When I was visiting my parents lately, I found an old I.F. Stone book on their shelves, The Haunted Fifties, that no one reads anymore. Most of the pieces in it are about dated subjects, or a matter that would not come to a head for another few years: the civil rights struggle.
In coming days I’m going to excerpt a few Stone pieces from the ’50s on the civil rights struggle because they show me that this moral leader seized on harbinger cases of the Jim Crow period that apply with uncanny directness to the American treatment of Palestinians. The pieces leave no doubt in my mind that if Stone were around today he would have to renounce Zionism and criticize Israel on a regular basis.
I should note that in 1956, Stone sided with Israeli aggression during the Suez crisis; "[b]ecause so many bonds attach me to Israel… Israel’s survival seemed worth the risk to world peace." But even as he took that position, he described it as hypocritical. And I am saying that in today’s political scene, with 10,000 Palestinians in jail and millions excluded from political representation and another war being pushed by Israel’s supporters, IF Stone would have found that hypocrisy too great to bear.
But let’s get to my first excerpt. It’s 1955. Emmett Till, a 14-year-old "colored boy" from Chicago, was lynched in Mississippi after he supposedly whistled at a white woman, 55 years ago this Saturday, and in October of that year, two white men were acquitted of his killing.
Blacks were of course disturbed across the country. But whites were largely silent. Remember, it is 1955. Now listen to I.F. Stone on this political situation. I would italicize key phrases, except I’d have to italicize everything!
It shames our country and it shames white Americans that the only meetings, in Harlem, Baltimore, Chicago, and Detroit, have been Negro meetings. Those whites in the South and in the North who would normally have been moved to act have been hounded out of public life and into inactivity. To the outside world it must look as if the conscience of white America has been silenced, and the appearance is not too deceiving. Basically all of us whites, North and South, acquiesce in white supremacy, and benefit from the pool of cheap labor created by it…
Unless Negroes rouse themselves to make their indignation felt in some dramatic way, nothing will be done in Mississippi or in Congress…. Were thousands of Negroes to converge on the Department of Justice and demand action against the murderers of Till, and of the other Negroes whose murders have gone unpunished in the South, such a demonstration would have an impact. The American Negro needs a Gandhi to lead him, and we need the American Negro to lead us. If he does not provide leadership against the sickness in the South, the time will come when we will all pay a terrible price for allowing a psychopathic racist brutality to flourish unchecked.
OK. I don’t think I need to connect the dots, but a couple of points. A Gandhi did arise, no question. And blacks led the struggle. Things changed dramatically. There were marches on Washington, and political change was demanded.
Every bit of this is happening today in Israel/Palestine. There is thorough-going American acquiescence in a system of racial supremacy in Palestine. We need Palestinians to lead us; and they are leading. We need a Palestinian Gandhi: and there are many of them. Read an IF Stone of our time, Jerry Haber, writing yesterday of the Abdallah Abu Rahmah case, Israel Convicts Another Palestinian Gandhi.
What is needed more than anything now is for Americans of conscience to embrace and celebrate these brave Palestinians who are taking such great personal risk. Lift them up, lift them up! I have said before that Mustafa Barghouthi is the Martin Lurther King of the struggle; he has tremendous mainstream appeal. Help him! We need to help our country stumble forward from 1955 to 1964. And we will.
Listen to I.F. Stone, a few weeks after that last column, now outraged by the University of Alabama expelling its first black student, Autherine Lucy because it could not protect her from the mob:
People and nations are made glorious by those men [and women, Izzy] who are willing to stand up against their own in defense of justice for minority elements. Milton opposing his own Puritans, Voltaire and later Zola defying the French mob, Gandhi living with the untouchables–such are the incidents which give a people honor in the eyes of mankind.
