U.S. Left Movement vs. `Israel First' Liberals History Revisited (3)

In Professor Michael R. Fischbach’s 2019 book, titled The Movement And The Middle East: How The Arab-Israel Conflict Divided The American Left, the contributions of various Marxist left sects and anti-imperialist left political groups of the U.S. Movement of the 1970s—like the Weather Underground Organization [WUO], the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee [PFOC], the Revolutionary Union/RCPUSA, the October League or other 1970s “new communist’ left-wing groups—to building a Palestinian Solidarity Movement in the USA are recalled in the “After The Storm” chapter.

And, in addition, the “After The Storm” chapter also recalls the contribution to building a Palestinian Solidarity Movement in the USA during the 1970s made by the 1970s Palestine Solidarity Committee [PSC] that was based in New York City on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. As Professor Fischbach accurately observes:

“The PSC ran out of steam in the early 1980s, but its brief history was an important turning point in pro-Palestinian activism…By returning to the active, street-level politics of protest…PSC paved the way for the emergence of more of that type of political expression in the 1980s…It also broke with the New Left and Old Left tradition of mobilizing for Palestine in relative isolation from the Arab and Arab American communities, because it consciously worked with Arab Americans.”

In the “Identity Politics and Intersectionality” chapter near the end of The Movement And The Middle East book, Professor Fischbach also examines how the 1970s and early 1980s U.S. women’s liberation movement dealt with the Palestinian national liberation struggle, noting that “the experience of the women’s movement” indicated “that the intra-left controversies over what stance to adapt toward Israel and the Palestinians clearly had outlived the tumult of the 1960s and early 1970s and were manifesting themselves in part of the identity movement by the early 1980s.”

Finally—as some of the post-October 7, 2023 political arguments on social media in the USA have revealed—this 2019 book’s epilogue accurately predicted that “although what remains of the American Left today is mostly united behind one point of view, the Arab-Israeli conflict is still divisive among liberal-to-progressive Americans in the neoliberal era, just as it was among leftists back in the 1960s.”

The Movement And The Middle East provides its readers with an excellent and historically accurate picture of “how the Arab-Israeli conflict divided the” white “American Left” in the 1960s and 1970s. But not much information is included in the book about how 1960s,1970s and early 1980s U.S. corporate mass media-disseminated folk music and rock music youth culture may or may not have contributed to politically marginalizing Palestinian Solidarity Movement supporters or perpetuated support for Israel within U.S. white left Movement subculture circles during the 1960 to 1985 historical era.

In the 1970s, for example, some U.S. pop music industry executives attempted to stop the production and distribution of the Paredon Records label’s vinyl album, which was titled Palestine Lives! Songs from the struggle of the people of Palestine. As the now-deceased former Sing Out! folk music magazine editor and former editor of the now-defunct U.S. Guardian left-wing newsweekly, Irwin Silber, recalled in a 1991 interview:

“The music industry in New York, is very heavily…pro-Israel. So, when word got around that we were doing this record, a campaign began to try to stop it. Literally to stop it.

“And important figures in the music industry called our various suppliers, the people who made the masters, the plates, the pressings: `Listen! We’re going to withdraw a whole lot of business from you if you cooperate with these people in putting out this record’…”

And as French sociologist and media critic Ali Saad—who focuses “on the influence of mass media on society”—recalled in an October 22, 2016 column on Al Jazeera’s website about the post-1965 U..S. pop music youth culture folk-rock super-star musician, Bob Dylan, who politically influenced many young U.S. white left Movement supporters during the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and following decades:

“…The Lebanese left-leaning al-Akhbar newspaper…reminded readers of Dylan’s controversial pro-Israel positions…Dylan wrote the song `Neighborhood Bully’, in which he praised a state of Israel…The song that Stephen Holden described in The New York Times in 1983 as `an out-spoken defense of Israel’…postulates the frequent representation of Israel as the underdog of the Middle East.”

But despite apparently not choosing to assess the possible political impact that the pro-Israeli U.S. music industry-promoted 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s youth culture influence may have had on white left Movement youth attitudes toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, The Movement And The Middle East—like Professor Fischbach’s previous Black Power and Palestine book—should be required reading in 2024 for all 21st-century U.S. Movement organizers, activists and supporters on the Upper West and elsewhere who have participated on the streets or on college campuses in the antiwar and Palestinian solidarity demonstrations in the USA since October 7, 2023 (end of article)