The Movement and the Middle East

How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left

Michael R. Fischbach

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781503611061, 9781503610446
• eBook ISBN: 9781503611078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

The Arab-Israeli conflict constituted a serious problem for the American Left in the 1960s: pro-Palestinian activists hailed the Palestinian struggle against Israel as part of a fundamental restructuring of the global imperialist order, while pro-Israeli leftists held a less revolutionary worldview that understood Israel as a paragon of democratic socialist virtue. This intra-left debate was in part doctrinal, in part generational. But further woven into this split were sometimes agonizing questions of identity. Jews were disproportionately well-represented in the Movement, and their personal and communal lives could deeply affect their stances vis-à-vis the Middle East.

The Movement and the Middle East offers the first assessment of the controversial and ultimately debilitating role of the Arab-Israeli conflict among left-wing activists during a turbulent period of American history. Michael R. Fischbach draws on a deep well of original sources—from personal interviews to declassified FBI and CIA documents—to present a story of the left-wing responses to the question of Palestine and Israel. He shows how, as the 1970s wore on, the cleavages emerging within the American Left widened, weakening the Movement and leaving a lasting impact that still affects progressive American politics today.

1

The Times They Are a-Changin’

The New Left and Revolutionary Internationalism

WHEN WAR ERUPTED in the Middle East on June 5, 1967, Bob Feldman was listening to the radio while recuperating from the measles. Feldman had entered Columbia University in 1965, and in November 1966 had joined its chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the most noteworthy student radical group in the nation in the 1960s. In 2009, he recalled having heard on the radio that day in 1967 that Egypt and Syria had attacked Israel, and that the Jewish state’s very existence was in peril. “Because the U.S. mass media portrayed Israel as being the victim of Arab military aggression in 1967,” Feldman remembered, “I did not get upset when it appeared that the Zionist military machine was rolling over the Egyptian Army and would win the June 1967 War quickly.”¹

A few weeks later, however, a fellow student Feldman bumped into outside Columbia’s Butler Library disabused him, saying: “Israel, you know, started the war in order to capture new lands.” Stunned, Feldman responded, “I thought the Arabs started the war in order to drive the Jews into the sea?” His friend replied that Israel had in fact struck first. In August that year, the Black Power Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) issued a newsletter denouncing Israel and hailing the Palestinians.² Years later, Feldman recalled: “[My friend’s] analysis of the 1967 Mideast War caused me to read more deeply about what had exactly happened. And when SNCC came out in opposition to Israel’s seizure of Arab lands and continued refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the claims of the Palestinian refugees and their Palestinian nationalist representatives, I inwardly supported SNCC’s position.”³ He was a changed man.

SDS stood at the apex of the New Left, a term that was coined by the sociologist C. Wright Mills.⁴ The New Left was a loosely organized collection of young, mostly white leftists who sought structural change in America but who generally eschewed ideological constructions and instead based their activism on moral passion and street-level politics. They looked upon the Old Left—the doctrinaire Marxist and socialist parties like the Socialist Party of America and the Communist Party USA that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—with disdain. Yet observing the widening conflict in Southeast Asia in the early 1960s and American military interventions elsewhere, as in the Dominican Republic in April 1965, New Leftists began to develop a more sophisticated politics that dovetailed with the growing pro–Third World, anti-imperialism being proclaimed by the Black Power movement. Support for national liberation struggles and guerrilla movements around the world came to be an essential part of New Left ideology by the late 1960s. As one former young leftist noted decades later, “There was a movement to see all peoples’ revolutionary struggles as one. Wherever people were adopting armed struggle, people in the New Left and the Marxist Left were thrilled and supported it.”⁵

No such overseas struggle animated New Leftists more than the Vietnamese struggle against the United States, but it did not take some of these young people long to offer verbal support for the Palestinian struggle in the wake of the 1967 war in the Middle East.⁶ Two events, both spearheaded by black militants, played a particularly crucial role in developing New Left consciousness about Israel and the Palestinians. SNCC’s anti-Israeli newsletter article in August 1967 came first. Several weeks later black activists at the National Conference for New Politics successfully demanded that the gathering issue a statement denouncing Israel.⁷ The issue of Americans’ attitudes toward Israel and the Palestinians was now on newspapers’ front pages. The stage was set for SDS and others in the Movement to tackle the Arab-Israeli conflict.⁸

Students for a Democratic Society and the June 1967 War

Just nine days after the war ended in the Middle East, the June 19, 1967, issue of New Left Notes, an SDS publication, carried a motion for adoption at an upcoming national SDS meeting. Roy Dahlberg was just shy of twenty-three years old. He had started out in SDS as a member of the San Francisco chapter and risen to become a member of the group’s national interim committee. Dahlberg’s motion noted that the recent Arab-Israeli war had “brought about strong reaction from American Jews and confusion on the Left in general.” Dahlberg urged Jews to stay focused on an anti-imperialist analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict: the Arab stance toward Israel as a colonial settler state was the same stance that black Africans maintained toward such states on their continent. From this perspective, settler colonialism was no more justified in Israel than it was in Kenya or Mozambique. “Perhaps most discouraging is the number of American students expressing the desire to fight for Israel,” Dahlberg wrote. Not understanding the nature of the conflict, they “let emotion fog their reason entirely.”⁹

Most Americans knew little about the Middle East, and reacted differently to the war. Judith Tucker, a Radcliffe student, learned things about the Arab-Israeli conflict that were completely new to her from Radio Havana’s coverage of the war, which was “like a totally different story,” she remembered. “The narrative was so different from what we were getting from American news. I thought, ‘there’s a whole other side to this story.’ It wasn’t a part of any discourse on the Left in ’67.” She recalled there being “very little talk of Israel-Palestine—virtually none” on campus prior to that.¹⁰ Others reacted more strongly. Dan Siegel was not pleased with Israel’s action during the war. During his first term as a law student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the fall of 1967, Dan Siegel discussed what he called Israel’s “reckless behavior” with fellow students, and he subsequently became a leader in the SDS chapter there.¹¹

As we have seen, Jews were disproportionately numerous in the New Left.¹² Many of them were against the war in Vietnam and against Big Power military intervention in the affairs of Third World countries, yet had been raised to think of Israel as a bastion of socialist progress surrounded by a sea of reactionary Arabs. So how were they to understand Israel’s preemptive attack in 1967, its subsequent military occupation of Arab territory, and the armed Palestinian resistance groups that emerged with such force thereafter?¹³ Mark Rudd recalled that the war led to much “soul-searching” for him. He had been raised in a “typical American Jewish family” of “moderate Zionists,” and “in Hebrew School I was taught to love Israel and buy trees; my parents dutifully gave to the UJA [United Jewish Appeal], which had Israel in the forefront of its causes.” The outbreak of the 1967 war prompted him to give a great deal of thought about the Middle East. On the second day of the 1967 war, when a good friend of his whose parents were Holocaust survivors told him that he felt he should be in Israel fighting, Rudd was taken aback: “I realized at the time that nationalism (Jewish in this case), meant a whole lot less to me than internationalism; and that I was thoroughly anti-imperialist.”¹⁴

During his upbringing “the promotion of Zionism wasn’t intense” but “it was always there, kind of a given,” David Gilbert, also a Jewish SDSer at Columbia, recalled: “In Hebrew school, I learned the prevalent myths: Israel made the desert bloom, was the only democracy in the region, and was surrounded by a hostile Arab population.” Although not strongly Zionist, he felt no need to challenge this and saw no contradiction with his involvement in the early 1960s in the civil rights and antiwar movements. However, by 1967, the year after he graduated from Columbia, Gilbert had progressed from involvement in anti–Vietnam War work to supporting Third World liberation struggles in general. The 1967 war led him to see Israel as “an enemy of Third World people” and Zionism as “a form of racism.”¹⁵

Some Jewish SDSers felt that their background predisposed them to an interest in the Arab-Israeli conflict. While an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Bob Ross became one of the founders of SDS in 1960. He “absolutely” felt his Jewishness was a factor in this regard. “I was always highly conscious of being a Jew, but a secular Jew [and] not a Zionist Jew. My father came from the communist movement. My mother was a [five-time Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene] Debs socialist. I had a Left, highly-identified-as-Jewish, secular, non-Zionist background.”¹⁶ Other Jewish SDS activists agreed, and in fact openly embraced the Palestinian cause precisely because their Jewish background demanded that they do so, they said. Mike Klonsky worked at the SDS regional office in Los Angeles before moving to the group’s national offices in Chicago in 1968 to assume a position in the national leadership. Looking back decades later, Klonsky recalled: “A lot of the activists at that time were Jewish, and a lot of us felt we had a special responsibility to speak out on those issues [e.g., the Palestinian cause] because we were Jewish. I interpreted my role as a Jew as someone who needed to support such causes.”¹⁷

