{"id":13716,"date":"2024-02-03T20:25:29","date_gmt":"2024-02-03T18:25:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/?p=13716"},"modified":"2024-02-03T20:41:43","modified_gmt":"2024-02-03T18:41:43","slug":"how-palestine-hijacked-the-u-s-civil-rights-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/how-palestine-hijacked-the-u-s-civil-rights-movement\/","title":{"rendered":"How Palestine Hijacked the U.S. Civil Rights Movement"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new generation of progressives has stumbled on old Soviet antisemitic propaganda<\/h3>\n

For over 50 years, the American left has tried rebranding the Palestinian cause by camouflaging Palestinian terrorism with the slogans of America\u2019s civil rights movement. Today, a new generation of would-be radicals has stumbled onto this zombie corpse of ahistoric sloganeering with the confident excitement of college freshmen on their first beer run.<\/p>\n

Using pseudo-intellectual jargon like \u201cintersectionality,\u201d multiple identity groups and astroturfed leftist political organizations have made fealty to the Palestinian cause a litmus test for belonging to the wider left. That is why many progressives were \u201cexhilarated\u201d by Hamas\u2019 massacre of innocent people, and feminists remained silent about the Gazans\u2019 mass rape of Israeli women. The artificiality, or often absurdity, of the supposed \u201cintersection\u201d between Palestine and the fashionable cause of the moment matters not at all. Hence, Palestine is a queer issue, as much as it is a feminist issue, and a social justice issue. The common thread remains supposed shared oppression\u2014regardless of how homophobic, sexist or dictatorial Palestinian society might be.<\/p>\n

But most group identities, no matter how politically fashionable, lack the social, cultural, and political heft to integrate the Palestinians into the new hierarchy of American victim groups and protected minorities. In America, only race has that valence. That is why other identity groups keep trying to graft their victimhood onto the story of the Black civil rights movement to cement their legitimacy.<\/p>\n

The Palestinian cause has gained a seat in the progressive sectarian tent by piggybacking off the historical experience of American Blacks. Especially since 2020, Palestine has become thoroughly incorporated into Black Lives Matter sloganeering and visual aesthetics. As a result, an Arab nationalist movement fighting a battle 6,000 miles away from America\u2019s Atlantic coast has become a central component of America\u2019s \u201canti-racist struggle,\u201d regardless of its lack of even the slightest connection to the historical reality of race-based discrimination in America, or to the values of the American civil rights movement.<\/p>\n

The differences between the Palestinian national movement and the American civil rights movement are obvious and fundamental. Palestinians have played no role in American history or the history of slavery. Palestinians played no role in the civil rights struggle. The Palestinian-Israeli clash, which is occurring a world away from America, is national not racial. Most Israelis are dark-skinned, while some Palestinians are light-skinned. Nonviolence fueled the civil rights struggle, while the Palestinian movement keeps perfecting new forms of political violence and terror-porn, from hijacking to suicide bombing.<\/p>\n

As this brief history suggests, the identification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with America\u2019s race problem was hardly made in America. It is a recent foreign import. Long before the \u201cglobalization of the intifada,\u201d Soviet communist propagandists \u201cinternationalized\u201d the Palestinian \u201cstruggle.\u201d In the mid-1960s, under Soviet patronage, Palestine became a global cause for the international left, earning a privileged spot in the constellation of Soviet-backed Third World anti-colonial and anti-imperial \u201cliberation\u201d movements through their use of terror. Today\u2019s movement toward the \u201cPalestinianization\u201d of the Black struggle in America therefore mirrors Soviet propaganda efforts that are now more than half a century old\u201430 years after Soviet communism imploded. Today\u2019s campus commissars and progressive fanatics use very similar methods toward similar aims. If one wants to understand current rhetorical political alignments, understanding that history is therefore crucial.<\/p>\n

As the late Palestinian academic, and member of the Palestine Liberation Organization\u2019s (PLO) Palestinian National Council, Edward Said, put it in The Question of Palestine (1979), the Palestinian movement moved to situate \u201ctheir struggle in the same framework that includes Vietnam, Algeria, Cuba, and black Africa,\u201d joining \u201cthe universal political struggle against colonialism and imperialism.\u201d<\/p>\n

The turn toward worldwide anti-colonial revolution and \u201cThird World solidarity\u201d pivoted Palestinian rhetoric around race. As Said explained, \u201cThe Zionist settler in Palestine was transformed retrospectively and actually from an implacably silent master into an analogue of white settlers in Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n

