CHAPTER 9

A SEAT AT THE TABLE

Bayard Rustin, Andrew Young, and Black Foreign Policy

WHEN BAYARD RUSTIN and his solidly pro-Israeli colleagues Roy Wilkins and A. Philip Randolph decided in 1975 that they needed once again to promote unlimited United States assistance to Israel, they decided to form a new black group to drum up support. Rustin wrote a “statement of principles” for the organization laying out their case. The document began by noting that the struggle of American blacks for racial equality had long been guided by a commitment to democracy, opposition to all forms of discrimination, and that the denial of equal rights to any minority threatened not only all minorities but democracy itself. It then articulated seven main points concerning Jews and the Arab-Israeli conflict and its impact on America. One asserted that Jews and blacks “have common interests in democracy and justice.” These common interests were much stronger than any differences they may have. Indeed, the statement opined, “Jews . . . have been among the most staunch allies in the struggle for racial justice.” Two other points attacked the Arab world. One of them denounced the Arab League’s boycott of Israel and blacklist of persons and companies doing business in or on behalf of Israel. The other claimed that “Arab oil policies have had disastrous effects upon blacks in America and in Africa.”1

Turning to Israel, the Statement of Principles upheld the Jewish state’s right to exist and praised Israel for “her impressive social achievements.” As for the Palestinians, Rustin and Randolph once again expressed “compassion” toward the refugees but anger at the Arab states for not resettling them. It continued: “We support the rights of the Palestinians to genuine self-determination,” but without saying the words independent state, without saying where that self-determination would take place, or what genuine meant. Also, Palestinian self-determination could not come “at the expense of the rights of Jews to independence and statehood, and not at the command of economic blackmailers [a reference to the Arab oil boycott] or of terrorists [presumably, the PLO] who would force their own ‘solution’ at the point of a gun.” The statement further denounced what it called “the so-called Palestinian Liberation Organization” by calling it an unelected, terrorist group. “Israel has consistently demonstrated the desire to make concessions in the interest of peace with her Arab neighbors,” the statement opined, but not where concessions would threaten its very existence. The Arabs, by contrast, refuse to “accept the legitimacy of the state of Israel.”2 It was vintage Bayard Rustin.

RUSTIN REDUX

The mid-to-late 1970s witnessed Rustin working harder than ever to articulate his belief that blacks and Jews in the United States must work together and support one another’s causes rather than focusing inward, engaging in the narrow politics of identity, and sinking into ethnic particularism. He believed in coalition politics and political action within the American system. In terms of his efforts among blacks, this meant embracing and promoting causes near and dear to Jewish Americans. Rustin believed this was good for blacks, good for Jews, and good for America.

Rustin also thought that support for Israel was good for American foreign policy. His vision of what was good for US interests overseas was becoming more and more right-wing. His views mirrored those of the Social Democrats USA, the political party he had chaired since 1972 that was moving further and further away from its left-wing origins and toward neoconservatism.³ Rustin’s championing of democracy and demonizing of the Soviet Union and its allies increased throughout the decade and led him to help establish the right-wing Committee on the Present Danger in 1976.

This hawkish foreign policy vision dovetailed perfectly with Rustin’s robustly pro-Israeli sentiments. His faith in Israeli democracy knew no bounds, nor did his antipathy for Arab governments and the PLO. To him, they merely used Israel as an excuse to divert the Arab masses’ attention away from more pressing problems. “Marx once said,” Rustin wrote, “that religion is the opiate of the masses. In the Middle East, Israel is the opiate of the Arabs.”4 The Israel resolution adopted by the National Black Political Convention in March of 1972 furthered his desire to combat Black Power support for the Arabs and criticism of Israel and to generate a more pro-Israeli black body politic. The Gary resolution troubled him because of the “misrepresentations and distortions which enabled a conference of black people to even consider such a proposal.”⁵ He set out developing arguments designed to sway blacks away from residual Black Power sentiments and to start thinking positively about Israel.

