existence, or, in a larger view, a surmountable obstacle to Israel’s creation in 1948. This has been, of course, part of the Zionist attitude toward the Arab, especially in the years before 1948 when Israel was being promulgated ideologically. Palestine was imagined as an empty desert waiting to burst into bloom, its inhabitants imagined as inconsequential nomads possessing no stable claim to the land and therefore no cultural permanence. At worst, the Arab is conceived as a shadow that dogs the Jew. In that shadow (because Arab and Jew are Semites) can be placed whatever traditional latent mistrust Americans might feel toward the Jew. The Jew of pre-Nazi Europe has split in two: what we now have is a Jewish hero, constructed out of a revived cult of the adventurer-pioneer, and his creeping, mysteriously fearsome shadow, the Arab. Thus isolated from his past, the Arab is chained to a destiny that fixes and dooms him to a series of spastic reactions, which are periodically chastised by what Barbara Tuchman imperiously calls “Israel’s terrible swift sword.” (5)

In the comments that immediately precede this key paragraph, Said figures the Arab beyond language’s capacity to articulate the manifold experience of human suffering, compressed into an almost ontological oblivion. As the paragraph unfolds, though, the figure of the Arab is returned its density, but only as a negative relation, as a constitutive absence for Zionism. The narrative of settler colonialism, Said intimates, formulates the figure of the Arab as the descendant of a quasi-Lockean indigeneity—portraying those communities living in Palestine without “stable claim to land” and hence inconsequential and temporary. This settler colonial framing of the figure of the Arab as an obstacle, to be transferred out of the frame of history, is necessary to understanding Zionism’s portrayal of Arabs, as many Arab scholars had been clarifying since at least the early 1960s. The essay adds a crucial analytical dimension to understanding how settler colonialism is operating in Palestine. As Said emphasizes, the momentous effects of the Holocaust also bear decisively on this portrayal. The debased figure of the Arab must be thought as part of a post-Holocaust bifurcation of the Jew in the Euro-American imaginary. This cataclysmic event forges the Arab as a constitutive absence that “doggedly shadows” the Jew in the wake of genocide, becoming the receptacle and recipient of an otherwise delegitimated anti-Semitism. The Arab is left to trail, in shadow form, alongside the Jew as “adventurer-pioneer,” doubly deracinated by the effects of an enduring settler mythos and a displaced wretched anti-Semitism. Attempts to break from this negative relation, Said claims, are thus understood in the United States only as a “series of spastic reactions,” inviting caustic rebuke from American pundits.

The repercussions of Said’s relational analysis are important. The essay offers a more expanded field for investigating race and empire than the one promulgated by other AAUG-affiliated scholars. By distinguishing between the figure of the Jew and Zionism, Said avers that any just response to genocide must recognize the persistence of anti-Semitism, even in its displacement onto Zionism’s racial others. It stresses understanding anti-Arab stereotypes not only as linked to the vicissitudes of U.S. foreign policy but also as the popular expression of an American settler imaginary sutured to an enduring Euro-American anti-Semitism transmuted in the aftermath of World War II. In this way, critics of such stereotypes must of necessity contend with the abiding imprint of U.S. national narratives of frontier violence and the differentiated legacies of the Holocaust.

The claim embedded in this evocative paragraph is an elaboration of a larger one made at the essay’s outset. There Said accentuates the condensed antagonism of frontier violence that characterizes U.S. imperial culture, a residue, he suggests, of how the habitual horizon of American expansion had long been oriented westward. Such a claim, that the “American imagination has always turned westward,” enables Said to juxtapose present-day imperial warfare with its bloody historical antecedent: “In the case of Vietnam, the adventure was incorrigibly misguided, or . . . as in the case of the Indian wars, cruelly dedicated” (2). Against this backdrop of U.S. imperial violence, Said reads the media portrayals of the June war as repetitions of “the simple pattern of a [James Fenimore] Cooper novel” (2). Israelis are cast as “stalwart individuals” painted in tones of “heroism, sentimentality, earthy practicality, and life near the apocalypse.” They are pitted against the portrayal of Arabs—“large numbers of people, mobs of hysterical anonymous men.” The specialist in Joseph Conrad could spot such pat imperial patterns with ease. “Was not the June War the conflict between the white European bravely facing the amoral wilderness in the person of savage natives bent on destruction? As an intelligible unit in the mind, the Arab has been reduced to pure antagonism to Israel” (2–3). The massification and representational reduction of the Arab into pure antagonism evaded what Said understatedly calls “the uncomfortable moral demands [the Arab’s] history and actuality might make” (3). The result is that the “gigantic tragedy” of the Nazi genocide and the outrageous suffering inflicted on the Jews becomes “a sop for the bewildered conscience of Western supporters of Israel,” while the tragedy of Arab dispossession and ethnic cleansing “disappears in exertions on behalf of the former” (3). Anti-Arab stereotypes register, in this sense, not simply as the result of poor U.S. foreign policy decisions, as other scholars in the AAUG would suggest, nor do they only reflect an enduring settler symbolic framework and a delegitimized anti-Semitism. They also signal a short-circuited evasion of the complex moral gravity that marks the dire conditions of possibility for the violence and aftermath of the June war.

When read retrospectively, this compact formulation—written as it was for the Arab World’s popular audience—reveals in embryonic form the kinds of contrapuntal nonequivalences that Said made in facing the legacies of the Holocaust. Even when ruminating on the anger and frustration of Arab military defeat, as he and so many Arab Americans were witness to their probationary privilege forcibly revoked, even as he was beginning to articulate a political consciousness that held out Palestine as a pressing site of revolutionary transformation, Said’s work fashioned a relational imaginary adequate to the task of coexistence.

Said continues this project in “Arab and Jew,” delivered as a paper five years later at the AAUG conference in Washington, D.C., and published in much-condensed form in the New York Times, here with the evocative subtitle, “Each Is the Other.” He replaced the early essay’s focus on media representation with a pressing theorization of intersubjectivity in a time of war. There is no way around the century-long historical intertwining of Arabs with Jews, Said writes. As two peoples, Arabs and Jews have “chosen each other for a struggle whose roots seem to go deeper with each year, and whose future seems less thinkable and resolvable each year.” Intersubjective dependency deepened as the intertwined histories of Israel and Palestine became more enmeshed. A psychic entanglement was unavoidable: “No Arab today has an identity that can be unconscious of the Jew, that can rule out the Jew as a psychic factor in the Arab identity.” A mirrored identificatory structure holds true for Jews as well: “No Jew can ignore the Arab in general, nor can he immerse himself in his ancient tradition and so lose the Palestinian Arab in particular and what Zionism has done to him.”

With only slight revision, Said returns to the same paragraph that appears in the “Arab Portrayed.” The New York Times op-ed repeats the formulation of the heroic Jew as adventurer-pioneer and the Arab as his “creeping, mysteriously fearsome shadow,” a relation that, again, emerges from the history of Nazi Europe. Rather than becoming the recipient of an otherwise delegitimized anti-Semitism, however, the Arab shadow here is condemned to “chastisement at the hands of Israeli soldiers and tourists, kept in his place by American Phantom jets and U.J.A. Money.” Said’s invitation to an ethic of connection forged in his earlier essay is muted in the op-ed. Instead, he implicates a broad American readership in the conditions of violence of open warfare playing out in the Middle East. U.S. imperial culture is, in this essay, not only responsible for the tropes and narrative frames of frontier violence; it also provides the tax dollars and military armaments for its enactment. The essay closes, then, with a brief lament for how the war short-circuited as practical impossibility a proposed secular democratic state for “Arabs and Jews, for Jews with Arabs.”⁹²

The long-form version of the argument, delivered at the AAUG’s 1973 conference, goes much further toward elaborating the kinds of connections warranted by this structure of intersubjective dependency. The same paragraph from “The Arab Portrayed” serves as a pivot to these connections. First Said elaborates on a self-described digression into the debasing portrayals of Islam in the West, a critique that will emerge in fuller form in Orientalism. Then he illuminates the paucity of Israeli “realism,” a discourse that presumes a permanent antagonism in the region that warrants ever-intensified security measures. Then he turns to the dire, disheartening, and, after the June war, depressingly expected media coverage of the October war in the United States. Said bellows, “How hard it is to watch the silent faces of Arab suffering on the anonymous, ruthless face of American TV!” (240). But even as he shares in his outrage with Arab friends and colleagues in the AAUG, and even as he maintains the centrality of the Palestinian cause for third world revolution, he warns of what he calls the war’s gravest threat: that whatever its outcome, the war will incite Arabs to believe that “our Middle East can be restored to us . . . as a pristine, unspotted land, free of its enemies, ours for the taking.” One could not turn back the clock on the structure of settler colonialism, as if the figure of the Jew, let alone the several million Israeli Jews, no longer existed. He says abruptly: “We cannot—I might even say that we must not—pretend that he will be gone tomorrow. . . . That he exists with a special attachment to the land, is something we must face” (242). Such is the kind of engagement that Said puts forward to the AAUG, one forged through an ethic of relation, even in the midst of war. The violence of war itself, Said goes on to say, “obstructs vision and impedes understanding,” no less for Arabs than for Israelis (243). “War leaves the major tasks undone.” Its stature on the media stage as much as in the domain of Cold War geopolitics narrowed, simplified, and reduced the immanent complexity of the region’s intertwined histories into the “symmetry of a blood feud,” one that obfuscated how the land itself was “central and absolute for both the Arab and the Jew” (244).

As a countermanding ethic to this formulation of violence, Said theorized “an interhuman violence of a constructive type.” This is the violence of Israelis and Jews having to reckon with Palestinian presence, namely, “a human and political and national and moral entity with which he, as a Jew and as an Israeli, must deal, and to which he must answer” (243). Such a confrontation with the presence of the other has mutually humanizing possibilities. “The fairly complex and rich process which connects Arabs with each other and with Jews,” Said notes in closing, is a crucial part of Palestine’s decolonization (246).

Said’s condensed inchoate analysis and his call for a humanizing form of Arab–Jewish relationality clarified the possibilities of decolonization in Palestine, evoking an ethical obligation to forge a secular democratic state as a kind of complex relation that, by 1997, Said would call the “bases of coexistence.” This formulation is present, if also remarkably muted, in Orientalism, which takes up a different aspect of the argument in “The Arab Portrayed.” The early essay theorizes the violent reduction of Arabs into a dimensionless abstract antagonism produced through the symbolic architecture of U.S. settler colonialism, the displacement of an otherwise delegitimized anti-Semitism, and an evasion of moral reckoning. These processes are sutured to the brute production of “facts” about the Arab that are generated for state agents by an “academic or enlightened liberal view” (8). Such facts are produced as instruments to service policy goals; they emerge from “regional studies” institutes to provide usable data to guide approaches to the management of new domains of global governance. Here the “Arab becomes simply an observable collection of factual statistics based on rigidly frozen categories of population, climate, trade, and so on” (8–9). Such a positivist form of knowledge invested with state interest truncates the mutability and heterogeneity of lived existence—what Said calls in the essay “the ambiguous, the nuanced, the in-between, and the precarious” (8). A fully elaborated critique of Cold War area studies and the fetishization of “expertise” that it produces is still to come in Said’s work, reaching its culmination in Orientalism.

However, notably absent from Orientalism is how “The Arab Portrayed” centered its concerns on the normalized violence of U.S. settler colonialism. The earlier essay’s west-facing geography of settler violence rendered a genealogy of manifest destiny as central to U.S. imperial culture. Orientalism does not substantively consider such a geography, perhaps because of the corporate institution’s eastward orientation, one pressed into producing an essential difference between West and East. Nevertheless, in Orientalism the paragraph from “The Arab Portrayed” that Said had revisited in the midst of the October 1973 War returns with a difference. Here it has much humbler aims than in its previous iterations. It functions to explain the broad circulation of the demeaning U.S. political cartoons ruefully skewering the OPEC oil embargo, and it is quickly subsumed in a catalog of racist anti-Arab stereotypes. What had been an evocative (if brief) relational analysis of an enduring settler symbolic framework, a delegitimized anti-Semitism, and a post-Holocaust moral evasion is reduced here to signal the lateral traffic between ostensibly “cultural” figures of anti-Semitism. These images produced in the context of the post-1973 oil shocks depicted Arabs with “clearly ‘Semitic’” features. “Their sharply hooked noses, the evil mustachioed leer on their faces,” Said suggests, “were obvious reminders (to a largely non-Semitic population) that ‘Semites’ were at the bottom of all ‘our’ troubles.” He continues, “The transference of a popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly, since the figure was essentially the same” (286). What follows is a subtle but substantial revision of the original paragraph from “The Arab Portrayed,” now with the categories of the oriental, the orientalist, and the tradition of orientalism brought to bear on the analysis. The “adventurer-pioneer” becomes the “adventurer-pioneer-orientalist,” for example.

The most complicated change involved the two-sentence conceptualization of the bifurcated Jew in the wake of the Holocaust that had done such substantial work in its earlier iterations. In Orientalism, it reads: “The Arab is conceived of now as a shadow that dogs the Jew. In that shadow—because Arabs and Jews are Oriental Semites—can be placed whatever traditional, latent mistrust a Westerner feels towards the Oriental” (286; emphasis added). What to make of this argument that Jews are not only essentially Semitic figures but oriental ones? As Said had famously noted throughout the book, anti-Semitism and orientalism, especially its “Islamic branch,” were constitutively related, the latter a “strange, secret sharer” of the former (27). The book’s most thoroughgoing analysis of this relation grows out of Said’s critique of Ernst Renan’s theory of the “Semitic,” a category enunciated simultaneously by comparative philology and racial typology. Arab and Jew were considered Semitic insofar as they shared an ethnolinguistic designation that bound them to each other. The forms of racialized dehumanization were bequeathed their scientific legitimacy by having been proved “natural” in the development of their languages (see 132–48). One is harder pressed to understand the emergence of the Jew as an essentially oriental figure. There is nary a justification for such a claim in Said’s broader argument about orientalism’s function as a corporate institution predicated on cultural domination. On one level, then, the collapse occludes the more complex relational and intersubjective dynamic to think together Jew and Arab as conjoined by the historical conditions of extermination and dispossession. On another level, read against the grain, it offers a momentary glimpse of precisely the figure that is otherwise absent from so much of Orientalism, namely, the non-European Jew.

A Critical Theory of Arab Reality

“To say, therefore, that the Arab is a victim of imperialism,” Said notes in summarizing his argument in “The Arab Portrayed,” “is to understand the statement as applying not only to the past, but also to the present, not only in war and diplomacy but also Western consciousness” (9). In tracing the contours of U.S. anti-Arab racism, Said names empire’s pervasive epistemic violence that Orientalism will come to address in much more detail. At the same time, in a final dialectical turn, Said refuses to contain the argument in static conditions of domination. He captures a glimmer of resistance, an energy and commitment that resonates broadly across contestations with imperial power. He writes, in closing, “there are signs, however, that with much of the Third World, the Arab has now fully recognized this as his predicament: he is demanding of the West, and of Israel, the right to reoccupy his place in history and in actuality” (9). In the decades to come, Said would play a major role in demanding such a right.

Said amplifies the specific coordinates of this reclamation in his 1974 presentation to the AAUG, where he advances a challenge at the level of epistemology itself meant to transform the “Arab status from that of object to that of subject.”⁹³ Such a transformation required not only a commitment to identify, enumerate, and disprove those instances of anti-Arab misrepresentation circulating in state and media discourses. Nor was it solely to situate an otherwise rarely documented history of Arab migration to the United States in a broader narrative of national assimilation, however partial and probationary such processes were. Both kinds of knowledge projects were central to the AAUG and the emergent domain of Arab American studies, as the monographs and related materials demonstrate. But stopping there would only satisfy what Said calls a “positivist pretense” that presumes the elaboration of facts themselves would render ineffectual the “mythifying” consequences of an episteme (110). They leave the historically sedimented relation of oriental object and Western subject unchallenged.

The task is instead to produce what Said calls a “critical theory of Arab reality” (106). The theoretical instruments elaborated by such a critical theory would be capable of disassembling myths “into the interests they serve but whose presence they always hide” (107). Doing so not only “reveals the plurality of forces, their fields, their dialectical connections”—as per the critique of orientalism—but also wields the production of theory itself as an intention to shape and reshape the world (109). It is an “act of will asserted against myths saying that ‘this, and only this, is Arab society’ ” (110). Such a theory of knowledge invited a collective project that worked not only to critique Eurocentrism but also to investigate “those activities in Arab society by which knowledge is transmitted, institutionalized, acted upon, preserved, reactivated, discarded” (110).

A contrapuntal reading of that moment when Said’s “life changed forever,” when Abu-Lughod recruited him to contribute to the Arab World, reveals precisely how central the meaning of Palestine had become for scholars of Arab descent in the ambit of post–civil rights U.S. imperial culture. It reveals both the invitation and the pressing limits of theorizing, organizing, and enacting forms of epistemic decolonization. “The Arab Portrayed” and the knowledge projects of the Association of Arab American University Graduates each, in different and limited ways, identified and attempted to displace institutional and epistemic violence through a transnational analysis of race and empire. In Said’s hands, the idea of Palestine served as a catalyst for a contrapuntal mode of being in the world. Said’s Palestine invites the difficult task of connection in a moment beset by ideologies of separation, from the monastic seclusion of the university from the terrain of the political, to the separatist confines of all manner of narrow nationalism, to the historic reality and abiding unwillingness to contend with the enduring linkages between mass extermination and mass dispossession. It refused the positivist pretense that, if one simply mobilized enough facts about Palestine that the enduring myths of Eurocentrism would be shattered, even as it refused, from another angle, a hegemonic post-structuralism that theorized the subject as only at most an effect of the discursive fields within which it is produced. This double move was all the more pressing in a conjuncture whose contradictions were mediated by the intensified absenting of the Palestinian from “history and actuality.”

The forms of relationality that Said’s work engenders suggest ways of inhabiting incommensurable, if also inextricable, connections. In the early 1980s shifting geopolitical configurations and shifting race politics would elicit new practices of relationality, with long-held questions about home and homelessness, solidarity and autonomy, in full view.

5

Moving toward Home

Women of Color Feminisms and the Lebanon Conjuncture

I need to talk about living room

Because I need to talk about home

I was born a Black woman

And now

I am become a Palestinian

against the relentless laughter of evil

there is less and less living room

and where are my loved ones?

It is time to make our way home

—June Jordan, “Moving towards Home”

THESE ARE THE CONCLUDING LINES from the Black feminist essayist, poet, and teacher June Jordan’s 1982 poem “Moving towards Home,” written in the immediate aftermath of the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps of Lebanon. In recent years, these lines have become a touchstone for naming convergences between racial and gender justice struggles and struggles for justice in Palestine. They serve as the closing lines to the preface of the 1988 Black British anthology Charting the Journey: Writings by Black and Third World Women.¹ The poem was reprinted in the 2007 inaugural issue of Until Return, the newsletter of Al-Awda: The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, which coincided with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.² “Moving towards Home” has been included in recent editions of the Heath Anthology of American Literature and has been translated into Arabic, Spanish, French, Swedish, German, and Japanese.³ The Palestinian American writer Suheir Hammad excerpted these lines as an epigraph to her 1996 collection of poems Born Palestinian, Born Black. There Hammad writes how Jordan “dared speak of transformation, of re-birth, of a deep understanding of humanity. The essence of being Spirit, something no label can touch.”⁴

Jordan’s lines evoke the need to breathe into words a convivial space of inhabitation, one made through the compact performance of becoming in the face of dispossession. They call forth the present as the pressing context for a relational enactment of home. In her first regular column for the magazine the Progressive, in February 1989, Jordan deepened these relational coordinates. In “Finding Our Way Home,” she demonstrates how her own mobility and privilege as a modestly well-remunerated writer to seek a new home must be seen as inextricable from the evisceration of home-spaces by domestic and imperial violence alike. She writes, “I believe that the issue of a home for Lisa Steinberg [a six-year-old girl killed by her abusive father] and the issue of a home for the Palestinian people is one and the same: The question is whether non-Europeans, and whether children, everywhere, possess a human right to sanctuary on this planet.”⁵ Reckoning with this question, Jordan enacts a spatial politics capable of addressing the intimate gendered violence around the corner and the state-sanctioned violence of military occupation around the world. Even as she invokes liberalism’s hegemonic prepolitical innocent subject—the child—alongside the question of Palestine, Jordan’s prose refuses their analogical collapse. What does “a human right to sanctuary on this planet” mean but the capacity to survive and sustain in community, without threat of exposure to imperial racism’s killing technologies?

From her activist literacy projects like “Poetry for the People” that crossed campus and community spaces, to her international poetic and political engagements with Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East, Jordan enacted what Cheryl Higashida calls a “black internationalist feminism,” one that routinely figured Palestinian humanity as the benchmark for liberation.⁶ In one of her last interviews, in October 2000, Jordan emphasized how engagement with Palestine in the United States continued to raise pressing questions about the differential valuation of life, the degraded place of sub-Saharan Africa in the imaginative geography of U.S. geopolitics, and the lasting set of unanswered questions about the legacies of the Holocaust. For precisely these reasons, Jordan called the “racist disgrace” of the seemingly permanent exclusion of Palestinians and Arabs from “normal, regular human rights” nothing less than the “moral litmus test of my life.”⁷

Jordan’s writings on the shifting relationship between the post–civil rights United States and postoccupation Israel and Palestine theorize how the ineluctably human status of Palestinians served as a foundational taboo figure in the United States, one that required enacting a different kind of feminist antiracism.⁸ She fashioned her work in the midst of a rupture within second-wave feminisms that put her in conversation with nascent Arab American feminist and Arab American literary formations. Careful consideration of what Jordan later called “life after Lebanon” elucidates intensified articulations of gender and sexuality to analyze Palestine in the context of antiracist and anti-imperialist struggles. It reveals, in other words, a conjuncture in transition.

The Invasion of Lebanon

The June 1967 War marked a discursive opening for race radical movements in the United States to critique Israeli settler colonialism and fashion anticolonial expressions of Palestinian solidarity. These practices, often animated by an antiracist response to Palestinian dehumanization, denaturalized the forms of liberal inclusion that remained persistently sutured both to U.S. racial capitalism and the state’s increasing connections to Israel as part of a Cold War cartography. Such critiques were curtailed and adumbrated during the 1970s. The post-1967 military occupation of Palestinian territories became increasingly permanent; the rightward turn of Israeli political culture paralleled a similar trajectory in the United States; and the anticolonial frames for race radical movements were increasingly repressed and dispersed. The lineaments of U.S. imperial culture had shifted in a little more than a decade, constricting the space from which to speak of Palestinian liberation.

The consolidation of U.S. foreign policy and the intensified deployment of Israeli state violence manifested itself with Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. This event revealed a new set of geopolitical arrangements. The Palestine question reemerged in this context, at least for a brief period, to be desedimented from the commonsensical discourse that buttressed Israel’s exceptional status. Israel’s invasion, named Operation Peace for Galilee, was a notable departure from the narrative logics of Jewish existential vulnerability that had framed the 1967 and 1973 wars. The invasion was recognized widely as an excessive projection of military power to achieve a narrow political objective, namely, the destruction of the capacity of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). At the same time, the geopolitical contours of Israel’s occupation had shifted. The invasion was of a piece with Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula as part of the Camp David Accords signed with Egypt in 1978. It likewise involved a corresponding shift in 1981 to civil administration in the West Bank and Gaza, and the unilateral annexation of the Golan Heights, Syrian territory that Israel occupied after 1967. This major inflection point in the occupation inserted a thick layer of highly localized and isolated Palestinian officials into Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza while expanding the capacity to develop the infrastructure of Jewish territorial settlement. Through the invasion, Israel likewise expanded its carceral regime that used “administrative detention” to manage Palestinian opposition to Israeli rule. In these ways, Israel’s occupation was normalized at the intersection of law, territory, and infrastructure.⁹

A proposed Israeli peace initiative with Lebanon in 1981 was conditioned on the Begin administration’s desire that the Lebanese government deport members of the PLO, effectively destroying the organization as a functional national movement. Negotiations on the treaty stalled. At the end of 1981 the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) bombed Beirut neighborhoods known to house PLO supporters. At the beginning of June 1982 a PLO rival group attempted to assassinate Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom. Begin’s administration used the assassination attempt to justify invasion, which the IDF commenced days later. Between June and September 1982, the IDF laid siege to Lebanon, and to Beirut in particular, killing tens of thousands of people, even as it effectively forced the PLO into further exile in Tunis.¹⁰ In August some fourteen thousand Palestinians, including the PLO leadership, left Lebanon on the U.S.-supported condition that Israel would not enter Beirut and further attack civilians. Nevertheless, in September, one day after the assassination of Lebanon’s newly elected president Bashir Gemayel—an act erroneously attributed to Palestinian militants but later recognized to be carried out by a Syrian nationalist group—the IDF invaded West Beirut.

Contemporaneous accounts suggest two primary targets for this invasion—the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, a presumed stronghold of PLO support, and the Palestine Research Center (PRC).¹¹ Since its founding in 1965, the PRC had amassed a substantial archive of maps and land deeds from Palestine’s pre-1948 Arab villages, among other notable documents of Palestinian history. It had been instrumental in producing knowledge germane to Palestinian resistance movements. During the September 1982 invasion, Israeli forces sacked the PRC and removed its extensive library.

As for the refugee camps, over three days, a Christian Phalangist militia seeking retribution for Gemayel’s death meticulously massacred between seven hundred and two thousand Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.¹² Sabra and Shatila, two of the oldest camps, were placed within a cordoned-off zone controlled by the Israeli military, which launched illuminating flares into the night sky and oversaw the massacres from several buildings around the camps’ perimeter. Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon was subsequently found personally responsible for enabling the massacre, and the UN General Assembly denounced the massacre as an act of genocide.¹³ Operation Peace for Galilee crystallized a deep division in Israeli public discourse about the origins, nature, and efficacy of Israeli state policies. The Sabra and Shatila horrors catalyzed an Israeli Left critical of the Begin regime, invigorated pockets of dissent among Israeli soldiers, and became a point of departure for Israeli sociological and historical research on Zionism’s violent racial and colonial dimensions.¹⁴

The invasion’s justificatory narrative was informed by the Begin administration’s investment in the preemptive evisceration of Palestinian liberation struggles as a possible terrorist threat. In this way it converged with U.S. President Reagan’s New Right geopolitical imaginary. The Reagan administration fashioned in its earliest moments in office a “war against international terrorism” that routinely framed Palestinian national aspirations as totalitarian threats to democracy.¹⁵ As the sociologist Leah Stampnitzky has recently shown, a moralizing counterterrorism discourse warranted the widespread growth and imbrication of U.S. and Israeli apparatuses of state security circuiting across otherwise incommensurable geographies. The figure of the “terrorist” that trafficked across this terrain congealed a racialized inscrutability elucidated through the shared rationality of U.S. and Israeli state expertise.¹⁶ Alongside this intensification of moralizing security discourses, the Reagan administration expanded carceral zones in the wake of deindustrialization, setting the stage for the astronomical growth in prison construction and militarized policing in the early 1980s. This process exemplified what the geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the shift “from military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism,”¹⁷ underwriting the figure of the criminal as neoconservatism’s color-blind racial threat par excellence.

The New Right’s geopolitical reordering converged with the rise of the Likud government in Israel. U.S. foreign military aid to Israel increased exponentially during the 1970s; the political strength of Evangelical Christian Zionism to shape “Greater Israel’s” political imaginary found durable allegiances within the Reagan administration.¹⁸ By 1982 the material, strategic, and military circuits between the United States and Israel were much more extensive than they had been in 1967. Some U.S.-based Palestine solidarity groups highlighted crucial connections between the Reagan and Begin regimes, evocatively portraying them as “partners in racism.” As one 1983 editorial in Palestine Focus put it, “Israel is a ‘democracy’ that is stamped with its own form of Jim Crow marked ‘for Jews only.’ . . . Americans have seen the same kind of racial discrimination create divisions among working people that hinder the struggle for justice and a better life.”¹⁹

Importantly, though, such rhetorical parallels were in reality never so neat. Within Israel, Begin’s Likud party had broken the effective thirty-year hegemony of the Labor Zionist government by exploiting the intra-Jewish racism of the long-standing Ashkenazi and secular ruling elite.²⁰ Mizrahi Jews who had been placed by the Labor elite on Israel’s racialized margins were drawn to Likud’s populism and its unadulterated religiosity. This strategic incorporation of a form of intra-Jewish racial difference propelled the Begin regime to power.²¹ It provided the ideological warrant and the political constituency necessary to intensify the Labor-initiated regime of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza begun in 1967, a project launched under the double guise of a theological commitment to a “Greater Israel” and an exclusionary commitment to willful separation from the Palestinians under the auspices of security.²² After Begin’s 1977 election, the settlement projects in the Occupied Palestinian Territories proceeded apace. The Israeli state’s nominal recognition and incorporation of non-European Jews into the state apparatus were articulated to expanding and increasingly coercive technologies of Palestinian dispossession and Israeli Jewish settlement. In this sense, nominal intra-Jewish racialized incorporation in Israel and the growth of settler projects in the West Bank and Gaza expanded in conjunction with an increasingly repressive racialized warfare state in the United States.²³

The State of War We Live In

These local, regional, and transnational reconfigurations reveal the emergence of a new conjuncture, one that signaled intensified circuitries of state-sanctioned coercion in the United States and Israel, the near decimation of U.S. anti-imperialist movements, and the devastation of the PLO. Paradoxically, the horrors wrought at Sabra and Shatila also revealed an expanded discursive field to contemplate the realities of Palestinian life. In this moment in the United States, the Palestine question and the race question were articulated in especially evocative ways along the contested terrain of feminist thought and action.

As differentiated oppressions coalesced around the imbrication of race, class, gender, and sexuality in new configurations of U.S. imperial culture, an array of feminist formations challenged those presumptive normativities that otherwise obscured the violent geographies of an emergent neoliberal order. As Roderick Ferguson demonstrates, relationality as a critical praxis of women of color feminism and queer of color critique was one key strategy through which to denaturalize systemic oppressions. Rather than reify the presumptive singular, coherent, static, and stable subject of Eurocentric patriarchy, women of color feminists understood identity to index a social relation that registers, following Ferguson, the “historical and contingent importance of identity in anti-racist struggles as well as identity’s limitations with regard to those struggles.”²⁴ Women of color feminists situated identity within those lineaments of the state, nation, and capital that secured its immutable juridical, familial, and reified categorization. They offered a critical counterpoint to both the ethnonationalist investments in patriarchal propriety and managerial state vocabularies invested in normative categorizations. In troubling such identificatory logics, women of color feminists produced insights into how processes of racialization were always already gendered and sexualized.

In a brief introductory essay to the 1983 second edition of the acclaimed anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, the queer Chicana feminist playwright and poet Cherríe Moraga lays out the changes that one might imagine in the collection had it been updated from its original 1981 edition. Titled “Refugees of a World on Fire,” the essay charts the necessity to shift the spatial imaginaries of radical women of color analyses and praxis.²⁵ Moraga writes:

[A] 1983 version of Bridge . . . would be much more international in perspective. Although the heart of Bridge remains the same, the impetus to forge links with women of color from every region grows more and more urgent as the number of recently-immigrated people of color in the U.S. grows in enormous proportions, as we begin to see ourselves all as refugees of a world on fire:

The U.S. is training troops in Honduras to overthrow the Nicaraguan people’s government.

Human rights violations are occurring on a massive scale in Guatemala and El Salvador (and as in this country those most hard hit are often indigenous peoples of those lands).

Pinochet escalates political repression in Chile.

The U.S. invades Grenada.

Apartheid continues to bleed South Africa.

Thousands of unarmed people are slaughtered in Beirut by Christian militiamen and Israeli soldiers.

Aquino is assassinated by the Philippine government.

And in the U.S.? The Reagan administration daily drains us of nearly every political gain made by the feminist, Third World, and anti-war work of the late 60’s and early 70’s.²⁶

Moraga’s “international perspective” foregrounds the pressing question of how to “forge links” among women of color to combat the particular spatialized contours of racialized oppression and the corresponding need for an analytic whose geographic dynamism could be attuned to these sites’ constitutive relations. Moraga constellates the intensified rollback of social justice gains in the United States through the moment’s deadly globalizing amalgam of racism and militarism: the early Reagan administration’s strategy of military intervention in Latin America, the persistence of racial dictatorship in apartheid South Africa buttressed by U.S. support, the repressive state violence of authoritarian rule in the Philippines, and, crucially, a recollection of the September 1982 massacres undertaken in Sabra and Shatila. In a flash, for a brief moment, Palestinians enter and exit this notable constellation of U.S. radical women of color.

Moraga’s mapping of differences of location in a shared context of state-sanctioned violence reveals the obfuscated processes of racialization that persistently shadowed U.S. imperialism’s liberal feminist justifications. The relational analytics that crystallized in this moment drew on genealogies of radical internationalism that implicated racialized and gendered oppressions in U.S. imperial culture. Such analytics were animated by the ways, in Ella Shohat’s words, “histories and communities are mutually co-implicated and constitutively related, open to mutual illumination.”²⁷ Women of color feminists infused scholarship and activism with attention to the densely situated, provisional, and contingent practices of women’s struggles against colonial domination, demanding that the hierarchical valuation of difference structuring gendered and sexualized norms be seen in relation to globalized racial capitalism and its localized everyday effects.

Moraga continues in the updated introduction: “Change don’t come easy. For anyone.” The challenge was to move a vision of radical women of color feminisms out from between the covers of the anthology into the world of praxis. As Grace Hong and Roderick Ferguson have compellingly shown, nationalist and identitarian rubrics for social transformation, were, by the early 1980s, severely hampered by the interlocking forces of neocolonialism, incorporative logics of multiculturalism, and severe state repression. The contours of U.S. imperial culture had shifted. “But this state of war we live in, this world on fire provides us with no other choice.”²⁸ Different modes for imagining forms of relation, new ways to “forge links,” necessitated remapping the emergent conjuncture’s field of power. Moraga’s “world on fire” gives one name to such a mapping: the end of “formal” colonization and the unfinished work of decolonization; late–Cold War proxy battles and counterrevolutionary action across Central Asia and Latin America; the emergence of the U.S. domestic penal state; and mandates for “structural adjustment” and deindustrialization in the infancy of the age of Reagan and Thatcher.

This was nothing less than a “state of war we live in.” Rather than presume “war” solely signified the projection of military violence between sovereign national-state actors, confined to stable geographies and temporalities, Moraga articulated the warfare state in the multilayered sediment of imperial violence that disrupted any stable parsing of the scales of the intimate, the domestic, and the international. Her pressing demand for analytical clarity, captured in the language “we have no choice,” not only suggests the need to animate a radical woman of color analysis of war but also presses for an alternative terrain of knowledge production, one tasked with producing an alternative episteme.

Moraga pointed toward such knowledge through the figure of the refugee.²⁹ The refugee figures the paradigmatic political subject through which to make legible everyday practices of survival in a context in which other possible political subjects—human, woman, worker, juridical rights-bearing citizen, or the “domestic” in both private and national senses—have been eviscerated by state and para-state violence. The refugee in Moraga’s sense is defined by her displacement from home, with little recourse to the legal protections that are the sovereign state’s promise. She is a permanently temporary figure working toward fashioning home. She is also crucial to the imagination of Palestinian histories and Palestinian futures.³⁰

Palestine’s Absent Presence

This Bridge Called My Back’s interventions into hegemonic white and women of color feminisms’ fields of racial meanings clarified the tense relationships between Jewishness, whiteness, and Zionism—tensions I render as a part of the post–World War II genealogy of the incorporative modalities of racial liberalism. A common concern at the time This Bridge was published was how to fashion a Jewish feminist, and often a Jewish lesbian feminist, identity out of this tension, elucidating its cultural and historical specificities and its communal capacities to enact practices of collective social transformation.³¹ In this context, Israel and Palestine were necessarily elements in discourses investigating racism’s relations to patriarchy and gendered capitalism. Given the intensified articulation of U.S. and Israeli moralizing frameworks and geopolitical imaginaries, Zionism as a project of national self-determination, Jewish securitization, and settler colonization were always close at hand, sometimes in shadowed form, often as heated arenas of debate and contestation.