Working with Soviet propagandists to delegitimize America\u2019s ally in the Middle East, PLO leader Yasser Arafat jumped at the opportunity to brand Zionism as racism, binding the Palestinian cause to what in his infamous speech at the U.N. he called the global \u201cstruggle\u201d against \u201ccolonialism, imperialism, neo-colonialism, and racism in all its forms, including Zionism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, after Israel won the Six-Day War in 1967, most Black American leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., continued to support Israel passionately. Their identification with Zionism drew on powerful, historical bonds with Jewish leaders and organizations, cemented by decades of joint struggle.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, although aimed at the developing countries, the Soviet strategy made headway in America, too, where Maoist China had built strong relationships with radical Black activists like Robert Williams. Groups like the Black Panthers and other extremists fused Black Nationalism with Marxist-Leninism and Maoism. Also seeing themselves as advancing a global struggle, Black Power activists fed off Soviet communism, Maoist China, and Fidel Castro\u2019s and Che Guevara\u2019s Cuba in their search for external sponsors. As the rise of identity politics in the 1960s and 1970s paved the way for America\u2019s grievance-based politics, sectarian activists gained cover to sacrifice individual rights on the altar of collective resentments.<\/p>\n

These Maoist Black American figures detested the Constitution-positive, patriotic, liberal-left mainstream Black leadership of Dr. King and his circle. Shut out from the U.S. liberal power structure, these radicals began traveling to the Middle East and Africa and meeting with members of the PLO. In 1970, the \u201cCommittee of Black Americans for Truth about the Middle-East\u201d took out an ad in The New York Times in \u201csolidarity with the Palestinian people\u2019s struggle for national liberation.\u201d It declared that \u201cZionism is a reactionary racist ideology that justifies the expulsion of the Palestinian people from their homes and lands.\u201d Marginal then, such rhetoric is common now on U.S. college campuses.<\/p>\n

In defying Dr. King and other civil rights liberals they found insufficiently militant\u2014and by defining themselves against Zionism, by extension\u2014a new generation of Black radicals staked their claim to being the \u201ctrue voice\u201d of angry young men in the cities. They demanded \u201crevolution,\u201d nothing less. While the language of global Marxist radicalism alienated Black churchgoers in the civil rights heartland, it provided Black Power activists with allies and street cred among white Marxist campus radicals who likewise celebrated \u201crevolution\u201d and established trust-fund terrorist organizations like the Weather Underground.<\/p>\n

The distance from anti-Zionism to antisemitism was predictably brief. One Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) newsletter portrayed the Jewish state as a tool of \u201cwhite western colonial governments \u2026 helping white America to control and exploit the rich oil deposits of the Arab nations.\u201d The pamphlet included a cartoon with a puppeteer\u2019s hand marked with a Jewish star and a dollar sign, pulling on a rope hanging Egypt\u2019s dictator Gamal Abdul Nasser and heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali; greedy Jews were lynching an iconic Black figure and an Arab leader, side by side. SNCC\u2019s program director Ralph Featherstone denied charges of antisemitism, as would his comrades in their 1970 New York Times ad, claiming the cartoon \u201conly\u201d targeted Jewish oppressors\u2014in Israel and \u201cin the little Jew shops in the [Negro] ghettos.\u201d Featherstone explained that the SNCC supported the Palestinian cause because it was working toward a \u201cthird world alliance of oppressed people all over the world\u2014Africa, Asia, and Latin America.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the United Nations branded Zionism to be a form of \u201cracism\u201d in 1975, most mainstream African American leaders openly objected. Martin Luther King\u2019s friend Bayard Rustin wrote a column invoking King\u2019s famous comment that \u201cwhen people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews, you are talking anti-Semitism.\u2019\u201d Vernon Jordan, the National Urban League president, wrote: \u201cBlack people, who recognize code words since we\u2019ve been victimized by code words \u2026 can easily smell out the fact that \u2018Zionism\u2019 in this context is a code word for anti-Semitism.\u201d Other civil rights leaders signed an ad proclaiming, \u201cWe have fought too long and too hard to root out discrimination from our land to sit idly while foreign interests import bigotry into America.\u201d Nevertheless, by singling out Jewish nationalism as \u201cracism,\u201d the U.N. assisted in the effort to frame the Palestinian struggle as a racial conflict.<\/p>\n

The equation of Zionism and racism, no matter how obviously ahistorical and unfair\u2014no other form of nationalism is accused of being inherently racist\u2014resonates and contaminates, inasmuch as race continues to have a hold on American emotions. The purpose of the slur is obvious and toxic: It aims to place American Jews, the vast majority of whom identify as some form of Zionist, outside the bounds of normal American morality, while stigmatizing Israel with America\u2019s own historical guilt over race relations.<\/p>\n

In the 1980s, the international left\u2019s crusade focused on the apartheid regime in South Africa. Palestinian propagandists quickly appended the term \u201capartheid\u201d to the Palestinian cause, further entrenching the racialist approach.<\/p>\n

