Conclusion

As we approach the third decade of the twenty-first century, the United States continues to wrestle with defining its role in Middle East conflicts and fully accepting and fairly treating Arab and Muslim Americans. In this contentious and often ill-informed climate, it is crucial to appreciate the struggles, priorities, and accomplishments of Arab Americans over the past several decades, both what has set them apart and what has integrated them into the politics and culture of the United States. Arab American organizing in the environment of minority rights movements in the 1960s and 1970s fostered a heightened consciousness of and pride in Arab American identity....

Seeking Integration

The chapter explains how Arab American activism became more connected to mainstream progressive political organizing. The Palestine Human Rights Campaign, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), and Arab American Institute (AAI) tried to collaborate with liberal religious and political organizations, especially moderate African Americans. The work of the ADC and AAI with Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition and his campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination signalled the inclusion of Arab Americans in mainstream civil rights coalitions.

“Enemies Within”

This chapter examines the federal government’s violations of Arab Americans’ civil liberties with attention to the Nixon administration’s program Operation Boulder, instituted after the murders by Palestinian commandos of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. The program instituted rigorous checks on Arab immigrants’ visas, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Immigration and Naturalization Service Arab American activists and Arab students for connections to terrorism.

Intersections

This chapter analyzes the intersections among African American, New Left, and Palestinian ideologies and activism in this period, exploring both the convergences and the tensions among these groups.

Progressive Activism after the June War

This chapter describes the formation of the Arab American University Graduates shortly after the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 and how it became the most influential organization on the Arab American Left. An organization of intellectuals, the AAUG was secular, pan-Arab, and it engaged in advocacy of Palestinian nationalism. It sought alliances with the Third World Left.

Arab Students and the Politics of Palestine

This chapter discusses the role of the Organization of Arab Students (OAS) in fostering the radical Arab American movement in connection to the Third World New Left. It covers the organization’s history at American universities in the 1950s and 1960s. The chapter focuses on its pro-Palestinian activism in the late 1960s at several universities, with emphasis on Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.

Traversing Arab and American Spaces

The chapter explores how a transnational Arab American political consciousness played out on the local level in a series of inter-related developments in Dearborn, Michigan, starting with a movement to fight the city’s plans to destroy a working-class, immigrant neighborhood called the Southend, the creation of ACCESS, an Arab American community center, and a movement to protest the United Auto Workers’ investments in Israeli bonds. Tied to these activities was the activism of the Arab Workers Caucus that combined struggles for workplace justice and justice for Palestine.

“A Disturbed Individual, not a Martyr”

This chapter explores the increasingly hostile climate faced by Arab American activists by examining Sirhan Sirhan and how his assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, his trial testimony about Palestine, and the U.S. media’s treatment of Sirhan and the Israel-Palestine conflict affected the environment for Palestinian activism in the United States.

Introduction

Carrying signs and banners proclaiming “Jewish People Yes, Zionism No,” in November 1973 hundreds of Arab American autoworkers and their supporters picketed an event in Detroit at which the Jewish organization B’nai B’rith was honoring United Auto Workers’ president Leonard Woodcock. Plans for the protest had been building for several weeks, emanating from demonstrations held in reaction to the war fought between Israel and several Arab nations in October 1973. The October demonstrations that took place in Dearborn, Michigan, home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the United States, focused on championing the Arabs’ fight along with protesting American support for Israel. In Dearborn and across the country, Arab American political mobilization on behalf of Palestine had escalated since the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, when Israel had defeated its Arab opponents and displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians....