CHAPTER 7

MIDDLE EAST SYMBIOSIS

Israelis, Arabs, and African Americans

ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER GOLDA MEIR was not amused. It was April 13, 1971, and she was having a meeting at her office in West Jerusalem with five young Jewish activists from a new protest group calling itself the Black Panthers Organization. The group was made up of Mizrahi/Sephardic Jews, Jews whose origins were from the Middle East and North Africa and who tended to occupy the lower socioeconomic strata within Israeli society as compared to Ashkenazic Jews (Jews of Central and Eastern European background). Meir kept asking the men—Ya‘akov Elbaz, Rami Marciano, Sa‘adiya Marciano, David Levi, and Re’uven Abergil—how and why they chose the particular name “Black Panthers” for their group. They liked its shock value, Sa‘adiya Marciano replied.

Clearly not satisfied, the prime minister followed up with, “Did you not hear of this name somewhere else?” Marciano admitted to her that they knew of the American Black Panthers. “We know they support Fateh and are against Jews,” he said. Then why, the prime minster wanted to know, did they take this particular name? “Because it gives us shock value [Hebrew: mahats],” Marciano responded with the bravado of Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. He thought that the name would help the organization make “noise” in Israel. Abergil picked up where his comrade left off: “We may share 40 percent of the ideology of the Black Panthers in the United States, who were also disenfranchised and screwed-up. The fact is that they are violent—we are not.” Meir noted acidly, “They are also anti-Semitic.”1 Black Power had arrived in Israel, and as in America, the ruling elite were not happy.

There was a significant cross-cultural mixing of ideas, information, and people around the world during what some have called the “Global 1960s.” One of the fascinating aspects of black Americans’ engagement with the faraway Arab-Israeli conflict is how those experiences impacted the people actually living in the midst of that conflict. African American stances on Israel and Palestine, in fact, played a symbiotic role; they not only mirrored and amplified their own attitudes toward race and identity but also affected Middle Easterners’ views both of American blacks and themselves. The best example of this was the emergence of the Israeli Black Panthers, who coalesced as an Israeli version of the BPP in early 1971.

THE ISRAELI BLACK PANTHERS

The Zionist movement that succeeded in creating the Jewish state of Israel developed as a movement of Ashkenazic Jews in Europe, who created the outlines of a state, and later ruled that state, along European political and sociocultural lines. While Mizrahi/Sephardic Jews from Arab and Islamic countries had always been present in small numbers in pre-1948 Palestine, it was the waves of Jewish immigration from countries like Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Egypt, and Libya during and after the establishment of Israel in 1948 that quickly changed the previously Ashkenazic-dominated demography of the new Jewish state. Coming from Middle Eastern and North African cultural backgrounds, these Jews often found it hard to adjust to a new secular, European-oriented Ashkenazic lifestyle and political system. A number of them came from poorer, less-educated, and more traditionally religious backgrounds than their Ashkenazic compatriots. The result was that when they were eventually integrated into Israeli life, they were disproportionately well represented in the lower socioeconomic strata and outside the political structure. For their part, many Ashkenazic Israelis looked down on the new Mizrahi/Sephardic immigrants as primitive and apt to cause the “Levantinization”—the Middle Easternization—of the European nature of the country via their high birth rate and Arab-like cultural attributes.

The founders of the Black Panthers in Israel tapped into the discontent felt by the Mizrahi/Sephardic population and decided to use confrontational tactics, just as American blacks were doing, to confront a power structure that they believed excluded them. Most of the group’s founders were Moroccan immigrants: Shalom “Charlie” Biton, Robert “Re’uven” Abergil, and Sa‘adiya Marciano. Another, Kokhavi Shemesh, was born in Iraq. The fountainhead of the new movement was the Musrara District of West Jerusalem, also called the Morasha District in Hebrew. Just north of the Old City, it was formerly a middle-class Palestinian neighborhood that, after the 1948 war and the depopulation of its Arab inhabitants, abutted the cease-fire line with Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem from 1948 until 1967. During this time, several hundred Mizrahi/Sephardic families (mostly Moroccan, with some Iraqis) were settled there in homes abandoned by Palestinian refugees.