The Soviet Union\u2019s collapse in the early 1990s deprived leftists of their ideological glue, while the end of South African apartheid deprived leftists of a favorite cause. Yet paradoxically, in the vacuum, these historic breakthroughs cleared the way for \u201cPalestine\u201d to become the paramount cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre on the activist left. Wearing a kaffiyeh proved to fellow progressives that you passed a default ideological litmus test. Throughout, spearheaded by its Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, established while passing the 1975 Zionism-is-Racism resolution, the United Nations kept amplifying the Soviet-Palestinian antisemitic project.<\/p>\n

Since 2010 or so, when progressive Third World sectarianism became quasi-official ideology among all right-thinking people, the Palestinian cause has become increasingly central in left doctrine, bounding to the top of the American left\u2019s \u201canti-racist\u201d agenda. Time and again, the Palestinian cause gets a free pass other movements somehow don\u2019t merit. When the Black Lives Matter movement emerged, its activists policed any attempts to broaden their slogan to include other identity groups. Yet pro-Palestinian activists were allowed to appropriate the slogan \u201cPalestinian Lives Matter\u201d and to embed themselves in an internationalized framework against \u201coppression\u201d that extends \u201cfrom Ferguson to Gaza.\u201d<\/p>\n

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YASSER ARAFAT AT THE WHITE HOUSE IN WASHINGTON. Photo by GPO<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

BLM has helped Palestine activists repackage their predecessors\u2019 racialist slogans and tailor them to fit America\u2019s current pathological zeitgeist. In addition to run-of-the mill charges of \u201cracism\u201d and \u201capartheid\u201d\u2014the new hot items, in line with the broader political agenda and official terminology of the Democratic Party, are \u201cwhite supremacy\u201d and \u201cwhite nationalism,\u201d resulting in the charge that American Jews and Israelis are beneficiaries of \u201cwhite privilege,\u201d a statement that casually erases nearly all of Jewish history up to and including the Holocaust. Apparently, Jews\u2014whether American or Israeli\u2014are so privileged that not even centuries of exclusion and pogroms, culminating in the worst genocide in human history, can detract from their inherent status as \u201cprivileged,\u201d i.e., evil.<\/p>\n

During the George Floyd riots in 2020, Palestinian activists commandeered \u201cI can\u2019t breathe\u201d as part of their transnational campaign painting Blacks and Palestinians as fellow victims of the same \u201cstructural violence, occupation, and colonial oppression\u201d inflicted by \u201cwhites.\u201d In what was dubbed the \u201cdeadly exchange,\u201d intersectional propagandists for Palestine charged that the \u201cIsraeli military trains U.S. police in racist and repressive policing tactics, which systematically targets Black and Brown bodies.\u201d This lie transformed some police junkets into nonexistent IDF boot camps where innocent American cops were systematically reeducated into specialized Israeli techniques of racial brutality.<\/p>\n

The point of this bizarre accusation was not just that the Jews are oppressors. It was that \u201cthe Jews\u201d are guilty of the most heinous crime in the American cosmos. Eerily echoing traditional blood libels, Jews became racist oppressors, complicit in, even responsible for America\u2019s original sin, racist oppression. After all, it was the IDF that \u201cperfected\u201d the chokehold \u201cused to murder George Floyd,\u201d hundreds of academics and students in the University of California system declared. In other words, it was \u201cthe Jews\u201d who had actually killed the 21st century\u2019s leading American Black martyr.<\/p>\n

In a way, this trajectory was inevitable, once progressives decided on a vision of social justice in which America would be run according to a sectarian quota system, in which they defined which groups would be worthy of everything from university admissions to political power. According to this logic, success and failure is\u2014and should be\u2014a function of group identity, which pigeonholes individuals as either \u201coppressors\u201d or \u201coppressed.\u201d Within this new taxonomy, American Jews have been defined as the quintessential \u201cwhite oppressors,\u201d since \u201cJew\u201d is defined as being synonymous with \u201cwhite\u201d and \u201csuccessful.\u201d The Jewish connection to Israel makes the Jews doubly or triply as oppressive as other \u201cwhite people.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is no coincidence that at its core the Palestinianization of the U.S. civil rights movement is an anti-American project. The intersection of the Palestinian cult of victimhood with the \u201canti-racist\u201d progressive ideology being pushed institutionally by DEI regimes, not only declares that Israel is inherently racist, it also maligns America as systemically racist. The implication is clear: Both projects should be dismantled. That a generation of young American radicals chooses to ignore the real-world implications of these insane slogans is scary enough. That many of them, their professors, and other influential politicos in fact embrace the broader message, is terrifying.<\/p>\n

Published by Tablet.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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