The late Michael Suleiman and others have argued that Arab American identity was formed as a result of negative portrayals of Arabs and strong pro-Israeli bias in the U.S. media during and after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Certainly, the media acted as a negative motivating force behind the solidification of an ethnic “Arab American” identity and was key to the formation of a handful of key community organizations, such as the Association of Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG). In AAUG publications and scholarly sources in the 1960s and ‘70s, the founders and founding members of AAUG distinguished between the “recent arrivals” and past generations from the Middle East in the U.S. They mostly framed these differences in terms of transnational politics, demographics, and ethnic identity; claiming a pan-Arab, secular nationalism as opposed to religious, ethnic, village based identities popular among earlier generations of immigrants from the Middle East. The two groups, however, were not so clearly defined into oppositional binaries. This paper will examine how Arab immigrants reflect on the period 1945-80 in memoirs and autobiographies, and how they related to the politics of “homeland” through emotional and financial connections with ecclesiastical structures, Islamic organizations and states in the region. The sources for this project will be AAUG publications, including memoir-articles in Arab Studies Quarterly, biographies and autobiographies published in the 1970s and 1980s as well as materials from the Antiochian Orthodox Church and the Washington Mosque Foundation.

The paper examines the federal government’s targeting of Arab Americans and Arab college students in America for surveillance and harassment in the late 1960s and early 1970s. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the Palestinian resistance movement swelled throughout the diaspora. In the wake of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September’s murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, the Nixon administration established the Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism which directed the FBI, State Department, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service to enact “special measures” to monitor both non-citizen Arab residents and Arab Americans who were citizens of the United States. The program, which included a visa check system called Operation Boulder, lasted until 1975. I also discuss the federal government’s treatment of Arab American activists going back to 1967, including investigations in conjunction with the COINTELPRO surveillance program. The federal government overstepped its constitutional boundaries and used its powers in order to repress lawful political activities, particularly Arab American activism on behalf of Palestine. The paper explores Arab Americans’ responses and resistance to government violations of their civil liberties. Ironically, the government’s attempt to divide and intimidate Arab Americans actually served to heighten their unity and augment their activism. A key figure in the Operation Boulder investigations was Abdeen Jabara, an Arab-American lawyer and political activist who was a target of NSA and FBI surveillance dating back to 1967 and who sued the federal government to challenge its violations of his and other Arab-Americans’ civil liberties. I rely most heavily on Jabara’s papers, my interviews with Jabara, the papers of the Association of Arab-American University Graduates, some federal government records, and mainstream and Arab-American press reports to piece together the story.

This paper examines the AAUG’s articulation of the Palestine question as both an Arab-American and Third World issue. As the first major Arab-American organization to form after the 1967 War, the AAUG faced two challenges. First, the 1967 War exposed the incapacity of the Arab states and dispossessed a new generation of Palestinians, which had far-reaching ramifications for Arabs in the Middle East and the diaspora. Second, Arab-Americans faced growing anti-Arab sentiments in the United States as support for Israel became a cornerstone of American politics and culture. In response, the AAUG engaged in unprecedented educational and activist endeavors to promote the Palestinian case in the U.S. and foster ties among Arab-Americans. In analyses of the post-1967 era, several scholars have discussed the role that the AAUG played in the creation of Arab-American identity and the field of Arab-American ethnic studies. Yet, only more recently have scholars begun to analyze the transnational character of both the AAUG and Arab-American identity more broadly. From its inception, the AAUG refused to limit its concerns to issues only affecting Arab-Americans, although Palestine was its first and dearest cause. On the contrary, AAUG members constructed a transnational collective identity by standing in solidarity with Black Americans, Africans, South Asians, and Latin Americans. Thus, Palestine was an issue that brought Arab-Americans into conversation with other groups that grappled with racism, settler-colonialism, and decolonization. Using the archival papers of the AAUG and its members, official organization publications, and personal interviews, I investigate how the AAUG engaged with the PLO and Palestinians during its first decade. I also explore the alliances that the AAUG made with leftists around the world, particularly under the leadership of Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Abdeen Jabara, Elaine Hagopian, Edward Said, Naseer Aruri, and others. By examining the AAUG’s advocacy for Palestine alongside its commitments to anti-colonial (and anti-neocolonial) movements in the Third World, this paper demonstrates that 1967 and subsequent moments in the Arab-Israeli conflict fostered the creation of a transnational intellectual generation that aligned itself with both the Palestinian revolutionary movement and the global postcolonial community.

This paper examines cooperation between Arab American organizations and non-Arab-identified groups from 1967 to 1980. It argues that such trans-ethnic cooperation was essential to the articulation and dissemination of critical perspectives on U.S. policy toward the Middle East and especially toward the Arab-Israeli conflict. The principal Arab American groups I examine are the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG), the National Association of Arab Americans (NAAA), and the Palestine Human Rights Campaign (PHRC), an offshoot of the AAUG. The main non-Arab groups I study fall into four main categories: Americans then living in the Arab world or who had done so; various Christian denominations; progressive, radical, or anti-Zionist Jewish groups; civil rights and African American organizations. The paper argues that the interaction of all of these groups helped to transform U.S. discourse on the Arab-Israeli conflict. In particular, this interaction contributed to the emergence of a compromise scenario involving Israel's withdrawal from all of the Arab territory occupied in 1967 and the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza strip--what later came to be called the two-state solution. Initially confined, more or less, to progressive circles, the two-state scenario later acquired greater credibility within the U.S. mainstream, though never enough strength to fundamentally alter U.S. policy toward the dispute.