The Israeli Black Panthers clearly were aware that they were borrowing a name—as well as an image, a vocabulary, and an attitude—from the American Black Panther Party. As early as January of 1971, they had used the name in press interviews when referring to their new movement: “We will be the Black Panthers of the State of Israel.”2 In fact, the young activists seemed to revel in the ominous connections that the name Black Panthers seemed to evoke among Ashkenazic Israelis. Kokhavi Shemesh had this to say about the name: “We hunted around for a name which would attract attention, which would help to get our problem into the headlines. Since a black group with the same name had arisen in the United States, and since Israel’s propaganda had claimed that its members were the enemies of Israel and since most of Israel’s foreign capital comes from the United States we chose the name ‘Black Panthers’ in order to give a jolt to Jews both here and abroad.”³ Shemesh also claimed that the idea first came to them after a statement made by a member of the Jerusalem municipality: “We have no connection with them [Black Panther Party in America]. But the name caused a stir, and that is what we wanted. It came about purely by chance, when Mrs. Miyuhas, a member of the Jerusalem Municipality, made a statement on youth organizations in Jerusalem in which she compared the youth to the Black Panthers in the United States. We jumped at the idea, and adopted the nickname applied to us by Mrs. Miyuhas.”⁴

There are other stories about how they came by the name Black Panthers. Some have to do with cross-fertilization from the Israeli anti-Zionist group known as Matzpen. According to one story, a Matzpen activist named Shimshon once spent a night in jail in the Moscobiya police complex in West Jerusalem with Sa‘adiya Marciano and Charlie Biton, before the Israeli Black Panthers had been formed. Supposedly, the man regaled his two fellow prisoners with tales of the Black Panthers in America, after which they decided to use that same name when they later formed their organization.5 Another alleged Matzpen connection to the name Black Panthers stems from early 1971, when the Israeli police, through an informant, had begun monitoring the nucleus of activists that came to be called the Black Panthers. According to the informant, a Matzpen activist inspired a group of the soon-to-be Black Panthers with stories he told about the exploits of the Black Panther Party in the United States.⁶

For all the eventual publicity surrounding the Black Panthers in Israel taking the name and the crouched panther symbol from the American Black Panther Party, did they actually have any contact with Americans connected with the BPP? An oft-circulated story claims that black American activist Angela Davis met with the group while visiting Israel in 1971, after which they decided to use the name Black Panthers. Davis, however, did not visit Israel in 1971, so the story is not true. Later that year, in October of 1971, a delegation of Israeli Black Panthers, including Charlie Biton, did in fact meet with some of their American namesakes at a Marxist conference in Florence, Italy.

One American who definitely did have contact with the Panthers in Israel, and who was quite important in their development, was not African American but rather a Jewish veteran of civil rights struggles named Naomi Kies. Kies received a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, after first visiting Israel in 1965 to conduct research, immigrated permanently in 1967. Thereafter she taught sociology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Kies became a close adviser to the Israeli Black Panthers starting in March of 1971—once they learned to trust her as an Ashkenazic Jew—as a result of her research on social conditions in Jerusalem. She was one of several people who worked with them as they cultivated the media and sought to broadcast their message, and she even allowed them to use her home as their base of operations when their headquarters burned down. Kies also helped arrange a tour of the United States that the Panthers announced in July of 1971, although the trip never materialized.⁷

The Black Panthers immediately raised the hackles of the Israeli political establishment, dominated as it was by Ashkenazic Jews like Prime Minister Meir. Meir’s government refused their application for a permit for their demonstration and took several of them into preventative custody in an attempt to stop it from happening. On May 19, 1971, when discussing a violent demonstration that had been staged by the Black Panthers in Jerusalem a day earlier, a politician told Meir at a press conference that he had met some of the Panthers and that they were “nice guys.” Meir famously retorted, “They are not nice guys” if they threw Molotov cocktails at the police.8

The Israeli press regularly reported on the New Left and Black Power movements, as well as the American Jewish reaction to both movements. In June of 1971 the newspaper Yediot Aharonot described the Black Panther Party in the United States as “an extreme organization, with an anti-Semitic character, that has strong ties with Arab terror organizations and preaches armed revolution in the U.S. to undermine the current regime which it deems rotten.”⁹ The fact that the Israeli Panthers took the name of a militant black American group widely known and reviled in Israel for its anti-Israeli stances only added to their dangerous mystique. So did their deliberate appropriation of Malcolm X’s famous phrase “by any means necessary.”¹⁰

The direct connection between the Black Panther Party and the Black Panthers in Israel offers an instructive example of the impact of the transnationalism of the “Global 1960s.” By borrowing directly the name of their American namesakes, as well as the tactics and discourse both of the Black Power movement and the New Left in the United States, which they learned in part from American immigrants, the Israeli Panthers show the degree to which a symbiotic relationship existed between the new attitudes of American and Israeli young people when it came to matters both of ethnicity and of the Arab-Israeli conflict. American Jews long had been deeply connected with their Israeli counterparts. Yet here was a case where Israeli Jews in turn were identifying with American blacks, not American Jews.¹¹ They shared the same idiom of dispossession: “The Blacks are being screwed,” “white power,” “masters and slaves,” “police state,” “brothers,” “equality of rights,” and others.¹²