Not all left-wing Jews in SDS were quite so sanguine about challenging the positive attitude about Israel of so many American Jews, at least, not at first. Hilton Obenzinger was a student involved in the antiwar movement and other activities at Columbia. “I was raised in a Jewish family, pro-Israel, and educated in a Zionist-oriented Conservative Jewish congregation,” he recalled. “Most of my family were murdered by the Nazis, so it was very emotional in a lot of respects. Israel was a form of redemption.” Obenzinger remembered staying up all night once during the June 1967 war, reading the New York Times and worrying about Israel. “Wasn’t Israel sort of socialist? Weren’t they advanced, democratic and progressive? Why did the Arabs want ‘to push the Jews into the sea’?” Yet he also thought “there’s something going wrong here.” Moreover, he also had to reconcile his warm feelings for Israel with the Israeli government’s support for the American war in Vietnam, symbolized by former Israeli general Moshe Dayan’s 1966 trip to Vietnam to report on the war for an Israeli newspaper. “This was cognitive dissonance in a big way,” Obenzinger noted years later. “I either had to be consistent with my principles or begin fudging them out of some sense of ethnic loyalty.”¹⁸

Naomi Jaffe had become a “passionate Zionist” at the age of five, with the creation of Israel in 1948. Her feelings as a young girl came as a result of “the desperate pride with which my parents and other adult relatives viewed the founding of Israel as a response to our [Jews’] unbearable vulnerability and victimization in the Holocaust.” Jaffe felt very conflicted and initially uncomfortable with those in SDS who embraced the Palestinian cause after 1967. She also found that not criticizing Israel would alienate her from her leftist comrades, for whom revolutionary internationalism—support for global revolution—was a part of their radical identity. Jaffe “gradually and painfully came to accept it as an inevitable part of the radical ideology and world view that I shared with the other young student radicals with whom I associated.”¹⁹ Other Jewish SDS members concurred that the group should come down solidly on the side of the Palestinians. One of SDS’s national secretaries, Michael Spiegel, said Jewish New Leftists needed to move beyond their upbringing in order to remain true to their internationalism. Although at first “shocked by the prospect of anti-Zionism,” they would “come to the inevitable conclusion” that it was correct.²⁰

Arab students attending SDS’s annual conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in June 25–30, 1967, soon after the war, took the initiative to discuss some ideas about the Middle East with their American counterparts.²¹ SDS seemed receptive. At the convention, the SDS foreign affairs workshop produced a minority report that criticized the American role in the creation of Israel and called Zionism and anti-Semitism two sides of the same coin.²² In late 1967, the SDS leadership printed Zionism and the Israeli State: An Analysis in the June War by Larry Hochman, who knew a thing or two about Zionism, having spent ten years, starting at age eleven, in a socialist Zionist organization, Hashomer Hatzair, and lived on Kibbutz Merhavya in Palestine. Returning to the United States, Hochman eventually taught physics at Eastern Michigan University, by which time he had become an ardent anti-Zionist.

Hochman succinctly stated what he saw as the essence of the Arab-Israeli conflict: the disruptive creation of a Jewish state in an Arab part of the globe in the context of Western imperialism: “To become more fundamental, the central issue in Southwest Asia is the fact that a Jewish state has been established in the midst of the Arab world without the invitation or consent of the indigenous population. The Jewish immigration occurred, and could only have occurred, under the aegis of Western colonial control.” He also dismissed a common belief among New Leftists that Israel was a progressive socialist state worthy of their support by arguing that what type of governmental system was in place in Israel was of little consequence when dealing with the central factor in the conflict, namely, that the native Palestinians were displaced by Zionism. “The fact that foreign colonizers established certain domestic structures is completely irrelevant to the question of the indigenous people’s rights,” he wrote.²³

Hochman summed up well the feelings of many New Left Jews who began championing the Palestinian cause during and after 1967. They believed that Zionism was a colonial movement that transported outsiders, mostly Europeans, into an area of the developing world already inhabited by other people, and then displaced them to make a state for themselves. This was like what American settlers had done to the Indians. The fact that Israel was Jewish st...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Acronyms
• Prologue
• 1. The Times They Are a-Changin’: The New Left and Revolutionary Internationalism
• 2. Conflict in the Ivory Tower: Campus Activism
• 3. (Fellow) Travelers: Left-Wing Youth in the Middle East
• 4. Israel Exceptionalism: Jewish Attacks on the New Left
• 5. Theory and Praxis: The Old Left against Israel
• 6. Ghost of Revolution Past: Conflicted Communists
• 7. We’re Not Gonna Take It: The Socialist Lurch toward Israel
• 8. Give Peace a Chance? The Ambivalent Anti–Vietnam War Movement
• 9. After the Storm: Divergent Left-Wing Paths
• 10. The Shadow of the Cold War: Continued Pro-Israeli Pushback
• 11. Taking Root: The New Thinking Goes Mainstream
• 12. Identity Politics and Intersectionality: Feminism and Zionism
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index