Palestinian Americans

PALESTINIAN AMERICANS. Palestinian activism in the United States has historically occupied three categories: political enfranchisement; cultural preservation and empowerment; and anti-imperialism in cooperation with various political and social movements in the United States, within the Arab region, and globally. While Palestinians have been recognized as a community with distinct social and political characteristics, much of the US organizing has also been folded into larger Arab-American frameworks and communal identity. Both parts have long-standing ties to the Left.

From the later nineteenth century through the early 1920s, Arab immigrants in the United States strove to undermine the racial supremacy that tethered full citizenship status and privilege to whiteness. These efforts, especially intense within the expansive Syrian-American communities, encouraged militant opposition to empire and socialist leanings. The Free Syria Society (FSS), formed in 1915, found hope in the “Arab Awakening” of the time. Child of the intellectual movement spawned at the end of the nineteenth century, the FSS encompassed young organizers who sought to secure Arab sovereignty beyond sectarian differences in the diaspora. They worked to advance reforms under the Ottoman Empire, while preparing for action that led to the Great Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule in 1916.

In 1925 the New Syria Party (NPP) formed as a diasporic arm of the Revolt, a Druze-led rebellion against French colonialism. Affirming an unwavering opposition to European imperial ambitions, the NPP played a critical role in resourcing counterparts in the region and educating within the United States. These efforts built resistance toward the 1916 Sykes-Picot Treaty between France and Britain, which had divided the entire Arab region into colonial provinces. In 1936, the US-based Arab National League arose in protest to the settlement of Palestine and in tune with a renewed Arab Revolt, launching a massive strike against land expropriation and labor market discrimination. In 1944, the Institute of Arab American Affairs grappled with the reconfigurations of power in a post-World War II era eventually led to the US oil wars in the region.

The formation of the Organization of Arab Students(OAS) in 1952 by Arab students in the United States brought resources, knowledge, and methods to support Arab independence from colonial regimes in their homelands. Participants developed relations of solidarity with other anti-war, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonial movements of the 1950s and 1960s. The OAS readily found allies among Iranian, Greek, and Puerto Rican students as well as Black students in SNCC and other civil rights organizations.

Various Palestinian community institutions that formed during the 1950s included village associations such as the American Federation of Ramallah, keen on preserving bonds of the Palestinian diaspora following the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe). While not a direct expression of leftist ideology or activity, these organizations were largely supportive of the political formations that grew alongside them and offered important means to connect members of the community who would go on to join political movements.

Following the 1967 war, the United States intensified its arms and financial aid both to Israel and to reactionary Arab regimes bent on suppressing the growing Palestinian insurgency, but also turned at home to suppress dissent from the Arab-American Left. Programs such as the Nixon administration’s Operation Boulder, which secretly spied on scores of Arab organizers, particularly students, renewed the McCarthy Era legacies. Palestinians and Arabs became increasingly demonized, and groups such as the Arab American University Graduates formed to counter mainstream stereotypes taken from old European colonial and Orientalist images of Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians and Arabs generally as bloodthirsty terrorists. By the early 1970s, Arab American organizing expanded to include the creation of Arab-based cultural and community centers across the country, including Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco and New York. Not always overtly Left, they supported a wide variety of causes including the complaints of Arab auto workers in Detroit at the one-sided support of Israel by the UAW.

During the 1970s, the larger project of Arab nationalism suffered drastically in the region. Much of the Arab-American left shifted toward Palestinian institutions within the United States. Palestinian-oriented grassroots unions, associations, and political formations became vibrant community sites of mobilization. The 1980s saw a growth of Palestinian/Arab feminist initiatives and groups including the 1986 formation of the Union of Palestinian Women’s Association and the Feminist Arab Network. Such groups popularized the struggle among the Palestinian-American community at large, giving women a chance to participate even while emphasizing the physical dislocation from the homeland. By this time, Arab socialists and feminists also played important roles in the networks of women of color.

Following the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the exodus of the Palestine Liberation Organization(PLO)and the massacre of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila Camps, world attention centered for the first time upon the suffering of Palestinian civilians. An uptick of solidarity formations followed within coalitions urging justice and peace. The November 29th Coalition of 1981, later renamed the Palestine Solidarity Committee, led demonstrations and organized educational initiatives and campaigns effectively linking the struggle in the West Bank with struggles of people of color and the indigenous in the United States. Palestinians also came to play an important role in electoral politics as part of the Rainbow Coalition during Jesse Jackson’s run for president in 1984 and 1988.

By the mid-1980s, some forms of Arab-American activism began taking a turn toward more integrated political approaches within liberal mainstream forums. Groups such as the American-Arab Anti-discrimination Committee and the Arab-American Institute formed to address issues affecting Arab-Americans at large, including racial discrimination and census reclassification. They also advocated for the rights of Palestinians, including rights to self-determination and an independent Palestinian state. Many Palestinian/Arab groups also began more seriously engaging in legislative politics and advocacy initiatives, resulting in a number of campaigns and state referendums that called on the US public to vote their recognition of an independent Palestinian state.

US policies that surveilled and repressed Palestinian/Arab activism during this period grew, alongside vigilante violence against Arab communities. In 1985, West Coast Regional Director of the ADC, Alex Odeh, was assassinated outside his Santa Ana office. The assassination, allegedly committed by a member of the Jewish Defense League, reflected a far-right intent to suppress Arab/Palestinian dissent. At the state level, the case of the “LA 8” reflected how political dissent had been criminalized: seven Palestinian men and one Kenyan woman were arrested and threatened with deportation in 1987 under a Cold War era anti-Communist law.

Broad-based Palestine solidarity formations have continued in the United States since the 1980s despite the repression, but global events have also impacted Palestinian grassroots efforts. Palestinian student unions and formations found themselves largely liquidated by the early 1990s, as a result of the rescinded support of Arab states for the PLO following the First Gulf War. This decline in diasporic national activity, confirmed during the 1993 Oslo Accords agreement between Israel and the PLO, resulted in a shift in trajectory of the PLO. The revolutionary struggle for peace and negotiations had been abandoned for the hope of an independent Palestinian state on a small fraction of historic Palestine. Palestinian national institutions in the United States waned in the early 1990s even as the occupation of the West Bank intensified. Repression of Palestinian organizers intensified in the United States.

In the wake of September 11, 2001 and the “War on Terror,” Arab communities struggled to address the growing needs of the community in a new racial and political situation. The National Network of Arab American Communities, a host umbrella of twenty-six Arab community-based-organizations across the United States, led by the largest of the organizations, ACCESS in Michigan, joined efforts for comprehensive immigration reform as well as a number of other progressive measures. Meanwhile, new expressions of Palestinian national organizing unfolded, including legal resistance to the arrest, indictment and eventual deportation of Chicago based community leader Rasmea Odeh.

By the middle of the 2010s, Students for Justice in Palestine had grown into a vibrant student movement anchoring the campaigns for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) of Israel’s West Bank products. Amidst the increase of Palestinian activism at academic, non-profit and grassroots communal levels, students and youth formations led the charge, joining hands with other communities as pillars to the growth of Palestinian organizing on a broader level. Inspired by the campaigns of Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and others stepped forward to give public voice to Palestinian demands. Such developments vindicated the perseverance of Palestinian activism and demonstrated the solidarity of the Left in the cause of freedom and self-determination.

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