Beyond their rough-and-tumble style and rhetoric, and their drawing public attention to distinctive Mizrahi/Sephardic grievances in defiance of the conventional wisdom that Israeli Jews constituted one people, the Panthers also were perceived as radical because they proposed allying themselves with Palestinians in creating a revolutionary new society. In April of 1972 Shemesh and some other Panthers spoke at a gathering near Bet She’an, in northern Israel. They articulated the Panthers’ vision of a new society built in cooperation with the Palestinians: “We intend to initiate in this country a social revolution, build a new society of which there is still no example anywhere in the world: leftist, but not like the USSR or China; something like the kibbutz, but not exactly. We shall establish a 100 percent egalitarian society. We must reach a situation in which we shall fight together with the ‘fucking’ Arabs against the establishment. We are the only one who can constitute a bridge of peace with the Arabs in context of a struggle against the establishment.” Clearly the American Black Panthers were not the only ones who felt akin to the Palestinians’ concerns; “black” Israelis did, too.13

The Panthers went a step further than their American counterparts in identifying with the Palestinians. Whereas Black Power advocates in America had supported the Palestinians as kindred people of color fighting against imperialism, the Panthers in Israel actually believed that Mizrahi/Sephardic Jews and Palestinians were culturally part of the same people. All that separated them was religion; other than that, the Panthers argued, they and Palestinians both shared a common Middle Eastern/North African cultural heritage. And as indigenous Middle Eastern peoples, both Jews from Arab and Islamic countries and Palestinians experienced the same discrimination from an Israeli establishment dominated by Ashkenazic Jews and Ashkenazic culture and values. Shemesh once wrote: “Ever since I came to consciousness people have tried to convince me that there is a big difference between me and the Arabs, that is, they have tried to instil [sic] into me that Jews are better than Arabs and that we, the Jews, are a chosen people. . . . Reality shows, at least to me, that there is no difference between the Arabs and me. The only difference is in the religious origins.”¹⁴ From their name to their tactics, the experience of the Israeli Black Panthers reveals a deep connection with and influence of the Black Panther Party in the United States and the wider Black Power movement’s attempt to change ethnic relations in America. Like the Newton faction of the Black Panther Party, elements of the Israeli Black Panthers eventually moved in the direction of conventional politics in the 1970s, even running as candidates for election to the Knesset. Hearing about the militant stances of the American Panthers and even being guided by Americans like Naomi Kies, the Israeli Black Panthers offer a tangible example of how the experience in the United States affected Israeli politics and society in a profound way during the Global 1960s.

ARAB SUPPORT FOR BLACK LIBERATION

On May 16, 1967, amid the tension in the Middle East that ultimately led to the June war, a pro-Arab rally was held in Sproul Plaza, the center of student political life on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. A leaflet entitled “Zionism, Western Imperialism, and the Liberation of Palestine” was distributed that in all likelihood was the work of Arab students at Berkeley. Clearly trying to connect the Arab-Israeli conflict with the black freedom struggle, it stated that “the Zionist settler-state was founded on an exclusivist racial basis” and that this racial discrimination continued to be practiced on the Palestinian citizens who remained in Israel after 1948. Although Zionism constituted a type of apartheid, the broadsheet claimed, it did not generate the same degree of negative criticism in the West as did the white minority states in Rhodesia and South Africa. Furthermore, it noted, Israel acted as a tool for imperialism in the Middle East.15 Two weeks later, and across the country, blacks and Arabs made common cause when activists from SNCC took part in a pro-Arab demonstration staged on May 31 in front of the White House by the Organization of Arab Students (OAS).¹⁶

Three months later the OAS came out strongly in support of SNCC after the infamous newsletter controversy. The OAS held its sixteenth annual convention at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from August 28 to September 2, 1967, just a few short weeks after the newsletter brouhaha broke out. Among the resolutions adopted at the convention was one condemning the “character assassination” of SNCC for its criticism of Israel. It also included the “black people in the American ghettoes,” along with the Palestinians as a kindred people in need of liberation. OAS vice president Ali M. Baghdadi was quoted as saying: “As a civil rights organization they [SNCC] are being true to their principles when they condemn those who regard territorial integrity and freedom from terrorism as rights to be enjoyed by Western nationals, but not by African or Asian nations.”¹⁷ Like Israelis of color, Arabs were being influenced by American Black Power and were reciprocating black militants’ feelings of commonality and solidarity with them.

Black Power figures began capitalizing on this by meeting with Arab students and delivering orations at OAS gatherings. In August of 1968 Stokely Carmichael gave a speech titled “The Black American and Palestinian Revolutions” at the OAS convention in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He told the assembled students that black Americans would stand with the Arabs, both those in the United States and those in the Middle East: “We will work more closely with the Arab students wherever we can. Our eyes are now open. . . . We want to make it clear that we see the Arab world, not only as brothers, but also as our comrades-in-arms. . . . They [the American government] cannot stop us from going to the United Arab Republic [Egypt],” Carmichael added. “They cannot stop us from going to Syria. As long as you invite us we will come.”18

Palestinian information professionals in the United States also were keenly aware of the benefits of cultivating ties with the blacks. The Arab Information Office’s Randa Khalidi al-Fattal was one of them. Looking back decades later, al-Fattal noted: “I started one of the very first efforts to get to know black Americans. When [they] finally politicized their cause they looked around for allies, and I was one of the Arabs in America who felt that they may very well fall under Israeli influence. . . . It was then our duty to draw their attention—of the Black Panthers and other groups—to the fact that we had a very legitimate cause.”¹⁹

So much for Palestinians and other Arabs in the United States. What about Palestinians in the Middle East itself? The PLO occasionally tried to cultivate black support through the media, for example when its Palestine Research Center in Beirut produced a pamphlet in 1969 written by the American academic Richard Stevens that linked Zionism and South African apartheid. Stevens plainly stated the connection between American blacks and the Middle East: “And in the broader sense, the inter-relationship of Zionism, apartheid and Israel possess problems of fundamental morality which will be of greater concern to the Black American community not only as it ponders its relationship to the moral and political aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian Arab relations, but as it asserts its concern for the well-being of the disenfranchised Black minority of South Africa.”²⁰

PLO chair Yasir Arafat personally extended solidarity messages to black Americans on occasion. So did other Palestinian militants. In 1970 Welsh journalist Colin Edwards asked famed Palestinian airplane hijacker from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Leila Khaled, about the black freedom struggle in America. “If you were now talking to the black revolutionaries in America, the Black Panther Party,” Welsh asked her, “what would you say to them?” Khaled responded: “I’m with those people because they are defending their rights as human beings and the worst thing you or anyone can face is when you are not treated like a human being. And I’m with them in their revolution against what is called a democratic government in the US. It’s not at all a democratic government. So those people, I hope they can have their rights and they can’t have their rights except by force. That is the motto of this century because force is the only way they can be heard.”21

Black Power supporter Yuri Kochiyama summed up the reciprocal feelings of solidarity and mutual struggle between African Americans and Palestinians when she recalled one small example of how Americans of color left a symbolic impact on Palestinian guerrillas and activists in the 1960s. She was quite familiar with the Black Power movement, even though she herself was not black. Born to Japanese immigrants in California, Kochiyama and her family were interned in a prison camp during the Second World War, as were other Japanese Americans. She married and moved with her husband to Harlem in 1960, where Kochiyama became friends with Malcolm X—she held him in her arms as he died—and went on to be an activist in the black freedom movement and a number of other causes. Kochiyama once recalled that some of the Palestinian activists who came to the United States in the late 1960s related to her that Palestinian guerrillas sometimes used code names like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Black Panther.²² Black Power had indeed spread to the Middle East.

SOLIDARITY TRIPS

On March 4, 1974, one of the most famous American athletes in the world gave a press conference in Beirut, Lebanon, at which he said, “America is the headquarters of Zionism and imperialism.”²³ The man later visited two Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon, much as his friend and mentor Malcolm X had done ten years earlier when he was in Gaza. Palestinian fighters in the camps fired their guns in the air in welcome, and the visiting American told the crowds, “In my name, and in the name of all Muslims in America, I declare support for the Palestinian struggle to liberate their homeland and oust the Zionist invaders.”24 The man? The world-famous heavyweight boxer, Muhammad Ali. How is it that the man Sports Illustrated magazine declared the “Sportsman of the Century” in 1999 found time amid his busy schedule to visit Palestinian refugees and offer his support for their cause?

