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

By late 2023 most white U.S. antiwar left Movement organizers, activists and supporters on the Upper West Side and elsewhere in the United States (as well as most non-Movement white people under 50 years-of-age in the USA of Jewish or non-Jewish religious backgrounds) were opposed to the U.S. government providing military aid to the militaristic Israeli government and also supported the democratic right of national self-determination for the Palestinian people.


Yet, as the author of the groundbreaking "Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Colors of Color" 2018-published book, Randolph-Macon College Professor of History Michael R. Fischbach, recalled in the prologue to his follow-up book, titled "The Movement And The Middle East: How The Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided The American Left" (which Stanford University Press published in 2019), during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, "some on the" U.S. white "left (and liberal but not quite left-wing allies in the Democratic Party, trade unions, and mainstream anti-Vietnam War activists) lined up solidly behind Israel"; and some still "saw Israel as a progressive socialist state."


So in "The Movement And The Middle East" book, Professor Fischbach "tells the story of the varying white left-wing American attitudes toward the Arab-Israel conflict during the 1960s and 1970s, and asks why these had such a tremendous impact on activists' divergent agendas, identities, and understandings of how to effect change in American society and foreign policy."


According to Fischbach, "two major rifts" developed related to Middle East issues within the U.S. white left Movement subculture during the 1960s and 1970s: "the split over who in the Middle East deserved the left's support;" and "questions of Jewish identity" that "often personalized the struggle between left-wing internationalism and Israel exceptionalism."


In addition to a prologue, epilogue and an extensive bibliography, the text of "The Movement And The Middle East" includes 12 chapters with the following titles: 1. "The Times They Are a-Changin': The New Left and Revolutionary Internationalism"; 2. "Conflict in the Ivory Tower: Campus Activism"; 3. "(Fellow) Travelers: Left-Wing Youth in the Middle East"; 4. "Israel Exceptionalism: Jewish Attacks on the New Left"; 5. "Theory and Praxis: The Old Left against Israel"; 6. "Ghosts of Revolution Past: Conflicted Communists"; 7. "We're Not Gonna Take It: The Socialist Lurch toward Israel"; 8. "Give Peace a Chance? The Ambivalent Anti-Vietnam War Movement"; 9. "After the Storm: Divergent Left-Wing Paths"; 10. "The Shadow of the Cold War: Continued Pro-Israeli Pushback"; 11. "Taking Root: The New Thinking Goes Mainstream"; and 12. "Identity Politics and Intersectionality: Feminism and Zionism."


In the "The Times They Are a-Changin'" chapter, the verbal positions that some 1960s National Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] and 1960s SDS campus chapter organizers, Yippie organizers like Abbie Hoffman and White Panther Party [WPP] organizers like John Sinclair took with respect to supporting the Palestinian liberation struggle after the June 1967 Middle East War, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, are accurately described. And it is also accurately recalled that, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, "like SDS and the Yippies, however, the WPP never did much publicly on behalf of Palestine solidarity."


The "Conflict in the Ivory Tower" chapter describes how attempts were made by Palestinian solidarity movement activists in the USA to use campus teach-ins and student newspapers at places like the University of California and Wayne State University, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, to increase U.S. student support for the Palestinian national liberation struggle.


Yet the same chapter also noted that in 1969 a "Committee for a Progressive Middle East" [CPME]--which was "the brainchild of Michael Lerner," whose "father, Joseph H. Lerner...served as vice president of the Zionist Organization of America,"--appeared in Berkeley and "issued a statement" asserting that "it was" allegedly "ridiculous for anyone to think that the Arabs were fighting a national liberation struggle" and which "called on al-Fateh to halt guerrilla warfare against Israel and instead focus on `redirecting that struggle internally in Arab lands'."


In the “(Fellow) Travelers” chapter, Professor Fischbach examines how some young U.S. left-wing late 1960s and early 1970s antiwar underground press journalists— “who wanted to be able to present their” Liberation News Service [LNS] “readers with first-hand information” about the Palestinian national liberation struggle—moved or traveled to countries like Lebanon, Jordan and Israel/Palestine, visited Palestinian refugee camps and interviewed or established personal contact with PLO, PFLP and/or Israeli left-wing activists.


And, after returning to the USA from their Middle East visits, “one group” of U.S. Palestinian solidarity Movement activists, “calling themselves the Middle East Research and Information Project, or MERIP, decided to create a new left-wing journal, MERIP Reports,” whose first issue appeared in May 1971.


The “Israel Exceptionalism” chapter of Professor Fischbach’s 2019 historical book, "The Movement And The Middle East: How The Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided The American Left", recalls how some—mostly then-elderly left-liberal or later neo-conservative Zionist academics and journalists of the late 1960s and 1970s in the USA—attempted to block the growing support of 1960s New Left youth for the Palestinian solidarity Movement in the USA by falsely caricaturing some New Left Movement organizers of Jewish religious background as “self-hating Jews.”


And the “Theory and Praxis” chapter of the same book reveals how some Old Left revolutionary socialist Trotskyist and Marxist-oriented U.S. Left Movement political groups in the 1960s—like the Workers World Party/ [WWP] and the Socialist Workers Party [SWP]—then “played important roles bringing awareness of the Arab-Israeli conflict to the Left” in the USA; since, “while the New Left” groups like SDS just “raised the question of the Palestinians” during the 1960s, “groups like the the SWP and the WWP actually did something about it immediately in 1967 and thereafter.”


In the “Ghost of Revolution Past” chapter, Professor Fischbach examines the political disagreements that developed within the then-elderly Old Left leadership circles of the 1960s Communist Party USA [CPUSA], with regard to how to respond to the 1967 Middle East War and its aftermath. And the same chapter also describes how some 1960s non-left-wing party-affiliated and politically independent Old Left socialist or Marxist publications, like "Monthly Review" magazine and the now-defunct U.S. "National Guardian/Guardian" radical left-wing newsweekly, responded to the 1967 Middle East War and its aftermath.


The “We’re Not Gonna Take It” chapter indicates how the anti-communist elderly and younger social democrats and liberal Zionists who were then members, historically, of the Socialist Party of America [SPA] and the Young People’s Socialist League [YPSL] in the 1960s—and later of the Social Democrats USA [SDUSA] and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee [DSOC] in the 1970s—” began to shift more and more in a strongly pro-Israel direction in the weeks and months following” the June 1967 Middle East War.


And the “Give Peace A Chance?” chapter recalls how, historically, the 1960s and 1970s U.S. Anti-Vietnam War Movement “not only faced the opposition of those who actively supported Israel but also the stubborn insistence even of” then historically “pro-Palestinian parties like the SWP in keeping the Arab-Israeli conflict off the Movement agenda lest it fragment the antiwar coalition they had painstakingly assembled.”


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 to December 1, 2025 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 Barbara Dane and Irwin Silber's 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 radical 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 2026 for all 21st-century U.S. Movement organizers, activists and supporters on the Upper West and in the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley Bay Area who have participated on the streets or on college campuses in the antiwar and Palestinian solidarity demonstrations in the USA between October 7, 2023 and December 1, 2025.