In the immediate years after the June 1967 War, the Jewishness/whiteness tension was palpably registered in competing nationalist, third world, and diasporic masculinities, a tension in which investments in exceptional moral and military supremacy seemed warranted by a deep sense of existential vulnerability. The neoconservative production of Cold War Jewishness drew on heteromasculinist tropes of militancy and toughness, calibrated for defense against Black and Arab insurrections alike. The substance of Jewish manhood as a stable agent of history mattered, even if it did not always articulate itself as such. By the late 1970s, in contrast, feminists critiquing patriarchy centered gender and sexuality as operative axes through which to map and contest women’s oppression. This meant the gendered tensions between race, Jewishness, and Zionism were persistently crosshatched by Israel’s intensifying racialized regime of rule, one that reached an apogee during the Lebanon invasion, an event that signaled broadly across the Israeli and U.S. Left the paucity of the existential vulnerability narrative to legitimate military violence.

Largely absent in Jewish feminist anxiety around Israel were substantive engagements with Arabs and Palestinians as subjects endowed with a complex personhood, subjects that moved beyond the stereotypical orientalist visage of either the gendered other in need of benevolent rescue or the accomplice to an inscrutable form of terror. Arab and Arab American feminist perspectives were thus often registered as spectral at best.³² The same was true about This Bridge Called My Back. Indeed, the single line about the Sabra and Shatila massacre hardly constituted a substantive engagement with Palestine in the archives of radical women of color. In fact, the persistence of the Palestine question was a spectral presence in the anthologies that have come to shape much of the hegemonic literature of U.S. women of color feminisms.

Nada Elia has pointed out how Arab, Arab American, and Palestinian feminists are notably absent from This Bridge Called My Back, consigned to a racialized invisibility that casts Arab Americans as feminism’s “white sheep.”³³ It was not until 1994’s groundbreaking Food for Our Grandmothers that Arab American and Arab Canadian feminism found a substantive publishing outlet, and this only after the end of the Cold War, the First Gulf War, and the dawn of the Oslo peace process; and while Food for Our Grandmothers notably centers transnational affiliations to Palestine and critiques of Zionism, and Israeli and U.S. state violence, its impact was largely not registered as a contribution to the literature of U.S. women of color feminisms.³⁴ As scholar-activists in the collective INCITE! Women of Color against Violence demonstrated in a 2001 essay in advance of the World Conference against Racism, Zionism remained a “forgotten-ism” in much antiracist feminist social justice work.³⁵

When told as a story about anthologies, then, the narrative of radical U.S. women of color feminism’s engagements with Palestine seems like a belated intervention, one crystallized by the dual crises of the war on terror and the second intifada. However, such a narrative obfuscates how the Palestine question was sedimented precisely where Moraga figured the hard work of fashioning coalition, namely, in the mix of feminist debates about racism and imperialism of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and intensified after 1982. As the proliferation of letters to the editor, position papers, and debates at conferences in the late 1970s and early 1980s bears out, some U.S. women of color feminists persistently addressed the special relationship between Zionism, anti-Semitism, and racism as inflected through the vicissitudes of U.S. imperial culture. Reading this alternative genealogy, following Ferguson, as “critically historiographical maneuvers . . . [addressing] the reality of dissension, conflict, and heterogeneity within anti-racist formations” clarifies how the identitarian polarizations that Palestine produced, intensified, or rearticulated were treated in the United States within feminist debates about racism and imperialism.³⁶ This archive of dissensus illuminates where and how self-identified Jewish feminists and lesbians broached the critical vocabularies invested in combating systems and structures of racial privilege and racial violence.

Feminism’s Anti-Semitism and Anti-Arab Racism

While the National Women’s Studies Association’s inaugural 1977 conference held a series of panels on Jewish feminisms, the debate about the relationship between American feminism and Zionism grew substantially after the 1980 United Nations Mid-Decade Conference on Women in Copenhagen. Five years before, the UN’s conference on Women in Mexico City adopted a resolution calling for the elimination of Zionism along with colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism.³⁷ The Mexico City declaration was a key precedent for the General Assembly’s adoption of Resolution 3379, condemning Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. The 1980 Copenhagen meeting likewise included a denunciation of Zionism. The conference’s official report included a paragraph on the “struggle to eliminate imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, zionism, racism, racial discrimination, apartheid, hegemonism, and foreign occupation, domination and oppression.”³⁸ Some U.S. participants reported a palpable distress at the vocalized expression of anti-Semitism in the meetings.³⁹

Among the most high-profile jeremiads about the Copenhagen conference was Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s “Anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement,” published in the June 1982 issue of Ms. Magazine, but appearing on newsstands prior to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Pogrebin’s widely circulated essay elucidated five reasons why “anti-Semitism remains the hidden disease” of the women’s movement.⁴⁰ For Pogrebin, the Copenhagen conference exemplified the pervasive manner in which anti-imperialist critiques of racism were producing a dire sense of insecurity for Jewish feminists on the international stage. Pogrebin distinguished between those who viewed “the Israeli-Palestinian problem as a conflict between two national movements with complex historical origins” and those who viewed it as “a clash between European imperialism and Third World anticolonialism.” For Pogrebin, given the past and present “intransigence of worldwide anti-Semitism,” the former view, of competing nationalisms, informs her own liberal support for Zionism. In her estimation, Zionism was “simply an affirmative action plan on a national scale.” Israel’s Jewish Law of Return was the liberal internationalist equivalent of “legal remedies . . . in reparation for racism and sexism.” The discord between Jewish and Black feminists, a concern with a long-held purchase on the U.S. post–civil rights imaginary, was a tinderbox for the expression of a viral anti-Semitism presumed to await its activation. In this way, the polemic that Pogrebin’s essay advances effectively drew on threads already elaborated in antiracist struggles since the late 1960s, linking post-1967 existential insecurity expressed by Jews on the left to a resolutely liberal idiom of the women’s movement. This framework likewise centered the Holocaust as the paradigmatic event—real in the past, possible in the future—that morally justified a commitment to Israel’s paramount existence as a Jewish state and reactivated the notion of anti-Semitism as a transhistorical disease. Pogrebin’s competing nationalisms narrative and the moralizing deployment of Holocaust memory tidily obfuscated Zionism’s exclusivist settler origins, the post-1967 military occupation, and the expanding regime of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Pogrebin’s essay circulated widely in the leading monthly magazine of the white liberal women’s movement. It was thus notable when Ms. ran an ad hoc “forum on anti-Semitism” several months later that substantively critiqued Pogrebin’s essay. One letter, cosigned by several self-identified Jewish feminists, argued that the growing attention given anti-Semitism in the women’s movement was “disproportionate.” It reflected a defensive “competition for victim status” in response to “constant charges of racism from Third World and white women alike.”⁴¹

The Black novelist Alice Walker contributed a lengthy letter to the forum, dated May 19, 1982. Walker identified the conspicuous absence in Pogrebin’s essay of a discussion of Jewish settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, a silence that Walker chalked up to the omission of “imperialism” as a keyword in Pogrebin’s analysis (15). “I think it would help our dialogue,” Walker writes, “if we could say for instance: yes, Israel must exist—because Jews, after heinous world maltreatment, deserve affirmative action . . . —but when it moves into other people’s lands, when it establishes colonies in other people’s territories, when it forces folks out of their kitchens, vineyards, and beds, then it must be opposed” (15). The garrison-style settlements in the West Bank “where indigenous people already live” echoed settler colonization in the United States. They “look chillingly familiar” to “all those forts that dot the American plains” (15). The haunting presence of the Indian wars as a persistent feature of American settler nationalism served as a notable referent through which Walker conceptualizes Palestinians’ dispossession and displacement. Centering the practice of colonization and the logic of imperialism would prove instructive for Jewish feminists, Walker averred, because it would clarify the perspective of “we who have lost whole continents to the white man’s arrogance and greed, and to his white female accomplice’s inability to say no to stolen gold and diamonds” (16). By the same token, Jews’ pervasive “fears of another Holocaust and of being left without a home at all” would be instructive for people of color. “After all,” Walker notes, “that is our story too” (16). Walker’s retort to Pogrebin thus activates what the literary critic Michael Rothberg calls “multidirectional memory,” one invested less in the zero-sum logics of comparison or competitions over victimhood status than in triangulating minoritized identities around foundational enactments of Euro-American state-sanctioned violence.⁴²

Another iteration of this debate unfolded on the pages of Off Our Backs (OOB), a smaller, more radical magazine devoted to coverage of the women’s movement. Its July 1982 issue juxtaposed two competing position papers, both of which were written before the Israeli invasion but surely were read through its context. These statements framed the magazine’s discursive parameters over the coming months. The first position paper, titled “Taking Our Stand against Zionism and White Supremacy,” was written by the San Francisco–based group Women Against Imperialism (WAI). The brief statement embraced the PLO’s commitment to a single secular state “where Jews and Arabs can live in peace.” WAI centered a structural analysis of U.S. racism, asserting that those in the women’s movement who claimed third world status for and as Jews “ignored the fact that Jewish people in America, despite anti-semitism, are part of a white supremacist social order that holds down Black, Chicano-Mexicano, Native American and Puerto Rican peoples.” WAI claimed that the logic and practice of U.S. counterinsurgency fashioned to contain national liberation movements was nothing other than a “strategy of genocide.” Israeli state violence was linked to an order of American settler colonial racism that “has built Israel into a bastion of white supremacy throughout the world.”⁴³

OOB juxtaposed WAI’s statement with one on the facing page written by a newly formed group of self-identified progressive Ashkenazi Jewish lesbian feminists organizing under the name Di Vilde Chayes (Yiddish for “The Wild Beasts”).⁴⁴ They expressed outrage at the idea that “to fight for Jewish survival is antithetical to working against racism and for Third World liberation.” Noting how they were “painfully aware of the complexities” of Israel’s emergence and Palestinian dispossession, group members nevertheless aligned themselves with many Israelis who were “critical of the racist, classist and militaristic policies of the current Israeli government.” Di Vilde Chayes insisted that such criticism of state policies was not anti-Zionism, a notion that was in their estimation nothing but a screen for anti-Semitism. They took umbrage with WAI’s implication that “Zionism is racism,” especially given that, from their perspective, more than two-thirds of Israel’s Jewish population were people of color. Hence the accusation of racism was erroneous. They insisted that WAI’s ostensibly false assertions inhibited the women’s movement’s capacity to “be proud enough to feel that Jews deserve a country where we can be safe, and at the same time to be a committed fighter against imperialism and racism.”⁴⁵

Bodies Ripped in Two

The polarized dispute between WAI and Di Vilde Chayes crystallized a broader set of debates on feminism, race, and empire. Jewish lesbian radicals joined rich and heterogeneous coalitions among Black, Chicana, Native, and Asian women in the United States throughout the 1960s and 1970s, coalitions that named and contested the differentiated forms of oppression wielded by white supremacist racial capitalism. These debates were prominently elaborated with the growth of feminist organizations like the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA). In an effort to address the institutional absence of substantive accounts of race and racism, in 1981 the NWSA conference focused on the theme “Women Respond to Racism.” The organization held a substantial set of preconference workshops a few months prior around the same topic.

One workshop in particular, on women of color and Jewish women, was especially fraught with a polarized conception of anti-Semitism and racism. In her poetic reflections on the workshop for the organization’s newsletter, Rosario Morales narrates a scene of irreconcilable competition that tore her Ukrainian Jewish Puerto Rican body in two.⁴⁶ In Morales’s telling, the workshop’s participants replaced a critique of structures with that of individuals, with “oppression thrown at each others’ faces like slaps.” There was no space to enunciate precisely the complexity of Morales’s own familial history (157). Morales juxtaposes those Jewish participants in the workshop whose history and future were wracked by the nightmares of genocide, alongside those women of color who drew attention to their own impossible access to the security granted white skin privilege: “I am dark in a racist society,” one voice announced, “and I have no place to hide. Now. This minute. And all the minutes of my life” (158). After this exchange, Morales returns home, she writes, to “sew myself together with the thread we’d spun, my jewish girlfriends and I.” Morales engages in reparative work made of memories of Yiddish-Spanish accents, of shared games and food, of intergenerational narratives of Central European dispossession, of “the feel of our arms around each other.” Morales poetically narrates spinning the healing work of a complex memory from the specificity of a genealogy whose admixture troubled the stark binaries on offer in the framing of racism and anti-Semitism. She completes her project of healing with thread left over, the surplus of which she promptly decides to give away. Recalling the regenerative power of such memory-work, she concludes matter-of-factly, “I can make more.”

In a follow-up letter responding to the same workshop, Moraga, Julia Perez, Barbara Smith, and Beverly Smith underscored the need for women of color, as part of their struggle within a “white-dominated feminist movement,” not to “fall into the trap of countering racism on the part of Jews with anti-Semitism.” The seeming irreconcilability registered in the workshop, as in Morales’s poetic telling, should not be seen as “an impasse, but rather as a moment of harsh enlightenment—reckoning with the extent and depth to which we are separated from each other. . . . we must refuse to give up on each other.”⁴⁷

At the national NWSA conference a few months later, Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other contributors launched the newly-published anthology This Bridge Called My Back. As documented in a report by Chela Sandoval written on behalf of the NWSA’s Third World Caucus, the conference did more to reveal the structural racism sedimented in the women’s movement than to “respond” adequately to it.⁴⁸ In her keynote address, Audre Lorde elaborated how her response to racism was anger, an anger fueled by “exclusion, unquestioned privilege, racial distortions, silence, ill-use, stereo-typing, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and co-optation.” To truly contend with the violence of racism and its uptake in an expanding project of Reagan-era militarization required recognizing how feminist investigations operated “in the teeth of a system for which racism and sexism are primary, established, and necessary props of profit.”⁴⁹ Adrienne Rich used her keynote address to center the animating importance of disobedience for the work of women’s studies. Taking up racism as a thematic concern for feminist thought and praxis of necessity disobeyed the institutionalization of women’s studies in U.S. universities. It also troubled the naturalized privileges of white women, even those, like Rich herself, who routinely theorized an antiracist praxis.⁵⁰

The Forgotten Minority

Among the outgrowths of this dissensus was a major plenary session sponsored by the Third World Caucus at the NWSA’s 1982 conference. The plenary was titled “Race, Class, and Sex Interactions: Perspectives by American Women of Color.” Held during the third week of June 1982, it would have been difficult not to grapple substantively with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the violence to which Arabs and Palestinians were being subjected, as pervasive news coverage of the invasion saturated large-scale and alternative media outlets alike. Carol Haddad, founder of the newly formed Feminist Arab American Network (FAAN), did just that, in a presentation titled “Arab-Americans: The Forgotten Minority in Feminist Circles.” Haddad shared the plenary stage with Sandoval, Anzaldúa, Nellie Wong, bell hooks, and Carol Lee Sanchez—scholar-activists whose intellectual and political contributions were crucial scaffolding for U.S. radical women of color feminism.

In remarks subsequently reprinted in OOB, Haddad narrates her own recognition of race consciousness. “As recently as last year,” she states, “I did not identify myself as a woman of color. Having grown up in a white working class suburb of Detroit, I knew that I benefitted from white skin privilege enough to be able to live in that suburb in the 1950’s and 1960’s without having crosses burned on my family’s front lawn. . . . But the more I get in touch with my anger about anti-Arab racism in America, the more I realized how much I have internalized my own racial oppression. The memories return.”⁵¹ In Haddad’s autobiographical telling, her becoming a woman of color was catalyzed by a recognition of anti-Arab racism’s remarkable prevalence, a situation inextricable from U.S. imperial culture. Haddad proceeds to analyze how the blanket of stereotypes, misinformation, and silence about Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians “has not been dropped accidentally.” Rather, anti-Arab racism serves the interests of three powerful entities: the American military-industrial complex, American oil companies, and the state of Israel and its Zionist supporters in the United States. “The founding of the state of Israel,” asserts Haddad, “its acceptance by the world community, and its economic and military support from the U.S. is heavily dependent upon promotion of the myth that Palestine was a country without a people, a cultural wasteland. . . . These facts unveil one of the greatest moral ironies of our time—that survivors of the Holocaust themselves participated in the attempted annihilation of the Palestinian people.”

In quick strokes, Haddad narrates a convergence between Zionism’s settler mythos, U.S. investment in Israel, and the lacerating conjunction between the survival from intra-European genocide and the ethnic cleansing of Europe’s externalized others. Given the pernicious imbrication of U.S. geopolitics in Israel and Palestine, Haddad calls on American feminists to detach from anti-Arab racism through a self-conscious Arab and Arab American knowledge project. FAAN was to be one avenue for such a project, providing a space to move “beyond traditional and visible sources of information.” FAAN could be one node through which to “seek out Arab and Arab-American feminists, and integrate the perspectives of these sisters into feminist thought and debate. Our survival,” she concludes, “as a movement, and as a civilization, depends on it.”⁵²

The most heated debate at the 1982 NWSA convention focused on how the association should respond to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. On the floor of the delegate assembly, the Third World Caucus put forward a resolution opposing Israel’s “genocidal” incursion. As reported by Deborah Rosenfelt, herself a signatory on the Ms. letter criticizing Pogrebin’s claims, some people in the delegate assembly claimed that “to single Israel out as an aggressor was anti-Semitic,” while others urged the need to “distinguish between anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel or anti-Zionism.” The final resolution removed any mention of Israel and instead moved to condemn genocide generally “within and outside the United States” and underscored the need for the NWSA to “distribut[e] information concerning genocidal practices taking place around the world” (10).

Soon thereafter, Di Vilde Chayes produced a second statement, written in the midst of the summer 1982 bombardment and signed, by among other people, Adrienne Rich. Published in the October 1982 issue of OOB alongside the NWSA conference report, the “open letter to all progressive peoples and movements” equated the group’s outrage at Israel’s attack on Beirut with their outrage at the “world-wide anti-Semitism that has been unleashed since the invasion of Lebanon.” Despite their “abhorrence of the Israeli aggression,” they assert their unwillingness to participate in protest activities because of the fashioning of “a cartoon-like simplification of Israel as an imperialist, exploitative, inhuman Jewish machine.” Using the language of “genocide,” or comparing Israel to “Nazis” or Beirut to “another Warsaw Ghetto,” is a sign, the statement alleged, of having “our oppression . . . used against us.” Di Vilde Chayes imputed a comparative deployment of Holocaust memory as a zero-sum practice of equation and displacement. They write, “What is being said is that the Holocaust and the centuries of persecution and pogroms preceding it are now equalled and cancelled out and, therefore, that Israel, founded on the Holocaust’s grief and need, is no longer in order.”⁵³

The Di Vilde Chayes statement’s exceptionalizing of Holocaust memory is echoed in an “editorial note” appended to the report on Haddad’s presentation included elsewhere in the OOB issue. Under the heading “military conflict not a holocaust,” the OOB editor Jeanne Barkey inferred that Haddad had “structurally compared the Holocaust with the current Palestinian-Israeli military conflict. . . . In particular, her use of the words ‘annihilation’ and ‘genocide,’ words indivisible from the historical tragedy of the Holocaust, was grossly inappropriate.”⁵⁴ In a subsequent letter to OOB, Jane Creighton (who was involved in executing the “Moving towards Home” reading) offered a rejoinder to Barkey’s footnote. Creighton argued to restore to the terms annihilation and genocide their incontrovertible meaning by maintaining a “deep awareness” of how the Holocaust perpetrated on the Jews by Nazi Germany “must not obscure what has for many years been happening to the Palestinians, that is, dispossession of their homeland, exile, fierce discrimination, and escalating during this summer and fall, attempted annihilation by people with the military and political power to inflict it.”⁵⁵ Holocaust memory cannot serve as a screen, Creighton intimates, and exceptionalizing its vocabulary would do more to obscure than reveal current conditions.

Haddad amplified Creighton’s critique in her own letter published in March 1983, framing Barkey’s editorial note as exemplifying a broad American fear of contending with the substance of Arab and Palestinian claims. Barkey’s note, combined with the pattern of OOB misidentifying Haddad’s name as either “Azizah al-Hibri” or “Carol Habib,” unwittingly illustrated the point that Haddad had made in her NWSA presentation: the hegemonic discourse of American feminism retained a pervasive anti-Arab racism that made the complex personhood of Arab and Arab American women illegible. Haddad advised OOB to solicit writings by more Arab and Arab American women in the future, requested that her comments from the NWSA be reprinted in full, asked that OOB publish the Preliminary Statement of Purpose of the Feminist Arab-American Network, and bade the editors to ask for permission from June Jordan to reprint her poem “Apologies to All the People of Lebanon.”⁵⁶ OOB complied with all of Haddad’s requests.

Structures and Agents

Growing directly out of a response to this debate, the 1983 NWSA conference featured a plenary session titled “Racism and Anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement.” There, the Lebanese American philosopher Azizah al-Hibri offered a scathing critique of the “hidden face of racism.” She calls her analysis an “unveiling” to critique the persistent orientalist investments in “issues” like the veil and clitoridectomy advanced by the “white, Christian, Western women’s movement.” Al-Hibri recalled the 1982 assembly floor debate, where, “tearful and sincere,” she expressed how she “did not know as I was talking to you whether my family was alive or dead.” In contrast to the growing movement of dissent in Israel, she stated plainly, “you—as we stand here amongst you—have not found it in your hearts or minds to recognize us as part of the feminist concerns in this country except in the most distorted ways.”⁵⁷

One of the key organizers for Di Vilde Chayes, the radical Jewish lesbian Evelyn Torton Beck, responded with a defense of Pogrebin’s concern over the need to underscore “Jew-hating” as a foundational and persistent oppression, a term analytically and politically sharper than anti-Semitism. In “No More Masks,” Beck emphasizes the historical experience of Jewish survivalism and the intergenerational fear sedimented over millennia, in the face of “torture, murder, active persecution, and institutionalized efforts at annihilation” (11). She registers concern at how a newly drafted NWSA constitution asserted the organization’s position against anti-Semitism, “as directed against both Arabs and Jews” (13). As a “slippery prejudice,” Beck is compelled to chart fifteen practices of anti-Semitism present in the women’s movement: these include singling out Israel, homogenizing Zionism, equating Jews and all Israelis, and “using the Holocaust against us.”⁵⁸

In her comments, the Black feminist Barbara Smith conceptualized the “tension” registered in the conjunction of racism and anti-Semitism as an outgrowth of “the Middle East and the role of Israel as a state in the destruction of the Palestinian people.” While such concerns were true and real, Smith argues, “criticisms of Israeli policy” have nevertheless been enunciated through a rhetoric of anti-Semitism. To confront that elision requires distinguishing structures of power from the actions of individual agents. A critical lens must be “able to separate what Israel does when it functions as a white male-run imperialist state from what individual Jewish people’s responsibility in relation to that situation can be.” Smith likewise emphasizes how the juxtaposition of anti-Semitism and racism against one another has had the tendency to enact a paralyzingly static comparative victimhood approach: “One reason for this weighing, comparing, and equating is that often in a feminist context oppression is understood solely as how people treat each other.” Rather, theorizing the systemic and interlocking forms of oppression at work demands an analysis of “how oppression occurs in the society as a whole.” Smith closes by asserting that “if we begin to deal with each other with some integrity and with some sense of the complexity of all of the horror, all of the pain, all of the violence that we hold within ourselves and that has been visited upon us by the systems of oppression under which we live, then I think there might be the beginning of some hope between us.”⁵⁹ In this way, Smith holds out a relational analytic attuned to interlocking and internalized oppressions alike.

Writing about the NWSA’s Women of Color caucus in the early 1980s, Sandoval says, “after ten years of struggle the issue of racism has finally surfaced within the white women’s movement.”⁶⁰ Importantly, racism surfaced in this context partly by mediating the entanglement of the United States, Israel, and Palestine in the age of Reagan. Racism was glimpsed as an outgrowth of a historically contingent linkage between new racial and gendered normativities and exclusions in the United States and the violent expression of Israeli security. It was registered historiographically in profound ways in the texture of dissent and debate about the unresolved differences shaping the transnational and comparative circuits of Arab racialization. In this sense, Palestine emerged, sometimes as a silence or an absence, as part of an alternative archive of radical women of color feminism, and in doing so disrupted governing paradigms of knowledge and produced new lines of sight and struggle.

Recasting Silences

In June 1982 the African American poet, essayist, scholar and activist June Jordan, then based in New York and teaching at SUNY–Stonybrook, was not at the NWSA conference because she was in and out of the hospital. She had been tangentially involved in organizing a major mobilization in New York City in support of nuclear disarmament in general and against President Ronald Reagan’s policies of increased militarization in particular. Initially a largely white-organized event, a group calling itself the Third World and Progressive People’s Coalition insisted that the antinuclear demonstration explicitly call for an end to U.S. interventions in Latin America, a shift from military spending to social services, and an end to institutionalized forms of racism. After some debate among the organizers, speeches and slogans along these lines were eventually (or as one historian says, reluctantly) allowed during the June 12 demonstrations.⁶¹ The only taboo topic was anything having to do with the Israeli military invasion of Lebanon that had begun one week earlier and was garnering significant international media coverage. Reports note that the taboo was largely adhered to, save for a speech by Noam Chomsky at the New York rally, and several notable speeches and placards at the coordinated march in San Francisco. The then relatively new Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, an organization that had grown out of the Association of Arab American University Graduates two years earlier, sponsored a small prop plane to trail the San Francisco march with a banner protesting the Israeli invasion.⁶²

This quasi-mandated silence, particularly among feminists and progressives, became June Jordan’s point of departure. Much of Jordan’s writing to that point had focused on giving form and language to those subjects silenced by processes of gendered racialization. Her Lebanon writings, which she commenced that summer, address the modes through which language was being used to shut down critique of state-sanctioned violence across an array of scales. An alternative poetics was necessary. In a contemporaneous essay, “Problems of Language in a Democratic State,” Jordan registers a critical concern with the capacities of democracy’s “shared currency”—language—to animate movements for those people subjected to the everyday precarity of racial capitalism.⁶³ Reagan administration policies produced “an economic system protected by the state rather than state protection against economic vagaries and depredations” (225). One of these policies cut into the pedagogical infrastructure meant to support the crafting of incisive language as part of the lifeblood of democratic practice. While “Problems of Language” focuses almost exclusively on the United States, Jordan’s prime example of people forging “an outcry against the language of the state” was Israel’s September 1982 mass protests in which four hundred thousand people had “plunged into the streets of Tel Aviv to demand an investigation of the massacre of Lebanon.” In the wake of the Sabra and Shatila atrocities, Israelis “demanded another kind of language” beyond the Begin administration’s passive voice constructions. The “uniformity of state language” was appalling, yet when the word “massacre” finally “broke through the foggy mess of American mass media,” the response was muted at best. Who took to the streets instead? Israeli citizens, whose mass action became the catalyst for envisioning how citizens respond when realizing that “the passive voice in a democracy means something evil beyond a horribly mixed metaphor” (230).

Jordan’s Lebanon writings fashion a language of action predicated by agential subjects. She makes visible how the abstractions of state discourse mask the violence of state practice. Yet her writings do not simply elucidate the forensic documentation of atrocity—à la the journalistic reportage of the news media, the juridical discourse of human rights, or the empirical data of the “factual” rendering of state and capital. The lexicon to account for post–civil rights atrocity struggles to retain a purchase on a morality whose paradigmatic figure, the Palestinian, remains in the United States an absent presence. Edward Said, in his postinvasion essay “Permission to Narrate,” rebukes the mode of critique that frames its knowledge of the Lebanon atrocities through a “history-transcending universal rationalism.”⁶⁴ Rather, the register of Jordan’s Lebanon writings situates atrocity in a dense sociality limned by a narrative intent on reckoning with its historical conditions of possibility. They make available a spatial imaginary for justice that governing language otherwise obscures, engendering a line of flight toward a different kind of home. In this way her writings express what, in addressing the 1982 conjuncture, Edward Said called “some perceived or desired or hoped-for historical narrative whose future aim is to restore justice to the dispossessed” (46).

Jordan’s place making in the face of the deadening domains of state-sanctioned violence marks a countermodality of witness, an anti-imperialism that refused the emancipatory seductions of a minoritized settler nationalism. Jordan dedicated Living Room, her 1985 poetry collection that culminates in “Moving towards Home,” to “the children of Atlanta / and / the children of Lebanon.” The conjoined proximity of Black and Palestinian life to the devastation of state and state-sanctioned violence exemplifies a poetics of relation that Living Room elaborates throughout, culminating in the oft-quoted closing lines of the collection’s last poem: “I was Born a Black woman / and now am become / a Palestinian.” The collection’s dedication turns on the paradigmatic figure of innocence—children—as not only the objects of racial terror but also as the vehicle to a reflexive vulnerability on which readers are called to account. In “The Test of Atlanta 1979,” Jordan documents the names and ages of the eighteen Black youth, between the ages of nine and sixteen, who were either found dead or had gone missing. The list at the core of the poem “brings out the dead,” in James Baldwin’s pointed provocation.⁶⁵ It serves as a fulcrum between the rhetorical question, “What kind of a person would kill black children?” that contains and individuates the perpetrator, and a collective interrogatory that addresses the reader and the poet simultaneously: “What kind of people are we?” (122). In this way the poem at once mobilizes the figure of the Black child as a stand-in for innocence while forestalling a desire to bracket collective accountability. When the book’s dedication is read back into the collection as a whole, its conjunctive relationality does similar work. The shared figure of children at once invites and forestalls simple analogy. It activates difference not as a yawning gap concealed by the blandishments of liberal innocence or moral outrage but as a recognition of one’s own complicity in and responsibility for U.S. imperial violence.

At a June 30, 1982, press conference arranged by the American Friends Service Committee, Jordan stood alongside faith leaders and members of the Israeli Peace Now movement, including Shulamith Koenig, who had been instrumental in politicizing Jordan around Israel, and to whom Jordan would dedicate her poem “To Sing a Song of Palestine.” At the press conference, Jordan names unequivocally the Israeli campaign a “genocide,” one that implicated the United States insofar as the campaign was “conducted with American arms and American diplomatic support.” Jordan activates Holocaust memory to underscore her critique, recalling the Americans who stood idly by in the face of Nazi Germany’s “obscene slaughtering of six million Jews.” In contrast to such paralysis, Jordan urges that “we cannot afford and we must not allow a repetition of such unspeakable disgrace in our time.” In her brief remarks, she queries whether the scarce response in the United States is an effect of racism. “Is it because the men, the women, and the children of Lebanon are not white? We should know by now the horrifying consequences that result from the valuing of one kind of life above another.”⁶⁶

At the end of July, New York’s free weekly newspaper, the Village Voice, which had begun to cover the Israeli invasion in great detail, published Jordan’s poem “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon.” (In critiquing the persistence of anti-Arab racism in the U.S. feminist movement, Haddad will request that OOB reprint this poem the following year.) Dedicated to “the 600,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who have lived in Lebanon since 1948,” the poem renders legible the continuing vulnerability of Palestinians wrought by the ongoing structure of the Nakba. The poem recounts the rhetorical figures of narrative legitimation enunciated by Israeli Likud government officials alongside the violent material effects on everyday existence in Lebanon.

They said they wanted simply to carve a 25 mile buffer zone and then

they ravaged your

water supplies your electricity your

hospitals and your schools your highways and byways all

the way north to Beirut because they said this

was their quest for peace. . . .

They said something about never again and then

they made close to one million human beings homeless

in less than three weeks and they killed or maimed

40,000 of your men and your women and your children.⁶⁷

Jordan links the geographic expansion of Israeli security to Holocaust memory. The former invests in the incapacitation of Lebanese infrastructure, while the latter is revealed as a figure of tragic irony called on to mystify the violent dimensions of Arab displacement. The apology to which the title refers indicates the speaker’s realization of her own unwitting complicity in the invasion. It is an apology not only for taking the Israeli state and the U.S. media at their word and therefore reproducing a discursive erasure of the Palestinians but also for recognizing that a portion of the poet’s taxable earnings was funding the Israeli military. The poem’s closing lines, “I’m sorry / I really am sorry” are less an expression of accountability or guilt than a sidelong critique of a different form of empty rhetoric—one in which well-meaning Americans immunized themselves from the devastation of complicity through a discourse of apology.

Jordan’s poem reflected much of the Village Voice’s editorial tone in its war coverage. Managing Editor Nat Hentoff featured critical coverage of the invasion from a range of sources, and Alexander Cockburn and James Ridgeway devoted their “Annals of the Age of Reagan” column to the invasion. Early on, Hentoff used his editorial column to lambaste what he called “the silence of American Jews”—a position he subsequently recanted later in the summer. “There’s something new in the air. Something terribly shameful. And no amount of revising the grisly statistics of the invasion of Lebanon will reduce that shame.” Hentoff chalked up the impact of that column to its being “the first piece in a general publication by a Jew and Zionist who was horrified by what Israel was doing in Lebanon.”⁶⁸ Elsewhere he lauds, as Jordan will, the outpouring in Tel Aviv of four hundred thousand Israelis—“the other Israel”—demanding an independent commission and the resignation of Begin and Sharon.⁶⁹

The critique that Jordan’s poem received in the letters published in the Voice spoke to the epistemic trouble that Jordan’s poetics could elicit. One letter writer called “Apologies” “misinformation, evasions of fact, inversions of truth.” The poem substituted “naked untruths” for “facts,” and the reader seemed scandalized that the poem used a polarizing pronoun structure of “they” and “you.” “Political works of art, it seems to me, require a more scrupulous adherence to the facts because their appeal to emotion and intellect, their aesthetic blending of the two, can confuse with particularly vicious consequences.”⁷⁰ In her response, Jordan clarifies that “Apologies” has no metaphors; it simply “chronicles the Israeli invasion and the various, always changing, explanations offered by the Begin government.”⁷¹ The poetic mode of chronicling the language and the practice of state violence carried over into “Moving towards Home.”

Moving toward Home

The November 28, 1982, UNICEF poetry fund-raiser for the children of Lebanon was held at New York City’s Ethical Cultural Center under the title “Moving towards Home.” According to media accounts, more than five hundred people attended the event organized by Jordan, the poet-activists Kathy Engel and Sara Miles, and the Palestinian artist, translator, and art historian Kamal Boullata. Boullata had met Engel at the Blue Mountain Center Writers Retreat in upstate New York earlier that summer. The reading was covered in the New York Times and in local television news broadcasts, and an audio recording was subsequently broadcast on WBAI radio. Reading alongside Engel, Miles, and Jordan were Stanley Kunitz, Thulani Davis, Ori Bernstein, James Scully, Galway Kinnell, Tuvia Reubner, and Shulamith Koenig (who read poems by Yehuda Amichai). The Lebanese and Lebanese American poets Etel Adnan and Gregory Orfalea were also on the program, both of whom had participated in an ADC-sponsored poetry reading earlier in the summer that Orfalea had been instrumental in organizing. (The slim pamphlet produced for the ADC reading, “Wrapping the Grapeleaves,” proved to be the kernel of the first anthology of Arab American poetry, published several years later.)⁷²

Many of the selections read that evening were included in And Not Surrender: American Poets on Lebanon, a book of poetry hurriedly assembled over the summer by the relatively young Arab American Cultural Foundation (AACF). Boullata was the book’s editor. Born in Jerusalem in 1942, in 1968 he moved to the United States and took up residence in Washington, D.C. By 1982 Boullata was an accomplished figure in the field of Palestinian cultural production. He had provided the illustrations for two early bilingual anthologies of Palestinian poetry translated into English, A Lover from Palestine (1970) and The Palestinian Wedding (1982). In 1977 he provided the layout and artwork for the AAUG’s commemorative tenth-anniversary book. In 1978 Three Continents Press published his edited collection of modern poetry by Arab women, Women of the Fertile Crescent. He had provided line drawings for the Arab writers Adonis, Yusuf Idris, Elias Khouri, Halim Barakat, Nagib Mafouz, and Ghassan Khanafani, as well as Sahtein, a Middle East cookbook published by the Arab Women’s Union. He produced political art for the General Union of Palestinian Studies in France, for Fatah, and for the Palestine Research Center’s journal Shu’un Filastiniya. By 1982 he was an active member of the Program Committee for the AACF, an organization founded several years earlier by Hisham Sharabi, professor of political science at Georgetown University. Under the guidance of Executive Director Claudette Schwiry, the AACF produced a handful of publications, launched arts exhibitions and poetry readings, and opened its own space in Georgetown to host cultural events—the first of which was an exhibit of artwork by the Lebanese poet and painter Etel Adnan.

In his opening remarks at the Moving Towards Home reading, Detroit congressman John Conyers (who also served as master of ceremonies for the event), emphasized the primacy of culture work for reckoning with geopolitical contestations. He stated that “the poets are doing what no experts, no legislators can do. They are attempting to bring us together, to talk, to recognize each other. To share the language of real people across the barrier of ideology.”⁷³ The Moving Towards Home fund-raiser and the AACF poetry collection do indeed take up this investment to demonstrate for a broad American audience the specificity of Arab and Arab American writing alongside that of “American” and “Israeli” authors. The pressing need to perform ethnonational attachment shaped the rhetorical framing of the reading. However, rather than combat the manifold falsehoods of anti-Arab racism through asserting the need to recognize the authentic truths of a singular ethnic identification, the poetry written and read by Arab and Arab American poets homed in on the terror and violence, the confusion and the specificity, of living a thick relation to the Israeli invasion’s human devastation.

This lived materiality of warfare was registered as much in who was present at the reading as who was absent. The renowned Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was also slated to read at the fund-raiser. Darwish had been living in Beirut at the time of the invasion.⁷⁴ His absence from the stage was described in an addendum to the printed program through the regulatory idiom of the state: “The United States has classified him as ‘inadmissable’ under the Ideological Exclusion Clause of the immigration laws and refused Darwish’s entry to join MOVING TOWARDS HOME.”⁷⁵ In response to Darwish’s absence, Kathy Engel read a short statement from the stage that was collectively signed by all the participants:

When any poet is labeled inadmissible, when any voice is silenced, when freedom of speech for any of us becomes negotiable, then each of us is threatened. We are diminished by the absence of Mahmoud Darwish from this stage tonight. Our poems cannot be complete while his voice is banned. We speak as poets despite the attempts of different governments to separate and silence us. We raise our voices here with the voice of Mahmoud Darwish whose spirit is with us moving towards home. The poet has been barred, but the poem continues. The poems will not stop.

The statement transmutes the specificity of Palestinian inadmissibility in the American consciousness into a generalizable concern via an American logic of freedom of speech. It takes the grounds of the First Amendment as the moral force to challenge Darwish’s physical absence, even as it celebrates the capacity of the poetry’s circulation and translation to evade capture by the state. Boullata proceeded to read translations of three of Darwish’s poems, “Passport,” “Palestinian Wedding,” and “On Fifth Avenue,” each of which reckons with the intimate and embodied relation between and among Palestinians differentially located by state power.

Jordan closed the evening with two poems, both of which recalibrated a Black feminist spatial imaginary to recast Palestine as a question of language and of home. “To Sing a Song of Palestine” begins with the “wildly dreaming schemes / of transformation” that are the militarized expression of men desiring to “fit / themselves how fast / into that place.” Jordan thematizes the perception of an absence given over to nature itself (“there are no natural wonders”) as driving a violent investment in land settlement. In contrast is the figure of the woman’s body, of the maternal, “the ribs the breathing muscles and the fat.” This figure serves as a reminder of the embodied practice of “home,” insofar as home “starts and ends with face / to face surrendering to the need / that each of us can feed or take / away.” The poem’s closing stanza narrates the praxis of writing itself amid the “burning day / that worked like war across my / empty throat.” It is in the poetic that the practice of writing reconciles itself to the interpersonal imbrication of mutuality. It is there, in the turning to the practice of writing, that the poet “thought to try this way / to say I think we can: I think we can.”⁷⁶

“To Sing a Song of Palestine” elucidates an embodied horizon across scales, one that holds out the possibility of a different kind of future. “Moving Towards Home” continues and expands this practice. The poem’s first section addresses the “unspeakable events” of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, providing specific details of human suffering that constitute the poem’s dialectical work of witness. The poet gives form and language to precisely what one does not desire to have been hailed to provide form and language for:

I do not wish to speak about the bulldozer and the

red dirt

not quite covering all of the arms and legs

Nor do I wish to speak about the nightlong screams

That reached

The observation posts where soldiers lounged about

Nor do I wish to speak about the woman who shoved

her baby

into the stranger’s hands before she was led away

The negative desire to account for embodied destruction makes plain how the excess of human devastation cannot be contained: soil cannot cover it, sounds of terror are carried in the air and escape their otherwise flat grounds, and kin are passed to strangers. The second section addresses the relationship between these events and the state and media language used to negate and justify them. It returns again to the refrain of a massacre whose evidence cannot be covered up, erased, or silenced. The limbs persist, their presence evidence of embodied devastation. Such unspeakable events must follow, writes Jordan,

from those who dare

“to purify” a people

those who dare

“to exterminate” a people

those who dare

to describe human beings as “beasts with two legs”

those are the ones from whom we must redeem

the words of our beginning

To proceed from a place of genocidal dehumanization, Jordan seeks to wrench language from the clutches of normalized violence and turn it toward other ends.

In the printed version of the poem published in Living Room, the page breaks at this point. On the following page, the third section begins by enacting the beginning of another beginning. The repeated “I do not wish to speak” is replaced with the phrase “I need to speak,” to speak about living room, about the redemption of language from the genocidal rubrics it had enabled, about moving from the negative desire of witness to the affirmative necessity to imagine an alternative future, to produce and inhabit a space of social interchange, social reproduction, an unromanticized and undomesticated home.

The Black woman becoming Palestinian thus names a relation to the gendered racialization that impedes dwelling in spaces of living even as it points up the tenuous possibility of crafting something otherwise. It signifies a practice of being in relation that is wholly mundane—not only in its recognition of the terrifying suffering produced by liberal democratic states but also in the commitment to the merely human practice of making home, a space to dwell and laugh and thrive and resist. Jordan’s poem stages an elaboration of a future becoming, a project of constructing a practice toward dwelling in common. The pivot between Black woman and Palestinian is a recognition not of interchangeable reified identity categories, juxtaposed through a logic of equivalence or comparison. Rather, they are recognized as a set of positional congruencies in relation to the lacerating force of imperial violence. In so doing, the poetic juxtaposition of Black woman and Palestinian refuses to be bound to the static nationalist structure of equivalence organizing the reading itself, replete with its framing of American, Arab, and Israeli poets. The poem fabricates a project of making home in a manner of collective accountability and reciprocity. Home becomes a spatial practice of conviviality, one that reckons with the already contorted national cartographies of the foreign and domestic, toward a mode of relationality in which difference itself might thrive.

Life after Lebanon

In an essay written in the months after the UNICEF fund-raiser, Jordan recasts the context in which “Moving Towards Home” emerged. Initially subtitled “On Racism and Militarism,” Jordan wrote “Life after Lebanon,” an essay that revealed how an ethical engagement with Palestine of necessity reckoned with the persistence of, and persistent struggle against, gendered white supremacy. The essay opens with a “good feeling” that ironizes the loyalty oaths of American anticommunism: “I am not now nor have I ever been a whiteman.”⁷⁷ As the essay proceeds, the “whiteman” figures neither a static identity nor a transhistorical one, but one that indexes a praxis and a relation. The “New Manliness” names an ideological predisposition that produces a subject “who maintains a system of unequal power relations in order to preserve his own domination” (188). The “whiteman” through which the New Manliness expresses itself is on display in how early-1980s political discourse drew on the racialized gender tropes of the nineteenth-century myth of masculinist American settlement. This masculine figure ostensibly “pit[ted] himself against much greater odds than he can ever see—pestilence, drought, outlaw bands of cattle thieves, and corporate encroachment upon his lands.” This settler “manliness” was exemplified by a figure in the White House whose cinematic Wild West persona lent a sheen of late–Cold War vigilantism to his militant anticommunism. It was provided a justificatory frame to prey “upon his wife, his children, his Black coworker, the poor, the elderly, Grenada, Nicaragua” (188).

To exemplify a contrast to the New Man’s circuitries of racialized and gendered violence that wound their way between the family, the workplace, and what the historian Greg Grandin would later call the new “workshops” of American imperialism,⁷⁸ Jordan reflects on the community of women activists and organizers, the “New Women,” that sustained her during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. These are the “people with whom I kept my witness, and wept, and worked, that summer.” Jordan emphasizes that many of these “New Women” were Jewish: Vivian Stromberg, who initially alerted Jordan to the devastating effects of the Israeli invasion, and American complicity; Shulamith Koenig, who made legible the large Israeli movement opposed to the invasion and the massacre of the Palestinians, and who put into context that the “ulterior purpose of the invasion was Israeli settlement of the West Bank”; and Jewish lawyers who were threatened by new Reagan legislation “intended to eliminate basic freedoms of dissent.” Jordan elucidated how in conversation with these women over the summer they came to realize that mobilizing Americans to intervene and stop the massacres in Lebanon could not be achieved simply through demystifying “misinformation” and providing “the truth of things.” Mobilization based on facts alone was a nonstarter. Rather, the problem was epistemic and adumbrated by the racialized and gendered limitations of the category of the “human”: “The problem was that the Lebanese people, in general, and that the Palestinian people, in particular, are not whitemen: They never have been whitemen. Hence they were and they are only Arabs, or terrorists, or animals. Certainly they were not men and women and children; certainly they were not human beings with rights remotely comparable to the rights of whitemen, the rights of a nation of whitemen” (191). The elucidation of facts and empirical truths required critical supplementing, to wit, the turn to organize and mobilize what would become the Moving Towards Home poetry reading, an event that would contest the “male white rhetoric about borders and national security and terrorism and democracy and vital interests,” while providing material support via UNICEF directly to the children of Lebanon victimized by the invasion.

Importantly, for Jordan in retrospect, the summer of 1982 revealed a split in the American political Left, including the “feminist community of North America,” that clarified the anti-Arab racism sedimenting the entanglement between the United States, Israel, and Palestine. “There were those,” she writes, “for whom Israel remained a sacrosanct subject exempt from rational discussion and dispute, and there were those to whom Israel looked a whole lot like yet another country run by whitemen whose militarism tended to produce racist consequences; i.e. the disenfranchisement and subjugation of non-white peoples, peoples not nearly as strong as they” (193). What would “life after Lebanon” be like, given that the only “supposedly legitimate persons” provided discursive space in the media to express views on “Lebanon/Israel/Palestinians/U.S.-Middle East- polices” were “whitemen”?

“With the construction of an ultimate taboo,” writes Jordan, “a taboo behind which the fate of an entire people, the Palestinians, might be erased, how could there be an intellectual, a moral life after Lebanon in this country?” Here, Jordan echoes language from a letter written to her by Etel Adnan on the occasion of Living Room’s publication, one that put into broader context the vitriol that Jordan’s Lebanon writings had received. Adnan writes, “You know that ‘Beirut’ divides the world in two. It is one of the most untouchable ‘taboos’ for some. . . . They never forgive you for thinking that Arabs are human beings.”⁷⁹ Given such a baleful situation, Jordan answers her own question this way: “Because many people in the United States and around the globe are not now nor have they ever been whitemen” (193). The fabric of a “moral life” was to be located in the mesh of those people structurally positioned outside the racialized gender norms that persistently reproduced the violence of the imperial state, whose positionality enabled insights into modes of conviviality that worked to forestall the deadening horizons of the new conjuncture.

“Life after Lebanon” closes with Jordan deploying a relational analytic to surface the growing community of New Women and their various organizations, “discovering each other with a happiness and a resolute purpose of survival that will surpass all the weird and fatal bewitcheries of traditional power” (194–95). In Jordan’s hands, this practice of discovery is catalyzed by a praxis of love that will “carry me across the borders of my own tribe.” Drawing from Adnan’s novel about the terrors of gendered violence in Lebanon, Sitt-Marie Rose, Jordan latches onto an ethical need to “stand up to our brothers to defend the Stranger.” Only in crafting a persistently transnational relational analytic, in refusing the “narrow cold light” of a violent tribalism, writes Jordan, “will we find our way into a tenable family of men and women as large and as invincible as infinite, infinitely varied, life” (195). The horizon of heterogeneity uncontained, the refusal to submit to the deadening enclosures of a new militarism, the willingness to forge links of relation through longtime commitments to solidarity and transformation: these are the capacious possibilities animated by life after Lebanon.

They are possibilities that endure.

Epilogue

On Shadows

PRECOCCUPATIONS OF PALESTINE AND ISRAEL in the United States have produced a vexing history of shadows. Across the cultural terrain mapped herein, shadows and their kin have produced a veritable chiaroscuro linking incommensurate but resolutely entangled histories. Their presence, function, and effects cannot be overstated. This book has offered one conjectural tracing of their mutable complexity, their turns and angles, their surfaces and depths, in order to desediment the imperial life of race in the United States. The implications of this approach warrant a further word, then, on shadows.

It is a veritable truism that when it comes to Israel and Palestine in the United States, entrenched interests, fierce passions, and ardent identifications have produced exceptionalist ideologies that crowd out or obscure alternatives for envisioning the past, present, and future of this violent entanglement. Insofar as shadows are a figure for that which obscures, veils, or otherwise shrouds the truth of an object, critical analysis is called on to dispense them with sustained scholarly illumination. Scholars dispel shadows. In one sense, that has been my aim: to shed light on a heterogeneous archive that reveals how the Israeli occupation and the presence of Palestine and Palestinians mediated Cold War articulations and anticolonial rearticulations of race for U.S. imperial culture. Illuminating this archive has revealed that what race has meant for U.S. imperial culture has been, in significant ways, constituted by and had substantive effects on knowledge about Israel and Palestine. To argue this claim, I have demonstrated how differential distributions of human value—call it a regime of racial relationality—circulated at the historical convergence of U.S. post–civil rights modalities of racial liberal inclusion and Israeli postoccupation modalities of permanently temporary exclusion.

The visual registers on which a methodology of critical illumination operates are legion, and the normative impulses that accrue to them require a dose of caution. The purportedly unseen is not just the effect of ideological mystification to be blown away by the stiff winds of investigation or critique. Historically sedimented relations of power rarely shift when new facts are brought to light. As any novice visual artist will note, shadows matter. Those that an object casts reveal the object’s multidimensionality. Shadows enable us to orient an object in the world, evidence its edges and contours, its mass and weave. Dispensing with shadows is a flattening process, and in this sense “illumination” can result in its own form of blinding obscurity. The racial regime I have investigated in this book is the product of a heterogeneous array of multidimensional culture work, the texture of which reveals a changeful complexity. My analysis has sought to render meaning from some of that texture—shadows and all—to dwell on the details of novels, poetry, essays, public statements, newspapers, letters, newsletters, and scholarly writing, all of which underscore how the field of representation was historically contested, which is to say, political, and thus demands reckoning with how heterogeneous forms of knowledge production—“commonsensical” and “subjugated” knowledges in Michel Foucault’s terms—interface with the structuring domains of geopolitics, state diplomacy, and political economy.

Islamo-Fascism’s Racial Reactionary Genealogy

In August 2006 President George W. Bush held a press conference to explain the ongoing war between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. The military wing of one of Lebanon’s democratically elected political parties had breached the southern border, captured two IDF soldiers, and launched scores of Katushya rockets into Israel’s northern region. The Israeli military responded with a six-week barrage of airstrikes, its largest and deadliest military operation in Lebanon since 1982. Bush described Israel’s strategy to unmoor Hezbollah—as they had the Palestine Liberation Organization two decades earlier—as epitomizing the larger arc of a shared global war on terror. “This is the beginning of a long struggle against an ideology that is real and profound. It’s Islamo-fascism. It comes in different forms. They share the same tactics, which is to destroy people and things in order to create chaos in the hopes that their vision of the world will become predominant in the Middle East.”¹ A few days later, Bush plainly laid out the new framing: “This nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation.”²

While the Bush administration waited several weeks to entertain a diplomatic push for a cease-fire, all of southern Lebanon had become a target for Israeli munitions.³ The supposed “root cause” of the operation—Hezbollah’s paramilitary presence in the south—was dealt with using exceptional military means. Israel’s artillery and airstrikes, including the prominent use of unmanned aerial vehicles, killed upward of one thousand people, displaced nearly one million residents in the south—a quarter of Lebanon’s population—while restricting movement by destroying bridges, main roadways, and power plants, leaving medical care and foodstuffs often inaccessible. During the last few days of military operations, Israel fired thousands of cluster bombs produced and supplied by the United States, leaving unexploded munitions to litter the region. Echoes of the Sabra and Shatila massacres resonated across an unbounded geography in southern Lebanon. Here again was a war zone where the categories of civilian and combatant were not only blurred but, as the critical geographer Derek Gregory argues, where residents as such, regardless of their status under international law, were violently recast as baleful “infrahuman” existence.⁴

Islamo-fascism thus emerged as a newly articulated expression of race war, one whose genealogy was shaped by durable symbolic and material links between Israel, Palestine, and U.S. imperial culture. Islam, according to this logic, is figured as pathology and distilled into an overdetermined figure essentially incompatible with the exemplary life of liberal democracy expressed in the United States and Israel—“those of us,” that is, “that love freedom.” Islamo-fascism resuscitates a residual relation to globalized wars in which U.S. hegemony was secured⁵—first against Nazi Germany during World War II, then against the Soviet Union in the Cold War—while framing an open-ended temporality for the expression of sovereign violence. While the origins and circulation of the term were the subject of journalistic and scholarly curiosity,⁶ and the Bush administration, under pressure from Muslim American organizations, backed away from the term, it is worth pausing a moment more on a key text in its genealogy: Norman Podhoretz’s World War IV: The Long Struggle against Islamofascism (2007).

Here Podhoretz weaves together essays he had published over several years that connect strategies for what he calls World War IV to the militant anticommunist strategies of containment and rollback that he narrates as the bedrock for the U.S. victory against the Soviet Union during the Cold War—what he calls World War III. Podhoretz followed Bernard Lewis—whose “clash of civilizations” thesis had at the outset of the War on Terror shaped the Bush administration’s geopolitical imaginary—to argue for a tutelary projection of U.S. imperial power: while “Arab ways are different from our ways . . . it is possible for them—as for anyone else, anywhere in the world, with discreet help from outside and most specifically from the United States—to develop democratic institutions of a kind.”⁷ Podhoretz gives this orientalist logic of benevolent imperialism historical heft through a lengthy citation of an early Cold War argument for Soviet containment, George Kennan’s 1947 essay “Sources of Soviet Conduct.” This essay (which Kennan himself, as a well-positioned foreign policy adviser, later claimed was taken up mistakenly as rationale for U.S. military intervention anywhere in the world) typifies for Podhoretz the destiny of the United States to spread freedom.⁸ “The issue of Soviet-American relations,” Kennan wrote in 1947 and Podhoretz quotes in full,

is in essence a test of the overall worth of the United States as a nation among nations. To avoid destruction the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation. . . . In the light of these circumstances, the thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will experience a certain gratitude for a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear. (215–16)

Podhoretz writes: “Substitute ‘Islamofascism’ for ‘Russian-American relations,’ and every other word of this magnificent statement applies to us as a nation today.” In swift analogical argumentation, Podhoretz elicits an early Cold War iteration of globalized manifest destiny as a bulwark against totalitarianism, a divinely ordained American responsibility to maintain a world safe for freedom. In doing so, Podhoretz argues by substitution for an invigorated U.S. security state whose intensified deployment of violence links fates with the state of Israel. Such an argument has no patience for the nuances differentiating Arabs and Muslims, Sunnis and Shiites, democratically elected political parties, and the like. The United States stands with Israel alone on the precipice of another 1938, goes this narrative, with future Hitlers and Stalins on the horizon.⁹

If the specter of 1938 lingers in Podhoretz’s political present, so too does 1968. Indeed, while the “long struggle” of the book’s title registers an implied and open-ended futurity, its substance says less about the future than it does about the earliest iterations of U.S. strategic alliances with Israel in the 1960s and 1970s. “To examine this history,” Podhoretz asserts, “is to realize that even while World War III was still going on, World War IV had already begun, and that 9/11, far from being the first salvo fired by an enemy as implacable as any we had ever faced, actually represented the culmination of a long series of attacks” (25). Podhoretz moves quickly through narrating these attacks on U.S. interests—all of which, going back to 1970, are expressions of resistance to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and all of which were, in Podhoretz’s terms treated mistakenly in the United States as “crimes, with cops and courts,” by a national culture weakened by antiwar, anticolonial, and antiracist demands and not with the toughness and resolve of a military response akin to Israel’s (25). In recounting history in this way, the internationalization of Black freedom struggles, the political claims of counterhegemonic race consciousness and feminist movements, the ascendance of the New Left, and the transformation of the university and the knowledge produced therein become retrofitted fronts for a continuation of the Cold War.¹⁰

Islamofascism as a keyword thus reignited a remarkably durable mode of race war in the guise of liberal democracy, framed first in relation to Black radical critiques of American racial liberalism, then to the “insecurities” revealed by the 1967 war, then to the anticolonial critiques of Zionism as racial project, and finally in its most recent iteration, as a compound justifying the providentialism of a globalized “war on terror.” Islamo-fascism assisted in garnering historical legitimacy for a coercive law and order apparatus whose racial resonances drew directly from the 1970s and early 1980s to underwrite intensified modes of securitization and militarized policing in the post-9/11 period.¹¹ As the geographer Stephen Graham puts it, “Israel’s military and security technology, doctrine, and expertise have rapidly been mobilized and generalized as part of the US global War on Terror.”¹² For instance, the leadership of U.S. municipal police departments has routinely consulted with the Israeli Defense Forces, sometimes traveling as delegations to Israel, other times hosting Israeli security experts in the United States.¹³ The blanket profiling and mapping of Arab and Muslim communities in New York by the NYPD’s so-called Demographics Unit drew directly from Israeli surveillance strategies in the West Bank.¹⁴ The United States has contracted out the construction of major homeland security infrastructure like the border wall between the United States and Mexico to Israeli security corporations, transiting discourses of racial policing in the process.¹⁵ The United States has drawn on legal rationales developed by Israel to circumvent International Humanitarian Law to craft doctrines for indefinite detention, targeted assassination, and torture.¹⁶

This is one set of shadows for which this book has provided a genealogy. There is another.

America’s Last Taboo

Just days prior to September 11, 2001, at the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, a large coalition of hundreds of nongovernmental organizations resolved to work toward reinstating the UN’s 1975 Resolution 3379, stating that Zionism is a form of racism. Among the countless scholarly and activist resources circulating in Durban was a collection of essays stressing the shape and impact of racism for U.S. women of color, including a critique of Zionism delimiting the analysis of antiracist feminist movements.¹⁷ At the time, Israel was in the midst of responding to the Palestinian second intifada. Practices of collective punishment, naval and aerial blockades, sweeping detention practices, and the growth of exclusive Jewish settlements in the West Bank were the order of the day. As the Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti argues, the 1991 revocation of Resolution 3379 had paved the way for conceptualizing such state-sanctioned violence less as an expression of a “colonial and inherently exclusivist state” than as the practice of a “normal member of the international community of nations.”¹⁸ Reinvigorating 3379 had the capacity to center an analysis of Israel’s settler colonial infrastructure predicated on exclusivist racial distinctions that the so-called peace process had otherwise obfuscated. It could make legible, in the words of the NGO Forum’s declaration, “the racial domination of one group over another through the implementation of all measures designed to drive out other indigenous groups, including through colonial expansionism in the Occupied Palestinian Territories . . . and through the application of discriminatory laws of return and citizenship.”¹⁹ The statement bears striking resemblance to Fayez Sayegh’s 1975 theorization of the “pumping-out” and “pumping-in” mechanisms of Zionist settler colonialism. Recuperating a racial analytic could assist in revealing how Israel’s logics and practices of exclusion and territorial fragmentation—practices intensified all the more during the 1990s—were consistent with the United Nations’ definition of apartheid. In so doing, it was thought to provide the potential to animate a global solidarity movement akin to the one that brought down the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Among the outcomes of the organizing efforts at the Durban conference was a call, first promulgated in 2004 by a coalition of Palestinian civil society groups, to demonstrate international support for Palestinian self-determination through boycotts of Israeli academic and cultural institutions. In 2005 an expanded call for solidarity included practices of economic divestment and diplomatic sanctions as part of an arsenal of nonviolence. The call received the endorsement of scores of Palestinian groups inside the West Bank and Gaza, inside 1948 Israel, and across the Palestinian diaspora. Such pressure aimed to end a political order predicated on what Barghouti calls the “relative humanity” of Palestinians by holding Israel accountable to international law.²⁰ The call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) has focused on working toward (1) ending Israel’s occupation and colonization of lands seized in 1967; (2) dismantling the illegal Apartheid Wall constructed throughout the West Bank; (3) recognizing the equal rights of Arab Palestinians inside of Israel; and (4) respecting and protecting the right of return of Palestinian refugees.²¹

The BDS movement has captured the imagination of many U.S. and European institutions and organizations invested in the practices and processes of antiracism and decolonization—including those organizations involved in the production and circulation of knowledge. Student governments on a growing number of university campuses have debated and passed bills in support of divestment from U.S. companies whose products are used to maintain Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank and its siege of Gaza.²² In December 2013 the American Studies Association (ASA) resolved to enact an organizational boycott of Israeli academic institutions, following the precedent set by the Association of Asian American Studies earlier in the year. The International Committee of the ASA had begun exploring the possibility of supporting the boycott in the immediate aftermath of Israel’s 2006 siege of Lebanon and returned to the idea again in the wake of Israel’s 2008–9 bombardment of Gaza.²³ At the organization’s annual meeting in November 2012, at a moment that coincided with another large-scale bombardment of Gaza, the Academic and Community Activism Caucus of the ASA sponsored several scholarly panels on Palestine in the United States. It hosted an open session to hear reports from a number of American studies scholars whose research on race, gender, labor, empire, and settler colonialism had taken them to Palestine as a delegation earlier in the year.²⁴ At the 2013 meeting, along with numerous scholarly panels on the links between Israel, Palestine, and the United States, the ASA’s program committee sponsored two town hall meetings to consider a boycott resolution introduced by the Caucus.²⁵

The ASA council adopted the resolution unanimously. In doing so, it joined with artists, scholars, students, and workers committed to studying, enacting, and refreshing practices of antiracism and decolonization in the present. It did so predicated on the recognition of lasting military, economic, and diplomatic complicity of the United States in precluding the expression of Palestinian self-determination. The council also underscored the ASA’s long-held commitment to social justice, to struggles against all forms of racism, as well as its commitments to the protected rights of students and scholars to education and intellectual freedom—both of which are severely curtailed for Palestinians.²⁶ A few weeks later, over twelve hundred members of the ASA cast ballots on whether to endorse the resolution; 66 percent affirmed the council’s resolution.

In the weeks that followed the resolution’s adoption by the ASA, university presidents and state legislatures censured the association, mainstream newspapers and educational journalists weighed in on the debate, and Palestinian and Israeli officials gave comment on the resolution’s passage. A national organization called Jewish Voice for Peace—whose strands of antiracist solidarity work on behalf of Palestinian justice have their origins in the New Jewish Agenda—provided levers for political mobilization and avenues to legal counsel. Scholars renewed investigations of the entangled—if often obscured—relationships between academic freedom and colonial violence.²⁷ Membership in the association grew. By the end of 2014 other scholarly organizations had passed similar resolutions, including the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, and the African Literature Association.²⁸ In short, in the domain of knowledge production and circulation, what Edward Said once called “America’s Last Taboo”—the “narrative that has no permission to appear . . . the systematic continuity of Israel’s . . . oppression and maltreatment of the Palestinians”—had been breached.²⁹

A Shadow over Palestine has reconstructed this breach’s notable, if often obscured, historical prefigurations. Knowledge projects, cultural projects, and activist projects to elucidate the ineluctable humanity of Palestinians against their systematic exclusions developed relational analyses of racism, colonial violence, and imperial culture, analyses whose critical force registered desires for the enactment of substantive practices of decolonization in excess of the violent reproduction of U.S. and Israeli national exceptionalisms. In 1965 scholar-activists who were part of the PLO’s Palestine Research Center worked to internationalize the Palestinian struggle by theorizing the particular and connected forms of racism animating Zionist settler colonialism.³⁰ Black Power’s Palestine envisioned Palestinian solidarity through the framework of connected anticolonial struggles for national liberation, touching down in places like the National Conference for New Politics, the Pan African Cultural Festival, and the United Front against Fascism Conference. Jewish organizations like Jews for Urban Justice conceptualized diaspora as an entrée into “multiparticularism” connecting spiritual struggles against racist state violence in the United States to shared Israeli and Palestinian liberation. At annual meetings of the Association of Arab American University Graduates, scholars of Arab descent often centered Palestine in analyses of anti-Arab racism and critiques of U.S. foreign policy. As feminist coalitions formed, broke apart, and were reconfigured while synthesizing critiques of racism and imperialism, the National Women’s Studies Association became a key site to consider the substantive connections between, Israel, Palestine, and the United States.

From James Baldwin’s ethical commitment to homelessness to June Jordan’s commitment to forging a collective home anew, the question persisted as to how to fashion heterogeneous forms of relation in a world on fire. Such necessarily fragmented visions remain unfinished. They constellate in a political present in transition, amid struggles to imagine and enact a different kind of future. Against the garrisoning logic of sui generis communities, territories, histories, and memories, envisioning noncoercive forms of relation matters all the more. Perhaps we’ll catch their fragments in the shadows of this future’s thick past.

Acknowledgments

THE KERNEL OF THIS BOOK’S CONTRAPUNTAL ORIENTATION emerged while I was an undergraduate at Brown University. In the late 1990s I exercised the privilege of a free ten-day tour of Israel, funded largely by the United Jewish Appeal as a pilot program for American Jewish college students that in the years to come would expand exponentially. On the tour’s last day, as we sat on Mount Scopus watching the sun set over Jerusalem’s Old City, and just before a raucous New Year’s Eve party in Tel Aviv prior to our departure for the United States, I came to realize less a love of land and people than a troubled sense of my interpellation into a narrative that did as much to obscure as it did to illuminate. The telling of Jewish biblical presence, exile, and modern miraculous return reproduced the structured absence of Palestinians in the historical present, an absence I was being hailed to reproduce.

In 1999 I was pleased to return to the region for seven months, under the auspices of an Israel–Palestine Relations semester abroad program cosponsored by Brown and Wesleyan Universities. Their partnerships with Israeli and Palestinian institutions were brief, but the contrapuntal possibilities they yielded were significant. Attending Hebrew University in the mornings and Al Quds University in the afternoons, sixteen students studied Hebrew and Arabic language and literature, Palestinian and Israeli histories and politics, comparative religious thought and practice. We worked for nonprofit agencies against torture and for collaborative arts initiatives for peace. We traveled to illegal Jewish settlements and long-standing refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza. U.S., Palestinian, and Israeli scholars were our teachers and mentors. The promise and peril of post-Zionism, of the Oslo Accords, of the Palestinian Authority, of an infrastructure of occupation and a past–present of displacement were daily topics of investigation. Many students stayed beyond the end of the semester, many returned to the region, and many pursued vocations linked substantively to Israel and Palestine. Thank you to Jeremy Zwelling, David Jacobsen, Kamal Abdel-Malek, and Rachel Tzvia Back for seizing the opportunity to structure a pedagogy of transnational contrapuntal investigation; to our incisive teachers and interlocutors; and to the students in the program who taught me to think and write amid dissensus. Thanks also to Elliott Colla, who assisted in charting lines of inquiry from there.

Several threads of this project came into relief while I was in Washington, D.C., in the days and months after 9/11. At George Washington University, I learned from Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Robert McRuer, Patricia Chu, Kavita Daiya, and Melani McAlister how to labor as a scholar. At the Middle East Research and Information Project, Chris Toensing taught me about the politics of knowledge production and circulation. I am grateful that he invited me to investigate the racial logic of the war on terror and handed me what has become a well-worn copy of Suheir Hammad’s Born Palestinian Born Black.

The textual life of A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America was incubated as a dissertation at the University of Washington, under the supportive guidance of Alys Eve Weinbaum and Nikhil Pal Singh. Their respective insights and critiques sharpened the project’s critical theoretical edge, and they routinely pushed me to ask more incisive questions about the material life of theory and the historical life of race—always as a detour on the way to a different kind of future. Terri DeYoung provided crucial expertise in Arab and Arab American literatures, and Laura Chrisman asked just the right questions at just the right times. My doctoral studies were substantively enriched by a bevy of engaged interdisciplinary faculty, including Anis Bawarshi, Bruce Burgett, Eva Cherniavsky, Kate Cummings, Christine DiStefano, Gillian Harkins, Nancy Hartsock, Ron Krabill, Joel Migdal, Katharyne Mitchell, Chandan Reddy, and Matthew Sparke. Under the tireless guidance of Kathleen Woodward and Miriam Bartha, the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities facilitated a robust space for interdisciplinary inquiry and action. I was privileged to study alongside a remarkable cohort of brilliant students, among them Edmond Chang, Sharleen Mondal, Vincent Schleitwiler, Daniel Griesbach, Ji-Young Un, Amy Reddinger, Trevor Griffey, Rahul Gairola, Jed Murr, Christian Ravela, and Simone Trujillo. I do not know what I would have done without Georgia Roberts and Anoop Mirpuri.

Interwoven throughout this book is a dialogue with scholars who have circuited through the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, from whom I have continued to learn so much. As chairs, Thomas Biolsi and Catherine Ceniza Choy ensured that existence on the tenure track has been more than simply bearable. It is an honor to call as colleagues Raúl Coronado, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Ramón Grosfoguel, Shari Huhndorf, Elaine Kim, Beatriz Manz, David Montejano, Michael Omi, Laura Pérez, Alex Saragoza, Lok Siu, Khatharya Um, Chris Zepeda-Millán, Hatem Bazian, Huma Dar, Victoria Robinson, Patricia Penn Hilden, and Carlos Muñoz. Nelson Maldonado-Torres showed me the ropes. Special gratitude to upstairs neighbors Leigh Raiford, Michael Cohen, Ula Taylor, Paola Bacchetta, Mel Chen, Juana María Rodríguez, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender incubates everything amazing under the committed vision of Evelyn Nakano Glenn and Alisa Bierria. The Program in Critical Theory has been a welcoming home away from home, with a door held open by Daniel Boyarin, Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, Samera Esmeir, Saba Mahmood, Zeus Leonardo, Robert Kaufman, and Martin Jay. Hossein Ayazi, Tasha Hauff, Bayley Jo Marquez, and Charisse Burden collectively stretched my thinking about the impact of the work of Edward W. Said. The Critical Prison Studies Strategic Working Group provided a key testing ground for several lines of argument in this book. Many thanks to the Townsend Center for the Humanities for supporting the group, and to Francisco Casique, William Drummond, Marcial Gonzalez, Patricia Penn Hilden, Tony Platt, Victoria Robinson, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Jonathan Simon, Jill Stoner, Bryan Wagner, and Connie Wun.

Research for A Shadow over Palestine benefited from the acumen of Francisco Casique, Maria Faini, and Kristen Sun. Tala Khanmalek, Maria Faini, and Kim Tran gave crucial late-stage feedback on the manuscript. Anyone who has interacted with Berkeley’s ethnic studies undergraduates knows the gravitational force they create in the universe; I’ve strived to write a book that can travel in its orbit.

My thanks to Sylvester Johnson and Tracy Leavelle for the invitation to participate in the Seminar on Religion and U.S. Empire, hosted by the Kripke Center for the Study of Religion and Society at Creighton University, where several of these ideas were honed. Tamara Lea Spira read and commented on most of this book. Her critical wisdom sharpened and clarified crucial elements of the book’s argument and continues to teach me about how to imagine forms of justice in deep affiliation to the historic past.

Research and writing for this book have been generously supported by the John C. Flanagan Dissertation Fellowship, the Hellman Family Faculty Fund, an Institute for International Studies Junior Faculty Fellowship Grant, a Committee on Research Research-Enabling Grant, and the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. My thanks to the Bancroft Library, the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, Special Collections at the Stanford University Library, and the Schlesinger Library. The Institute for International Studies also graciously sponsored a manuscript workshop in the book’s final stages. I am immensely grateful for the insights provided by Amy Kaplan, Alex Lubin, Nadine Naber, Colleen Lye, Waldo Martin, and Laura Pérez.

Interlocutors at the Center for American Studies and Research at the American University of Beirut, where I presented aspects of this project, have included Sophia Azeb, Moustafa Bayoumi, Ira Dworkin, Brian Edwards, Nada Elia, Sirene Harb, Salah Hassan, Maryam Kashani, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Patrick McGreevy, Anjali Nath, Dana Olwan, Vijay Prashad, Junaid Rana, Steven Salaita, Harry Stecopolous, and Adam Waterman. Thanks as well to generous hosts at UCLA, Oklahoma State University, and Penn State University.

Rabab Abdulhadi, Melani McAlister, Hilton Obenzinger, and Steven Salaita have been this book’s scholarly pathbreakers. They have been generous guides from its inception. Writing this book has given me the excuse to bend the ears of a wide range of brilliant scholars: Hosam Aboul-Ela, Thomas Abowd, Hisham Aidi, Evelyn Alsultany, Paul Amar, Amal Amireh, Ruha Benjamin, Dan Berger, Marcellus Blount, Jordan Camp, Sylvia Chan-Malik, Ebony Coletu, Sohail Daulatzai, Ashley Dawson, Aureliano DeSoto, Noura Erakat, Carol Fadda-Conrey, Nina Farnia, Nouri Gana, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, David Theo Goldberg, Che Gossett, Zareena Grewal, Maryam Griffin, Lisa Hajjar, Sora Han, Salah Hassan, Peter Hitchcock, Gil Hochberg, Sharon P. Holland, Grace Hong, Apple Igrek, Matthew Frye Jacobson, Ronak Kapadia, Caren Kaplan, Jodi Kim, Sue J. Kim, Marcy Knopf-Newman, David J. Leonard, Erik Love, Jenna Loyd, Sunaina Maira, Anita Mannur, John David Márquez, Sophia McClennen, Leerom Medovoi, Sarah Anne Minkin, Koritha Mitchell, Nick Mitchell, Manijeh Moradian, Fred Moten, Aamir Mufti, Bill V. Mullen, Donna Murch, Marcy Newman, Dinna Omar, Therí A. Pickens, Jasbir Puar, Dylan E. Rodríguez, Ricky Rodríguez, Jordana Rosenberg, Malini Johar Schueller, Micol Seigel, Magid Shihade, David Stein, Cheryl L. Suzack, Robert Vitalis, and Howard Winant.

I am forever indebted to Richard Morrison, former executive editor of the University of Minnesota Press, for his commitment and vision for this book, and to Jason Weidemann and Erin Warholm-Wohlenhaus for seeing it to completion. Cathy Hannabach and Paula Dragosh provided meticulous copyediting. Reviews from Amy Kaplan, Melani McAlister, Jodi Melamed, and two anonymous scholars were crucial in identifying what was valuable about the project. Many thanks, also, to David Kyuman Kim, John L. Jackson, Rudy V. Busto, Emily-Jane Cohen, and Jade Brooks for their support.

Dear friends have lived with this book, and with me, through assorted iterations: Eric Bruskin, Matthew Aronoff, Christiaan Greer, and all the Bethesda Boys; Sadie Costello, Josh Costello, Wendy Mazursky, and Scott Fischette.

Angie Parlin, Chris Parlin, Nicole Saul, and Ben Saul have been consummately supportive throughout this project, offering nourishment, good stories, and great questions. Ben Feldman has made just the right joke at just the right time. Ruth Tenzer Feldman and Michael Feldman have taught me love, caring, how to ask questions, how to search for answers. Samuel arrived just when this project was being hatched in Seattle, and Milo came to be as it was coming into book form. Both have been remarkably patient with me and always willing to laugh, even as they have borne the brunt of tenure track effects.

This book, and so much more, would have been utterly impossible without Amy. Counterfactuals tremble at the thought. She has inhabited this book with me, clarified things when necessary, cursed it with me, and enlivened the process from beginning to end. Two words will never capture the impossible immensity of it all, yet they are what must be said again and again: Thank you.

Notes

Prologue

1. James Baldwin, “Letters from a Journey,” Harper’s Magazine, May 1963, 48. Hereafter cited in the text.

2. See Magdalena J. Zambrowska, James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009).

3. Nabile Farès and Peter Thompson, “James Baldwin: A 1970 Interview,” Transition 105 (2011): 66.

4. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963; repr., New York: Vintage International, 1993), 30.

5. Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt, eds., Conversations with James Baldwin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 86. Baldwin did tour the continent briefly in the spring of 1962, though he never published substantively about it. My thanks to Ed Pavlić for this clarification.

6. James Baldwin, “Open Letter to the Born Again,” Nation 229, no. 9 (1979): 264.

7. Margaret Mead and James Baldwin, A Rap on Race (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1971), 193.

8. Ibid.

9. Margaret Mead and James Baldwin, A Rap on Race (New York: CMS Records, 1972).

Introduction

1. Quoted in Warren Bass, Support Any Friend: Kennedy’s Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 183. Kennedy’s sale of Hawk short-range antiaircraft missiles broke with the precedent of previous administrations and inaugurated what would become a long-standing U.S. commitment to providing Israel large-scale military aid. See Abraham Ben-Zvi, John F. Kennedy and the Politics of Arms Sales to Israel (London: Routledge, 2002).

2. “A conjuncture is a period during which the different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions that are at work in society come together to give it a specific and distinctive shape. . . . As I see it, history moves from one conjuncture to another rather than being an evolutionary flow. And what drives it forward is usually a crisis, when the contradictions that are always at play in any historical moment are condensed, or, as Althusser said, ‘fuse in a ruptural unity.’ Crises are moments of potential change, but the nature of their resolution is not given” (Stuart Hall and Doreen Massey, “Interpreting the Crisis,” Soundings 44, no. 1 [2010]: 57).

3. Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the U.S. State (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011); and Dylan Rodríguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

4. See Warren Bass, Support Any Friend: Kennedy’s Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

5. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2009). On the rich forms of Holocaust memory among American Jews prior to 1960, see Hasia Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

6. Cynthia Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of U.S. Third World Left (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006); Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007).

7. On the “permanently temporary” structure to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, see Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007).

8. On the global contours of 1968, see Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Immanuel Wallerstein, “1968, Revolution in the World-System: Theses and Queries,” in The Essential Wallerstein (New York: New Press, 2000), 355–73.

9. Adi Ophir et al., eds., The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009).

10. Alex Lubin, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Imaginary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

11. Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance (London: Verso, 1999), 19–38.

12. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011), 11.

13. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), xx.

14. See Nikhil Pal Singh, “Racial Formation in an Age of Permanent War,” in Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Daniel HoSang et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 276–301.

15. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 62.

16. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975–1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 46.

17. Michelle Mart, Eye on Israel: How America Came to View Israel as an Ally (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 176.

18. The most nuanced cultural histories of the emergence of this attachment in the post–World War II period are Mart, Eye on Israel; and Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). On their prefiguration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Lawrence Davidson, America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001); Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); Hilton Obenzinger, American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Steven Salaita, The Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2006). On the framing of this attachment from an Israeli perspective, see Tom Segev, Elvis in Jerusalem: Post-Zionism and the Americanization of Israel (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002).

19. On the vision and repression of multiracial democracy, see Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007).

20. On settler colonial orders to the racialized differential of labor in the early twentieth century, see Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

21. Edward W. Said, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” Social Text 1 (1979): 7–58.

22. See, for instance, Laurence J. Silberstein, The Postzionism Debates: Knowledge and Power in Israeli Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999); Oren Yiftachel, Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Self-Fashioning in Israel Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Gil Z. Hochberg, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007); Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, The Palestinian People: A History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Ella Shohat, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006).

23. See John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).

24. Even focusing on the Holocaust, comparative memory, Israel, and the United States, the following is only a small sample: Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Novick, Holocaust in American Life; Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009); Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

25. Again, here is a small sliver of a burgeoning field affecting my own argument. See John Collins, Global Palestine (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Rochelle Davis, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011); Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: Beacon, 2006); Walid Khalidi, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); Laleh Khalili, Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013); Are J. Knudsen and Sari Hanafi, eds., Palestinian Refugees: Identity, Space, and Place in the Levant (London: Routledge, 2011); Ronit Lentin, ed., Thinking Palestine (London: Zed Books, 2008); Joseph Massad, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians (London: Routledge, 2006); Adi Ophir et al., eds., The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (New York: Zone Books, 2009); Julie Peteet, Landscapes of Hope and Despair: Palestinian Refugee Camps (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Elia Zureik et al., eds., Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory, and Power (London: Routledge, 2011).

26. Along with scholarship already cited, see Brian Edwards, Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005); Zareena Grewal, Islam Is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Carol Fadda-Conrey, Contemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

27. On an important theorization of this dynamic, see Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70, no. 3 (1998): 581–606. On the multiple valences of domesticity for indigenous American writers in the ambit of U.S. settler colonialism, see Beth H. Piatote, Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013).

28. See, for instance, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography,” Professional Geographer 54, no. 1 (2002): 15–24; George Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011); and Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

29. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1991); Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

30. Kim, Ends of Empire; Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Holt, 2007).

31. Stephen Graham, Cities under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (London: Verso, 2010); Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004).

32. Obenzinger, America’s Palestine; Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven.

33. Salaita, Holy Land in Transit, 15.

34. Peteet, Landscape of Hope and Despair.

35. Lisa Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 18.

36. See Shu Mei-Shih, “Comparative Racialization: An Introduction,” PMLA 123, no. 5 (2008): 1347–62.

37. On desedimentation, see Nahum Dimitri Chandler, X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).

38. David Theo Goldberg, “Racial Comparisons, Relational Racisms: Some Thoughts on Method,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 32, no. 7 (2009): 1276. See also Natalia Molina, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); and Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeus Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014).

39. Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, Race in Translation: Culture Wars and the Postcolonial Atlantic (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

40. Howard Winant, The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

41. See Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin, 2012); and Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

42. On a rich elaboration of such an approach, see Stam and Shohat, Race in Translation.

43. Here I am considering, in particular, Paul Berman, ed., Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments (New York: Delacorte, 1994); Emily Miller Budick, Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Hasia R. Diner, In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915–1935 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Seth Forman, Blacks in the Jewish Mind: A Crisis of Liberalism (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Ethan Goffman, Imagining Each Other: Blacks and Jews in Contemporary American Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000); Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006); Michael Lerner and Cornel West, Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin (New York: GP Putnam’s Sons, 1995); Jack Salzman and Cornel West, eds., Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Eric J. Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).

44. Nadine Naber, Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism (New York: New York University Press, 2012); Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America (New York: Penguin, 2009); Amira Jarmakani, Imagining Arab Womanhood: The Cultural Mythology of Veils, Harems, and Belly Dancers in the U.S. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11 (New York: New York University Press, 2012); Sarah M. A. Gualtieri, Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

45. Ann Laura Stoler and Carole McGranahan, “Refiguring Imperial Terrains,” in Imperial Formations, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter C. Perdue (Santa Fe, N.M.: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007), 15.

46. As I demonstrate in chapter 1, this point has been powerfully argued—and persistently misread—since at least 1965. Recent iterations of this claim include Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409; Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and Collins, Global Palestine.

47. Etienne Balibar, “Racism and Nationalism,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 37–67.

48. Melamed, Represent and Destroy.

49. Quoted in Eve Tavor Bannet, “Analogy as Translation: Wittgenstein, Derrida, and the Law of Language,” New Literary History 28, no. 4 (1997): 655.

50. As Alexander Weheliye compellingly argues, “Not a secondary product of preexisting elements, relation epitomizes the constitutive potentiality of the world activated via the processes of bringing-into-relation. It also differs radically from comparison, since relation offers not tools of measurement but spheres of interconnected existences that are in constant motion” (“After Man,” American Literary History 20, nos. 1–2 [2008]: 331).

51. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 27.

52. See Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), 54–96.

53. Weheliye, “After Man,” 322.

54. Lisa Lowe, “Insufficient Difference,” Ethnicities 5, no. 3 (2005): 412.

55. “An Interview with Edward W. Said,” boundary 2 20, no. 1 (1993): 3.

56. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 5.

57. Quoted in Nikhil Singh, “The Afterlife of Fascism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 105, no. 1 (2006): 86.

58. Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York: New Press, 2003), 54.

59. Ibid., 151.

60. Ibid., 71.

61. Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), 293.

62. Ibid., 290.

63. Quoted in Gabriel Piterberg, “Zion’s Rebel Daughter: Hannah Arendt on Palestine and Jewish Politics,” New Left Review 48 (2007): 51.

64. Conjunctural analysis, following Lawrence Grossberg, aims to provide a “better understanding of ‘what’s going on,’ through a) seeing knowledge as an act in [rather than a representation of] the world, and b) (re)constructing a context of possibilities . . . for the future disclosed in the present” (Cultural Studies in the Future Tense [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010], 57).

1. Specters of Genocide

1. “Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination,” A/RES/3379 (XXX), November 10, 1975.

2. “Decade for Action to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination,” Resolution 2919 (XXVII), November 15, 1972.

3. Sponsored by: (25) Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Cuba, Dahomey, East Germany, Egypt, Guinea, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Yemen, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen Arab Republic. Voted yes: (72) The twenty-five sponsoring nations and forty-seven other nations: Albania, Bangladesh, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burundi, Byelorussian SSR, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Chad, Cyprus, Czechoslovakia, Democratic Kampuchea, Equatorial Guinea, The Gambia, Grenada, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Laos, Madagascar, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Mexico, Mongolia, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, People’s Republic of China, People’s Republic of the Congo, Poland, Portugal, Rwanda, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Turkey, Uganda, Ukrainian SSR, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. Voted no: (35) Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Barbados, Belgium, Canada, Central African Republic, Costa Rica, Denmark, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Fiji, Finland, France, Haiti, Honduras, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Luxembourg, Malawi, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Swaziland, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, and West Germany.

4. “Huge Rally Here Condemns U.N. Anti-Zionism Move,” New York Times, November 12, 1975.

5. H. Con 475, “Providing for Condemnation of Resolution of U.N. General Assembly Equating Zionism with Racism and Providing for Hearings to Reassess Further U.S. Participation in U.N. General Assembly,” November 11, 1975.

6. See Gil Troy, Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight against Zionism as Racism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 158–82.

7. “Shame of the U.N.,” New York Times, November 13, 1975.

8. “Anti-Zionism Resolution: An Attack on the U.N.,” New York Times, December 2, 1975. The authors included Martin Arroyo, Betty Friedan, Bayard Rustin, Leonard Bernstein, Beverly Sills, and James Michener.

9. Saturday Night Live, November 15, 1975.

10. “Zionism and Judaism,” Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, November 22, 1975.

11. “Zionism: Enemy of the Jews,” originally published in Palestine in Struggle, a newsletter of the Canada-Palestine Solidarity Association; Sharif Kanaana, “Survival Strategies of Arabs in Israel,” originally published in the Middle East Research and Information Project (October 1975); and George J. Tomeh, “Unholy Alliance,” excerpted from Israel and South Africa: The Unholy Alliance (New York: New World Press, 1973).

12. “A Letter from an American Rabbi to an Arab Ambassador,” New York Times, November 23, 1975.

13. A. M. El-Messiri, “Zionism and Racism,” New York Times, November 13, 1975. Having such a spirited defense of the resolution appear in the Paper of Record was notable, as was having it appear directly beneath a typescript replica, replete with signature, of the 1917 Declaration by Arthur J. Balfour.

14. See, for instance, Harris O. Schoenberg, The Adoption and Repeal of the Z=R Resolution and the Implications for UN Reform (Wayne, N.J.: Center for UN Reform Education, 2001).

15. Mark Gerson, The Essential Neoconservative Reader (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1996), 40.

16. On the philosophical lineaments of racial liberalism, see Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997). Foundational historical scholarship on racial liberalism includes Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002); Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005); Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); and Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

17. This line of argument is indebted to Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998); and Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).

18. Hilton Obenzinger, “Naturalizing Cultural Pluralism, Americanizing Zionism: The Settler Colonial Basis to Early-Twentieth-Century Progressive Thought,” South Atlantic Quarterly 107, no. 4 (2008): 651–69; and Victoria Hattam, In the Shadow of Race: Jews, Latinos, and Immigrant Politics in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

19. See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 171–200.

20. Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

21. Michael E. Staub, Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

22. Charter of the League of Nations, Article 22.

23. “Persecution and Discrimination,” Resolution 103(I), November 19, 1946.

24. “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples,” Resolution 1514 (XV), December 14, 1960.

25. Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009). See also Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin, 2012).

26. Randall Williams, The Divided World: Human Rights and Its Violence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

27. Civil Rights Congress, We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government against the Negro People, 3rd ed. (New York: Civil Rights Congress, 1952). See also Kimberley L. Phillips, War! What Is It Good for? Black Freedom Struggles and the U.S. Military from World War II to Iraq (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 162.

28. The OAAU, under the brief leadership of Malcolm X, demanded observer status at the UN and mobilized the OAU in 1964 to take up the question of Black freedom in the United States as a problem of human rights. See chapter 2.

29. “Treatment of People of Indian Origin in the Union of South Africa,” Resolution 395(v), December 2, 1950.

30. “Situation in South Africa Resulting from the Policies of Apartheid,” Resolution 3151(xxvii)(g), December 14, 1973.

31. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009); Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York: Owl, 2000).

32. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), 7.

33. See, for instance, Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003); Lewis Gordon, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Eric Mielants, “Global Anti-Semitism in World-Historical Perspective,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 7, no. 2 (2009): 1–14.

34. Institute of Human Relations, As the UN Probes Prejudice: Observations on the United Nations Inquiry into Anti-Semitism and Other Forms of Religious and Racial Prejudice (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1960). Hereafter cited in the text.

35. David Caplovitz and Candance Rogers, Swastika 1960: The Epidemic of Anti-Semitic Vandalism in America (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1961).

36. Quoted in Stuart Svonkin, Jews against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 184.

37. Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 235.

38. Quoted in Wheatland, Frankfurt School, 236.

39. The UN adopted the “Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief” in 1981. See A/RES/36/55, November 25, 1981.

40. Egon Schwelb, “The International Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination,” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 15 (1966): 999.

41. Yohanan Manor, To Right a Wrong: The Revocation of UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 Defaming Zionism (New York: Schreiber Shengold Publishing, 1996), 6.

42. Michael Banton, International Action against Racial Discrimination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 60.

43. Ibid., 61.

44. See “Palestine National Charter,” in The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History, ed. Walter Lacquer and Barry Rubin (New York: Penguin, 2008), 119.

45. Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post–Cold War Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

46. Sabri Jiryis and Salah Qallab, “The Palestine Research Center,” Journal of Palestine Studies 14, no. 4 (1985): 185–87.

47. Thomas Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 159.

48. Friedman claims that the Palestine Research Center was one of two key targets of the Israeli invasion in 1982—the other being the refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila.

49. In chapter 5, I elaborate on this historical moment as part of a broader ideological link between the genocidal violence in the camps and the epistemicide committed to the PRC’s destruction.

50. Fayez Sayegh’s brothers, Anis and Yusuf, also took substantive roles in the Palestine Research Center’s leadership, with Anis directing the center after his elder brother’s departure; Yusuf’s wife, Rosemary Sayigh, became a groundbreaking ethnographer of Palestinian refugee experiences.

51. In chapter 2 I discuss a transposed version of this pamphlet in the context of its entrance into debates about the anticolonial contours of the Black Power movement.

52. Fayez A. Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (Beirut: Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center, 1965), v. Hereafter cited in the text.

53. Fayez A. Sayegh, Palestine, Israel, and Peace (Beirut: Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center, 1970), 22. Hereafter cited in the text.

54. Hasan Sa’b, Zionism and Racism (Beirut: Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center, 1968). Hereafter cited in the text.

55. Einstein registered his own critique of the state in a letter he cosigned to the New York Times that highlighted the fascist dimensions of the new state’s hard-right “Freedom Party,” whose leader, Menachim Begin, was scheduled to visit the United States. “The New Palestine Party,” New York Times, December 4, 1948.

56. For more on the Kallen–Cohen debate, see chapter 3.

57. “The United Nations Has Condemned Zionism; The United Nations Has Not Condemned Judaism,” New York Times, November 21, 1975.

58. Fayez A. Sayegh, “Statement Made at the 2134th Meeting of the Third (Social, Humanitarian & Cultural) Committee of the General Assembly on 17 October 1975,” in Zionism: “A Form of Racism and Racial Discrimination”; Four Statements Made at the U.N. General Assembly (New York: Office of the Permanent Observer of the Palestine Liberation Organization to the United Nations, 1976), 14. Hereafter cited in the text.

59. Ian F. Haney-Lopéz, “‘A Nation of Minorities’: Race, Ethnicity, and Reactionary Colorblindness,” Stanford Law Review 59, no. 4 (2007): 1009.

60. See Herbert J. Gans, “The Moynihan Report and Its Aftermaths,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 8, no. 2 (2011): 315–27; Daniel Geary, “Racial Liberalism, the Moynihan Report, and the Daedelus Project on ‘The Negro American,’” Daedelus 140, no. 1 (2011): 53–66; and Kevin J. Mumford, “Untangling Pathology: The Moynihan Report and Homosexual Damage, 1965–1975,” Journal of Policy History 24, no. 1 (2012): 53–73.

61. “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” printed with original page numbers in The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy, ed. Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967), 5. Hereafter cited in the text.

62. See Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon.

63. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “United States in Opposition,” Commentary 59, no. 3 (1975): 42.

64. On “benign neglect,” see Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Toward a National Urban Policy,” Public Interest 17 (1969): 8–9.

65. Moynihan, “United States in Opposition,” 41, 44.

66. Quoted in John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1994 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 84.

67. Quoted in Daniel Patrick Moynihan, with Suzanne Weaver, A Dangerous Place (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), 153–54. Hereafter cited in the text.

68. Tom Buckley, “Brawler at the U.N.,” New York Times Magazine, December 7, 1975, 32, 107–13.

69. Lewis’s “historical approach” reveals the post–World War II emergence of a “distinctive Palestinian entity” as “the joint creation of Israel and the Arab states—the one by extruding the Arabs of Palestine, the others by refusing to accept them.” Bernard Lewis, “The Palestinians and the PLO: A Historical Approach,” Commentary 59, no. 1 (1975): 33. Subsequent extensive scholarship on Palestinian nationalism suggests much deeper historical roots. See, for instance, Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, The Palestinian People: A History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).

70. Sayegh agreed. “By this diversionary trick he evaded answering the question: Does the definition of ‘racial discrimination’ adopted by the United Nations apply to Zionism or does it not?” (reply to DPM, 38).

71. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Statement by Ambassador Daniel P. Moynihan, United States Representative to the United Nations, in Plenary, in explanation of vote on the resolution equating Zionism with racism and racial discrimination,” in The Essential Neoconservative Reader, ed. Mark Gerson (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1996), 96. Hereafter cited in the text.

72. Moynihan would continue to reflect on the power of language in several subsequent publications. See “A Diplomat’s Rhetoric,” Harpers 252, no. 1508 (1976): 40–43; “Words and Foreign Policy,” Policy Review 6 (1978): 69–71; and “Further Thoughts on Words and Foreign Policy,” Policy Review 8 (1979): 53–59.

73. Ernie Meyer, “Detente Dangerous—Moynihan: ‘Israel a Metaphor for Democracy,’” Jerusalem Post, July 6, 1976.

74. Norman Podhoretz Papers, 1950–1986, MSS60103, box 2, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

75. Daniel P. Moynihan, “Address by Daniel P. Moynihan at the Convocation of the Hebrew University Jerusalem” (Jerusalem, Israel, July 5, 1976), 17.

76. See Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 181–87.

77. Daniel P. Moynihan, “Remarks by Daniel P. Moynihan, Weizmann Institute of Science Dinner” (New York Hilton Hotel, New York City, October 18, 1976), 4.

78. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Totalitarian Terrorists,” New York Magazine, July 26, 1976, 38.

79. See, for instance, David C. Wills, The First War on Terrorism: Counter-terrorism Policy during the Reagan Administration (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).

80. Zionism and Racism: Proceedings of an International Symposium (Tripoli, Libya: International Organization against All Forms of Racial Discrimination, 1977), vii.

81. Edward W. Said, “Intellectual Origins of Imperialism and Zionism,” in Zionism and Racism, 129.

82. Ibid.

83. Fayez Sayegh, “Racism and Racial Discrimination Defined,” International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (EAFORD) 27 (1982): 1. Hereafter cited in the text.

84. See Sasha Polakow-Suransky, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa (New York: Vintage, 2011).

85. See “Elimination of Racism and Racial Discrimination,” A/RES/46/86, December 16, 1991.

86. George Bush, “Address to the Forty-Sixth Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City” (September 23, 1991), www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=20012.

87. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at AIPAC Policy Conference” (March 4, 2012), www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/03/04/remarks-president-aipac-policy-conference-0.

88. This line of argument has been most thoroughly developed by the legal scholar Kenneth Marcus, who spent much of the 2000s serving as assistant secretary of education for civil rights, and then staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Marcus calls the new anti-Semitism a set of “reracialization processes that stigmatize Jews as morally blameworthy and that mark them for reprisal.” The Office of Civil Rights, which circulated a letter in 2004 asserting that, while investigations into religious discrimination were outside its purview, it would nevertheless look into cases of what it calls “racial or ethnic harassment against Muslim, Sikh, and Jewish students.” See Marcus, Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

89. Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011).

2. Black Power’s Palestine

1. Fayez Sayegh, Do You Know? Twenty Basic Facts about the Palestine Problem (Beirut: Palestine Research Center, Palestine Liberation Organization, 1966).

2. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “New SNCC Officers,” SNCC Newsletter 1, no. 2 (1967): 6.

3. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “Third World Round-up: The Palestine Problem: Test Your Knowledge,” SNCC Newsletter 1, no. 2 (1967): 4.

4. “Racism is the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007], 247).

5. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Fifty Years After” (1903), in The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (New York: Blue Heron, 1953), xi.

6. David Hilliard and Donald Weise, eds., The Huey P. Newton Reader (New York: Seven Stories, 2002), 137.

7. Jack O’Dell, “The July Rebellions and the ‘Military State,’” in Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell, ed. Nikhil Pal Singh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 154–55.

8. Nikhil Pal Singh distinguishes the “long civil rights era” from what he calls the dominant national narrative of the “short civil rights era,” 1955–65. The short civil rights narrative focuses on a liberal capitalist, domestic, and integrationist struggle, contained in the U.S. south, and culminates in the federal passage of civil rights and voting rights legislation. The arc of the long civil rights era, by contrast, emerges as early as the 1930s and continues into the 1970s, has an internationalist lens shaped by anticolonial, liberationist, and anticapitalist movements, and views struggles for black freedom in the United States as part of a broader global struggle. See Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 5–6.

9. My thinking has been influenced by the flourishing scholarship in African American studies that has charted Black internationalism. See, for instance, Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (New York: Beacon, 2002); Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Brenda Gayle Plummer, A Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Singh, Black Is a Country; Michelle A. Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals, 1914–1962 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005); Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anti-Colonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), and Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).

10. For elaborations of the pre–World War II history of Afro-Zionism, see Alex Lubin, “Locating Palestine in Pre-1948 Black Internationalism,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 9, no. 2 (2007): 95–108; and Robert Weisbord, ed., Israel in the Black American Perspective (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985).

11. David Scott, “The Sovereignty of the Imagination: An Interview with George Lamming,” Small Axe 6, no. 2 (2002): 94.

12. Von Eschen, Race against Empire.

13. Elad Ben-Dror, “Ralph Bunche and the Establishment of Israel,” Israel Affairs 14, no. 3 (2008): 519–37. See also Alex Lubin, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 78–110.

14. Edwin Hoyt, Paul Robeson, the American Othello (Cleveland: World, 1967), 161.

15. On the process of anticommunist “domestication,” see Von Eschen, Race against Empire and Satchmo Blows Up the World.

16. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Suez,” in The Creative Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Herbert Aptheker (White Plains, N.Y.: Kraus-Thomson Organization, 1985), 45–46.

17. Michael W. Williams, “Pan-Africanism and Zionism: The Delusion of Comparability,” Journal of Black Studies 21, no. 3 (1991): 362.

18. James Baldwin, “The Harlem Ghetto: Winter 1948, the Vicious Circle of Frustration and Prejudice,” Commentary 5, no. 2 (1948): 165. Hereafter cited in the text.

19. James Baldwin, “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White,” New York Times Magazine, April 9, 1967, 27, 135–39, 135. Hereafter cited in the text.

20. Loïc Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the ‘Race Question’ in the United States,” New Left Review 13 (2002): 52.

21. Ibid., 52.

22. Loïc Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punishment and Society 3, no. 1 (2001): 112.

23. On the salient cultural work of this formation, see Cynthia Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006).

24. For a concise summary of the concept’s history, see Ramón A. Gutiérrez, “Internal Colonialism: An American Theory of Race,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 1, no. 2 (2004): 281–95.

25. Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution? (New York: Morrow, 1969), 75.

26. Nikhil Singh, “Negro Exceptionalism: The Antinomies of Harold Cruse,” in Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual Revisited, ed. Jerry Watts (New York: Routledge, 2004), 73–91.

27. Jack H. O’Dell, “A Special Variety of Colonialism,” Freedomways 7, no. 1 (1967): 7–15. In itself, the origins and political trajectories of Freedomways testify to the international and anticolonial landscape of Black freedom struggles. The journal has its origins in Paul Robeson’s newspaper Freedom (1951–55), which, in the midst of heavy pressure from anticommunist forces within the United States, did the work of articulating anticolonial liberation in Africa with social justice movements in the United States. See Von Eschen, Race against Empire, 124; Lawrence Lamphere, “Paul Robeson, Freedom Newspaper, and the Black Press” (PhD diss., Boston College, May 2003), 125; and Ian Rocksborough-Smith, “Bearing the Seeds of Struggle: Freedomways Magazine, Black Leftists, and Continuities in the Freedom Movement” (MA thesis, Simon Fraser University, 2005), 5. In the early 1980s Freedomways routinely published on the question of Palestine and collaborated with the Association of Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG), including a two-issue series on the aftermath of Sabra and Shatila.

28. Eldridge Cleaver, “The Land Question and Black Liberation,” in Eldridge Cleaver: Post-Prison Writings and Speeches, ed. Robert Scheer (New York: Random House, 1969), 57. Hereafter cited in the text.

29. Recent scholarship on Black Power’s specific cultural and political formations has done much to challenge the liberal nationalist narrative of the civil rights movement’s “tragic radicalization.” See especially Eddie S. Glaude Jr., ed., Is It Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Judson L. Jeffries, ed., Black Power in the Belly of the Beast (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power (New York: Henry Holt, 2006); Joseph, ed., The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights–Black Power Era (New York: Routledge, 2006); Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003); Singh, Black Is a Country, 174–211; and Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

30. On Carmichael’s itinerary, see Stokely Carmichael and Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) (New York: Scribner, 2003). See also Peniel E. Joseph, Stokely: A Life (New York: Basic Civitas, 2014), 197–230.

31. Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage, 1967), 5. Hereafter cited in the text.

32. Stone’s remarks come from his New York Review of Books essay on the mammoth 1966 collection The Negro American, which featured Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s scholarly version of the report written for the Johnson administration, “Employment, Income, and the Ordeal of the Negro Family.” Stone was one of the very few Jewish intellectuals in the United States in 1967 to frame the aftermath of the June war in colonial terms. See “Holy War,” New York Review of Books, August 3, 1967, www.nybooks.com/articles/12009.

33. In a stunning inversion of this analogy, the presidential candidate Richard Nixon predicted that “if we allow [the crime wave] to happen, then the city jungle will cease to be a metaphor. It will become a barbaric reality and the brutal society that now flourishes in the core cities . . . will annex the affluent suburbs.” Quoted in Michael W. Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 173.

34. In Racial Formation in the United States, while emphasizing the “Great Transformation” in racial politics in the late 1960s, Michael Omi and Howard Winant regret the “doomed” internal colonial model because it was “an analogy which was politically and not analytically grounded,” a statement that gets reiterated numerous times across the text (46). See also John Liu, “Towards an Understanding of the Internal Colonial Model,” in Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America, ed. Emma Gee (Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, UCLA, 1976), 160–68; Eva Cherniavksy, “Subaltern Studies in a U.S. Frame,” boundary 2 23, no. 2 (1996): 85–110; Jenny Sharpe, “Is the United States Postcolonial? Transnationalism, Immigration, and Race,” Diaspora 4, no. 2 (1995): 181–99.

35. Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 117–46.

36. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 117.

37. This reading of analogy is informed substantially by Brent Hayes Edwards’s discussion of décalage as it emerges in discourses of black internationalism. For Edwards, décalage “is the kernel of precisely that which cannot be transferred or exchanged, the received biases that refuse to pass over when one crosses the water. It is a changing core of difference; it is the work of ‘differences within unity,’ an unidentifiable point that is incessantly touched and fingered and pressed” (Practice of Diaspora, 14).

38. Martin Luther King Jr., “A Time to Break the Silence,” in A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson and Kris Shepard (New York: Warner Books, 2002), 142.

39. Huey P. Newton, “In Defense of Self Defense,” in Off the Pigs! The History and Literature of the Black Panther Party (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1976), 364–76.

40. See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America, 222; and Simon Hall, “On the Tail of the Panther: Black Power and the 1967 Convention of the National Conference for New Politics,” Journal of American Studies 37, no. 1 (2003): 59–78.

41. See Watts, Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual Reconsidered.

42. Joseph, Waiting for the Midnight Hour, 183–92.

43. See Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret War against Dissent in the United States (Boston: South End, 2002).

44. Quoted in Joseph, Waiting for the Midnight Hour, 188.

45. Ibid., 27.

46. Martin Luther King Jr., “Martin Luther King Defines ‘Black Power,’” New York Times Magazine, June 11, 1967, 26–27, 93–98. This essay was reprinted as the first chapter in King’s Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (New York: Harper Row, 1967).

47. “SNCC Anti-Israel Remarks Blasted by Young, Others,” Chicago Daily Defender, August 17, 1967.

48. “S.N.C.C. Charges Israel Atrocities: Black Power Group Attacks Zionism as Conquering Arabs by ‘Massacre,’” New York Times, August 15, 1967.

49. “S.N.C.C. Criticized for Israel Stand: Rights Leaders Score Attack on Jews as ‘Anti-Semitism,’” New York Times, August 16, 1967.

50. Robert G. Weisbord and Richard Kazarian Jr., Israel in the Black American Perspective (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985), 44.

51. Clayborne Carson, “Black-Jewish Universalism in the Era of Identity Politics,” in Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States, ed. Jack Salzman and Cornel West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 188.

52. Gary E. Rubin, “African Americans and Israel,” in Struggles in the Promised Land, 357–70, 358–59.

53. McAlister, Epic Encounters, 113.

54. Eric Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 332.

55. Matthew Quest, “Letters on the Arab-Israeli Dispute in James Forman’s The Making of Black Revolutionaries,” Palestine Solidarity Review (Fall 2004), psreview.org/content/view/29/72/.

56. Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour, 194–95, 334.

57. Carmichael and Thelwell, Ready for Revolution, 558.

58. Carson, In Struggle, 267.

59. Carmichael and Thelwell, Ready for Revolution, 558. Hereafter cited in the text.

60. Carson agrees with this claim, suggesting the text was written “after the Central Committee, meeting in the midst of Israel’s six-day victory over Arab forces in June 1967, requested that SNCC’s research and communications staff investigate the background of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Ethel Minor, editor of SNCC’s newsletter, volunteered for this task, recalling that the committee wanted an ‘objective critique of the facts’” (In Struggle, 267).

61. Sayegh, “Do You Know?”

62. See, for instance, Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008); Ilan Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007); and Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim, eds., The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (London: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

63. A classic scholarly critique of Israeli state violence that draws similar structural linkages, published in 1967, is Michael Selzer, The Aryanization of the Jewish State (New York: Black Star, 1967).

64. McAlister, Epic Encounters, 90.

65. Hall, “On the Tail of the Panther: Black Power and the 1967 Convention of the National Conference for New Politics,” 61.

66. Quoted in Joel Wilson, “Invisible Cages: Racialized Politics and the Alliance between the Panthers and the Peace and Freedom Party,” in In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement, ed. Jama Lazerow (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 191.

67. Jacobson, Roots Too, 225.

68. Hall, “On the Tail of the Panther,” 66.

69. Ibid., 67.

70. Jack W. Weinman, “New Politics Is Born,” Jewish Currents 21, no. 11 (1967): 8, 9.

71. Nikhil Pal Singh, “The Black Panthers and the ‘Undeveloped Country’ of the Left,” in The Black Panther Party, Reconsidered, ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore, Md.: Black Classic, 1998), 79.

72. Ibid.

73. “October 1966 Black Panther Party Platform and Program: What We Want, What We Believe.” “The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over twenty million black people; therefore, we feel that [reparation] is a modest demand that we make.”

74. Robert Self, “The Black Panther Party and the Long Civil Rights Era,” in Lazerow and Williams, In Search of the Black Panther Party, 37.

75. Ibid.

76. Nathan Hare, “A Report on the Pan African Cultural Festival,” Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research 1, no. 1 (1969): 3.

77. The table of contents of this inaugural issue captures the era’s global frame, including articles by Sékou Touré, “A Dialectical Approach to Culture”; Stokely Carmichael, “Pan-Africanism—Land and Power”; Eldridge Cleaver, “Education and Revolution”; Imamu Ameer Baraka, “A Black Value System”; and Robert Chrisman’s review of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, titled “The Crisis of Harold Cruse.” The avant-garde photographer and filmmaker William Klein produced two films documenting this moment in Algiers, Festival Panafricain (1971) and Eldridge Cleaver: Black Panther (1970). See also 1er [i.e. Premier] festival culturel panafricain, Alger, 1969 (Algiers: Éditions Actualité Algérie, [1970]).

78. “African Nations Open Twelve-Day Cultural Festival with Parade through Algiers,” New York Times, July 22, 1969.

79. Hare, “Report on the Pan African Cultural Festival,” 3.

80. McAlister, Epic Encounters, 104. Larry Neal’s definitive 1968 essay defines Black Art as “the aesthetic and spiritual sister of Black Power. . . . One is concerned with the relationship between art and politics; the other with art as politics.”

81. Archie Shepp’s performance in Algiers has recently been rereleased. See Varese Sarabande, Blasé/Live at the Pan-African Festival (2001).

82. According to Kathleen Cleaver, the Black Panther contingent was joined by other “fugitives,” including Byron Booth and Clinton Smith (who had spent time with Cleaver in prison) and James “Akili” and Gwen Patterson and their daughter, Tanya. Cleaver’s history of the International Section of the Party, written in 1983 to fulfill her graduation requirement as a Yale undergraduate, is arguably still the most detailed work on the International Section to date. See Kathleen Neal Cleaver, “Back to Africa: The Evolution of the International Section of the Black Panther Party (1969–1972),” in Jones, Black Panther Party, 211–51. I am indebted to Cleaver for sharing with me her reflections on the Algiers festival.

83. Erika Doss, “‘Revolutionary Art Is a Tool for Liberation’: Emory Douglas and Protest Aesthetics at the Black Panther,” in Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy, ed. Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas (London: Routledge, 2001), 179. See also Collete Gaiter, “What Revolution Looks Like: The Work of Black Panther Artist Emory Douglas,” in Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas, ed. Sam Durant (New York: Rizzoli, 2007), 96.

84. Singh, Black Is a Country, 203. See also Tim Lake, “The Arm(ing) of the Vanguard, Signify(ing), and Performing the Revolution: The Black Panther Party and Pedagogical Strategies for Interpreting a Revolutionary Life,” in Lazerow and Williams, In Search of the Black Panther Party, 306–23.

85. Douglas provided much of the artwork for the newspaper until it closed in 1979; the content of his work changed significantly after 1973, emphasizing much more the domestic successes of working-class Black people.

86. On the iconography of the Black Panther Party, see Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

87. Davarian L. Baldwin, “‘Culture Is a Weapon in Our Struggle’: The Black Panther Party and the Cultural Politics of Decolonization,” in Lazerow and Williams, In Search of the Black Panther Party, 300.

88. Cleaver, “Back to Africa,” 213.

89. Ibid.

90. “Al Fatah, at Festival in Algiers, Seeks Black Africans’ Support,” New York Times, August 2, 1969.

91. Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: Beacon, 2006), 141.

92. Ibid.

93. Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, The Palestinian People: A History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 243.

94. “Fatah: The Seven Points (January 1969),” reprinted in The Arab-Israeli Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, ed. Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (New York: Penguin, 2001), 131.

95. Sunquist, Strangers in the Land, 333–34. A photo of Arafat and Jesse Jackson embracing during one of the Rainbow Coalition’s solidarity trips in the late 1970s haunted Jackson’s presidential campaigns for more than a decade.

96. Cleaver, “Back to Africa,” 213.

97. Yasser Arafat, “Palestine: Voices of Rebellion,” Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, December 20, 1969.

98. Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, August 15, 1969. For more on representations of Palestinian liberation struggles in the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, see Lubin, Geographies of Liberation, 111–40.

99. David Graham Du Bois, . . . And Bid Him Sing (Palo Alto, Calif.: Ramparts, 1975), 10. Hereafter cited in the text.

100. See, for instance, Shirley Graham Du Bois, “Egypt Is Africa,” Black Scholar 1, no. 7 (1970): 20–27; Graham Du Bois, “The Confrontation in the Middle East,” Black Scholar 5, no. 3 (1973): 32–37: and Graham Du Bois, “The Middle East: Where to from Here?” Black Scholar 5, no. 6 (1974): 40–43. Graham Du Bois published one of the first posthumous English-language biographies of Gamal Abdel Nasser, which, she noted on numerous occasions, emphasized Egypt’s place in an African imaginative geography. See Shirley Graham Du Bois, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Son of the Nile: A Biography (New York: Third Press, 1972).

101. On the multivalent possibilities of reading “circulation,” see Brian T. Edwards, “Logics and Contexts of Circulation,” in A Companion to Comparative Literature, ed. Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2011), 454–72.

102. Brent Hayes Edwards, “Diaspora,” in Keywords of American Cultural Studies, ed. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 82–83.

103. Ibid., 15.

104. See Andrew F. Jones and Nikhil Pal Singh, eds., “The Afro-Asian Century,” special issue, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 11, no. 1 (2003); and Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen, eds., Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008); Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon, 2001); and Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen, eds., AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

105. See Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (New York: New York University Press, 2000); and Kevin Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

106. Horne, Race Woman, 210.

107. Quoted in Horne, Race Woman, 210.

108. Ibid., 258.

109. David Graham Du Bois, “The Confrontation in the Middle East,” Black Scholar 5, no. 3 (1973): 32.

110. Quoted in Carol Berger, “In Cairo, an Expatriate Black American Recalls Malcolm X,” Christian Science Monitor, February 10, 1992.

111. David Graham Du Bois, “Toward Pan-African Media Workers Unity,” Black Scholar 5, no. 1 (1973): 11–14.

112. Malcolm X, “Appeal to African Heads of State” (1964), in Malcolm X Speaks, ed. George Breitman (New York: Grove, 1990), 85.

113. Quoted in “David G. Du Bois Appointed Editor-in-Chief of The Black Panther,” Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, November 10, 1973.

114. Ibid., 11. A few years earlier, the School of Criminology had housed important internal support for the Third World Liberation Front strikes that brought ethnic studies into existence; an associate dean of the school, Paul Takagi, the first Asian American tenured faculty member on the campus, sponsored the first courses in Asian American studies in the United States that deftly analyzed social relations across local, national, and international contours of race and ethnicity. The school also developed close ties to the Black Panthers and instituted a series of solidarity projects with U.S. prisoners. My thanks to Anthony Platt, the coteacher of Graham Du Bois’s course, for discussing this history with me.

115. Doss, “‘Revolutionary Art Is a Tool for Liberation,’” 179.

116. “Mid-East War: Nixon’s New Vietnam,” Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, October 27, 1973.

117. David Graham Du Bois to Huey P. Newton, Memorandum No. 28, May 2, 1974, “Re: Position Paper on the Middle East,” Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc. collection, M0864, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

118. “The Issue Isn’t Territory, but Human Rights,” Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, May 25, 1974.

119. “Toward Peace in the Middle East,” Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, July 1980.

120. While the Intercommunal News Service routinely serialized scholarly articles and featured extended excerpts of Huey Newton’s writing, . . . And Bid Him Sing is the only serialized work of fiction published in the paper.

121. David Graham Du Bois, “Osman Aims to Make Cairo Jazz-Conscious,” Egyptian Gazette, February 10, 1965.

122. David Graham Du Bois, “One-Man U.S. Progressive Jazz Wave Hits Cairo and Flips Those Arab Cats,” Variety, December 16, 1964, 47.

123. Graham Du Bois, “Osman Aims,” 5.

124. Graham Du Bois, “1-Man,” 47. The actual Cairo Jazz Quartet included a young Egyptian drummer named Salah Ragab, who, reportedly, was introduced to jazz forms by Osman. Ragab founded the first big band in Cairo in 1968 and had his own illustrious career as a jazz musician based in Cairo, purportedly authoring an Arabic-language book titled Jazz Music: The Roots and Futures in the process.

125. David and Shirley Graham Du Bois were both exempt from deportation because of their Ghanaian citizenship. The latter’s diary entries and letters to her family describe in detail her experiences in the city during the war. She published a brief selection and analysis of life in Cairo in the months after in “Cairo—Six Months after the Blitzkrieg.”

126. Eric Goldscheider, “At Home with David Graham Du Bois,” Boston Globe, June 28, 2001.

127. “Carter Expects Rise in Joblessness; Believes G.O.P. Will Pick Reagan,” New York Times, August 1, 1979.

128. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “An Unfortunate Comparison,” Congressional Record 125, no. 109 (August 2, 1979).

129. See Andrew J. DeRoche, Andrew Young: Civil Rights Ambassador (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2003), 97–120.

130. James Baldwin, “Open Letter to the Born Again,” Nation, September 29, 1979, 263–64.

131. “Foreign Policy Voice Demanded by Top Blacks,” Washington Post, August 23, 1979.

132. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 21.

3. Jewish Conversions

1. Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, The New Anti-Semitism (New York: McGraw Hill, 1974), 10. Hereafter cited in the text.

2. See Amy Kaplan, “Romancing the Israel Defense Forces,” unpublished manuscript.

3. Recent illustrative works that frame the relationship between American Jews and liberal ideologies include Marc Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); Henry L. Feingold, American Jewish Political Culture and the Liberal Persuasion (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2013); Seth Forman, Blacks in the Jewish Mind: A Crisis of Liberalism (New York: New York University Press, 1998); and Michael E. Staub, Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

4. In making this argument, I am informed by scholarship that theorizes how the Jewish question comes to inform liberalism’s modern lexicon and deployment of conceptions of minority difference. It follows in substantive ways from Marx’s own “On the Jewish Question,” which famously queried the distinction between a nascent liberalism’s investment in the contours of political emancipation as distinct from—and at times even contrary to—human emancipation. See, in particular, Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002); Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 47–77; and Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 37–90.

5. See Stephen Steinberg, Race Relations: A Critique (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008); and Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994). Svonkin narrates how a “theory of the unitary character of prejudice” came to shape the institutionalization of organizational struggles against anti-Semitism. See Jews against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 11–61.

6. See, for instance, Cathy Schlund-Vials, Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011).

7. Here I have in mind scholarship on Jewish diaspora as animated by an ethical relation to difference. See Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4 (1993): 693–725; and Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 205–24.

8. See Dean Franco, Race, Rights and Recognition: Jewish American Literature since 1969 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012).

9. On the broader context of ethno-nationalist resurgence in which of which Jews were active participants, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).

10. For a comprehensive early history of the American Jewish Committee, see Naomi W. Cohen, Not Free to Desist: The American Jewish Committee, 1906–1966 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1972).

11. Morris Cohen, “Zionism: Tribalism or Liberalism,” New Republic, March 8, 1919, 182–83.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Hasan Sa’b, “Zionism and Racism,” Palestine Essays, no. 2 (Beirut: PLO Research Center, 1968).

15. Horace Kallen, “Zionism: Democracy or Prussianism,” New Republic, April 5, 1919, 311–13. For more on Kallen’s enmeshment of Zionism and cultural pluralism, see Daniel Greene, The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Association and American Diversity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), esp. 63–90. Noam Pianko explicates how Kallen’s Zionism was informed by the writings of Ahad Ha’am, which enabled Kallen to envision Zionism as an expression of a national Jewish spirit, such that Jewish settlement in Palestine renewed the Jewish spirit of those in the diaspora. See “‘The True Liberalism of Zionism’: Horace Kallen, Jewish Nationalism, and the Limits of American Pluralism,” American Jewish History 94, no. 4 (2008): 299–329.

16. “The Columbus Platform,” in The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, ed. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 410.

17. Thomas Kolsky, Jews against Zionism: The American Council for Judaism, 1942–1948 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010).

18. Emily Alice Katz, “Pen Pals, Pilgrims, and Pioneers,” American Jewish History 95, no. 3 (2009): 249–76.

19. Jacob Blaustein, Israel through American Eyes (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1949), 4.

20. Charles S. Liebman, “Diaspora Influence on Israel: The Ben-Gurion-Blaustein ‘Exchange’ and Its Aftermath,” Jewish Social Studies 36, nos. 3–4 (1974): 271–80.

21. Ibid., 280.

22. As an AJC historian, Lawrence Grossman, puts it, “That [the AJC] transformed itself almost overnight into a passionate defender of the Jewish state and, in so doing, shed old inhibitions to espouse Jewish peoplehood was itself a measure of the impact this crisis had on American Jewry as a whole.” See “Transformation through Crisis: The American Jewish Committee and the Six Day War,” American Jewish History 86, no. 1 (1998): 27–54.

23. Norman Podhoretz, “Now, Instant Zionism,” New York Times Magazine, February 3, 1974, 42.

24. Staub, Torn at the Roots.

25. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Random House, 1995), 93.

26. Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York: Random House, 1967). Hereafter cited in the text.

27. In 2013 Commentary ran a fiftieth-anniversary reprint of “My Negro Problem” with a new headnote that recapitulated Podhoretz’s earlier reflections. The essay has been anthologized in a wide variety of venues under different auspices, including as a document of the end of the “black-Jewish alliance” during civil rights movement, an influential essay in the formation of neoconservatism, and even as a representative literary text. Podhoretz himself described the essay as a “successfully realized literary work.” See Paul Berman, ed., Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments (New York: Delacorte, 1994); Peter Collier, ed., Crisis: A Contemporary Reader (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969); Don Lewis Cook et al., eds., The Current Voice: Readings in Contemporary Prose (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971); Bradford Daniel, ed., Black, White, and Gray: Twenty-One Points of View on the Race Question (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964); Mark Gerson, ed., The Essential Neoconservative Reader (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1996); Raymond John Murphy and Howard Elinson, eds., Problems and Prospects of the Negro Movement (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1966); Norman Podhoretz, Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and After in American Writing (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964); Thomas L. Jeffers, ed., The Norman Podhoretz Reader: A Selection of His Writings from the 1950s through the 1990s (New York: Free Press, 2004); Edward Quinn and Paul J. Dolan, eds., The Sense of the 1960s (New York: Free Press, 1968); and Jack Salzman et al., eds., Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews (New York: George Braziller, 1992).

The title itself has become a flexible formulation, including Harold Cruse, “My Jewish Problem—and Theirs,” in Black Anti-Semitism and Jewish Racism, ed. James Baldwin and Nat Hentoff (New York: R. W. Baron, 1969); Sol Stern, “My Jewish Problem—and Ours: Israel, The Left, and the Jewish Establishment,” in Jewish Radicalism: A Selected Anthology, ed. Jack Nusan Porter and Peter Dreier (New York: Grove, 1973); Ian Buruma, “His Toughness Problem—and Ours,” New York Review of Books 54, no. 14 (2007): 10–18; and Podhoretz’s own “Hannah’s Jewish Problem—and Mine,” in Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000). Significant analysis of the text is included in Emily Miller Budick, Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Staub, Torn at the Roots.

28. Norman Podhoretz, “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” Commentary 35, no. 2 (1963): 98. Hereafter cited in the text.

29. Norman Podhoretz, “My Negro Problem—and Ours; A Postscript,” in Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments, ed. Paul Berman (New York: Delacorte, 1994), 96.

30. On the structure of anti-Blackness that persists in the racial politics of miscegenation, see Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

31. On the figure of the tough Jew in American literature, see the foundational work by Paul Breines, Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry (New York: Basic Books, 1992). Jacqueline Rose, among others, tracks the tough Jew as a constitutive figure of political Zionism. See The Question of Zion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). On the centrality of reconstructing Jewish gender norms for the architects of Zionism, see, for instance, Daniel Boyarin, “The Colonial Drag: Zionism, Gender, and Mimicry,” in The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kaplana Seshadri-Crooks (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 234–65.

32. Norman Podhoretz, “A Certain Anxiety,” Commentary 52, no. 2 (1971): 4. Hereafter cited in the text.

33. See Daniel H. Perlstein, Justice, Justice: School Politics and the Eclipse of Liberalism (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); and Jerald E. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004).

34. Nathan Glazer, “On Being Deradicalized,” Commentary 50, no. 4 (1970): 74–80.

35. Nathan Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 22.

36. Ibid., 200.

37. Nathan Glazer, “Exposed American Jew,” Commentary 59, no. 6 (1975): 25–30. Hereafter cited in the text.

38. On the JDL’s use of symbolism and rhetoric, particularly as it enabled describing the JDL as a “terrorist organization,” see Judith Tylor Baumel, “Kahane in America: An Exercise in Right-Wing Urban Terror,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 22, no. 4 (1999): 311–29.

39. The Black National Economic Conference, “Black Manifesto,” New York Review of Books 13, no. 1 (1969): 32–33. While Forman names Jewish synagogues in the manifesto, the overwhelming focus of the BNEC’s organizing focused on Christian churches.

40. Rabbi Meir Kahane, The Story of the Jewish Defense League (Radnor, Penn.: Chilton Book, 1975), 102. Hereafter cited in the text.

41. “Is This Any Way for Nice Jewish Boys to Behave?” New York Times, June 24, 1969.

42. Hilton Obenzinger, “Jabotinsky’s Legacy Continues,” Journal of Palestine Studies 14, no. 1 (1984): 137–39, 138. See also Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: Norton, 2014).

43. Quoted in Lenni Brenner, The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir (London: Zed Press, 1984), 74–75.

44. Quoted in Raphael Mergui and Philippe Somonne, Israel’s Ayatollahs: Meir Kahane and the Far Right in Israel (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Saqi, 1986).

45. Podhoretz notes that in his estimation Bellow could not be considered a neoconservative: “While the neocons became full-throated American patriots and defenders of capitalism, Bellow retained an aesthetic distaste for American excess.” John Podhoretz, “Saul Bellow, a Neocon’s Tale,” April 10, 2005, Times Online, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article379354.ece.

46. Ellen Pifer, Saul Bellow against the Grain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).

47. Allen Guttman, “Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler,” Contemporary Literature 14, no. 2 (1973): 157.

48. Irvin Stock, “Man in Culture,” Commentary 49, no. 5 (1970): 94.

49. Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press 2004), 18.

50. Ibid.

51. For a small but wide-ranging sample of readings of the pickpocket, see esp. Joshua L. Charlson, “Ethnicity, Power, and the Postmodern in Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet,” Centennial Review 41, no. 3 (1997): 529–36; Stanley Crouch, “Barbarous on Either Side: The New York Blues of Mr. Sammler’s Planet,” Philosophy and Literature 20, no. 1 (1996): 89–103; Andrew Furman, Israel through the Jewish-American Imagination: A Survey of Jewish-American Literature on Israel, 1928–1995 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); James Neil Harris, “One Critical Approach to Mr. Sammler’s Planet,” Twentieth Century Literature 18, no. 4 (1972): 235–50; Sukhbir Singh, “Indian Karma Yogi in Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet,” Comparative Literature Studies 44, no. 4 (2007): 434–57; and Dean Franco, Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literatures since 1969 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012).

52. Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet (New York: Penguin, 1970), 171. Hereafter cited in the text.

53. See Saul Bellow, “Israel: The Six-Day War,” It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future, a Nonfiction Collection (New York: Viking, 1994), 206–16.

54. Furman, Israel through the Jewish-American Imagination, 72.

55. Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics, and Scholarship in Israel (London: Verso, 2008), xii.

56. Steven Salaita, The Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2006).

57. Amy Kaplan, “Zionism as Anticolonialism: The Case of Exodus,” American Literary History 25, no. 4 (2013): 870–95.

58. McAlister, Epic Encounters, 155–97.

59. Michael P. Lerner, “Jewish New Leftism at Berkeley,” Judaism 18, no. 4 (1969): 475.

60. Morris U. Schappes, “A Secular View of Jewish Life,” Jewish Currents, June 1961, 10–14, 39.

61. Morris U. Schappes, “Zionism and Imperialism,” Jewish Life, March 1953, 11–17.

62. Louis Harap, The Zionist Movement Revisited (New York: Jewish Currents Reprint, 1976), 21.

63. “Honor Is Departed from Thy Gates,” Jewish Life, July 1948, 3–4.

64. “Israel—Second Anniversary,” Jewish Life, May 1950, 5–6.

65. Morris U. Schappes, “Six Months after the War,” Jewish Currents, December 1967, 3–5.

66. Louis Harap, “Two More on the Six-Day War,” Jewish Currents, December 1967, 16–20.

67. Morris Schappes, “Remarks by Discussant Morris U. Schappes,” Jewish Social Studies 27, no. 1 (1965): 63. Hereafter cited in the text.

68. Albert S. Axelrad, Robert E. Goldburg, Huey Newton, Morris U. Schappes, and George Wald, “The Black Panthers, Jews, and Israel,” Jewish Currents, February 1971. Hereafter cited in the text.

69. Robert E. Goldburg, “The Black Panthers,” Jewish Currents, November 1970, 4–8.

70. Jack Nusan Porter and Peter Dreir, preface to Jewish Radicalism: A Selected Anthology, ed. Jack Nusan Porter and Peter Dreir (New York: Grove, 1973), xii.

71. Piterberg, Returns of Zionism, 94.

72. “Jewish Liberation Organization Constitution,” BANC MSS 86/157 c, reel 81, folder 21, Bancroft Library Social Protest Collection, University of California, Berkeley. Hereafter cited as Bancroft Library.

73. Ibid.

74. Murray Zuckoff, “Toward Socialist Zionist Politics,” BANC MSS 86/157 c, reel 81, folder 21, Bancroft Library.

75. “Jewish Liberation Organization Working Paper,” BANC MSS 86/157 c, reel 81, folder 21, Bancroft Library.

76. “Jewish Liberation Organization Statement for the Fascism Conference,” BANC MSS 86/157 c, reel 81, folder 21, Bancroft Library.

77. Tsvi Bisk, “A Radical-Zionist Strategy for the 1970’s,” in Jewish Radicalism, 90.

78. Ibid., 96–97.

79. M. J. Rosenberg, “To Uncle Tom and Other Jews,” in Jewish Radicalism, 7.

80. Ibid., 10.

81. Ibid.

82. Committee for a Progressive Middle East, “Statement on the Middle East,” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal 18, no. 4 (1969): 484. Hereafter cited in the text.

83. Lerner, “Jewish New Leftism,” 476.

84. Arthur I. Waskow, The Bush Is Burning! Radical Judaism Faces the Pharaohs of the Modern Superstate (New York: Macmillan, 1971), n.p. Hereafter cited in the text.

85. Michael E. Staub, Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 154.

86. “For Peace and Justice in the Middle East: A Position Paper of Jews for Urban Justice, adopted November 10, 1970,” in Waskow, Bush Is Burning!, 76–77.

87. Arthur I. Waskow, “The Jewish Contradiction,” New York Times, October 21, 1970, 47.

88. Renata Adler, “Radicalism in Debacle: The Palmer House,” in Toward a Radical Middle: Fourteen Pieces of Reporting and Criticism (New York: Random House, 1970), 239–59. Adler had written a piece on the Six-Day War for the New Yorker, also collected here.

89. Arthur I. Waskow, “More Amplification,” New York Review of Books, December 21, 1967, 42.

90. Arthur I. Waskow, “Dept. of Amplification,” New York Review of Books, November 23, 1967, 42.

91. Arthur Waskow, The Freedom Seder: A New Haggadah (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1970), v.

92. Staub, Torn at the Roots, 164.

93. Ibid.

94. Robert Alter, “Revolutionism and the Jews,” Commentary 51, no. 2 (1971): 49.

95. Arthur I. Waskow, “The Jewish Contradiction,” New York Times, October 21, 1970, 47.

96. Jack Ross, Rabbi Outcast: Elmer Berger and American Jewish Anti-Zionism (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2011).

97. Staub, Torn at the Roots, 280–308.

98. Ezra Berkley Nepon, Justice, Justice Shall You Pursue: A History of New Jewish Agenda (Philadelphia: Thread Makes Blanket, 2012).

99. Daniel Berrigan, “Responses to Settler Regimes,” in Settler Regimes in Africa and the Arab World: The Illusion of Endurance, ed. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod and Baha Abu-Laban (Wilmette, Ill.: Medina University Press, 1974), 226. Hereafter cited in the text.

4. Arab American Awakening

1. See Rochelle Davis, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011).

2. See Helena Lindholm Schulz, with Juliane Hammer, The Palestinian Diaspora: Formation of Identities and Politics of Homeland (London: Routledge, 2003).

3. See Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, The One State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013).

4. Michael W. Suleiman, “The Arab Immigrant Experience,” in Arabs in America: Building a New Future, ed. Michael W. Suleiman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 1–21.

5. “Nasser and His Canal,” Daily Princetonian, October 11, 1956, 2. Said writes of the brief essay: “The article was published without provoking the kind of response that it might have had if it had appeared after 1967. It was my first piece of political writing, but so quiescent were political passions and so muted were Zionist opinions—this was, after all, when Eisenhower in effect compelled Israel to withdraw from Sinai—that I was able to publish it quite easily” (Out of Place: A Memoir [New York: Knopf, 1999, 279–80).

6. Edward W. Said, “The Arab Portrayed,” in The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967, ed. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 1–9. Hereafter cited in the text.

7. Elaine C. Hagopian, “Ibrahim and Edward,” Arab Studies Quarterly 26, no. 4 (2004): 4.

8. Edward Said, “My Guru,” London Review of Books, December 13, 2001, 19.

9. Countless scholars have implicitly and explicitly positioned themselves in relation to Orientalism for decades, affecting the fields of postcolonial studies, art history, anthropology, cultural studies, geography, and American studies, among others. The text itself has been subject to periodic appraisals, including most recently Ziad Elmarsafy et al., eds., Debating Orientalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). On the text’s “seditious life,” see Gyan Prakash, “Orientalism Now,” History and Theory 34, no. 3 (1995): 199.

10. There is formative and growing scholarship on the AAUG, an organization rightfully centralized in the historiography of Arab American studies. See Gregory Orfalea, The Arab Americans: A History (North Hampton, Mass.: Olive Branch, 2006); and Sarah M. A. Gualtieri, Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 171–80. On important turn-of-the-century predecessors to the AAUG, see Hani J. Bawardi, The Making of Arab Americans: From Syrian Nationalism to U.S. Citizenship (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014). My aim in this chapter is limited to a consideration of how elements of the organization’s knowledge production were invested in a transnational analysis of race and empire, and to consider the relationship between this analysis and Said’s post-1967 critique of U.S. imperial culture.

11. Edward W. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Cultural Critique 1 (1985): 91.

12. Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Unintended Consequences of Cold War Area Studies,” in The Cold War and the University: Toward and Intellectual History of the Postwar Years (New York: New Press, 1997), 195–231. As Ella Shohat puts it, “Said’s Orientalism was published . . . at a very specific moment in the history of the U.S. academe, when ethnic studies, women’s studies, and Third World studies had transformed the intellectual landscape by challenging the epistemological foundations of what constituted a legitimate subject of inquiry deserving institutional academic space” (“The Sephardi-Moorish Atlantic: Between Orientalism and Occidentalism,” in Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora, ed. Evelyn Alsultany and Ella Shohat [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013], 45). On U.S. ethnic studies and women’s studies formations as part of a broader decolonial epistemic shift, see also Walter Mignolo, “Citizenship, Knowledge, and the Limits of Humanity,” American Literary History 18, no. 2 (2006): 312–31; Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Thinking through the Decolonial Turn: Post-continental Interventions in Theory, Philosophy, and Critique—an Introduction,” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1, no. 2 (2011): 1–15; and Ramón Grosfoguel, “The Dilemmas of Ethnic Studies in the United States: Between Liberal Multiculturalism, Identity Politics, Disciplinary Colonization, and Decolonial Epistemologies,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 10, no. 1 (2012): 81–89.

13. Edward W. Said, “Traveling Theory Revisited,” in Reflections on Exile, and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 436–52.

14. For early evocations of the former, see Timothy Mitchell, “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 289–317. On the latter point, see Lisa Lowe, “Rereadings in Orientalism: Oriental Inventions of the Orient in Montesquieu’s ‘Lettres persanes,’” Cultural Critique 15 (1990): 115–43.

15. See, for instance, Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity, and Representation (New York: Routledge, 1995); Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

16. Shohat, “Sephardi-Moorish Atlantic”; and Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011).

17. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983; repr., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

18. Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); and Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

19. For scholarship that expands the conceptual clarity and historical specificities of U.S. orientalism, see Malini Johar Schueller, U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790–1890 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); Timothy Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Brian T. Edwards, Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005); Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009); and McAlister, Epic Encounters.

20. I thank John Berry, the comparative ethnic studies librarian at UC Berkeley, for sharing Ron Takaki’s personal copy of Orientalism with me.

21. Edward W. Said, “The Palestinian Experience” (1968–1969), in The Edward Said Reader, ed. Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin (New York: Vintage, 2000), 25. Hereafter cited in the text.

22. Edward W. Said, “Michel Foucault as an Intellectual Imagination,” Boundary 2 1, no. 1 (1972): 1–36; Said, “Abecedarium culturae: Structuralism, Absence, Writing,” Triquarterly 20 (1971): 33–71.

23. Said describes Barthes as “one of the very few literary critics in any language of whom it can be said that he has never written a bad or uninteresting page” (“Overcoming the Thereness of Things,” New York Times, July 30, 1972).

24. “An Interview with Edward Said,” in Bayoumi and Rubin, Edward Said Reader, 423.

25. Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 65–66. Hereafter cited in the text.

26. Edward W. Said, “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community,” Critical Inquiry 9, no. 1 (1982): 25.

27. Ibid., 16.

28. On epistemological transfer as one of settler colonialism’s many strategies to “discursively or practically empt[y] the indigenous sector of the population,” see Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (London: Palgrave, 2011), 35–52.

29. See also Timothy Brennan, “The Illusion of a Future: Orientalism as Traveling Theory,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 3 (2000): 558–83.

30. Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s touchstone: Racial Formation in the United States (London: Routledge, 1986).

31. Edward W. Said, “An Ideology of Difference,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 41. Hereafter cited in the text.

32. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 244. Hereafter cited in the text.

33. Edward W. Said, “The Music Itself: Glenn Gould’s Contrapuntal Vision,” in Music at the Limits (1983; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 3–10.

34. Edward W. Said, “Arab and Jew,” in Settler Regimes in Africa and the Arab World: The Illusion of Endurance, ed. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod and Baha Abu-Laban (Wilmette, Ill.: Medina University Press, 1974), 242. Hereafter cited in the text.

35. Edward W. Said, “Bases for Coexistence,” in The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (New York: Vintage, 2001), 209. Hereafter cited in the text.

36. Recent scholarship on the connective histories of Israeli Jews and Arab Palestinians in the ambit of the Holocaust has been growing. See, for instance, Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009); and Jo Roberts, Contested Land, Contested Memory: Israel’s Jews and Arabs and the Ghosts of Catastrophe (Toronto: Dundurn, 2013). My analysis is substantially informed by Gil Z. Hochberg, “Edward Said: ‘The Last Jewish Intellectual’: On Identity, Alterity, and the Politics of Memory,” Social Text 24, no. 2 (2006): 47–65; and Judith Butler, “‘What Shall We Do Without Exile?’ Said and Darwish Address the Future,” ALIF: Journal of Comparative Poetics 32 (2012): 30–54.

37. Edward W. Said, “Between Worlds,” in Reflections on Exile, and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000): 562. Hereafter cited in the text.

38. Said, Politics of Dispossession, xvi.

39. Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 282.

40. Ranajit Guha, “The Turn,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 2 (2005): 425.

41. See, for instance, Gualtieri, Between Arab and White; Nadine Naber and Amaney Jamal, eds., Race and Arab Americans before and after 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2008); and Steven Salaita, Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where It Comes From and What It Means for Politics (New York: Pluto, 2006).

42. See Waïl S. Hassan, Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 38–58. Lawrence Davidson documents Rihani’s Palestine advocacy within an organization called the Palestine Antizionism Society (dating from 1917), which included outspoken Arab intellectuals in the United States—including Fuad Shatara, Habib Katibah, N. A. Katibah, Peter S. George, Elias Joseph, George Shadak, Frank Sakran, Jacob Handal, Andria Mansour, and Abraham Rihbany. See Lawrence Davidson, “Debating Palestine: Arab-American Challenges to Zionism, 1917–1932,” in Suleiman, Arabs in America, 227–40.

43. Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, 1212.

44. Suad Joseph, “Against the Grain of the Nation: The Arab-,” in Suleiman, Arabs in America, 258.

45. Nabeel Abraham, “The Gulf Crisis and Anti-Arab Racism,” in Collateral Damage: The New World Order at Home and Abroad, ed. Cynthia Peters (Boston: South End, 1992), 255–78; Joanna Kadi, introduction to Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab American and Arab Canadian Feminists, ed. Joanna Kadi (Boston: South End, 1994), viii–xx; Terese Saliba, “Military Presences and Absences,” in Food for Our Grandmothers, 125–32; Nadine Naber, “Ambiguous Insiders: An Investigation of Arab American Invisibility,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 23, no. 1 (2000): 37–61.

46. Helen Samhan, “Politics and Exclusion: The Arab American Experience,” Journal of Palestine Studies 16, no. 2 (1987): 20–28.

47. Minoo Moallem, Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Politics of Patriarchy in Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). This argument draws on Étienne Balibar, “‘Is There a Neo-Racism?,’” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, ed. Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (New York: Verso, 1991), 17–28.

48. Nadine Naber, Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 135–36.

49. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 264.

50. See Fuad Shaban, Islam and Arabs in Early American Thought: Roots of Orientalism in America (Durham, N.C.: Acorn, 1991); and Marr, Cultural Roots of American Islamicism.

51. Edward W. Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Pantheon, 1981).

52. Edward W. Said, “The Essential Terrorist,” Nation 242 (1986): 832.

53. Denis Sinor, ed., Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Congress of Orientalists (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1971), 36. Hereafter cited in the text. The ICO continues to meet, though to date it has not returned to the United States; in the mid-1970s, the organization departed from its overt framing as an “orientalist” organization as it changed its name to the International Congress of Human Sciences in Asia and North Africa and, more recently to the International Congress of Asian and North African Studies.

54. For a detailed legislative history of NDEA, see Barbara Barksdale Clowse, Brainpower for the Cold War: The Sputnik Crisis and National Defense Education Act of 1958 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981). Genealogical critiques of U.S. area studies have been extensive, especially since Orientalism. For an exemplary recent collection of essays tracing the epistemological and disciplinary limitations of area studies, see Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian, eds., Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002).

55. Fauzi M. Najjar, quoted in The First Decade, 1967–1977 (Detroit, Mich.: AAUG, 1977).

56. Ibid., n.p.

57. M. Cherif Bassiouni, “The AAUG: Reflections on a Lost Opportunity,” Arab Studies Quarterly 29, nos. 3–4 (2007): 30.

58. Abdeen Jabara, “The AAUG: Aspirations and Failures,” Arab Studies Quarterly 29, nos. 3–4 (2007): 15.

59. Baha Abu-Laban, “Reflections on the Rise and Decline of an Arab-American Organization,” Arab Studies Quarterly 29, nos. 3–4 (2007): 48.

60. Rashid Bashshur, “Unfulfilled Expectations and the Genesis and Demise of the AAUG,” Arab Studies Quarterly 29, nos. 3–4 (2007): 12.

61. “Why ASQ?,” Arab Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1 (1979): iv–v.

62. Ibid., v.

63. See, for instance, Nasser Aruri, “The Nixon Doctrine and the Mideast,” New York Times, May 20, 1972; Abdeen Jabara, “Letters to the Editor,” New York Times, June 22, 1972; and Abdeen Jabara, “Grievances of Palestinians,” New York Times, September 27, 1972.

64. “Needed,” New York Times, November 2, 1969. In his inaugural address, Nixon remarked that “the greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.” See Richard Nixon: Speeches, Writings, Documents (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), 154.

65. “The Silenced Majority in the Middle East,” New York Times, March 15, 1970.

66. Barbara C. Aswad, Arabic-Speaking Communities in American Cities (New York: Center for Migration Studies and the Association of Arab American University Graduates, 1974).

67. Barbara C. Aswad, “Arab-American Studies,” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 8, no. 3 (1974): 13.

68. First Decade, n.p.

69. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, preface to The Arab-Americans: Studies in Assimilation (Wilmette, Ill.: Medina University Press International, 1969), vi.

70. Abdo A. Elkholy, “Nationalism and Traditional Preservation,” in Arab-Americans, 10. Hereafter cited in the text.

71. “Text of Statement and Resolution Released at the End of the Third Annual Convention, November 1, 1970,” in The Arab World: From Nationalism to Revolution, ed. Abdeen Jabara and Janice Terry (Wilmette, Ill.: Medina UP International, 1971), 207.

72. Ibid., 206.

73. “Text of Statement Released at Close of Second Annual Convention, 7 December 1969,” in The Palestinian Resistance to Israeli Occupation, ed. Naseer Aruri (Wilmette, Ill.: Medina University Press International, 1970), 169.

74. Ibid., 170.

75. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, ed., Settler Regimes in Africa and the Arab World: The Illusion of Endurance (Wilmette, Ill.: Medina University Press International, 1974).

76. Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 188.

77. See Joe Stork and Rene Theberge, “‘Any Arab or Others of a Suspicious Nature . . .’” MERIP Reports 14 (1973): 3–6, 13.

78. Elaine Hagopian, “Minority Rights in a Nation-State: The Nixon Administration’s Campaign against Arab-Americans,” Journal of Palestine Studies 5, nos. 1–2 (1975): 99.

79. A central part of Sirhan’s defense was that he incurred significant psychological trauma as a child during his family’s dispossession in 1948. The one-year anniversary “celebration” in Los Angeles of Israel’s victory in the June war triggered a psychotic break. A significant amount of Sirhan’s testimony recounted his personal experience of the 1948 war, the conditions of post-1948 Palestinian life, and the U.S. popular embrace of Israel. See “The Lost Significance of Sirhan’s Case,” Organization of Arab Students (Los Angeles: University of Southern California, 1969).

80. “Is the Nixon Administration Playing Politics with Civil Liberties?,” New York Times, October 29, 1972.

81. M. C. Bassiouni, ed., The Civil Rights of Arab-Americans: The “Special Measures” (North Dartmouth, Mass.: Association of Arab-American University Graduates, 1974); Hagopian, “Minority Rights.”

82. Stork and Theberge, “‘Any Arab or Others of a Suspicious Nature . . .,’ ” 3.

83. Hagopian, “Minority Rights.” On the continuities between Operation Boulder and the post-9/11 regimes of state surveillance, see Elaine C. Hagopian, ed., Civil Rights in Peril: The Targeting of Arabs and Muslims (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2004).

84. “A Plan to Screen Terrorists Ends: U.S. Project to Block Arabs Was Not ‘Cost Effective,’ ” New York Times, April 24, 1975.

85. Baha Abu-Laban and Faith T. Zeadey, eds., Arabs in America: Myths and Realities (Wilmette, Ill.: Medina University Press International, 1975), xii.

86. Nikhil Pal Singh, “Learn Your Horn,” in Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 43.

87. Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 176–77.

88. Nathaniel Sheppard Jr., “Arab Businessmen Give $10,000 to Jackson’s Rights Organization,” New York Times, October 17, 1979.

89. James Zogby and Jack O’Dell, eds., Afro-Americans Stand Up for Middle East Peace (Washington, D.C.: Palestine Human Rights Campaign, 1980).

90. See special issue of Arab Studies Quarterly 29, nos. 3–4 (2007).

91. Said, “Arab Portrayed,” 4. Hereafter cited in the text.

92. Edward W. Said, “Arab and Jew: ‘Each Is the Other,’” New York Times, October 14, 1973.

93. Edward W. Said, “Orientalism and the October War: The Shattered Myths,” in Abu-Laban and Zeadey, Arabs in America, 112. Hereafter cited in the text.

5. Moving toward Home

1. Epigraph by June Jordan originally published in Moving towards Home: Political Essays (London: Virago, 1989). Copyright 2005 by the June Jordan Literary Estate. Reprinted with the permission of the June M. Jordan Literary Estate. www.junejordan.com. S. Grewal et al., eds., Charting the Journey: Writings by Black and Third World Women (London: Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1988).

2. Al-Awda: The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, Until Return 1, no. 1 (2007), http://www.al-awda.org/until-return/june.html.

3. Paul Lauter, ed., Heath Anthology of American Literature, 5th ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

4. Suheir Hammad, Born Palestinian, Born Black; and The Gaza Suite (Brooklyn, N.Y.: UpSet, 2010), 13.

5. June Jordan, “Finding the Way Home” (February 1989), reprinted in Life as Activism: June Jordan’s Writings from “The Progressive” (Sacramento, Calif.: Litwin, 2014), 3.

6. Cheryl Higashida, Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945–1995 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011). Higashida defines Black internationalist feminism as that which “challenged heteronormative and masculinist articulations of nationalism while maintaining the importance, even centrality of national liberation movements for achieving Black women’s social, political, and economic rights. . . . This feminism was internationalist in two different but related senses. First, it held that self-determination for oppressed nations would bring about socialism for the working classes of all nations. Second, it linked the struggles of African Americans in the United States to struggles for national self-determination in the Caribbean, the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australia” (2–3).

7. June Jordan, radio interview with David Barsamian, Alternative Radio, Program #JORJ003, Boulder, Colo., October 13, 2000.

8. A partial list of Jordan’s writings on Israel and Palestine includes “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon” (1982), “To Sing a Song of Palestine” (1982), “Cedar Trees of Lebanon” (1982), “Moving towards Home” (1982), “Problems of Language in a Democratic State” (1982), “Beirut Jokebook” (1983), “Life after Lebanon” (1984), “For Etel Adnan” (1984), “Poem for the West Bank” (1990), “Intifada, USA” (1990), “Islam and the USA Today” (1993), “Eyewitness in Lebanon” (1996), “Looking for Lebanon” (1996), “Intifada Incantation” (1997), “Hunting for Jews” (2002), and “Letter to My Friend” (2002).

9. On this inflection point in Israel’s “infrastructure of control,” see Neve Gordon, Israel’s Occupation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). Adi Ophir and Ariella Azoulay similarly contend that by 1981 the occupation had become inextricable from the structure of the Israeli regime. See The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine, trans. Tal Haran (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013).

10. See Ze’ev Schiff and Ehd Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War (New York: Touchstone, 1985); Rashid Khalidi, Under Siege: PLO Decisionmaking during the 1982 War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War against the Palestinians (London: Verso, 2003), 92–101; and Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (Boston: South End, 1983), 181–328.

11. Thomas Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991), 159.

12. The Israeli government estimated between seven hundred and eight hundred people were killed; the Lebanese government issued about twelve hundred death certificates; and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society estimated about two thousand people dead.

13. “The Situation in the Middle East,” A/Res/37/123, December 16, 1982.

14. Much of the intellectual debates would come under the heading of “post-Zionism.” For a useful synopsis, see Laurence J. Silberstein, The Postzionism Debates: Knowledge and Power in Israeli Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999).

15. See David C. Wills, The First War on Terrorism: Counter-Terrorism Policy during the Reagan Administration (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).

16. Lisa Stampnitzky, Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented “Terrorism” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 49–82.

17. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Globalisation and US Prison Growth: From Military Keynesianism to Post-Keynesian Militarism,” Race and Class 40, nos. 2–3 (1999): 171–88.

18. See Victoria Clark, Allies for Armageddon: The Relentless Rise of Christian Zionism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007).

19. “Reagan and Begin: Partners in Racism,” Palestine Focus 1, no. 2 (1983): 4.

20. Smadar Lavie, Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture (New York: Berghahn, 2014).

21. Ella Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” Social Text, nos. 19–20 (1988): 1–35.

22. On the Labor origins of the settlement movement, see Gershom Gorenberg, The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967–1977 (New York: Times Books, 2006). On the settlement movement’s widespread growth after 1977 under Likud and national unity governments, see Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, Lords of the Land: The War over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories (New York: Nation Books, 2009), 55–188.

23. On the intensification of the racialized warfare state, see James Kyung-Jin Lee, Urban Triage: Race and the Fictions of Multiculturalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); and Dylan Rodríguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

24. Roderick Ferguson, “On the Specificities of Racial Formation: Gender and Sexuality in the Historiographies of Race,” in Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Daniel HoSang, Oneka LaBennet, and Laura Pulido (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 53.

25. My reading practice is inspired by Grace Kyungwon Hong, who treats Moraga’s 1981 introduction to This Bridge. See Hong, The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), vii–xii.

26. Cherríe Moraga, “Refugees of a World on Fire: Preface to the Second Edition,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, 2nd ed. (Latham, Mass.: Kitchen Table: Women of Color, 1983), n.p.

27. Ella Shohat, “Area Studies, Gender Studies, and the Cartographies of Knowledge,” Social Text 20, no. 3 (2002): 75.

28. Moraga, “Refugees of a World on Fire,” n.p.

29. June Jordan, “We Are All Refugees,” Progressive 58, no. 7 (1994): 16.

30. I treat the figure of the refugee as a relational figure in more detail in “‘One Like Me’: The Refugee as Relational Figure,” in Ethnic Literatures and Transnationalism, ed. Aparajita Nanda (New York: Routledge, 2014), 28–40. See also Alex Lubin, “‘Fear of an Arab Planet’: The Sounds and Rhythms of Afro-Arab Internationalism,” Journal of Transnational Studies 5, no. 1 (2013): 243–63.

31. See Evelyn Torton Beck, ed., New Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology (Boston: Beacon, 1989).

32. One major exception was Elly Bulkin’s substantial essay on the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Arab racism in feminist movements. Begun in August 1982, the essay reckons with the need to “overcom[e] the anti-Arab racism that is deeply engrained in Western culture. Anti-Arab racism reveals itself, as does racism generally, in the simple failure to see—that the other is there, that the other is very much like oneself.” See Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith, Yours in Struggle: Three Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand Books, 1988), 163.

33. Nada Elia, “The ‘White’ Sheep of the Family: But Bleaching Is Like Starvation,” in This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, ed. Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Ana Louise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2002), 223–31. See also Therese Saliba, “Resisting Invisibility: Arab Americans in Academia and Activism,” in Suleiman, Arabs in America, 304–20; and Amira Jarmakani, “Arab American Feminisms: Mobilizing the Politics of Invisibility,” in Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging, ed. Rabab Abdulhadi, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Naber (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011), 227–41.

34. Joanna Kadi, ed., Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists (Boston: South End, 1994). By contrast, two notable anthologies published after September 11, 2001, self-consciously forged as sequels to 1981’s Bridge—This Bridge We Call Home and Sing, Whisper, Shout, Pray!—offered sustained and substantive engagement with Palestine. The production of the former collection at the time of the second intifada, as Elia notes, included heated debates among its contributors on the listserv about whether critiques of Zionism were tantamount to anti-Semitism or racism. Rather than allow these debates to play out, the editors shut down the list and, in their introduction to the collection, misrepresented the statements of those who had criticized Zionism. As Elia puts it, “The centrality of the Palestinian issue to women of color generally—namely, the fact that we are a colonized people seeking to break through the distorted hegemonic narrative that either completely erases or totally misrepresents us—was once again pushed to the margins.” See Nada Elia, “The Burden of Representation: When Palestinians Speak Out,” in Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging, ed. Rabab Abdulhadi, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Naber (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2011), 144–58.

The latter collection, begun in 1987, was initially riven by internal dissent among the editors as to the relationship between racism and anti-Semitism and, following one editor’s urging, required a careful historicization of the concept of race. M. Jacqui Alexander et al., eds., introduction to Sing, Whisper, Shout, Pray! Feminist Visions for a Just World (Fort Bragg, Calif.: EdgeWork Books, 2003), xxi–xxiv. The resulting essay clarified how the particularly genocidal logic of American “settlerism” created the conditions for very different expressions of racial oppression and anti-Semitism in the United States and Europe, respectively. The foundations of American whiteness were constituted out of a history of settler genocide, one that structurally positioned Jews as white ethnic immigrants predicated on dynamics of capitalist incorporability into a settler state. See Matthew Nemiroff Lyons, “Parasites and Pioneers: Antisemitism in White Supremacist America,” in Alexander et al., Sing, Whisper, Shout, Pray!, 293–339.

35. See Nadine Naber, Eman Desouky, and Lina Baroudi, “The Forgotten ‘-Ism’: An Arab American Women’s Perspective on Zionism, Racism, and Sexism,” in Time to Rise: US Women of Color: Issues and Strategies, ed. Maylei Blackwell, Linda Burnham, and Jung Hee Choi (Berkeley, Calif.: Women of Color Resource Center, 2001); also included in INCITE! Women of Color against Violence, ed., Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology (Cambridge, Mass.: South End, 2006), 97–112. It is worth noting that INCITE’s anthology includes numerous essays about Palestine.

36. Ferguson, “On the Specificities of Racial Formation,” 55.

37. Report of the World Conference of the International Women’s Year (New York: United Nations, 1976).

38. Report of the World Conference of the United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development, and Peace, A/Conf. 94/35 (New York: United Nations, 1980), 5.

39. Regina Schreiber, “Copenhagen: One Year Later,” Lilith, no. 8 (1981): 30.

40. Letty Cottin Pogrebin, “Anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement,” Ms. Magazine, June 1982, 46. Hereafter cited in the text.

41. “Letters Forum: Anti-Semitism,” Ms. Magazine 11, no. 8 (1983): 13. Hereafter cited in the text.

42. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009).

43. Women Against Imperialism, “Feminism, Anti-Semitism, and Racism . . . Taking our Stand against Zionism and White Supremacy,” Off Our Backs 12, no. 7 (1982): 20.

44. Signatories to the group included Evelyn T. Beck, Nancy K. Bereano, Gloria Z. Greenfield, Melanie Kaye, Irena Klepfisz, Bernice Mennis, and Adrienne Rich.

45. Di Vilde Chayes, “. . . What Does Zionism Mean?,” Off Our Backs 12, no. 7 (1982): 21.

46. Originally published in A Working Conference on Women and Racism: New England Women’s Studies Association Newsletter (May 1981); my citations come from “Double Allegiance,” in Getting Home Alive, by Aurora Levins Morales and Rosario Morales (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand, 1986), 157–58.

47. Quoted in Bulkin, Pratt, and Smith, Yours in Struggle, 151.

48. Chela Sandoval, “Feminism and Racism: A Report on the 1981 National Women’s Studies Association Conference,” in Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990), 55–71.

49. Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” in Sister Outsider (Freedom, Calif.: Crossing, 1984), 124.

50. Adrienne Rich, “Disobedience Is What NWSA Is Potentially About,” WSQ 9, no. 3 (1981): 4–6.

51. Carol Haddad, “Anti-Arab-ism,” Off Our Backs 13, no. 3 (1983): 21–22.

52. For Haddad’s own narration of this event, see “In Search of Home,” in Kadi, Food for Our Grandmothers, 218–23.

53. Di Vilde Chayes, “Zionists Deplore Killings in Lebanon and Criticize Nature of Anti-Israel Protests,” Off Our Backs 12, no. 9 (October 1982): 27.

54. Off Our Backs 12, no. 9 (1982): 3.

55. Jane Creighton, “Misplaced Footnote,” Off Our Backs 12, no. 11 (1982): 26.

56. Carol Haddad, “Women without a Name,” Off Our Backs 13, no. 3 (1983): 34.

57. Azizah al-Hibri, “Unveiling the Hidden Face of Racism: The Plight of Arab American Women,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 11, no. 3 (1983): 10–11.

58. Evelyn Torton Beck, “‘No More Masks’: Anti-Semitism as Jew-Hating,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 11, no. 3 (1983): 11–14.

59. Barbara Smith, “A Rock and a Hard Place: Relationships between Black and Jewish Women,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 11, no. 3 (1983): 7–9.

60. Sandoval, “Feminism and Racism.”

61. Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che (London: Verso, 2002), 269–86.

62. Hilton Obenzinger, “Palestine Solidarity, Political Discourse, and the Peace Movement, 1982–1988,” CR: The New Centennial Review 8, no. 2 (2008): 234–36.

63. June Jordan, “Problems of Language in a Democratic State” (1985), in Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan (New York: Basic, 2002), 223–32. Hereafter cited in the text.

64. Edward Said rebukes the mode of critique that frames its knowledge of the Lebanon atrocities through a “history-transcending universal rationalism” (“Permission to Narrate,” Journal of Palestine Studies 13, no. 3 [1984]: 47).

65. James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 39.

66. June Jordan, “Lebanon Press Conference,” June 30, 1982, Jordan, June, 1936–2002, T-331, Phon-38, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute.

67. June Jordan, “Apologies to All the People of Lebanon,” Village Voice, July 20, 1982, 32. Copyright 2005 by the June Jordan Literary Estate. Reprinted with the permission of the June M. Jordan Literary Estate. www.junejordan.com.

68. Nat Hentoff, “The End of the Silence / What Now for American Jews?,” Village Voice, August 24, 1982, 8.

69. Nat Hentoff, “The Other Israel—a Guide to Its Rising Voices,” Village Voice, October 18, 1982, 8.

70. Barry Singer, “Poetic Injustice,” Village Voice, August 3, 1982, 25.

71. June Jordan, “Sticks and Stones,” Village Voice, August 17, 1982, 3.

72. Gregory Orfalea, Wrapping the Grapeleaves: A Sheaf of Contemporary Arab-American Poets (Washington, D.C.: American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, 1982). See also Gregory Orfalea and Sharif Elmusa, eds., Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab-American Poetry (New York: Interlink, 1999).

73. All the quotations from the fund-raiser are drawn from Moving towards Home (November 28, 1982), Jordan, June, 1936–2002, T-331, Phon-38, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute.

74. See Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982, trans. Ibrahim Muhawi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

75. Jordan, June, Papers 1954–2002, MC 513, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute.

76. June Jordan, “To Sing a Song of Palestine,” in Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan. Copyright 2005 by the June Jordan Literary Estate. Reprinted with the permission of the June M. Jordan Literary Estate. www.junejordan.com.

77. June Jordan, “Life after Lebanon,” in Some of Us Did Not Die (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 187. Hereafter cited in the text.

78. Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Holt, 2007).

79. Jordan, June, Papers 1954–2002, MC 513, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute.

Epilogue

1. “President Bush and Secretary of State Rice Discuss the Middle East Crisis,” Office of the Press Secretary, August 7, 2006, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2006/08/20060807.html.

2. “President Bush Discusses Terror Plot upon Arrival in Wisconsin,” Office of the Press Secretary, August 10, 2006, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2006/08/20060810–3.html.

3. Histories of the war include Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, Thirty-Four Days: Israel, Hezbollah, and the War in Lebanon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and Nubar Hovsepian, The War on Lebanon: A Reader (Northampton, Mass.: Olive Branch, 2007).

4. Derek Gregory, “The Death of the Civilian?,” Environment and Planning D 24, no. 5 (2006): 637. Gregory borrows the term infrahumanity from Paul Gilroy. “The native, the enemy, the prisoner and all the other shadowy ‘third things’ lodged between animal and human can only be held accountable under special emergency rules and fierce martial laws. Their lowly status underscores the fact that they cannot be reciprocally endowed with the same vital humanity enjoyed by their well-heeled captors, conquerors, judges, executioners, and other racial betters” (“‘Where Ignorant Armies Clash by Night’: Homogeneous Community and the Planetary Aspect,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6, no. 3 [2003]: 263).

5. On the Cold War articulation of American antitotalitarianism infusing a race war without races, see Leerom Medovoi, “The Race War Within: The Biopolitics of the Long Cold War,” in American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War: A Critical Reassessment, ed. Steven Belletto and Daniel Grausman (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 163–86.

6. See, for instance, “Verbal Front in the Terror War: ‘Islamofascism,’” NPR Day to Day, August 15, 2006, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5651001.

7. Norman Podhoretz, World War IV: The Long Struggle against Islamofascism (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 213–14. Hereafter cited in the text. Bernard Lewis echoed Podhoretz’s historical analysis: “The better part of my life was dominated by two great struggles—the first against Nazism, the second against Bolshevism. In both of these, after long and bitter conflict, we were victorious. . . . Today we confront a third totalitarian perversion, this time of Islam” (“Second Acts,” Atlantic Monthly, November 2007, 23).

8. For insightful analysis of the gendered racialization organizing Kennan’s narrative, see Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 46–51.

9. See the conference “Will History Repeat Itself? Is It 1938 All Over Again?,” Center for Jewish Studies, Queens College of the City University of New York, April 22–23, 2007, which included Podhoretz and Hillel Halkin, both of whose lectures were revised and published in Commentary in June 2007.

10. Ian Buruma likewise places World War IV in a longer intellectual trajectory that originates in “My Negro Problem.” See “His Toughness Problem—and Ours,” New York Review of Books 54, no. 14 (2007): 10–18.

11. On the Cold War residues of the law and order state to sustain frameworks of racialized warfare in the political present, see Nikhil Singh, “Racial Formation in an Age of Permanent War,” in Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Daniel Ho Sang et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 276–301.

12. Stephen Graham, Cities under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (London: Verso, 2010), 228.

13. Ali Abunimah, The Battle for Justice in Palestine (Chicago: Haymarket, 2014), 1–20.

14. See Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden’s Final Plot against America (New York: Touchstone, 2013).

15. See José I. Fusté, “Containing Bordered ‘Others’ in La Frontera and Gaza: Comparative Lessons on Racializing Discourses and State Violence,” American Quarterly 62, no. 4 (2010): 811–19.

16. Lisa Hajjar, “International Humanitarian Law and ‘Wars on Terror’: A Comparative Analysis of Israeli and American Doctrines and Policies,” Journal of Palestine Studies 36, no. 1 (2006): 21–42.

17. Naber, Souky, and Baroudi, “The Forgotten ‘-Ism.’” The essay was reprinted in Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology (Boston: South End, 2006). Many thanks to Nadine Naber for this reference.

18. Omar Barghouti, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011), 52–53.

19. See “NGO Forum Declaration and Programme of Action,” http://academic.udayton.edu/race/06hrights/WCAR2001/NGOFORUM/ (accessed July 8, 2014).

20. Omar Barghouti, “Relative Humanity: Identity, Rights, and Ethics: Israel as a Case Study,” PMLA 121, no. 5 (2006): 1536–43.

21. Barghouti, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, 6.

22. Nora Barrows-Friedman, In Our Power: U.S. Students Organize for Justice in Palestine (Charlottesville, Va.: Just World Books, 2014).

23. “Council Statement on the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions,” American Studies Association, December 4, 2013.

24. These included Bill V. Mullen, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Robin D. G. Kelley, Nikhil Pal Singh, Sunaina Maira, and Neferti X. M. Tadiar. In July 2012 Social Text Periscope published expanded reflections by these scholars. See “Palestine,” Social Text Periscope, http://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_topic/palestine/ (accessed July 8, 2014). This delegation followed a group of indigenous and women of color feminists the previous summer, which included Rabab Abdulhadi, Ayoka Chenzira, Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Melissa Garcia, Anna Romina Guevarra, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Premilla Nadasen, Barbara Ransby, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Waziyatawin. See “Palestine Statement: Justice for Palestine: A Call to Action from Indigenous and Women of Color Feminists,” Transforming Anthropology: Journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists 20, no. 1 (2012): 90–92. 

25. For the text of the presentations delivered by Alex Lubin, Steven Salaita, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, and Jasbir Puar, see “Substantive Erasures: Essays on Academic Boycott and the American Studies Association,” Jadaliyya, December 23, 2014, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/15697/substantive-erasures_essays-on-academic-boycott-an.

26. “Council Statement on the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions.”

27. See Jodi Melamed, “Dangerous Associations,” American Quarterly 66, no. 2 (2014): 289–300; Journal of Academic Freedom 4 (2013); and Judith Butler, “Academic Freedom and the ASA’s Boycott of Israel: A Response to Michelle Goldberg,” Nation Online, December 8, 2013, http://www.thenation.com/article/177512/academic-freedom-and-asas-boycott-israel-response-michelle-goldberg. For an earlier account of the paucity of academic freedom for Palestinians in the everyday practice of education, see Amy Kaplan, “In Palestine, Occupational Hazards,” Chronicle Review, November 7, 2010.

28. In January 2015, the National Women’s Studies Association released a solidarity statement to underscore its “support of academic freedom, political dissent, and the pursuit of education and research without undue state interference or repression.” The statement grew out of a plenary session on Palestine at the 2014 conference.

29. Quoted in Alex Lubin, “Breaking ‘America’s Last Taboo,’ ” Middle East Research and Information Project, November 27, 2013.

30. The journal Settler Colonial Studies devoted one of its first issues to the theme, “Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine.” The journal reprinted an extended excerpt of Fayez Sayegh’s 1965 monograph, “Zionist Colonialism in Palestine.”

Index

AACF. See Arab American Cultural Foundation

AAUG. See Association of Arab American University Graduates

Abraham, Nabeel, 160

Abu-Laban, Baha, 166, 173–74

Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim, 169; on Arab American assimilation, 170–71; Arab Studies Quarterly editorship, 167, 175; work with Said, 148, 149

ADC. See Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee

ADL. See Anti-Defamation League

Adnan, Etel, 218; Sitt-Marie Rose, 219

Adorno, Theodor, 32; Minima Moralia, 33; “Research Project on Anti-Semitism,” 33

affirmative action: effect on Jewish equality, 116–18; versus meritocracy, 117

Africa: imaginative geography of, 258n100

Africa, sub-Saharan: in U.S. geopolitics, 187

African Americans: alternative epistemology for, viii; in Armed Forces, 46; effect of laboring-class immigration on, 67; equality for, 48; family structure, 45–46; immigrant analogy for, 45; incorporability of, vii; national assimilation of, 27–30, 45–46; premature deaths of, 61, 251n4; relationship with Arabs, 86–88; reparations for, 105, 119, 256n73; role in foreign policy, 100, 101. See also Black liberation; feminists, Black

African liberation movements: Israel and, 77

Afro-Asian Women’s Conference (Cairo, 1961), 89–90

Afro-Zionism, 252n10; and Black radicalism, 63

Agamben, Giorgio, 14

AJC. See American Jewish Committee

Ali, Muhammad, 93–94; conviction for draft evasion, 79

aliyah (immigration to Palestine), 106; Jewish radicals on, 127

alterity: humanist ethic of, 149, 150

Althusser, Louis, 152, 238n2

American Council for Judaism, 19, 39, 108

American Jewish Committee (AJC): alignment with U.S. imperialism, 129; Commentary Magazine, 47, 65; espousal of Jewish peoplehood, 263n22; on founding of Israel, 108–9; history of, 262n10; JDL and, 118; non-Zionism of, 106, 109; shift toward Zionism, 109; Studies in Prejudice, 32–34; support of racial liberalism, 129

American Jewish Congress, 73

American Studies Association (ASA), 228–29, 284nn24–25

Amin, Idi, 50; anti-Semitism of, 48–49

. . . And Bid Him Sing (Du Bois), 19, 61, 86–88, 101; Afro-Arab diaspora in, 86–88, 94; Afro-Arab solidarity in, 96, 97; American racism in, 96–97, 98; Black Americans in, 93–94; Cairene jazz in, 94–96; culture work of, 88; June war in, 97; Malcolm X and, 91; publication of, 93, 260n120; racial performance in, 94; translation in, 88, 93–98

And Not Surrender: American Poets on Lebanon, 212

anticolonialism: of Fatah, 86; international, 64; of Jewish secularism, 127, 129–30; of race radical movements, 187; Zionist framing of, 125–26, 225

anticolonialism, U.S., 60; of Black liberation, 18, 60, 86, 99, 248n51

Anti-Defamation League (ADL), 31; on Radical Left, 103–4; on SNCC, 73

antiracism, 36; feminist, 187, 196, 226; Palestinian, 21

anti-Semitism: American social science on, 32; versus anti-Zionism, 203; Arendt on, 15–16; “cultural” figures of, 181–82; delegitimized, 181; epidemiology model of, 30–31, 32, 33–34, 103, 110; eternal, 31, 32; European, 9; feminist, 197–200, 206, 278n32; intra-European, 43; “new,” 56, 250n88; organizational struggles against, 261n5; and orientalism, 182; permanent, 115; of postwar era, 30–35; race/religion relationship in, 34; racism and, 133, 206; of Radical Left, 103, 114; targeting of Arabs, 182; theories of, 30–31; of totalitarianism, 26, 53; as transhistorical disease, 198; United Nations framing of, 26, 34–35

antiwar movement: Black freedom movement and, 71; effect on Israel, 117

Anzaldúa, Gloria, 201

apartheid, South African, 7, 41, 54, 55, 74, 101, 171, 192, 193; United Nations on, 29, 35, 50, 197, 227

Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), 207, 212

Arab American awakening, 148

Arab American Cultural Foundation (AACF), 212

Arab Americans: and African American rights, 21; ethnic relations paradigm of, 12; federal discrimination protections for, 161; heterogeneous lifeworlds of, 168; incorporability of, 159–60; intersubjectivity of, 179; and June war, 148, 165; knowledge production by, 20; media stereotyping of, 173; nonbelonging of, 173; prejudice against, 160, 174; probationary privileges of, 170, 178, 183; racial profiling of, 172; scholars, 158; surveillance of, 172–73; and U.S.–Israel relationship, 170–71. See also assimilation, Arab American

Arab American studies, 11–12; AAUG’s, 164–75; Black freedom movement’s influence on, 169; knowledge production in, 166. See also Association of Arab American University Graduates

Arab Information Center, 25, 41, 60

Arab–Israeli conflict: beginning of, 77; Black Panther newspaper coverage of, 93; effect on Arab Americans, 174; scholarship on, 7; state-sanctioned violence in, 144

Arab–Israeli relations: connecting links in, 158–62, 271n36; contrapuntal, 156–57; culture work of, 2; ethic of, 180; humanizing form of, 180; racism in, xi; relational approach to, 157, 178; shadow tropes for, 221–22; and U.S. race relations, xi, 2; U.S. representations of, 13

Arab League, 25, 29, 75, 148

“Arab Portrayed, The” (Said), 20, 148–49, 153, 175–82; on anti-Arab racism, 183; Arab/Jewish suffering in, 175–77, 178; Arab resistance in, 183; coexistence in, 181; Cold War geopolitics in, 180; constructive interhuman violence in, 180; decolonization in, 180; empire in, 177; intersubjective dependency in, 179–80; Israeli “realism” in, 179–80; June war in, 178; October war in, 180; race in, 159, 177, 184; relationality of, 184; relationship to Orientalism, 175; settler colonialism in, 180, 181; theory of Arab reality, 183–84; use of Sartre, 176

Arabs: as abstract antagonism, 181; African Americans’ relationship with, 86–88; anti-Semitism against, 182; bourgeois leadership of, 135; as constitutive absence, 176–77; migration to United States, 161, 183; misrepresentation in state discourse, 183; positivist knowledge concerning, 181, 184; racialized fears of, 125, 182, 187; as shadow of Jews, 176, 177, 182; stereotyping of, 160, 178; terrorist figuration of, 173; Zionist portrayal of, 176–77, 179

Arabs, Israeli: civil rights of, 92–93; discrimination against, x–xi, 39, 40; following June war, 147–48; living conditions of, 24, 40, 77; racialization of, 11; status of, 6

“Arabs Today: Alternatives for Tomorrow, The” (AAUG proceedings), 175

Arab Studies Quarterly: Said’s editorship of, 167, 175

Arab World (monthly magazine), 148; issue on the June war, 175; popular audience of, 178; Said’s contribution to, 184

Arafat, Yasser, 86; and Cleaver, 85; and Jesse Jackson, 258n95; meeting with Newton, 93

area studies, U.S., 162–64; and Arab American studies, 166; effect of Cold War on, 163–64; genealogical critiques of, 273n54; language studies in, 164; political development of, 164

Arendt, Hannah: on anti-Semitism, 15–16, 31; Eichmann in Jerusalem, 16; Origins of Totalitarianism, 16

ASA. See American Studies Association

Asian-African Conference (Bandung, 1955), 64

assimilation: African American, 27–30, 45–46; as alternative to Zionism, 107; Jewish American, 11, 28, 57, 104

assimilation, Arab American, 168; anti-Arab racism and, 173; fractured, 175; liberal process of, 170; transnational dimension of, 170

Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG), 20, 90; and African American rights, 166–67; analysis of race, 149; anti-Arab racism studies, 166, 167; on Arab American living conditions, 173; Arab American studies of, 164–75; Berrigan’s address to, 144, 145, 157; Black America Project of, 174; charter of, 165; collaboration with Freedomways, 253n27; commitment to political activity, 158, 171; conferences of, 144, 169–71; countering of stereotypes, 166; critique of Zionism, 35; documentary films of, 167; David Graham Du Bois and, 98; founding of, 163, 165; internationalism of, 171–72; intra-organizational differences in, 167; knowledge production by, 162–63, 174, 184, 269n10; liberal inclusion of, 160; portrayals of Palestinian life, 174–75; print advertisements of, 173; publications of, 165–66, 167–68, 169, 170; research on Arabic-speaking communities, 168; scholarship on, 269n10; state surveillance of, 172–73; support for Palestinian Revolutionary Movement, 171, 229

Aswad, Barbara, 168–69

Atlanta child murders, 209

atrocity: forensic documentation of, 208

Axelrad, Albert, 131

Azoulay, Ariella, 276n9

Bailey, Kofi: SNCC art of, 79

Baldwin, Davarian L., 84

Baldwin, James, 64, 209, 230; Another Country, vii–viii; on anti-Arab racism, 2; on Black Muslims, 111; controversy with Podhoretz, 111–12; “Down at the Cross,” viii, ix, 16; The Fire Next Time, viii; “Harlem Ghetto,” 65; “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” 111; and Nation of Islam, viii; “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White,” 66–67, 71; on racial genocide, 100; relationality of, ix; sense of homelessness, ix, x, 230; on U.S. racial formation, vii–viii; visit to Africa, 237n5; visit to Israel, vii–xi; on Young resignation, 100

Balfour Declaration (1917), 28, 77, 245n13; exclusionary logic of, 106

Balibar, Étienne, 243n47, 272n47

Barghouti, Omar, 226, 227

Barkey, Jeanne, 204

Barthes, Roland, 152, 270n23

Bashshur, Rashid, 165, 166–67

Basle Conference (1897), 38, 42

Bassiouni, M. Cherif, 173

Beck, Evelyn Torton, 280n44; “No More Masks,” 205–6

Begin, Menachim, 74, 188–91, 208, 211–12, 248n55

Begin administration: justification of Lebanon massacre, 189; and PLO, 188

Bellow, Saul: during June war, 123; Newsday journalism, 123, 124; political views of, 124, 265n45; To Jerusalem and Back, 124–25. See also Mr. Sammler’s Planet

Ben-Gurion, David, 51, 74; on immigration, 109; support for American imperialism, 129

Berger, Elmer, 25, 54; anti-Zionism of, 143–44; Jewish Dilemma, 41

Bernadotte, Count Folke: assassination of, 64

Berrigan, Daniel, 139–40; address to AAUG, 144, 145, 157; articulation of Jewish morality, 144–45

Berrigan, Philip, 139

Bisk, Tsvi, 134

Black Arts movement, 83, 257n80

Black freedom movement: and African continent, 88–89; alliances of, 78; anticommunist domestication of, 64, 252n15; and antiwar movement, 71; engagement with human rights paradigm, 246n28; engagement with Palestine, 60–65, 68, 71–80, 98–101, 111, 130–38; global, 251n8; influence on Arab American studies, 169; internationalism of, 60, 73, 89, 225, 251n9; and Palestinian decolonization, 61, 71, 76; Radical Left’s solidarity with, 103; secular Jewish support for, 131; transnational culture of, 83. See also Black Panther Party; Black Power movement; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Black–Jewish relations, U.S., 6, 73–74, 130; during civil rights movement, 263n27; division in, 60; in Harlem, 65–66; narrative of decline, 11. See also Black freedom movement: engagement with Palestine

Black liberation: anticolonial dimensions of, 18, 60, 86, 99, 248n51; and Palestinian liberation, xi

Black Muslims, 46; Baldwin on, 111; effect on integration, 112; inassimilability of, 47

Black National Economic Conference (BNEC), 119, 265n39

Blackness: pathologization of, 44; racialization of, 10

Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, 61, 83, 84, 131; David Graham Du Bois’s editorship of, 92–93; “Fat’h Speaks to Africa,” 85–86; Newton’s writings in, 260n120; Palestinian liberation in, 258n98; PLO fact sheet in, 75

Black Panther Party: Algeria offices of, 82, 84; bond with Fatah, 85–86; call for reparations, 256n73; civil rights leaders’ criticism of, 100; contribution to American political culture, 82; domestic struggle of, 132; iconography of, 84–85, 258n86; International Section of, 257n82; on June 1967 war, 81–82; at Pan-African Cultural Festival, 83–86, 257n82; politics of permanent war, 82, 84, 101; progressive Jewish support for, 131; on Resolution 3379, 24; Sacramento protest (1967), 71, 84; spatial politics of, 82; support for Palestinian liberation, 18–19, 61, 131–32, 133–34; survival strategies of, 131; ties to University of California, Berkeley, School of Criminology, 259n114

Black Power movement: cultural formations of, 253n29; cultural politics of, 71; FBI targeting of, 71–72, 172; internationalism of, 73; politics of relation, 99; translational practices of, 101

Black radicalism: and Afro-Zionism, 63; in Cairo, 87; critique of Jewish survival, 122; cultural production of, 88; Shirley Graham Du Bois’s work with, 89

Black Scholar (journal), 82, 83, 256n77

Blauner, Robert: Racial Oppression in America, 68

Blaustein, Jacob, 108–9

BNEC. See Black National Economic Conference

Boullata, Kamal, 212–13, 214

Boumediene, Houari, 83

Breira (Israeli organization), 144

Brennan, Timothy, 158, 159

Brickner, Balfour, 139

Brown, H. Rap, 74

Brown, W. Norman, 163–64

Bulkin, Elly, 278n32

Bunche, Ralph, 63–64, 71

Buruma, Ian, 283n10

Bush, George H. W., 56, 160

Bush, George W., 222–23, 224

Byrd, Jodi A., 70

Cacho, Lisa, 10

Cairo: Afro-Arab diaspora in, 86, 89–91; Black liberation in, 86–90; internationalism of, 89; jazz music of, 94–96, 260n124

Camp, Allen and Jeanne, 167

Camp David Accords (1978), 188

Camus, Albert, 155

capitalism: gendered, 195; global, 70; imperialist oppression in, 134–35; Israeli, 135; and U.S. race making, 70

capitalism, racial, 4–5, 47, 63, 90; exploitation in, 12; liberal inclusion and, 187; of Reagan administration, 208; violence of, 118; women of color feminism on, 193

Carmichael, Stokely, 62, 89; Black Power, 69–70; on “Third World Round-up,” 74–75; world tour of, 253n30

Carson, Clayborne, 73, 255n60

Carter, Jimmy, 100; on civil rights–Palestine link, 99

Chamberlin, Paul Thomas, 36

Charting the Journey (Black British anthology, 1988), 186

Chase, Chevy, 24

children: rights to sanctuary, 186; violence against, 209

children, Lebanese: UNICEF fund-raiser for, 212–16

Chomsky, Noam, 171, 207

civil rights: and Black power internationalism, 73; ethnic relations paradigm of, 11; long/short eras of, 251n8; radicalization narrative of, 253n29; U.S. legislation for, 161

Civil Rights Act (1964), 56

Civil Rights Congress: on anti-Black violence, 29

Clark, Kenneth, 69

Cleaver, Eldridge, 140, 256n77; and Arafat, 85; on land question, 68–69; at Pan-African Cultural Festival, 83; Soul on Ice, 83

Cleaver, Kathleen, 84, 85, 257n82

Clinton, Bill, 160

Cockburn, Alexander: “Annals of the Age of Reason,” 211

Cohen, Morris, 39; on secular incorporation, 108; “Zionism: Tribalism or Liberalism,” 106–8

COINTELPRO. See FBI Counter Intelligence Program

Cold War: American imaginary of, 125; anticommunist containment strategies of, 224; articulation of antitotalitarianism in, 282n5; cartographies of, 8; continuous present of, x, 225; diplomacy in, 1; effect on U.S. area studies, 163–64, 269n12; geopolitics of, 180; influence on racialized warfare, 283n11; liberal citizen subject in, 44; racialized aspects of, ix, 187, 221; U.S.–Israeli relations in, 54, 187

colonialism: agency of colonized in, 151; Black theorizations of, 69–70; oil, 129; conceptual apparatus of, 17; relationship to racism, 50, 69. See also settler colonialism

colonialism, internal, 67–70; BNEC on, 119; history of, 252n24; and Israeli occupation of Palestine, 81; sociospatial control through, 68; of U.S., 81, 100

Committee for a Progressive Middle East (CPME), 134–36; anticapitalist politics of, 136; socialism of, 135

Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA): cultural wing of, 127

comparativity, 12–14; and comparative frames, 15, 45, 70, 99, 143, 157, 199, 216, 243n50

Conference of Ministers for Foreign Affairs of Non-Aligned Countries (1975), 23

Congressional Black Caucus: on U.S. and Israeli links to South Africa, 101

Congress on Racial Equality, 60

conjunctural analysis, 22, 238n2, 243n64

Conrad, Joseph, 178

constructivism in race theory, 154

conviviality, 145, 216, 219

Conyers, John, 213

counterpoint: in Arab–Israeli relations, 156–57; in music, 155–56

CPME. See Committee for a Progressive Middle East

CPUSA. See Communist Party of the United States of America

Creighton, Jane, 204

criminality, racialized, 10, 66, 67, 92, 190

Critical Inquiry (journal), 154

Cruse, Harold: Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 68, 71; “My Jewish Problem—and Theirs,” 263n27

Cullen, Countee: “Yet Do I Marvel,” 87

cultural production, 1–3; American Jewish, 110; Black radical, 60, 83, 88; decolonization and, 83; geopolitical importance of, 213; Palestinian, 212; post–civil rights, 60

Dachau: as metonym, 78–79

Darwish, Mahmoud, 36, 213–14

Davidson, Lawrence, 272n42

Davis, Sammy, Jr., 24

décalage: in Black internationalism, 254n37

decolonization, 143–45; and cultural production, 83; exilic practice of, 145; noncoercive, 149; ruptures following, 10; unfinished work of, 194; and U.S. racial justice, 3; U.S. role in, 47–48

decolonization, Palestinian, 61, 71, 76; ethical obligation of, 180

Deir Yassin massacre (1948), 24

democracy, American: multiracial, 239n19; post–civil rights failures of, 6; race consciousness of, 3; white rhetoric of, 218; Zionism and, 107, 108

democracy, Jewish: indigenization of, 143

democracy, liberal: conception of national identity, 169; inassimilable other of, 44; suffering produced by, 216; Zionism as expression of, 110–11

Derrida, Jacques, 14

desegregation, 2, 8, 27, 28, 61

diaspora, Afro-Arab, 86–89; in Cairo, 86, 89–91

diaspora, Black: Zionist analogy for, 62

diaspora, Jewish: African American identification with, 67; Egypt in, 142; future in United States, 142; multiparticularism of, 229; revolutionary, 136–43; scholarship on, 262n7; state formation and, 142; territorial solution for, 133

difference: colonial, 15; minority, 261n4; relationality of, 15, 155, 262n7; Said on, 154–55, 156

dispossession, Palestinian, 2, 6, 26, 37–38, 42; becoming in the face of, 186; and figure of Native Americans, 198; Holocaust memory and, 211; as last taboo, 229; state-sanctioned, 41

Douglas, Emory, 83; Black Panther artwork of, 84, 257n85

Dreirer, Peter, 132

Du Bois, David Graham, 19, 61, 69; on Afro-Arab solidarity, 98; and Association of Arab American University Graduates, 98; at UC Berkeley School of Criminology, 91–92; Black freedom essays of, 92; Cairo residence of, 87, 90–91; career of, 90–92, 98; collaboration with Malcolm X, 91; editorship of Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, 75, 92–93; Ghanaian citizenship of, 260n125; during June war, 97; Oakland residence of, 91–92; on Palestine question, 90. See also . . . And Bid Him Sing

Du Bois, Shirley Graham: on Afro-Arab solidarity, 98; and Association of Arab American University Graduates, 171; Cairo residence of, 87, 89–90; Ghanaian citizenship of, 260n125; Ghana residence of, 89, 91; and Malcolm X, 91; on racial capitalism, 90

Du Bois, W. E. B., 62, 89, 90; Afro-Zionism of, 64; Pan-Africanism of, 87; The Souls of Black Folk, 61

economy, U.S.: flexible accumulation in, 4. See also political economy

Edwards, Brent Hayes, 88; on décalage, 254n37

Egypt: war with Israel (1973), 92, 97, 157, 180

Egyptian Gazette, 86, 97; David Graham Du Bois’s work with, 90–91, 94

Eichmann, Adolf: trial of, 2, 16

Einstein, Albert: critiques of Zionism, 39, 248n55

Eisenhower, Dwight, 268n5

Elia, Nada, 196, 278n34

Elkholy, Abdo, 170

Elkins, Stanley, 46

Ellington, Duke: “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,” 95

Ellison, Ralph, 113

Elmessiri, Abdelwahab, 24, 245n13; “Distinctive Traits of Zionist Settler Colonialism,” 55

emancipation, political and human, 12, 25, 46, 57, 105, 140, 261n4

empire: AAUG analysis of, 166; cultural hegemony of, 149; racial otherness in, 150; transnational analysis of, 149, 161, 174, 184, 269n10. See also imperial culture

Engel, Kathy, 212, 214

Entebbe: Israeli raid on, 53, 162

Epstein, Benjamin, 103–4; The New Anti-Semitism, 104

Epstein, Itzhak, 133–34

ethnicity, 7, 27, 49, 107; conflation with race, 45; liberal nationalist ideas of, 11

ethnic studies, U.S., 7, 149–50; influence of Orientalism on, 149–51

ethno-nationalism, Jewish, 143

Eurocentrism: academic interventions into, 150; Arab critique of, 184; knowledge regimes of, 151; third world colleges and, 151

exceptionalism: Israeli, 14, 154, 188; U.S.–Israeli, 26

exceptionalism, American, 14; cultural pluralism and, 108; dissents from, 104; Israel in, 118; Jewish security and, 19, 105; Jews in, 105; liberal inclusion in, 106; melting pot of, 107; Zionist narrative of, 126

exceptional relations, 14–16

exclusion, racial, 65–70; American Jews’ role in, 66; in Zionism, 38

exile: James Baldwin and, x; Jewish, 109, 127, 143–45; Palestinian, 85, 188, 204; in Said’s works, 157–58; in Zionist foundational myth, 132–33; Zionist negation of, 143. See also dispossession, Palestinian

Falashas, 42

Fanon, Frantz, 73, 155; on Négritude movement, 83; Wretched of the Earth, 69

Farsoun, Samih, 174

Fatah: Algiers office of, 84–85; anticolonialism of, 86; bond with Black Panther Party, 85–86; feda’i of, 85

FBI Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), 71–72, 92, 172

Featherstone, Ralph, 72

feminism: antiracist, 187, 196, 226; Arab Canadian, 196; second-wave, 187; third world, 21

Feminist Arab-American Network: Preliminary Statement of Purpose, 205

feminists, Arab American, 196; as forgotten minority, 202–5; on Holocaust memory, 204

feminists, Black: discord with Jewish feminists, 197–98; internationalism of, 186–87, 276n6; spatial imaginary of, 214

feminists, Jewish, 195; Ashkenazi, 199; discord with Black feminists, 197–98; lesbian, 195, 196, 199, 200; NWSA conference on, 197; on racial privilege, 196; Spanish, 200–201; Zionism and, 197. See also Vilde Chayes, Di

feminists, U.S.: and anti-Arab racism, 203–5, 210, 278n32; on racism, 21; split among, 218; and Zionism, 197

feminists, women of color: Palestine question and, 195–96, 207; on racial capitalism, 193; racial meanings of, 194; situated identity of, 191–92

Ferguson, Roderick, 191, 193, 196

Flowerman, Samuel, 33–34

Food for Our Grandmothers (1994), 196

foreign policy, U.S.: Arab racialization and, 174; Black American role in, 100, 101. See also imperial culture, U.S.

Forman, James, 119, 265n39

Forster, Arnold, 73, 103–4; The New Anti-Semitism, 104

Foucault, Michel: on adjacency, 153; on power relations, 5; Said on, 152, 153; on subjugated knowledge, 222

Freedom Seder, 139–43; logic of relationality, 140–41; multiparticularist diaspora of, 140; presentism of, 141

Freedomways (periodical), 62; Palestine question in, 253n27

Friedman, Thomas, 247n48

Furman, Andrew, 124

Garment, Leonard, 50

Gemayel, Bashir: assassination of, 189

gender: in Black poverty, 47–48; in capitalism, 195; “New Manliness” tropes of, 217; racialization of, 112–13, 124, 125, 192, 216, 219, 282n8. See also masculinity

genocide: anti-Black violence and, 29; discrepant sites of, 141; Euro-American, 10; normative rubrics of, 13; social-psychological heuristic of, 32

genocide, Nazi, 12; conceptual categories of, 13; humanitarian response to, 63; and imperial culture, 16; Israel as response to, 6, 26, 40, 218

Gerson, Michael, 112

ghettos: as economic colonies, 69; relationship to prisons, 67, 70

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, 190, 251n4

Gilroy, Paul, 14, 282n4

Glazer, Nathan: Affirmative Discrimination, 116–17; Beyond the Melting Pot, 44–45, 115; deradicalization of, 115–16; “The Exposed American Jew,” 116–17; on meritocracy, 118; “Negroes and Jews,” 46

“global 1968,” 3, 238n8

Goldberg, David Theo, 10

Goldburg, Robert E., 131–32

Gould, Glenn, 156

Gowan, Peter, 4

Graham, Stephen, 226

Grandin, Greg, 217

Gregory, Derek, 223, 282n4

Gromyko, Andrei, 128

Grossberg, Lawrence, 243n64

Grossman, Lawrence, 263n22

Group of 77, 47

Guha, Ranajit, 158, 159

Gulf War, first: anti-Arab racism following, 160

Guttman, Allen, 121

Haddad, Carol, 204, 210; “Arab-Americans: The Forgotten Minority,” 202–3, 205

Haganah (Jewish parliamentary organization), 128–29

Hagopian, Elaine, 148, 173

halutziut (pioneering), 109

Hamilton, Charles: Black Power, 69–70

Hammad, Suheir: Born Palestinian, Born Black, 186

hamzat al-wasl (grammatical concept), 159

Haney-López, Ian, 45, 118

Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, 159

Harap, Louis, 128, 129–30

Hare, Nathan, 82

Harlem: Black/Jewish antagonism in, 65–66

Hart-Cellar immigration reform act (1965), 161

Hassidism: ecstatic tradition of, 142

Hentoff, Nat, 211

Hervé, Julia Wright, 83

Herzl, Theodor, 38, 39, 42, 51, 68–69, 74; Der Judenstaat, 42

heteropatriarchy, racialized, vii

Hezbollah: conflict with Israel, 222–23, 282n3

Hicks, James, 64

Higashida, Cheryl, 186

Himmelfarb, Milton, 118

historiography: culture work in, 5

history: conjunctures in, 238n2

Hochberg, Gil Z., 271n36

Holocaust: effect on racial liberalism, 30; and founding of Israel, 78; incommensurable relationships of, 14; liberal norms following, 10; in PRC publications, 40; relational engagement with, 157; as sacralized paradigm, 141

Holocaust memory: American Jewish engagements with, 2, 110, 238n5; Arab abjection and, 125; Arab American feminists on, 204; Israeli security and, 210–11; Moynihan’s use of, 49; Palestinian dispossession and, 211; in United States, 7, 21, 240n24; Di Vilde Chayes on, 204

homeland security, U.S.: Israeli security corporations’ work with, 226

homo sacer, 14–15

Hong, Grace Kyungwon, 193, 277n25

Hoover, J. Edgar, 71–72

Horkheimer, Max, 32; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 33; theory of anti-Semitism, 33–34

Hoyt, Edwin, 64

humanism, 92, 121, 149–50; relational, 21

humanity, 29, 73, 91, 116, 121, 186; gendered categories of, 218; Palestinian, 187, 227, 229; racial relationality of, 222

ICO. See International Congress of Orientalists

identity, 55, 157–58, 161, 217; Arab American, 161, 169, 179; comparison and, 13–14, 70, 216; ethnic, 133; Israeli nationalist, x; Jewish feminist, 195; in liberal democracy, 169; politics of, 80; religious, 39; of women of color feminists, 191–92

IDF. See Israeli Defense Forces

immigration policy, U.S., 161; Ideological Exclusion Clause of, 213–14

imperial culture, U.S., 7–9, 16; anti-Arab racism in, 202–3; cartography of, 8; forms of knowledge in, 8; frontier violence in, 177–78, 179; gendered oppression in, 193; global, 2; Holocaust and, 25; Israel in, 149; Jewish Left on, 125; of late twentieth century, 193–94; manifest destiny in, 181; narrative of Jewish security, 125; neoconservatism of, 125; and Palestinian liberation, 18; Podhoretz’s contribution to, 112; of post–civil rights era, 104, 184; race in, 25, 158–59, 160, 221–22; relational analysis of, 229; Said’s critique of, 269n10; state violence in, 19, 62, 177–78; Zionism and, 25

imperialism: liberal feminist justifications of, 193; orientalist logic of, 224; in Western culture, 155

imperialism, U.S.: apologias for, 126; Vietnamese struggle against, 136; “workshops” of, 217

INCITE! Women of Color against Violence, 196, 279n35

inclusion, viii, 17, 45, 99, 101, 142, 161, 169; AAUG and, 160; in American exceptionalism, 106, 116; civic, 27, 104, 118, 125; Israeli, 6, 9; liberal, 28, 80, 142, 187, 222; racial capitalism and, 2, 187. See also racial liberalism

incorporability: Arab American, 159–62, 173; Black, vii, 101; indigenous Arab, 17, 128; Jewish, 11, 105–9, 113–14, 142, 190–91; multiculturalism as, 193; racial liberalism’s investment in, 12, 18, 194; settler national, 279n34

individualism, American, 49, 121

infrahumanity, 14, 223, 282n4

Institute for Palestine Studies, 35

Institute for Social Research, 32

integration, racial: Black Muslims’ effect on, 112; failures of, 137; role in Cold War, 27

intellectuals, Arab: on ethnic relations paradigm, 12

intellectuals, Black: on Zionism, 62–63

International Congress of Orientalists (ICO): Ann Arbor Conference (1967), 163–64, 165; name changes of, 273n53

International Convention on Human Rights (April 1968), 51

International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, 34–35, 37, 171

International Humanitarian Law: U.S. circumvention of, 226

internationalism: anticolonial, 64; of Cairo, 89; “imperial,” 29; Israeli racialization and, 44

internationalism, Black, 60, 89, 251n9; and civil rights, 73; décalage in, 254n37

International League for the Rights of Man, 32

International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (EAFORD): “Zionism and racism” symposium, 54–57

intifada, second, 196, 278n34

Iraq: U.S. sanctions against, 160

Irgun movement, 120

Islam: debasing portrayals of, 161, 179, 182; expert knowledge about, 162; Nation of, viii, 46, 74, 79, 84, 93, 94; as pathology, 223; as totalitarianism, 282n7

Islamo-Fascism, 222–26; George H. W. Bush on, 223; origin of term, 224; as race war, 223, 225; and Russian–American relations, 224–25

Israel: accountability to international law, 227; and African liberation movements, 77; Agricultural Settlement Law, 43; in American imagination, 6; in American imperial culture, 149; American Left and, 6; American public opinion on, 117; Anglo-American sovereignty and, x; boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against, 227–28; carceral regime of, 188; conflict with Hezbollah, 222–23, 282n3; construction of peoplehood, 12; Covenant of 1961, 42; as defense against Arab violence, 125; discourse of Palestinian terrorism, 190; discrimination in, x–xi, 24, 38, 39–40, 77; exclusions in, 6, 9, 143; existential threat to, 104, 130, 156, 188, 195; foundational narratives of, 118, 126; and global liberation movements, 3; global perceptions of, 105; “Greater Israel” project, 190, 191; identification with third world, 133, 135, 141; immigration to, 106, 109; infrastructure of control, 276n9; intra-Jewish racism in, 24, 190; invasion of West Beirut (1982), 37; Keren Kayemeth Law, 42; Labor Party, 144, 190–91, 277n22; Law of Return, 42; Likud government of, 3; at Madrid Peace Conference, 56; meaning making in, 9; as metaphor for democracy, 53–56; military strength of, 9, 104, 148; as multiracial society, 52; national geographies of, 9; Nationality Law, 42; negotiations with PLO, 144; October war with Egypt (1973), 92, 97, 157, 180; political cynicism concerning, x; racial distinctions in, 24, 35, 42, 190; sacralization by genocide, 6, 26, 218; scholarly boycotts of, 228–29; shadow tropes for, 221–22; Soviet denunciation of, 129; survival of, 104, 130; symbolism for United States, 9; ties to South Africa, 7, 23, 25, 40, 41, 55–56, 101; U.S. journalists’ coverage of, 168; U.S. military aid to, 190; vulnerability of, 104, 130, 143; Western alliances of, 129–30, 135, 137; as white imperialist state, 206; withdrawal from Sinai, 188. See also Arab–Israeli relations; Lebanon invasion; settler colonialism, Israeli; state violence, Israeli; Zionism

Israeli Black Panther Party, 42

Israeli Defense Forces (IDF): bombing of Beirut, 188; U.S. police consultation with, 226

Israeli Peace Now movement, 209

Jabara, Abdeen: FBI surveillance of, 172–73

Jabotinsky, Vladimir Ze’ev: “Iron Wall” ideology of, 120

Jackson, Jacqueline, 174

Jackson, Jesse: and Arafat, 258n95; PUSH coalition of, 174

Jacobson, Matthew Frye, 80

Jahin, Salah, 95–96

Jameson, Fredric, 5

Japanese Americans: internment during World War II, 172

JDL. See Jewish Defense League

Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism, 53–54, 162

Jewish American Reform movement, 39

Jewish Cultural Club: anti-imperialism of, 129

Jewish Currents (magazine), 127–32; anti-imperialist narrative of, 128–29; “The Black Panthers, Jews, and Israel,” 130–31; Communist sponsorship of, 127; non-Zionism of, 128, 129, 132

Jewish Defense League (JDL), 118–19, 122

Jewish establishment: anticommunism of, 136; critique of JLP, 133; response to Ocean Hill strike, 119; role in U.S. imperialism, 136

Jewish Liberation Journal, 134

Jewish Liberation Project (JLP), 132–34

Jewish Life (magazine), 127, 128

Jewishness: Cold War, 195; definitions of, 52; and political Zionism, 28, 104; as whole life process, 136

Jewish question: and conceptions of minority difference, 261n4

Jewish Radicalism (anthology, 1973), 132

Jewish radicals: anti-imperialism of, 127; militant, 118–20; on racial liberalism, 127; on settler colonialism, 125–27; on U.S. state violence, 126

Jewish Social Studies (journal), 130

Jewish Voice for Peace (organization): support for Palestine, 229

Jews: as adventurer-pioneers, 177, 179, 182; comparativity of, 13; deterritorialized world community of, 141; intergenerational fears of, 205; Oriental, 39, 40, 42, 182; racial definition of, 51; racialization during Reconquista, 151; as religious community, 108

Jews, American: in American exceptionalism, 105; Ashkenazi-descended, 112; assimilation into American life, 11, 28, 57, 104, 137; and Black freedom, 60, 73–74; conversions to Zionism, 109–11; culture work and, 19; defense organizations of, 31, 73, 106, 261n5; engagement with Holocaust, 2, 110; in ethnonational resurgence, 262n9; incorporability of, 105–9, 113–14, 279n34; in neoconservative imaginary, 113; non-Blackness of, 28; in post–civil rights period, 113; relationship to liberal ideologies, 261n3; role in racial exclusion, 66; threats to, 19, 104, 105, 110, 122, 125, 134, 139, 198; vulnerability feelings of, 115

Jews, Ashkenazi: feminist, 199–200; racism of, 190

Jews, Black: deportation of, 42

Jews, Mizrahi: marginalization of, 190

Jews, non-European, 182–83; Israeli recognition of, 191

Jews, Sephardic: Israeli racism against, 24

Jews for Urban Justice (JUJ), 229; anti-imperialism of, 136–37; Freedom Seder of, 139–43; internationalism of, 140; “Jewish Campaign for the People’s Peace Treaty,” 136; politics of adjacency, 140

Jiryis, Sabri, 36, 37

JLP. See Jewish Liberation Project

Jordan, June, 230; “Apologies to All the People of Lebanon,” 205, 210–12; “Life after Lebanon,” 217–19; Living Room, 209, 216, 218; “Moving towards Home,” 21, 185–86, 209, 211, 215–16; at “Moving towards Home” fund-raiser, 214; on “New Woman,” 217–18, 219; “Poetry for the People” project, 186; “Problems of Language in a Democratic State,” 207–8; “The Test of Atlanta 1979,” 209; “To Sing a Song of Palestine,” 209, 214–15; use of Holocaust memory, 210; writings on Lebanon, 208–9, 218; writings on Palestine, 276n8. See also “Moving towards Home”

Joseph, Peniel, 74

Judaism: as liberation theology, 139; prophetic, 142

Judaism, Reform: opposition to Zionism, 108

JUJ. See Jews for Urban Justice

June war (1967), 61; aftermath for Palestinians, 147–48; Arab Americans following, 165; Arab victims of, 123–24; Black Panther Party on, 81–82; colonialist description of, 254n32; David Graham Du Bois during, 97; media portrayals of, 178; in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, 122; rhetoric preceding, 114

justice: racial, 3, 21; spatial imaginary for, 208. See also social justice, U.S.

