Nearly 70 people crowded a room at Columbia University yesterday to hear a talk on historical divisions on the left over Palestine, and the news of the day was celebrated. Rashid Khalidi enthused over Bernie Sanders’s unprompted embrace of Palestinian rights to the Democratic debate the night before as a sign of progress. And Dorothy Zellner celebrated Benjamin Netanyahu’s indictment that morning as a “happy day,” and teachable moment about Israel in the United States.
The gathering at the Center for Palestine Studies was for an important new book by Michael Fischbach,“The Movement and the Middle East,” about how the Israeli Arab conflict divided the American left in the 1960s and 1970s.
Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies, introduced Fischbach by telling of protesting when Golda Meir spoke at Yale University Law School in the 1960s. “There were four of us,” he said. Fischbach’s book reports that American public opinion was then 95 percent in favor of Israel. “I think that exaggerated support for the Palestinians in the 60s,” Khalidi quipped. He went on:
Things are obviously very different today. You heard a presidential candidate last night on network television talking about things that could not have been spoken anywhere in the Democratic Party, ever, under any circumstances in the 60s. And things are happening on college campuses. Things are happening in churches. Things are happening in the Jewish community, which paint a very different picture than the United States in the 60s and 70s.
Today we can talk about matters on campus that were “completely off limits 20 years ago,” Khalidi said.
In his talk, Fischbach also emphasized the importance of Bernie Sanders’s comments on Palestine in opening the floodgates on a progressive discussion of Palestine inside the Democratic Party. The number of Democrats who sympathize more with Israel than Palestine has been falling, to about 27 percent in recent polling. Liberal Democrats in surveys are twice as sympathetic to Palestinians as they are to Israelis.
Fischbach warned against allowing this divide to weaken the party’s battle against Trump. The strongly pro-Israeli party bosses are not listening to the very constituencies it needs to win, constituencies that are solidly pro-Palestinian, women, youth, and people of color. And those three are pretty clear about their sympathies, with Palestine.
Progressives fighting back against the agenda of Donald Trump and his ally, the now-indicted prime minister, would do well to consider the weakening of the left five decades ago due to its infighting over Israel Palestine as a cautionary tale, if they seek to create a united front among progressives against 21st century reactionaries in America. With Trump so deeply connected with Netanyahu and his policies, and with the left both within and outside the United States virtually unanimous in support of Palestinians, strongly pro-Israel progressives’ ability to make common cause here in America with Palestinian activists as part of a wider anti-Trump coalition appears to be a major stumbling block. Like American politics, Middle Eastern politics are internal, and they present American progressives with the same kind of challenges they did five decades ago, particularly related to the Arab Israeli conflict.
Dorothy Zellner, the activist with Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews Say No, and formerly with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s (SNCC), said the divide may not be resolvable.
This division does not surprise me. This is an ethical division. It didn’t start in 1967, it started in 1948 and it’s connected with the Nakba…. What we are looking at is the result of the Nakba. There is no way we can be united on this, friends. This is an ethical political division. It’s foolish to think there’s a united front. Either you are going to support the right of the Palestinains to be human beings or you’re not. I don’t see any kind of unity on that. I think the way forward is to work like we’re working, like JVP is working, to convince people that there is an ethical dilemma. I think that’s where that 27 percent [figure in the Democratic Party] comes from…
Now we have a happy day when their prime minister is indicted for bribery!
“Fischbach warned against allowing this divide to weaken the party’s battle against Trump. The left needs to respect the Pro Israel progressives.”
This despicable, vomitive message fits very well with the newfangled acception of “Left” and “Progressive” as socially fashionable causes for liberals. No surprise there.
What kind of “progress” can be pro-Empire, colonial invasion and genocide?
The message is exceedingly clear — this Fischbach person seemingly does not care about camouflaging the fact that the only reason he (or Sanders) is (or has just become) interested in “Palestinian rights” is that it is good for their sheepdog operation: pulling all that have been nauseated by the imperial Single Party operation back to the Dim voting fold!
