[Peace-discuss] A Critical Response to Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America

[David Green]

A slightly revised version of what appeared today on
the Counterpuch website:

http://www.counterpunch.org/green03132006.html

A Critical Response to Strangers in the Land: Blacks,
Jews, Post-Holocaust America

David Green

Since I began intensively studying the
Israel-Palestine conflict nine years ago, I have (as a
Jew) also been concerned with its historical and
current effect on relations among blacks and Jews in
this country. These relations have reflected the
influence that neoconservatism, originating primarily
among Jewish intellectuals, has had on mainstream
(liberal) Jewish institutional life and political
culture in America, and the manner in which
Jewish-identified aspects of neoconservatism
(opposition to affirmative action, support for Israel,
an obsession with alleged anti-Semitism and now
“Islamo-fascism”) have been adopted by a broader
culture of white racism and class privilege, with
obvious dire effects both domestically and globally.
What began as one aspect of the white ethnic
intellectual backlash in the 1960s has evolved, been
appropriated, and become central to the domestically
ruthless and globally violent ideology of the current
administration, with a concurrent black-Jewish subplot
that has been much discussed but not adequately
understood.

	It is in this context that I was intrigued to
discover a massive 527-page work of scholarship called
Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust
America by UCLA English professor Eric Sundquist
(Belknap-Harvard, 2005). Upon obtaining this book,
however, I was quickly disappointed to find—in spite
of many insightful analyses of literary works—a clear
unwillingness to seriously engage the central issues
noted above. While I will leave it to others to judge
whether Strangers in the Land succeeds as a work of
cultural/literary criticism, I would suggest that it
is an utter and insidious failure of political
criticism. Moreover, I think that it is as a work of
political criticism that it will be (and should be)
primarily received. As such, this book stands as an
apology for neoconservatism and its support for white
privilege in America, as well as its support for the
Zionist project in all its aggressive criminality, now
coming to a head as any possibility of viable
Palestinian state is being destroyed. In this context,
Sundquist shows a marked lack of compassion for the
dire plight of the Palestinian people, and—given his
obviously considerable scholarly skills—demonstrates a
seemingly willful innocence of the implications of
historical scholarship, human rights reports, and
diplomatic records now freely available, most recently
summarized by Norman Finkelstein.

	In summary, Sundquist views neoconservatism as rather
benignly emanating in the 1960s from liberal Jewish
intellectuals understandably caught amongst a
dedication to the meritocracy, Jewish group interests,
and the threatening demands of what he sees as
anti-Zionist and incipiently anti-Semitic advocates of
Black Power. Sundquist reduces Black Nationalist,
Black Power, Pan-African, and Third World Liberation
movements, and specifically the leadership of Malcolm
X and Stokely Carmichael, to demagogic, venal,
anti-Semitic opportunism and bigotry. Sundquist adopts
a boilerplate Zionist narrative of the history of
Palestine and Israel that would not pass muster in any
college classroom worth its name, which romanticizes
Israelis and denigrates Palestinians. While
maintaining a scholarly tone and engaging in
prodigious amounts of research, Sundquist ultimately
refuses to seriously engage the critical scholarship
which he references, from the work on Jewish whiteness
of his UCLA colleague Karen Brodkin, to Manning
Marable’s careful scholarship on African-American
political movements, to the new Israeli historians,
and to Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi.

	All this is done in the framework of a purportedly
unbiased treatment of Black-Jewish relations.  But two
examples will be quoted of Sundquist’s peculiarly
jaundiced notion of “balance” in his treatment of
black-Jewish and Israeli-Palestinian issues:

(Meir) Kahane’s views were all the more remarkable for
being borrowed from the same black nationalism the JDL
(Jewish Defense League) meant to oppose. The paperback
jacket of Kahane’s “Never Again!,” an exposition of
JDL militancy, rightly compared the book to Cleaver’s
“Soul on Ice” and “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”
The JDL’s symbol, a clenched fist issuing from a Star
of David, mirrored the clenched fist of Black Power.
Consciously styling themselves “Jewish Panthers,”
members undertook armed community patrols
Underscoring
the parallel, Kahane declared that the JDL did not
differ from the Panthers in wanting to instill
self-assurance and pride in young people
”  In the
face of Black Power’s demand that Jews acquiesce to
policies inimical to their own interests, and wary of
their precarious position in a nation still for the
most part ruled by a Protestant elite, many Jews may
well have felt hemmed in by the “politics of
powerlessness.” (p. 357-59)

	This passage is reflective of Sundquist’s tone
throughout the relevant sections of the book: blacks
threaten innocent Jews, who do not partake in the
racism of other whites, and just want a “color-blind”
society based on merit. Some Jews understandably react
negatively to black betrayal. Black Power—the basis of
this betrayal—was an insidious force sui generis, and
a corruption of Martin Luther King’s movement which
was supported by most Jews. Some Jews have of course
over-reacted. But Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X are
to be equated (or worse) to Meir Kahane, and Kahane
was simply reacting to their provocations. These black
leaders—viewed by Sundquist as stereotypes of
threatening black males rather than evolving socialist
revolutionary political leaders, are more deserving of
harsh criticism and dismissal than someone who
immigrated to Israel to lead the most vicious and
openly racist aspect of the Jewish settler movement.

Whether or not the massacre (at Deir Yassin in April,
1948, during which Zionist forces led by Menachem
Begin killed 100 Palestinian villagers, including old
men, women, and children) was intended—at least some
dimension of it, such as killing all the men of the
village apparently had been discussed—remains a vexed
question. 
Whatever the explanation for the killings
at Deir Yassin, there is little doubt that the
Palestinian Jews, soon to be Israelis, used the threat
of other Deir Yassins, coupled with less fearsome
raids on individual villages, as psychological
warfare. If the killings led to wild rumors about
Jewish determination to exterminate Arabs, however,
such rumors were made credible less because of the way
Jews conceived of the war than because of the way a
number of Arabs did. Ahmed Shukeiry, aide to the Mufti
of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, envisioned “the
elimination of the Jewish state,” while Abd al-Rahman
Azzam Pasha, the secretary general of the Arab League,
looked forward to “a war of extermination and
momentous massacre” and declared that “it does not
matter how many (Jews) there are. We will sweep them
into the sea.” Joined with other factors—the early
flight of the wealthy elite, Arab calls for women and
children to evacuate, and the dissolution of
Palestinian military leadership—fears that Israelis
were bent on waging such a war, a mirror image of the
declarations of Arab leaders, were a decisive factor
in the momentous outflow of Arab refugees in the
months to come. Responding to concerted attacks by
five Arab nations bent on destroying the Jewish state,
Israel captured some 30 percent more territory than it
had been granted by the United Nations. With the
exodus of the Arabs, a Jewish majority was created. So
too, the “Palestinian problem,” the approximately
700,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled from
their homes in Palestine, most expecting to return
after Arab nations had driven out the Jews 
(p.
374-375)

	This virtually propagandistic obfuscation is typical
of Sundquist’s treatment of Israel and Palestine
throughout his historical account, from 1948 to 1967
to 1973, with Israel’s survival always assumed to be
at stake from hateful Arab nations. The most
significant and brutal Jewish massacre of Arabs is
buried in a sea of equivocation (including a veiled
reference to the myth of “Arab broadcasts”) in a
selective and distorted historical context—without
regard, for example, to what is now known about
Zionist plans for transfer (carried out before and
after Deir Yassin), collusion between Zionist leaders
and the leader of Trans-Jordan (Emir Abdullah) to
prevent the formation of a Palestinian state, or the
tepidness of Arab intervention, arguably not a serious
threat to the nascent but already well-armed Jewish
state. Again, in spite of the Sundquist’s references
to new Israeli historians like Avi Shlaim and to
Rashid Khalidi, he seems unwilling to seriously
address the implications of what is now conventional
scholarly wisdom, which well explains the ongoing
destruction of Palestinian national aspirations.

     In his narrative context, both American and
Israeli Jews—including the worst sorts of
neoconservatives and Likudniks (although not always
clearly distinguishable from liberals and
Laborites)—maintain an essential innocence and
humanity; black Americans and Palestinians, on the
other hand, are seen as easily manipulated by the
demagogic appeals of their leaders, who ultimately
undermine whatever legitimate aspirations their
followers might have, which can best be served
(according to Sundquist) by traditional liberal
activism (as defined by Jews). In tracing what he sees
as the naïve and unwarranted affinity of black
nationalists for the Palestinian cause, Sundquist
casts aspersions on third world liberation movements
as antithetical to the centrist, domestic liberalism
with which he, and in his view most Jews, rightly
identify. African-Americans, according to Sundquist,
have been betrayed by their leaders, whose criticism
of Jews is self-serving and impractical at best, and
anti-Semitic and violent at worst. Ultimately,
Sundquist collapses James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and
Stokely Carmichael onto Louis Farrakhan, Leonard
Jeffries, and Tony Martin.

     At bottom, Strangers in the Land fails as a work
of political criticism not only due to a careless
rendering of reality in the Middle East, but due to an
unwillingness to entertain the notion of a peculiarly
Jewish intellectual and ideological contribution to
white racism and the maintenance of white privilege in
this country, including the projection of racist
attitudes onto the Israel-Palestine conflict, and onto
western relations with the Arab and Muslim worlds.
While the notion of Jewish racism is absent from this
book (as if the experience of discrimination and the
Holocaust makes such a thing unthinkable and
impossible), an indigenous anti-Semitism is assumed to
be long-standing, central, and substantial in
African-American culture. Sundquist has thus written a
book that accepts the basic assumptions of
neoconservative ideology, with all of the racist
baggage that that implies at home and abroad. In these
narrative confines, there is no objective place to
stand from which to understand the peculiarly
Jewish-American contribution to this ideology, and to
propose a new interpretation of Black-Jewish relations
based at least partly on Jewish self-criticism,
including criticism of what has turned out to be a
morally disastrous Jewish state.

David Green (davegreen84 at yahoo.com) lives in
Champaign, Illinois.


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