Kach movement: on Jewish “purity,” 120

Kahane, Meir: on Jewish establishment, 119; Kach movement of, 120; Never Again!, 118

Kallen, Horace, 39; cultural pluralism of, 107, 108, 262n15

Kaplan, Amy, 126

Katz, Emily Alice, 108

Kazarian, Richard, 73

Kennan, George: “Sources of Soviet Conduct,” 224, 282n8

Kennedy, John F., 1, 2, 13, 238n1

Kerim, Osman (Mac X Spears), 94–95, 260n125; “Yayeesh Nasser,” 95

Kerner Commission: on white racism, 51

Khalidi, Rashid, 85

kibbutzim, Israeli, vii, 6, 127, 135, 136

King, Martin Luther, Jr.: “Beyond Vietnam,” 71; comparison to Yasir Arafat, 99; Freedom Seder and, 139, 140; “Martin Luther King Defines ‘Black Power,’” 72, 255n46; at National Conference for New Politics, 80; and nonviolence, 145; on racial liberalism, 72; on “Third World Round-up,” 73

Kissinger, Henry, 48

knowledge: conceptual apparatus of, 17; contested, 5; relationship to power, 149; subjugated, 222; symbolic architecture of, 153

knowledge production: by AAUG, 162–63, 174, 184, 269n10; Arab American, 20, 166; concerning BDS movement, 228; in ethnic studies, 150; exceptional relations of, 14; heterogeneous forms of, 222; “objective,” 164; concerning Palestine, 37, 75, 76, 121; Said’s challenge to, 154; by women of color, 194

Koenig, Shulamith, 209, 217

Kristol, Irving, 121

Labor Bund: socialism of, 142

“Lament of the Children of Israel in Rome” (poem), 65

Latin America: liberation movements in, 5, 36; solidarity with, 60, 74, 85, 127, 171, 186; structural adjustment programs in, 4; U.S. military intervention in, 8, 193, 194, 207

League of Nations, 29; paternalism of, 28

Lebanon: civil war in, 124; gendered violence in, 219

Lebanon invasion (1982), 3, 7, 154, 187–91; Arab American protests against, 207; Arab poetry on, 213; Israeli protests against, 208, 211; mobilization of Americans against, 217–18; NWSA response to, 203–5; Palestinian question and, 188; Di Vilde Chayes on, 203–4

Left, American: coalitions of, 80; Israel and, 6; split in, 218

Left, Jewish, 19–20, 141–42; anti-imperialism of, 143; at Berkeley, 126; Black Power and, 130; conversion narratives of, 136–39; critiques of U.S. imperial culture, 125; government concessions to, 116; Zionist support in, 132–36

Left, Radical: ADL on, 103–4; anti-Semitism of, 103, 114; JDL on, 119

Lerner, Michael, 126; CPME leadership of, 134, 135

Lester, Julius, 129

Lewin, Yitzhak, 34–35

Lewis, Bernard, 49, 224, 282n7; “The Anti-Zionist Resolution,” 51–52; historical approach of, 249n69; “Palestinians and the PLO,” 50

liberalism, American: African American assimilation in, 27; complicity with racism, 49; dilemma of, 105; incorporative impetus of, 107; Jewish outlooks toward, 104; minority rights and, 19; structural violence in, 105

liberalism, Cold War: exclusions of, ix; race question in, 18, 26–27; state violence and, 19

liberalism, racial, 26–30; AJC support of, 129; Black radical critiques of, 225; civic inclusion in, 27, 57; defense of liberal democracy, 35; domesticating narrative of, 60; effect of Holocaust on, 30; exceptionalist discourse of, 70; global, 47–53; and international governance, 28–29; Jewish radicals on, 127; in Moynihan’s works, 44; nation of immigrants in, 45; neoconservative tenor of, 65; philosophical lineaments of, 245n16; post–World War II, 194; and spatial transformations, 67, 252n23; support of Zionism, 52–53, 63

liberation, geographies of, 3. See also Black liberation; Palestinian liberation

liberty as civic religion, 26

Liebman, Charles, 109

Likud government (Israel), 3; populism of, 190

literary culture: circulation of, 88, 258n101

literary theory, U.S.: modes of address, 153–54

literature, Arab American, 212; American audience for, 213

literature, U.S.: post-Holocaust, 121

Lorde, Audre: response to racism, 201–2

Lover from Palestine, A (anthology, 1970), 212

Lowe, Lisa, 15, 270n14

Lowen, Marilyn, 141

Lowery, Joseph, 174

Lubin, Alex, 3

Malcolm X, 64, 73, 133; assassination of, 74, 97; collaboration with David Graham Du Bois, 91; debate with Baldwin, viii; at OAU conference, 90, 91; visit to Cairo, 87, 91; “Zionist Logic,” 91

manifest destiny, American, 126, 181; globalized, 225

Marcus, Kenneth, 250n88

Markaz al-Abhath al-Filastini. See Palestine Research Center

Mart, Michelle, 6

Marx, Karl: “On the Jewish Question,” 261n4

masculinity: nationalist, 276n6; in U.S. settler colonialism, 217

masculinity, black, 46–47, 124; fetishization of, 112; hypersexualized, 121–22

masculinity, Jewish, 111–13, 118–20, 122–23, 195

Maslow, Will, 73

Mazower, Mark, 29

Mbembe, Achille: “Necropolitics,” 14

McAlister, Melani, 74, 79, 126

McCone Commission, 68

McGranahan, Carole, 12

Mead, Margaret, xi

meaning making: beginnings in, 153; in Israel, 9; in Orientalism, 152; post-structuralism and, 153

Meir, Golda, 1, 2

memory: multidirectional, 199; regenerative power of, 201. See also Holocaust memory

meritocracy, American: versus affirmative action, 117; color-blind, 143; denaturalizing of, 115; immigrant success in, 114; and race neutrality, 118; redressing of anti-Semitism, 116

Middle East Coordinating Committee: cycle-of-violence narrative of, 125; “Did You Know?,” 75

Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA), 165

milchemet chova (defensive war), 131

Miles, Sara, 212

Minor, Ethel, 74, 75, 78, 256n60

miscegenation, 113; racial politics of, 264n30

Mitchell, Timothy, 4–5

modernity: colonial, 15; discursive productivity of, 152, 153; liberal, 126

modernity, Euro-American: Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen in, 16; Israel and, 6; Nazi genocide in, 12–13; oppression of other, ix–x; Palestine and, 17; race in, 9–10, 14, 17; sociality in, 17

Moraga, Cherríe, 196, 201; “Refugees of a World on Fire,” 192–94

Morales, Rosario, 200–201

“Moving towards Home” (UNICEF fund-raiser), 21, 212–16; June Jordan’s poetry at, 185, 214–16; participants in, 212

Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 18; Beyond the Melting Pot, 44–45, 115; on civil rights/Palestine link, 99; defense of racial liberalism, 48; “Employment, Income, and the Ordeal of the Negro Family,” 254n32; formalism of, 52; framing of race, 27; government service of, 47, 48; media appearances of, 48; “The Negro Family,” 44, 45–47, 49; on power of language, 249n72; Senate campaign of, 53, 54; speech against Resolution 3379, 27, 43–44, 48, 49–52, 53; “Totalitarian Terrorists,” 53; trip to Israel (1976), 53; “The United States in Opposition,” 47, 52; UN ambassadorship, 27, 43, 48, 53; use of Holocaust memory, 49

Mr. Sammler’s Planet (Bellow), 120–25; black masculinity in, 124; Black pickpocket of, 122–23, 265n51; critical reception of, 121; gendered racialization in, 124; Holocaust in, 122, 123, 124; humanism of, 121; Jewish toughness in, 121, 122–23; June war in, 122, 123–24; publication of, 121; violence in, 123–24; witnessing in, 124

Ms. Magazine: “Anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement,” 197–98, 205; forum on anti-Semitism, 198

Muhammad, Elijah, 91

Munich Olympics (1972), 172

Muslims: and Muhammad Ali, 79–80; Arab American discourse on, 20, 168, 202; James Baldwin on Middle Eastern, xi; discourse of terror concerning, 3, 21, 161, 172, 224–26; Hollywood stereotyping of, 160; Moynihan on, 52; racialization of, 10, 12, 44, 46, 112; during Reconquista, 151

“My Negro Problem—and Ours” (Podhoretz), ix, 111–15, 283n10; amalgamation in, 113; disavowal of racism, 116; gendered racialization in, 112–13; Jewish toughness in, 114; Jewish vulnerability in, 113, 114; Ocean Hill–Brownsville strike in, 115; reprint of, 263n27

Myrdal, Gunnar, 105

Naber, Nadine, 160

Najjar, Fauzi, 169

Nakba (catastrophe), Palestinian, 9, 110, 147–48; incommensurable relationships of, 14; ongoing structure of, 210

Naksa (setback), Palestinian, 9

Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 2; Shirley Graham Du Bois’s biography of, 258n100; Pan-Arabism of, 64, 79, 94

Nasserism, 36

National Conference for New Politics (NCNP, 1967), 229; Black caucus of, 80–81, 137–38; Zionism debate at, 81

National Defense Education Act (NDEA), 163; legislative history of, 273n54; Title VI (“Language Development”), 164

nationalism, Israeli: identity in, x; Zionism as, 42

nationalism, masculinist, 276n6

nationalism, Palestinian: AAUG’s, 166; historical roots of, 249n69; Reagan administration and, 189

nationalism, Pan-Arab, 165; AAUG’s support for, 171

nationalisms, competing, 197–98

national security, U.S., 8–9; racial difference and, 12

National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), 230; conference on Jewish feminism, 197; position on anti-Semitism, 205; “Race, Class, and Sex Interactions” (conference session, 1982), 202; “Racism and Anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement” (conference session, 1983), 205–6; response to Lebanon invasion, 203–5; Third World Caucus of, 201, 202, 203; Women of Color caucus, 206; “Women Respond to Racism,” 200–201

nation-states: indigenous peoples of, 16; race making in, 10

Nazism: comparativity of, 13; use of exceptionality, 15; and Zionism, 40–41, 51, 55. See also genocide, Nazi

NCNP. See National Conference for New Politics

NDEA. See National Defense Education Act

Neal, Larry, 257n80

Négritude movement, 83

neoconservatism, U.S., 5, 65, 112, 121, 162, 195; American Jews and, 110, 113; color-blind ideologies of, 52; emergence of, ix, 3, 112–13, 125

neoliberalism, racialized, 5

Netanyahu, Benjamin, 162

Newark Black Power Conference, 81

New Jewish Agenda, 144

Newton, Huey P., 92; “In Defense of Self-Defense,” 61–62; meeting with Arafat, 93; trial of, 68; writings of, 260n120

New York Police Department: mapping of Arab/Muslim communities, 226

Ngai, Mae, 161

NGO Forum: on racial domination, 227

Nixon, Richard: “law and order” policies, 136; “peacemaker” aspirations of, 168, 274n64; on urban crime, 254n33

Nixon administration: Black Panther newspaper coverage of, 92; Moynihan’s service in, 47–48; relations with OPEC, 4; surveillance of Arab/Muslim populations, 172–73

Nkrumah, Kwame, 89

Non-Aligned Movement, 47

NWSA. See National Women’s Studies Association

OAAU. See Organization of Afro-American Unity

OAU. See Organization of African Unity

Obama, Barack, 56

Occupied Territories, Palestinian: under Begin administration, 191; colonial expansionism in, 227; Israeli administration of, 3, 148, 188; Israeli justification for, 144; Jewish settlements in, 7, 148, 198; settlement movement, 190–91, 277n22; social terrain of, 35; U.S. divestment from, 228; U.S. imperialism and, 26

Ocean Hill–Brownsville teachers strike (1967), 114–15; Jewish establishment response to, 119

October war (1973), 92, 97, 157; U.S. media coverage of, 180

O’Dell, Jack, 62, 68, 174

Office of Civil Rights, U.S.: on religious discrimination, 250n88

Off Our Backs (OOB, magazine), 199, 202, 204–5, 210

oil companies, American: anti-Arab racism of, 203

Omi, Michael, 107; Racial Formation in the United States, 254n34

OPEC. See Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries

Operation Boulder: anti-Zionist dossiers of, 173; post-9/11 surveillance regimes and, 275n83; targeting of AAUG, 172–73

Operation Peace for Galilee, 188, 189. See also Lebanon invasion

Ophir, Adi, 276n9

Orfalea, Gregory, 212

Organization of African Unity (OAU), 23; Cairo conference (1964), 90, 91

Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), 29, 246n28; Cairo chapter of, 97; Malcolm X and, 91

Organization of Arab Students, 172

Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC): oil embargo of, 4, 92, 165, 181

orientalism: anti-Semitism and, 182; cultural domination in, 182. See also Orientalism (Said)

Orientalism (Said), 20, 55; analysis of race, 149; anti-essentialism of, 150–51; contrapuntal readings of, 158; critique of scholarly neutrality, 150–51; on epistemic violence, 183; fetishization of expertise in, 181; on meaning making, 152; omissions from, 151–52; place in knowledge production, 158; on portrayals of Islam, 179; postcolonial feminists on, 151; publication of, 269n12; role in ethnic studies, 149–51; scholarly reaction to, 269n9; theorization of race, 151

orientalism, U.S., 151, 270n19; Arab American subjects in, 160

other: racial, 150, 177; in Zionism, 17

Palestine: absent presence of, 17, 194–96, 206–7; alternative knowledge concerning, 18; in American imperial culture, 149; antiracist relation to, 21; Black freedom’s engagement with, 60–65, 68, 71–80, 98–101, 111, 130–38; British Mandate for, 28, 38, 40, 77; cultures of resistance, 9; Defense Emergency Regulations (1945), 39, 40; effects of racism in, 158; ethos of inclusion for, 156; and Euro-American modernity, 17; exceptional status of, 17; intellectual solidarity with, 3; Israeli occupation of, 1, 2, 3, 7, 76, 238n7; partition (1947), 30, 63, 77, 128; post–civil rights Jewish response to, 143; in post-Holocaust discourse, 17; razing of towns, 147; relationality of, 21, 149, 219; shadow tropes for, 17, 221–22; solidarity with, 162, 190; U.S. engagement with, 187. See also dispossession, Palestinian; Occupied Territories, Palestinian

Palestine Affairs (quarterly), 36

Palestine Is the Issue (documentary), 167

Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO): Black Panther Party and, 61, 131–32; devastation of, 191; equation with terrorism, 99; exile in Tunis, 188; Fatah in, 85; Israeli negotiations with, 144; and Lebanon invasion, 188; NCNP stance on, 81; UN recognition of, 44; Andrew Young’s meeting with, 99–100; on Zionism, 36

Palestine question: culture work about, 12; effect of Sabra and Shatila massacre on, 191; as epiphenomenon of race, 11; Freedomways on, 253n27; Lebanon invasion and, 188; production of knowledge concerning, 37, 75, 76, 121; in Said’s work, 153; SNCC on, 71–80; UN on, 30; women of color feminism and, 195–96, 207, 279n34

Palestine Research Center (PRC), 18, 51, 229; critique of Zionism, 35; destruction of, 37, 189, 247n49; Do You Know?, 59–60, 75, 80; “Facts and Figures” series, 37, 247n51; “Israeli Racism,” 39–40; Israeli targeting of, 247n48; leadership of, 247n50; publications of, 36–41; on settler colonialism, 26, 41, 52, 75–76

Palestinian Human Rights Campaign: Afro-Americans Stand Up for Middle East Peace, 174

Palestinian liberation: and Black liberation, xi; Black Panther support for, 18–19, 61, 131–32, 133–34; race and, 18; as totalitarian threat, 189; transnational narratives of, 2; U.S. imperialism and, 18

Palestinian National Liberation Movement. See Fatah

Palestinian Revolutionary Movement: AAUG support for, 171

Palestinians: alternative future for, 216; departure from Lebanon, 188–89; exceptional relations of, 14; exclusion of, 24, 128, 187, 222, 229; following June war, 147–48; human status of, 187; nonviolent movement for, 145; as paradigm for atrocity struggles, 208; racialization of, 11, 195; refugee camps of, 9; representational reality of, 153; revolutionary iconography of, 85; right of return, 99, 227; scholarship on, 7; self-determination for, 37–38, 128, 227; UN support of, 18, 38. See also dispossession, Palestinian; Sabra and Shatila massacre

Palestinians: Holding On (documentary), 167

Palestinian Wedding, The (anthology, 1982), 212

Pan-African Cultural Festival (Algiers, 1969), 19, 82–86, 133, 229; attendees at, 83; Black Panther Party at, 83–86, 257n82; Palestine activists at, 84; press coverage of, 85

Pan-Africanism: David Graham Du Bois’s, 87; nontransferability of, 86; Zionism and, 70

patriarchy: ethnonationalist investments in, 192; racism’s relations to, 195

peoplehood, Jewish: AJC’s espousal of, 263n22; American expression of, 133; Israeli construction of, 12

Perez, Julia, 201

personhood: Arab, 195; Jewish, 143

Pianko, Noam, 262n15

Pifer, Ellen, 121

Piterberg, Gabriel, 126, 132

PLO. See Palestine Liberation Organization

pluralism, cultural, 107; in American exceptionalism, 108; Zionism and, 262n15

pluralism, liberal: equality in, 46; exceptionalism of, 143; Jewish defense of, 113–18; Jewish incorporability into, 105–9, 113–14; race-conscious critiques of, 115; universal values of, 105

Podhoretz, John, 121

Podhoretz, Norman: contribution to neoconservatism, 112; controversy with Baldwin, 111–12; on conversions to Zionism, 109–10; on meritocracy, 118; neoliberalism of, ix; “Now, Instant Zionism,” 110; on structural interventions, 117; work with Moynihan, 47, 49, 50; World War IV, 224–25, 283n10. See also “My Negro Problem—and Ours” (Podhoretz)

“Poetry for the People” (literary project), 186

Pogrebin, Letty Cottin: “Anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement,” 197–98; responses to, 198–99, 203

political economy, 4–5, 67, 82, 164, 222

Porter, Jack Nusan, 132

post-structuralism: French, 152; meaning making and, 153; subject production in, 184

Powell, Adam Clayton, 81

Prakash, Gyan, 149

PRC. See Palestine Research Center

prisons: anti-citizenship in, 82; growth of, 8, 190; and political prisoners, 36, 72, 140, 144, 257n82; relationship to ghettos, 8, 13, 67, 70, 71; and UC Berkeley School of Criminology, 259n114; use by Israel, 40, 168, 188

Puar, Jasbir, 70

Quest, Matthew, 74

race: AAUG analysis of, 166; American expertise on, 18, 27; conflation with ethnicity, 45; in Euro-American modernity, 10; formalist understanding of, 25–26; in knowledge of Israel, 221–22; liberal nationalist ideas of, 11; Orientalism on, 151; and Palestinian liberation, 18; postwar-era meanings of, 56–57; relational analysis of, xi, 12, 222, 229; transnational analyses of, 149, 174, 184; in U.S. imperial culture, 25, 158–59, 160, 221–22

race making, 158–59, 161

race radical movements: anticolonial frames for, 187

race relations, American, 120; and Arab–Israeli relations, xi, 2

racial formation: Baldwin on, vii–viii; exceptional relations of, 14

racialization: Arab, 161, 206; of Arab-Islamic culture, 162; of Blackness, 10; of colonial difference, 15; comparative processes of, 10; of national identity, 161; sexualized, 192; of space, 65, 66

racialization, gendered, 192, 216, 282n8; of imperial violence, 219; of Israeli militancy, 125; in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, 124; in “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” 112–13

racial liberalism, 27–30, 43, 52, 57, 63–64, 122, 127, 129, 194, 222, 245n16; Black radical critiques of, 60, 62, 65, 67, 70, 72, 98, 225; Moynihan’s global imaginary for, 47–53

racism: anticolonial writers on, 5; anti-Semitism and, 133, 206; in Arab–Israeli relations, xi; complicity with liberalism, 49; cultural, 160, 162; genetic nature of, 55; imperial, 160, 162; legitimization of, 11; nation-based, 160, 162; political, 160; relationship to colonialism, 50; relationship to patriarchy, 195; settler colonialist, 24; state-sanctioned, 251n4; UN discourse of, 35; Webster’s definition of, 51; in women’s movement, 197–200, 201–2

racism, anti-Arab: AAUG on, 166, 167; in American military-industrial complex, 203; and anti-Black racism, xi, 2; Arab American assimilation and, 173; following first Gulf War, 160; following June war, 165; Said on, 152, 183; stereotypes of, 181–82; in U.S. feminism, 203–5, 210, 278n32; in U.S. imperial culture, 202–3

racism, anti-Black: and anti-Arab racism, xi, 2; and Resolution 3379, 24

racism, structural: Jewish secularism and, 130; NWSA on, 201; race-conscious remedies for, 116; white disavowal of, 111–12; of white supremacy, 113, 130; in women’s movement, 201–2

racism, U.S.: benign neglect of, 48, 248n64; effect on women of color, 226; feminist analyses of, 199, 229–30; and Israel security, 206

Ragab, Salah, 260n124

Rap on Race, A (Baldwin/Mead), xi

Reagan, Ronald, 92; Wild West persona of, 217

Reagan administration: incarceration policy of, 190; intervention in Latin America, 193; militarization under, 201, 207; on Palestinian nationalism, 189; racial capitalism of, 208

reason, enlightenment, 106

Reconquista in (1492), 100, 151

Reddy, Chandan, 57

refugees: Hannah Arendt on, 15–16; Jewish, 130, 131; Palestinian, 9, 13, 30, 85, 92, 100, 147, 174, 227; as relational figures, 192–94, 278n30; survival practices of, 194. See also Sabra and Shatila massacre

relationality, 9–12; in . . . And Bid Him Sing, 96; in analysis of difference, 15, 70, 152, 262n7; Arab American analysis of, 169, 174; Baldwin’s, ix; in distribution of human value, 222; in enactment of home, 186; in feminist and queer critical praxis, 191, 193, 206, 209, 216; in the Freedom Seder, 140–41; heterogeneous, 230; and the Holocaust, 41, 43; humanist, 21; of Palestine, 21, 145, 149, 219; potentiality of, 243n50; in race, xi, 12, 15, 25, 55, 222, 229; in Edward Said’s work, 155–57, 175–82, 184; in SNCC’s “Third World Round-up,” 72, 79–80

Renan, Ernst: on the “Semitic,” 182

Revisionism, Jewish, 120

Rich, Adrienne, 202, 203

Ridgeway, James: “Annals of the Age of Reagan,” 211

Right, New: geopolitical imaginary of, 189, 190

al-Rihani, Amin: concept of hamzat al-wasl, 159; Palestine advocacy of, 159, 272n42

Robeson, Paul, 62; Afro-Zionism of, 63; Freedom newspaper of, 253n27; meeting with Bunche, 63–64

Rogin, Michael, 28

Roonstrasse Synagogue (Cologne): defacing of, 31

Rose, Jacqueline, 264n31

Rose, Sharon, 136

Rosenberg, M. Jay: “To Uncle Tom and Other Jews,” 134

Rosenfelt, Deborah, 203

Rothberg, Michael, 199

Rubin, Gary E., 73–74

Sa’b, Hasan: “Zionism and Racism,” 38–39, 40–41, 107

Sabra and Shatila massacre (Lebanon, 1982), 185, 189, 223, 247n48, 253n27; effect on Palestine question, 191; Israeli protests against, 208; in “Moving towards Home,” 215; number of dead, 276n12; in This Bridge Called My Back, 193, 195

sabras, Israeli, 13

Sahtein (Middle East cookbook), 213

Said, Edward W., 15; “Age of Reagan,” 154; Arab American identity of, 158; “Arab and Jew,” 157, 175, 178–79; “Bases for Coexistence,” 157; Beginnings: Intention and Method, 152–53; “Between Worlds,” 157–58; contrapuntalism of, 155–57, 178, 184; critique of Renan, 182; critique of U.S. imperial culture, 269n10; on cultural racism, 161–62; Culture and Imperialism, 152, 155; culture work of, 158; decolonization theory of, 145; on difference, 154–55, 156; editorship of Arab Studies Quarterly, 167, 175; engagement with post-structuralism, 158; on exile, 157–58; humanist ethic of, 149, 150; identity production of, 157–58; on June war, 152, 158; on Lebanon invasion, 281n64; “Nasser and His Canal,” 268n5; on Palestine, 20–21; on Palestine taboo, 229; “The Palestinian Experience,” 156; “Permission to Narrate,” 208; on Western imperialism, 155; work with AAUG, 171, 175, 183. See also “Arab Portrayed, The” (Said); Orientalism (Said)

Sandoval, Chela, 201, 202, 206

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 176

Saydah, George, 159

Sayegh, Anis, 36, 37, 247n50

Sayegh, Fayez, 18, 26, 50, 51; color-line argument of, 52; and EAFORD, 54; PRC leadership of, 37; on racial discrimination, 249n70; “Racism and Racial Discrimination Defined,” 55–56; remarks to United Nations, 41–43; “Zionist Colonialism of Palestine,” 37–38, 40, 284n30

Sayegh, Yusuf, 247n50

Sayigh, Rosemary, 247n50

Schappes, Morris U., 128, 129, 130; on Black Panthers, 131

Scheer, Robert, 81

Schmitt, Carl, 15

Scott, David, 101

Seale, Bobby, 71

secularism, Jewish, 127–32; anticolonialism of, 127, 129–30; goals of, 127; and structural racism, 130; support for Black freedom, 131; on Zionism, 127–28

segregation, 28, 29, 107; de jure and de facto, 67; in UN debates on racism, 35, 36, 38, 50, 55

Self, Robert O., 82

self-determination: Euro-American paradigms of, 6; Israeli, 142; Palestinian, 37–38, 128

September 11 attacks: militarized policing following, 226; surveillance following, 275n83

settler colonialism: racial aspects of, 24; removal of indigenous people, 271n28; South African, 40; violence in, 243n46; and white supremacy, 5, 29

settler colonialism, Israeli, 6; anomaly of, 35–41; anti-imperialism as, 125–27; Arab indigeneity in, 176–77; imperialism of, 144; and Jewish American assimilation, 57; Jewish radicals on, 125–27; permanence of, 180; racial dimensions of, 17, 26, 35, 39–40, 52, 227, 229; racialized labor in, 239n20; revolutionary promise of, 135; sacralization of, 137; socialist aspects of, 135; spatial imaginary of, 76; U.S. racial state and, 104; violence in, 12, 135

settler colonialism, U.S., 20, 70; American imaginary of, 177; domesticity in, 241n27; figure of Indian in, 198; genocidal logic of, 279n34; links to Israeli state violence, 199; masculinist tropes of, 217; normalized violence of, 181; symbolic architecture of, 181

Settler Colonial Studies (journal), 284n30

shadows, 221–22

Shagara (Cairo club), 95

Shahak, Israel, 157

Sharon, Ariel: and Palestinian massacre, 189

Sharpeville Massacre (1960), 29

Shepp, Archie, 83, 257n81

Shohat, Ella, 10, 193, 269n12

Shu’un Falastiniya (PRC journal), 213

Singh, Nikhil Pal, 82, 251n8

Sing, Whisper, Shout, Pray! (anthology), 278n34

Sirhan Sirhan, 162, 172, 274n79

Six Day War. See June war (1967)

slavery, 45, 48, 67, 96, 130, 151; and Nazi concentration camps, 46, 70

Smith, Barbara, 201, 206

Smith, Beverly, 201

SNCC. See Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

social formations, racialized, 3. See also racial formation

socialism, British parliamentary, 47

socialism, Jewish, 127–32; non-Zionism of, 127–28; in settler colonialism, 135

social justice, U.S., 253n27; ASA’s, 228; Jewish engagement with, 137, 139. See also justice

South Africa: antiracist struggle in, 36; apartheid in, 29, 101, 193, 227; ties to Israel, 7, 23, 25, 40, 41, 55–56, 101

Southeast Asia: antiracist struggle in, 36; U.S. actions in, 5

Southwest Asia: Arab communities of, 20

sovereignty: Anglo-American, x; and Black Power, 68; colonial, 15, 69; exceptionality, 15; indigenous, 70; Israeli, 17, 104, 129; settler, 5, 16, 55

Soviet Union: collapse of, 56; Jewry, 119; Jewish radicalism and, 137, 140; support for Palestine, 128, 129; U.S. Cold War framing of, 18, 26, 27, 28, 34, 52, 63, 73, 110, 117, 163, 223–25

space, x, 82; contrapuntal analysis of, 155, 158; deindustrialization of urban, 70; home, 186, 216; and race, 8–9, 15, 27, 65–70

Stam, Robert, 10

Stampnitzky, Leah, 189–90

state violence: countermodality of witness for, 209; global, 186; normality of, 226–27; racial, 16

state violence, Israeli, 12, 78, 124–25, 144, 256n63; Jewish establishment and, 126; justifying language for, 215–16; links to U.S. settler colonialism, 199; settler, 12, 145; U.S. implication in, 209–10

state violence, U.S., 8, 104, 107; criticisms of, 115; desegregation and, 2; in District of Columbia, 139; in imperial culture, 19, 62, 177–78; Jewish radicals on, 126

Staub, Michael, 110, 136

Steinberg, Lisa, 186

Stoler, Ann Laura, 5, 12

Stone, I. F., 69, 254n32

Stromberg, Vivian, 217

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC): ADL on, 73; anti-Semitic tropes of, 76; Black antidraft initiative, 60, 250n2; civil rights leaders on, 100; conference (May 1967), 60; expulsion of white members, 71; figuration of permanent war, 61; loss of influence, 82; at NCNP, 80–81; newsletter of, 59, 75; and Palestinian liberation, 18–19, 62; police raid on (San Francisco), 60; political program of, 60, 72; reading group of, 74, 78. See also “Third World Round-up”

subject formation: historico-political, 156; in post-structuralism, 184; under state formation, 152

subjects, Western: and oriental objects, 183

Suez Crisis (1956), 64

suffering, Arab: and Jewish suffering, 175–77, 178

suffering, black: exceptionality of, 15

Sundquist, Eric, 74

Svonkin, Stuart, 31, 261n5

“swastika epidemic,” 30–35

Takaki, Ronald, 151

terrorism: globalized war against, 44, 223, 225, 226; as totalitarian threat, 53–54; white rhetoric of, 218

Terrorism: How the West Can Win (1986), 162

Terzi, Zehdi, 99–100, 174

Third World and Progressive People’s Coalition, 207

Third World Liberation Front, 259n114

“Third World Round-up,” 59–60, 71–80, 100; authorship of, 75; composition of, 75, 255n60; on June war, 78; lynching imagery in, 79; multigenre character of, 80; Palestine in, 61; question structure of, 76–77; readership of, 76; responses to, 72–73; on Rothschild family, 77, 78; sources for, 75, 78; visual elements of, 78–79; on Zionist violence, 77, 78

This Bridge Called My Back (anthology), 192, 194–96, 201

This Bridge We Call Home (anthology), 278n34

totalitarianism: American intervention against, 32; and anti-Semitism, 26, 53; Palestinian liberation as, 189; Positivist critique of, 33; terrorism in, 53–54; U.S.–Israeli relations and, 54

toughness, Jewish, 113–18, 121; of Cold War era, 195; in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, 121, 122–23; in political Zionism, 264n31

transnational American studies, 7–8

trauma, intergenerational, 46

Traverso, Enzo, 15

Tree, Marietta, 34

tribalism, violent, 219

Turé, Kwame. See Carmichael, Stokely

Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), 108

United Federation of Teachers strike (1967), 114–15

United Front Against Fascism conference (Oakland, 1969), 133, 229

United Nations: antidiscrimination pledge of, 35; anti-Semitism charges against, 24; Center against Apartheid, 29; Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, 30; debates on Zionism, 47; Decade for Action, 23–24, 30; Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief, 247n39; Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD, 1963), 18, 23, 26, 30–31; decolonization efforts of, 29, 35; definition of apartheid, 227; framing of anti-Semitism, 26, 34–35; Mid-Decade Conference on Women (1980), 197; Palestine Commission, 63; Palestine Partition Plan, 77; racial liberalism and, 28; racism debates of, 50–51; recognition of PLO, 44; resolution on racial persecution (1946), 29, 50–51; Sayegh’s remarks to, 41–43; Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Affairs Committee, 34–35; Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, 34

United Nations Resolution 3379: anti-Black racism and, 24; Black Panthers on, 24; epidemiological discourse of, 35; movement for reinstatement of, 226, 227; Moynihan’s opposition to, 27, 43–44, 48, 49–52, 53; precedents for, 30, 197; revocation of, 56, 226–27; sponsorship of, 244n3; U.S. Congress on, 23–24; U.S. media on, 24; U.S. view of, 25–26; Zionism/racism in, 23, 25, 48–49

United States: Asian exclusion in, 107; counterinsurgency practices of, 2; culture wars in, 3; discourse of Palestinian terrorism, 190; educational funding in, 163–64; gendered normativities of, 206; links to Middle East, 8; manifest destiny of, 126, 181, 225; penal state of, 190, 194; post–civil rights era, 2, 6, 60, 104, 113, 184; racial exclusion in, 65–70; racialized social formations of, 3; racialized warfare in, 191; racial normativities of, 206; racial/spatial reorganization of, 65; relationship with Arab world, 165, 170–71; relations with oil-producing states, 4–5; riots of 1967, 62, 71, 163; spatial imaginaries of, 8; ties to South Africa, 101; triumphalism of, 54; westward expansion of, 177. See also exceptionalism, American; imperial culture, U.S.; state violence, U.S.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 30

University of California (Berkeley) School of Criminology: David Graham Du Bois at, 91–92; ties to Black Panthers, 259n114

Until Return (Al-Awda newsletter), 186

Uris, Leon: Exodus, 126

U.S.–Israeli relations: Arab Americans and, 170–71; during Cold War, 54, 187; emergence of support in, 18, 239n18; geopolitical imaginaries of, 126; race in, 11; under Reagan administration, 190; SNCC on, 79; “special,” 1, 2, 8, 13; statecraft of, 7; strategic alliances of, 225; totalitarianism and, 54

U.S. State Department: on Zionism, 129

victimhood: feminist competitions over, 198, 199, 206

Vietnam: U.S. imperialism in, 24, 48, 71, 79, 92, 126, 129, 132, 136, 144, 177, 250n2

Vilde Chayes, Di (Jewish feminists): dispute with WAI, 199–200; on Holocaust memory, 204; on Lebanon invasion, 203–4; members of, 280n44

Village Voice: coverage of Lebanon invasion, 210, 211

violence: evisceration of home-spaces, 186; gendered, 186; intra-Arab, 125. See also state violence

violence, imperial: academic freedom and, 229; accountability for, 216; apologists for, 141; and area studies, 150; complicity in, 209; Jewish critiques of, 132; racialized gender norms of, 219; relational analysis of, 7, 80, 178, 186, 194, 229

violence, racial, 16, 60, 61, 79, 107, 131, 196; genocide and, 29, 30, 78; spatialized, 69–70

Wacquant, Loïc, 67

Wald, George, 130

Walker, Alice: response to Jewish feminists, 198–99

Wallerstein, Immanuel, 150, 163

war: as object/method, 6

war, permanent, 61–65; Black Panther Party and, 82, 84, 101; Israeli, 5–6; political economy and, 4–7; SNCC counterhistory of, 78; state coercion in, 5

warfare, globalized: against terrorism, 44, 223, 225, 226; U.S. hegemony in, 223

warfare state, racialized, 191, 277n23, 283n11. See also state violence

Waskow, Arthur, 20, 136–43

Weaver, Suzanne, 50

Weheliye, Alexander, 15, 243n50

Weisbord, Robert, 73

whiteness: in American settler genocide, 279n34; and Arab American incorporability, 160, 170; ethnic, 45–46; multiethnic, 44; nation-of-immigrants paradigm of, 44; as privileged category, 11; probationary privileges of, 170; single-category for, 116; spatial stratification of, 66; in U.S. census, 160; and Zionism, 194

white supremacy: Baldwin on, viii; Jewish secular opposition to, 130; of postwar era, 10; and settler colonialism, 5, 29; structural racism of, 113, 130

“Will History Repeat Itself?” (Center for Jewish Studies conference, 2007), 283n9

Williams, Michael W., 64–65

Williams, Randall, 29

Winant, Howard, 10, 107; Racial Formation in the United States, 254n34

Winthrop, John, 9

Women Against Imperialism (WAI): dispute with Di Vilde Chayes, 199–200; “Taking Our Stand against Zionism and White Supremacy,” 199

women of color: analysis of war, 194; combating oppression, 193; critiques of Zionism, 196, 278n34; impact of racism on, 226; Palestine question and, 279n34; spatial imaginaries of, 192; in white feminist movement, 201. See also feminists, women of color

Women of the Fertile Crescent (anthology, 1978), 212

women’s movement: anti-Semitism in, 197–200, 206, 278n32; racism in, 197–200, 201–2. See also feminism

women’s studies: disobedience, in work of, 202. See also National Women’s Studies Association

World Conference against Racism (2001), 56, 226–27

World Conference of the International Women’s Year (Mexico City, 1975), 23

World War II, x, 4, 6, 10, 14, 18, 32, 38, 56, 63, 70, 78, 105, 108, 121, 151, 164, 175, 177, 194, 223; Atlantic Front, 28

World Zionist Organization (WZO), 38, 127

“Wrapping the Grapeleaves” (Arab American poetry anthology), 212

Yaqoub, Malik Osman Karim, 94–95

Young, Andrew: engagement with PLO, 99–100; resignation from UN, 99, 100, 101, 174; work on racial conflict, 101

Zeadey, Faith, 173–74

Zionism: Afro-diasporic, 18; American democracy and, 107, 108; and American Jewishness, 19; American Jews’ conversion to, 109–11; Amin on, 48–49; analogy for Black diaspora, 62; anticolonial framing of, 125–26, 225; anti-imperialist, 110, 126, 128; Arab critiques of, 35–41, 43, 53, 110, 159; Arendt on, 16; articulation of liberal freedom, 2; versus assimilation, 107; as colonialist movement, 36; comparativity of, 13; conversions to, 109–11; and cultural pluralism, 262n15; decolonization under, 38; discrimination in, 43; and Euro-American imperialism, 16; European racialist doctrine in, 39; Evangelical Christian, 190; exclusion in, 24, 38, 128; as expression of liberal democracy, 110–11; as expression of national spirit, 262n15; feminism and, 196, 197; foundation myth of, 132–33; imperialist alliances of, 128; and indigenous dispossession, 26; “instant,” 109–11, 114; institutions of, 38; intellectual origins of, 55; in Israeli law, 24; Jewish critics of, 38–39; Jewish Left support for, 132–36; and Jewish moral thought, 74; Jewish organizations supporting, 109–10; Jewish race and, 38–39; Jewish secularists on, 127–28; as liberation movement, 20, 51, 110, 134; middle-class professionals of, 128; militaristic expansionism of, 74; and Nazism, 40–41, 51, 55; negation of exile, 143; other in, 17; and Pan-Africanism, 70; population transfer in, 41, 42; post-Zionism, 277n14; racial dimensions of, 17, 25, 38–39, 50, 56, 189, 200, 226, 229; racial liberal support of, 52–53; racial others in, 177; Reform Judaism on, 108; scholarship on, 7; secular, 25, 42; separation from Jewishness, 36; and settler colonialism, 25; socialist, 110; and South African racism, 23; state-centered telos of, 142; territorializing aims of, 107–8; UN debates on, 47; U.S. State Department on, 129; whiteness and, 194; women of color critiques of, 196, 278n34

Zionism, political, 17, 19, 36, 154; Jewishness and, 28, 104; Jewish toughness in, 264n31; separation from Judaism, 41

Zuckoff, Aviva Cantor, 133

Keith P. Feldman is assistant professor of comparative ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a core faculty member in the Program in Critical Theory. His writing has been published in CR: New Centennial Review, MELUS, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, Theory & Event, Jadaliyya, and Al Jazeera English.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Contents

Prologue: James Baldwin in the Holy Land

Introduction: Special Relationships

1. Specters of Genocide: Cold War Exceptions and the Contradictions of Liberalism

2. Black Power’s Palestine: Permanent War and the Global Freedom Struggle

3. Jewish Conversions: Color Blindness, Anti-Imperialism, and Jewish National Liberation

4. Arab American Awakening: Edward Said, Area Studies, and Palestine’s Contrapuntal Futures

5. Moving toward Home: Women of Color Feminisms and the Lebanon Conjuncture

Epilogue: On Shadows

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index