This is the dead giveaway. Go along with whatever genuinely worries the people about the imperial party policy, but at the same time draw limits that prohibit seriously questioning the foundations of imperial aggression.
Fischbah is openly telling us what is afoot.
it’s not a major stumbling block for me, let them stumble until they figure it out. there’s no such thing as a pro israel progressive because israel is an apartheid state.
i agree w/zellner.
I wonder to what extent leftist ethical considerations are influenced by tactics tolerated, at times celebrated, in working toward justice and human rights. Likely for some, violence distances concern for justice and human rights. I find it difficult to characterize the advantages of rocks or rockets.
@Elizabeth Block
“Some years ago I asked Margaret Macmillan, the historian (“1919” etc.), whether she thought that if the Palestinians had adopted, and stuck to, nonviolent resistance from the beginning, they would have gotten any more than they have gotten using violence. She said no, they would not.”
I’m sure that Ms. Macmillan said “no, they would not,” because she knew what the early Zionists’ grand plan for the Palestinians was:
Israel Zangwill, the influential Anglo-Jewish essayist and Zionist, 1901: [W]e must be prepared to either drive out by the sword the [Arab] tribes in possession…or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population….”
In May 1911, Arthur Ruppin, one of early Zionism’s leading figures proposed to the Executive of the Zionist Organization, a “population transfer” of the Arab peasants from Palestine.
In 1918, Polish born David Ben-Gurion (real name, David Gruen), described the future borders of the Jewish state as: “to the north, the Litani River; to the northeast, the Wadi’Owja, twenty miles south of Damascus; the southern border will be mobile and pushed into the Sinai at least up to Wadi al-`Arish; and to the east, the Syrian Desert, including the furthest edge of Transjordan.” (Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs)
In the February 1919 issue of the League of Nations Journal, Zangwill proposed that the Palestinians should be “transplanted” in Arab countries and at a public meeting in the same year he remarked that “many [Palestinians] are semi-nomad, they have given nothing to Palestine and are not entitled to the rules of democracy.” (Jewish Chronicle, Dec. 12 1919).
Although its origins can be traced back to Herzl and other early Zionists, Plan Dalet (Plan D) began to take concrete form in 1937, when the Jewish Agency’s Transfer Committee was established by Yosef Weitz and others. The committee’s purpose was to devise a plan that would lead to the “transfer” of the Arab population out of Palestine so that Jews would become a large majority. This would be accomplished by “promoting measures designed to encourage the Arab flight.” Weitz did not mince his words: “…there is no room for both people together in this country….The only solution is a Palestine…without Arabs. And there is no way than to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, to transfer all of them; not one village, not one tribe, should be left.” (Yosef Weitz, My Diary and Letters to the Children, 1965).
Ben-Gurion, 1937: “”[a] partial Jewish state is not the end, but only the beginning. The establishment of such a Jewish state will serve as a means in our historical efforts to redeem the country in its entirety.”
In a letter to his son in 1937, Ben Gurion stated that “[w]hen the Jewish state comes into being, we will expel the Arabs and take their places.” He also declared in a speech to the 20th. Zionist Congress, on Aug. 7, 1937: “In many parts of the country new Jewish settlements will not be possible unless there is transfer of the Arab peasantry…. The transfer of the Arab population is what makes possible a comprehensive [Jewish] settlement plan.”
During a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive on 12 June 1938, Ben-Gurion again advocated expulsion of the Palestinians: “I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see in it anything immoral.” (Benny Morris, “Refabricating 1948”)
Part of the Problem #511 – Jews Call Out Other Jews for Being Jews–Concerned Americans, please listen to this POV on the #AltRight, beginning at 1.05 hours into the video & continuing to its end. https://youtu.be/qReuHwRC2fo via @YouTube