Muhammad Ali has been described as the most famous Muslim on Earth in the 1960s, a highly visible black American well known to the peoples of the Third World.²⁵ Yet his action in support of the Palestinians is largely forgotten today. The famously loud and opinionated young boxer became the Olympic heavyweight boxing champion in 1960 and the world heavyweight professional champion four years later. He hobnobbed with celebrities from the Beatles on down, but significantly, the young athlete also became close friends with Malcolm X. What garnered Cassius Clay significant, often negative, attention was the fact that the day after he earned the world heavyweight title in February of 1964, he announced his conversion into the Nation of Islam and his new name: Muhammad Ali. He traveled to Egypt several months later, in June of 1964, as part of a tour of Africa, met President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and prayed at the medieval Husayn Mosque in Cairo.

Ali’s conversion and name change were treated with derision by a confused white public. He became even more controversial three years later when he refused to be inducted into the army in April of 1967. Ali stated that his religious beliefs prohibited him from doing so. After his conviction of draft evasion and his expulsion from the world of professional boxing, Ali was out of the ring until 1971. Soon thereafter, he made the Islamic pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca in Saudi Arabia in January of 1972.

Two years later, Ali again traveled to the Middle East. After arriving in Lebanon on March 2, 1974, he met with Prime Minister Taqi al-Din al-Sulh and other notables, visited the al-Maqasid Hospital, and held a press conference. Yet he departed from such customary events on March 5 by taking some unusual steps. He began the day with an early morning exercise run in Beirut in the company of several US Marine Corps embassy guards. Ali then traveled to southern Lebanon, where he toured the al-Ayn al-Hilwa and Mi’a wa Mi’a refugee camps while escorted by uniformed Palestine Liberation Army soldiers sporting maroon berets. Fighters fired bursts of automatic weapons in celebratory welcome, after which he spent more than an hour visiting the camps and signing autographs. While there, Ali hailed the Palestinians’ “great fighting spirit.”26

Lesser-known black Americans who sympathized with the Palestinian cause visited the Middle East in the early 1970s, as well. One was the activist Paul B. Boutelle.²⁷ Boutelle was contacted by Randa Khalidi al-Fattal of the Arab Information Center in New York and asked if he would be interested in traveling to the Arab Middle East as part of a delegation of black American activists. Three years earlier she had escorted Stokely Carmichael during his September 1967 trip to Syria. Boutelle and about ten other men and women ended up traveling to Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan in August of 1970.²⁸ With al-Fattal as a guide, the Americans visited Palestinians in their homes, refugee camps, and guerrilla training camps.²⁹

In Amman, Jordan, the group achieved a diplomatic coup of sorts by attending the meeting of the Palestine National Council, the PLO’s highest decision-making body, which took place August 27–29, 1970. While at the meeting the group even met with Arafat; a picture of Boutelle and the others shaking hands with a smiling Arafat, wearing his trademark kefiyya headdress and dark sunglasses, graced the cover of al-Fateh, the official newspaper of Arafat’s al-Fateh organization. That same issue of the paper ran a quotation from a member of the group, who was described as a “representative of the movement for the liberation of blacks.” The person expressed support for the Palestinians’ struggle, stating, “It is better to die as men than die as slaves. . . . Our revolution is exactly like the Palestinian revolution, and it is a drop of blood, a drop of sweat, and a drop of ink that will accept nothing except the liberation of every one.”³⁰

A fascinating follow-up to the visit involving an African American friend of Boutelle’s occurred just a few days after the group returned to the United States. On September 7, 1970, the PFLP hijacked two airliners and diverted them and their passengers to Dawson Field, a deserted Second World War–era airfield in the Jordanian desert that PFLP militants renamed Revolution Field. Two days later, a PFLP sympathizer diverted a third airliner to the field, as well. Barbara Mensch, a young Jewish American from Scarsdale, New York, who had turned sixteen a mere thirty days before the hijacking, was among the hostages being held by the PFLP at the airfield. She had been returning to the United States from Israel, where she had spent the summer living on a kibbutz. Her father was Martin Mensch, a lawyer working in the New York City law firm of Fleischer, Dornbusch, Mensch, and Mandelstam. Worried about his daughter, Mensch approached one of his associates at the firm, a young black attorney named Robert Van Lierop, for help inasmuch as he knew that Van Lierop was sympathetic to the Palestinians.

Mensch asked Van Lierop if he could use his contacts to arrange for a message to be delivered to his captive daughter in Jordan. Knowing that Boutelle had just returned from meeting with Palestinians in Jordan, Van Lierop contacted his friend and asked for assistance. The young lawyer soon was on the telephone with none other than Bassam Abu Sharif, the PFLP’s spokesperson on the ground at Dawson Field. After asking Abu Sharif to deliver a message from the girl’s father, Abu Sharif reportedly told Van Lierop that the PFLP was offering to release her instead as a gesture of solidarity with the black American fugitive, Angela Davis, and other blacks in the United States, and to challenge the American government to drop all charges against Davis. Martin Mensch was thrilled and agreed to travel to Jordan to pick up his daughter.

