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Transnational Commitments: Arab American Activism and Palestinian Solidarity
Abstract
The historic meeting of AAUG in 1968, the year after the June War, also took place coincidentally in the same year as the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, which resulted in the 1969 conviction of the Palestinian American, Sirhan Sirhan. Strangely, the conviction of Sirhan Sirhan did little to inhibit the political activism. Arab American activism in solidarity with Palestinians living under occupation in the period between 1967 and 1982 was also conditioned by the broader movements of political action on US campuses and in US inner cities, which were sites of intense political contestation in opposition to US racism and Vietnam War. Some of this work emerged from a the rising generation of students shaped by antiwar activism who became especially interested in the Middle East during the 1970s, and published in the AAUG journal Arab Studies Quarterly, The Journal of Palestine Studies, and Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP). Crosshatched by political events in the Middle East and transformations taking place in the United States during the late 1960s and 1970s, Arab American activism was complicated by the unique social positioning of Arabs in the US as both white and racially other that on the one hand contributed to the mainstreaming of many Americans of Arab descent, and on the one hand produced the possibility of coalitions on Palestinian solidarity with Blacks, Latinos, Asians and Native American activists. This paper offers an initial attempt to periodize Arab American activism in support of Palestine with particular emphasis on the years from 1967 to 1982. This paper follows the model offered by Fredric Jameson in his essay, “Periodizing the 60s,” which does not argue for “some omnipresent and uniform shared style or way of thinking and acting, but rather as the sharing of a common objective situation, to which a whole range of varied responses and creative innovations is then possible, but always within that situation's structural limits” (178). I want to propose that Arab American activism in solidarity with Palestinians in the long decade of the 1970s took various forms in response to the objective conditions that were characterized simultaneously by the residual effects of US radical politics of the 1960s and by the emerging conditions in the Middle East punctuated as they were by the 1973 War, the Civil War in Lebanon, the Camp David Accords and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries