Abstract
Excerpted From: Annalisa Jabaily, 1967: How Estrangement and Alliances Between Blacks, Jews, and Arabs Shaped a Generation of Civil Rights Family Values, 23 Law & Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice 197 (Winter 2005) (226 Footnotes) (Full Document)
Since September 11, 2001, Arabs and Muslims in the United States have faced increasing infringements on their civil rights and civil liberties, but today's leading advocates of Arab and Muslim civil rights only touch the surface of exclusions that these groups experience. While civil rights advocates have successfully refuted the argument that Arabs and Muslims pose a threat to national security, they have not addressed these groups' deeper isolation from dominant American institutions of power and culture.
Arabs and Muslims in the United States are identifiable but rarely written about as a “minority” because we exist primarily within our relationships to other minority groups. Power struggles among allied minority groups emerge as “family dramas” that occur at the margins of our collective struggle within the dominant society. Family dramas are disputes between loved ones that nevertheless play out within certain “family” norms. Particularly, I am interested in our existence in the black-Jewish family drama because it is the norms of this family drama that have produced the compulsion to be silent about the key issue of Palestine. The stifling of debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the fear of the anti-Semitism charge that sometimes accompanies criticism of Israel, and the prevalence of this phenomena in various areas of American life (e.g., movies, newspapers, academic environments) has produced a group of people held together by their own silence. These are the Arabs and Muslims to whom I refer. Therefore, I am talking about a very fluid identity, better defined by the politics of exclusion than by affirmative descriptions like blood, culture, or religion.
This Essay examines one unexpected place where these silences are produced: civil rights coalitions. I propose that Arabs and Muslims today are asked to make the same concession for a civil rights coalition that blacks made to Jewish progressives in 1967: silence on or support for Israeli policies. Current events in the Middle East and in the United States require us to re-examine the estrangements and alliances of 1967, in hopes of promoting more open terms of coalition with both critical race theorists who struggle against subordination and civil rights advocates who struggle against discrimination. Building true coalitions in the United States between blacks, Jews, and Arabs means rewriting the terms of the coalition to differentiate between anti-Semitism and a critique of Israel, enabling us to advocate a just peace in the Middle East. A reconsideration of the black nationalist critique of integrationism and the Arab-Israeli War will contribute to a modern rewriting of the 1967 chapter.
The 1967 chapter is interesting because that year encompassed the struggle between competing visions of black liberation, the impact of the Arab-Israeli War on Jewish identity, and the tensions produced when Arabs and Muslims today identify with Palestinian rights. The late 1960s and early 1970s were years of massive social unrest in the United States: African Americans rioted in urban ghettos; the Black Panthers began to organize nationally; dissent from the Vietnam War heated up; public schools in the South were ordered to desegregate; white women had begun to mobilize across the nation for gender equality; and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. In addition to the upheaval at home, the Arab-Israeli War and Israel's subsequent occupation of the West Bank was transformative for many American Jews.
I believe it was against the backdrop of this rupture that groups split apart, realigned themselves, and set the boundaries of contemporary mainstream thinking about race and the Middle East. This Essay will examine the roots of the integrationist-Jewish alliance in the greater context of 1967 and the black nationalist protest. Part I will summarize two well-known ruptures that changed the direction of the civil rights movement: the fracture between integrationists and black nationalists, and the end of the “golden age” chapter of the black-Jewish family drama. In Part II, I introduce the Arab-Israeli War and the question of Palestine. The first part details the black nationalists' reasons for identifying with the story of Palestinian nationalism instead of Jewish nationalism. I will then discuss the multiple reactions of the Jewish conservatives, liberals, and radicals to the war and the black nationalists. Finally, I will examine the integrationists' dual, but primarily domestic, reaction to the black nationalists and the Jewish community and the character of the compromise that resulted. Part III discusses how the 1967 chapter has refracted the “double consciousness” experienced by many American minorities into a “triple consciousness” for Arabs and Muslims by structuring the way progressives talk about race. While African Americans often speak of how the double consciousness imposes upon them the burden of watching themselves through the eyes of mainstream white America, this section argues that not only do Arabs and Muslims watch themselves through “mainstream” eyes, they also watch themselves through “outsider eyes.” Often, Arabs and Muslims experience the feeling of being outside even those progressive racial projects because those projects continue to dictate when and how much to talk about Israel.
[. . .]
I have argued that the 1967 Arab-Israeli War played a significant role in the split between black nationalists and integrationists. I have also suggested that it deepened a rift in the black-Jewish family drama and figured prominently in the new integrationist-Jewish alliance created. The black nationalists' ideological commitments allowed for the development of a Middle East consciousness that recognized alternative narratives of Middle East politics. Their view of racism as subordination and their vision of racial justice as a redistribution of power convinced them that Palestinians were subordinated in the Middle East and that a just peace would require redistribution of resources, especially a change in U.S. military aid to Israel. The advocacy of Palestinian nationalism came despite, or perhaps because of, the black-Jewish family drama that set the acceptable limits of international critique of Israeli military operations.
At the precise moment when black nationalists broke away from integrationists, the Arab-Israeli War galvanized the identity of American Jews. Jews had a dual response, at once championing Israel's victory in the war and condemning the black nationalist criticism of it. The response accelerated progressive Jews' retreat from black nationalism, which had begun with black power. They sought civil rights allies with a less threatening vision of racial justice. The integrationists, after watching the black nationalists collapse in part because they refused to act within the boundaries of the black-Jewish family drama, pursued a new deal with Jewish progressives to maintain their own coalition. It was not necessary to revamp the ideologies of either group because both believed in the central tenets of the perspective and the vision of racial justice embodied in integrationism. The price of the ticket was the promise to prioritize the black-Jewish domestic relationship over conflicting analyses of the Middle East.
In the margins of my analysis of the 1967 chapter are the Arabs and Muslims of today. The integrationist-Jewish compromise, in addition to constraining race consciousness, also constrains a Middle East consciousness that prevents Arabs and Muslims from speaking on the same terms with the civil rights advocates speaking out for them. It has also slipped through the fingers of traditional critiques from the bottom, because those critiques are primarily interested in encouraging subordinated groups to tell their own story. Because the story of being Arab or Muslim in America exists more in the intersections of the black-Jewish family drama, rather than in a category of its own, we exist in critical race theory as “immigrants” or some undetermined form of “ethnic.” We are pressured to perform in a way that does not threaten the equilibrium of suffering that Jews and African Americans are constantly trying to maintain. While alliances between blacks and Jews have achieved many civil rights victories, the nature of the current compromise on Israel has suppressed Arab and Muslim identity to the point of imposing upon us a “triple consciousness.”
In the aftermath of September 11 and in the midst of the Second Intifada in the Middle East, we should re-examine the cultural bargain of 1967, and ask whether a new one should be struck among those who struggle against subordination and discrimination. We must reconsider the black nationalists' notion of a Middle East consciousness, that parallels their idea of race consciousness. A Middle East consciousness would apply a particularist, historicized view of social relations to the Middle East and explore the clash of competing nationalisms at its heart. Such a consciousness does not necessarily lead to a pro-Arab position as articulated by the black nationalists, but it does require an analysis of competing narratives and power. Like the potential for race consciousness to talk about race without advocating racism, so can a Middle East consciousness allow its adherents to talk about Israel without advocating anti-Semitism, allowing for good-faith coalitions between Arabs, blacks, and Jews. And like the possibilities that race consciousness offers advocates of a just peace between blacks and whites in America, a Middle East consciousness could open up a new world of possibilities for striking a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
J.D. Georgetown University Law Center 2004.