Accompanied by Van Lierop, Mensch was soon on a plane flying to Jordan to arrange for his daughter’s release or offer himself as a hostage in her place. The two Americans finally arrived in Amman via Beirut on September 15, 1970, and quickly met with Abu Sharif and others from the PFLP at the Intercontinental Hotel in Amman. By that time the PFLP had moved the hostages and blown up the three empty aircraft because, they told the crestfallen Mensch, the Jordanian army was preparing to move against the Palestinians, and the PFLP wanted to move them to safer locations. Indeed, the following day, King Hussein of Jordan ordered his army on the offensive and attacked PFLP and other Palestinian armed forces in the country—putting an end to talk of Barbara Mensch’s quick release.

The fierce fighting, known as Black September, lasted several days, trapping Mensch and Van Lierop in the Jordanian capital. Eventually, both men managed to survive the ordeal and arrive back in the United States safely on September 22. The PFLP released Barbara Mensch and the other remaining hostages five days later, after which they were flown home via Cyprus. Mensch’s young daughter returned from her lengthy stay in the Middle East with a new and different understanding of the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict. She told the press after her release that the PFLP hijackers had taken good care of them, even providing kosher food to one Jewish hostage. More remarkably, considering her ordeal, she also said, “I must say I’m more sympathetic now that I’ve seen how they [Palestinians] live in the refugee camps.”31

The travels to Arab countries undertaken in the 1960s by political figures like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Eldridge Cleaver were being replicated in the early 1970s by famous black athletes and more ordinary activists alike, who visited Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, attended PLO congresses in Jordan, and even met with PLO leaders. Such encounters reinforced the cross-cultural connections present in the Global 1960s and reinforced a visceral sense of solidarity and shared destiny between blacks and Palestinians that was essential to the formulation of a new black identity. The shared identity of blacks and Arabs championed by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth was deepening.

THE MYTH OF THE PLO TRAINING BLACK MILITANTS

On May 14, 1970, the FBI wrote a report for President Richard M. Nixon claiming that members of the Black Panther Party might be traveling to the Middle East to receive training at the hands of al-Fateh guerrillas. By August of 1970 the New York Times was reporting on BPP members in Jordan. Both the FBI and the CIA began looking into the reports. Could the worst nightmares of Nixon’s paranoid administration turn out to be a reality? Were domestic blacks receiving training or other material support from Palestinian groups? The meteoric rise in global prominence of the Palestinian guerrilla movement after the 1967 war did lead to some American blacks visiting the Middle East. But were they returning with more than just a firsthand perspective on the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict? Was their pro-Palestinianism extending into actual military training at the hands of Palestinian guerrillas?

The story began in the spring of 1969, when reports began circulating in Washington that al-Fateh agents in the United States were trying to recruit Americans. In response to an inquiry Assistant Attorney General J. Walter Yeagley informed Representative J. Herbert Burke (R-FL) on May 6, 1969, that the FBI would investigate such reports and that the Department of Justice would deport any foreign students involved in illegal activities of this sort.³² More stories and reports surfaced in 1969 about al-Fateh recruiting Western radicals to attend a type of course in Jordan that summer. The August 18, 1969, issue of Newsweek carried a story that 140 students, mostly European but allegedly including four Americans, attended a five-week al-Fateh course in Amman, Jordan, the month before.33

The press was not the only group to believe the story: the FBI wrote in a classified June 1970 report that it believed that “representatives of black extremist and domestic subversive groups” would “probably be invited to camps in the Middle East for guerrilla and political training.”³⁴ The CIA also believed that al-Fateh had been inviting groups of Americans and Europeans “to participate in training and indoctrination courses in the summers of 1968 through 1970.”³⁵ The FBI also claimed that at least one American was recruited successfully to work with al-Fateh against Israeli interests about that time.³⁶

The FBI continued to look into reports of recruitment. The bureau claimed that al-Fateh agents attended an Arab conference in Montreal that was attended by some American students in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and discussed the formation of some kind of “international brigade” of Americans and Europeans who would go and fight in Jordan in the summer of 1970.³⁷ This latter report may have referred to a March 11, 1970, teach-in in Montreal that was part of the Mobilization for Palestine organized by the Québecois Palestine Solidarity Committee and various Arab student groups. Some Americans, including high-ranking BPP official Raymond “Masai” Hewitt and other Panthers, attended the gathering.³⁸

