U.S. Left Movement vs. `Israel First' Liberals History Revisited (2)

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 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.” (end of part 2 of review article. To be continued.)