The arrival of Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria in mid-1969 helped set in motion the rumor of a particular connection between Palestinians and the BPP. Cleaver’s close ties to al-Fateh personnel in Algeria, particularly an official who went by the nom de guerre Abu Basim, gave rise to stories about Black Panthers undergoing training by al-Fateh. On January 30, 1970, CBS news correspondent Richard C. Hottelet reported from Algiers that Abu Basim had told him that he had spent two months in the United States and Canada in 1969 and had studied the BPP. He claimed he wrote a report to his al-Fateh superiors urging that they support the Panthers, including with training. Hottelet also reported that Cleaver was going to travel to Jordan in mid-February of 1970 and spend two to three weeks as a guest of Yasir Arafat. The FBI picked up on the story, although the bureau cautioned that an al-Fateh spokesman in Amman denied the allegation. The New York Times then reported in August 1970 that “well-placed Palestinians” said that “some Panthers” already had been trained by al-Fateh in Jordan during the previous year.³⁹

Despite the rumors and reports, the above-cited FBI report of June 1970 discounted the possibility that al-Fateh actually had trained BPP members at that point. The report had this to say about the subject: “There is no information which would indicate that the Fedayeen have given military training to black militants in the past. On the contrary, the United States Department of State during February, 1970, advised that the American Embassy, Beirut, has no information that BPP members have visited Fedayeen camps to receive military training. According to the State Department, American newspapers have made inquiries on this point in the Middle East and uncovered no evidence of BPP training by the fedayeen [sic].” The same FBI document stated that although no evidence existed showing that Black Panthers had been trained by al-Fateh, the bureau had found indications that Panthers and Palestinians had at least discussed the issue. The report stated that the New Haven, Connecticut, chapter of the BPP discussed the possibility of sending two members to the Middle East to be trained by al-Fateh. The two would then return to the United States to set up training camps.40 A former CIA official who worked in the MH/CHAOS Program and who was responsible for monitoring the BPP claimed years later that the al-Fateh did agree to train BPP members in 1970.⁴¹

That same June 1970 FBI report also stated that two male employees of the Arab Information Center, along with the wife of a Syrian diplomat—no doubt a reference to Randa Khalidi al-Fattal—posted to the United Nations in New York asked a BPP member on April 30, 1970, if he was interested in attending a “revolutionary school” in Egypt starting in late June of that year.⁴² It was this report that the FBI passed on to President Nixon two weeks later in its May 14, 1970, report. That report went further, stating that the training would last two weeks and that the BPP member would then return to the United States and establish similar schools at home.⁴³

That same FBI report added to the confusion by discounting some other suspicions about the Black Panthers. First, it noted that the FBI had not found any indication that the Panthers were involved with violent actions inside the United States on behalf of Palestinians: “While there is no question that black extremists in this country politically support the Arab position in the Middle East, there has been no evidence that they have carried out any violence to underscore their support for the Arabs.” Second, the FBI possessed no “information which would indicate that the BPP is being financed by Middle Eastern sources.” The document did, however, hold out the possibility that Palestinian guerrillas might someday invite Americans to train in the Middle East as activism against the war in Vietnam receded and as more “establishment” figures supported Israel. As noted above, it stated that “representatives of black extremist and domestic subversive groups will continue contacts with and support of Fedayeen and members of both groups will probably be invited to camps in the Middle East for guerrilla and political training.”44

Reports surfaced again in August of 1970, two months after that FBI report was written, indicating that the Panthers might indeed be in the Middle East—in Jordan. The New York Times ran a story on August 27, based in part on an article that appeared in the Palestinian guerrilla newspaper al-Fateh, reporting that several Black Panthers arrived in Jordan on August 22 to attend a meeting of the Palestine National Council, the legislative body of the PLO. The group of Americans allegedly included a woman and came to Jordan overland from Syria. The Times story quoted one of the “Panthers” who arrived in Jordan: “There is a large similarity between the status of the Palestinian people and the status of blacks. The Palestinian people represent the vanguard of the peoples in the Middle East area in the conflict with imperialism and racism.” The Times based its story on another Arab source as well: Baghdad Radio. Iraqi radio apparently reported something similar: that early in the week of August 23, some Panthers arrived in Jordan who were committed to waging a “people’s war of liberation” in the United States, much like the Palestinians were doing in the Middle East.⁴⁵

Based on what it had heard several months earlier about Panthers attending a “revolutionary school” in the Middle East, the FBI believed these new press reports. An FBI document written four years later mentions what appears to be the same story as reported by the Times: six “American black extremists” traveled to the Middle East with a representative of al-Fateh in August 1970 to receive firearms and explosives training. The group supposedly met Arafat and was urged to conduct propaganda upon returning to the United States.⁴⁶ Some people even said that Stokely Carmichael was among them.

So what really did happen in the summer of 1970? Did a delegation of Black Panthers travel to the Middle East for training? No. The facts are that several black Americans did arrive in Jordan in August of 1970. They did attend the Palestine National Council Meeting from August 27 to August 29, and they did meet with Arafat. They were not, however, a delegation of visiting Black Panthers but rather Paul Boutelle and the group of black Americans that was being shown around the region by the Arab Information Center’s Randa Khalidi al-Fattal. The details of this trip match almost identically with the shadowy reports of “Black Panthers” in Amman at the same time. Adding to the confusion was the fact that the Jordanian press mistakenly reported that the Americans were a delegation from the Black Panthers. This mischaracterization appeared in the Jordanian daily newspaper al-Difa‘ on August 27, 1970, which reported that the head of this alleged BPP delegation spoke at the Palestine National Council meeting and said that they preferred to “fight to the death as men rather than die as slaves.”

The Palestinian newspaper al-Fateh, which had been the basis of the New York Times’ erroneous report, had, in fact, reported correctly what actually transpired: a delegation from the “movement for the liberation of blacks” in the United States—Boutelle and his colleagues—attended the Palestine National Council meeting that met in Amman, Jordan, August 27–29, 1970. The words about dying like men rather than slaves also appeared in the August 29 edition of al-Fateh and also included a photo of the delegation shaking hands with Arafat. In fact, al-Fateh made it abundantly clear that these American visitors were not Black Panthers when its August 30 issue carried the text of a telegram sent to the meeting by the actual Black Panther Party specifically stating that the BPP regretted that it was not able to send delegates to attend the meeting in person.47

Al-Fattal, who had arranged Boutelle’s trip, commented years later on the American government’s suspicions about her real intentions and how those suspicions followed her for a long time thereafter. In a 2013 interview she noted: “The Americans chose not to see it as an innocent invitation. They saw it as an effort by me to train them in warfare. . . . They made me persona non grata in America for quite some time, though I was the wife of a diplomat. . . . Eventually he became an ambassador and there was a big issue about that. But I’m very proud of it, because I really felt that I could at least draw their attention to our cause.”⁴⁸

The exaggerated “Panthers in Jordan” reports were false. The FBI, the New York Times, and others mistook Boutelle and his colleagues for Black Panthers. Regardless of the real circumstances, the confusion at the time was genuine, and by the end of 1970 the FBI had decided that it now had proof of some kind of Palestinian-BPP connection. The venerable director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, issued a statement several months later on November 11, 1970, in which he indicated that the Black Panther Party was being supported by terrorist organizations. The FBI continued to monitor alleged Panther-Palestinian ties thereafter. In February of 1972 the bureau claimed that the faction of the BPP loyal to Eldridge Cleaver was trying to obtain weapons and ammunition for two or three al-Fateh operatives in the United States who were planning to attack an American airport somewhere in the eastern part of the country.49

The FBI’s great rival, the CIA, correctly dismissed the possibility that Palestinian fighters were training Black Panthers. A massive May 1973 CIA report written by the agency’s director of security, Howard J. Osborn—a report that famously became known as the CIA’s “Family Jewels”—revealed that the agency had examined the FBI’s evidence in 1970 and concluded that no such training ever took place. On December 10, 1970, the CIA’s deputy director of intelligence read press reports of Hoover’s earlier November 11 statement about terrorist support for the Black Panthers. In the words of the May 1973 CIA document, which was part of the famous “Family Jewels”: “He said that we have examined the FBI’s related files and our own data and find no indication of any relationship between the fedayeen [sic] and the Black Panthers. He provided the Director with a memorandum on this topic.”⁵⁰

The discourse of global black revolution against the powers-that-be found receptive audiences among those most directly affected by the Arab-Israeli conflict: Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Moreover, African Americans were in direct contact with Israelis and Palestinians both in the Middle East and at home. Black Power’s connection to the conflict in the Middle East thus played itself out in more than just domestic African American politics, highlighting the fact that Black Power internationalism was deeply embedded in the Global 1960s and that transnational links stretched far and wide during that turbulent period.