By 1972 Rustin was using several familiar arguments—familiar in the sense that some Jewish critics of Black Power were using them also—when arguing why blacks should turn their backs on the condemnation of Israel first articulated by black militants in the late 1960s. These arguments were designed both to smear the Arab world and contradict the idea that the Arabs were fellow people of color fighting in the same progressive struggle as American blacks. For example, Rustin wanted black audiences to see through the “myth of Arab-African brotherhood.” He touched on the raw nerve of slavery, claiming that Jews had never been slave traders while Arabs had. Second, he argued that the Arab states were not sending aid and technicians to black African countries like Israel was. Third, he claimed that Arab countries were helping to oppress black Africans: the Sudan persecuted blacks in the country’s south, he opined, and Egypt supported Nigeria during the bloody Biafran secession and civil war. Finally, he scorned the notion that Arab and Palestinian society constituted a “revolutionary vanguard.” In contradistinction to all this Rustin touted Israel as a progressive democracy.⁶

Rustin did feel some human if not political compassion for the Palestinian people. The refugees were individuals who were suffering from “severe” problems, he wrote in 1974, and he “deplore[d] the continued plight of the Palestinian refugees.” He believed, however, that it was the Arab regimes that were perpetuating the refugee problem by refusing to resettle them with their respective territories. Never mind that the refugees themselves overwhelmingly rejected resettlement and demanded their right to return to Israel or that Israel categorically had refused to repatriate the refugees. For Rustin it was the Arab states, not Israel, who were primarily responsible for the plight of the refugees.7 A month after Arafat addressed the United Nations General Assembly in November of 1974, Rustin was arguing that the Palestinians deserved “self-determination”—he steadfastly avoided the words independent state—because the PLO’s official vision of a secular, democratic state in all of historic Palestine would spell the end of Israel as a Jewish state: “I believe that the Palestinian people have the right to a homeland, to self-determination, to the resolution of their state of uncertainty,” Rustin wrote. Just where this “self-determination” would be exercised, he did not say.⁸

The Black Power movement continued to earn Rustin’s condemnation in the 1970s for its stances on Israel. In a draft text titled “Israel: A Beleaguered Bastion of Democracy and Socialism,” which he wrote sometime soon after his pro-Israeli advertisement appeared in the New York Times, Rustin claimed that many Americans, black and white, were surprised by his 1970 statement because they had been seduced by Black Power advocates into thinking that “the majority of black Americans were opposed to Israel’s existence.” His advertisement proved the opposite, he argued. Why had all those black American leaders lent their names to it? It was because it “represented an expression of solidarity with the progressive ideals and values which a nation like Israel represents.” As he turned rightward—perhaps not so coincidentally as many whites were as well—Rustin was fighting his war over identity not with Black Power advocates themselves but by presenting his alternative vision of blacks and Jews defying ethnic particularism by working together for the good of Israel and American foreign policy.

In early 1975 Rustin once again thought that he needed to harness his energy and connections within the black mainstream in defense of Israel and in hopes of affecting American foreign policy. In late 1974 the PLO gained two important political victories when the Arab League recognized it as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people” and when the United Nations invited Arafat to address the General Assembly. Just four years after its mauling by Jordanian forces during the Black September fighting, the PLO had a new lease on life politically, if not militarily. Equally bad for Rustin, US-Israeli relations were once again testy, even in crisis by the spring of 1975. Another Republican administration, that of President Gerald R. Ford, was pressuring Israel hard to make diplomatic concessions in the hopes that the United States could broker a second interim agreement between Egypt and Israel following the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war. The Ford administration was angry with Israel’s refusal to go along with American plans and decided in March of 1975 to undertake a “reassessment” of relations with Israel. As part of this reassessment the government once again held up Israel’s request to acquire top-of-the-line American aircraft. Israel and American Jewish organizations went on a public relations offensive much as they had in 1970.

Rustin decided to act by forming an organization that would assist in pressuring the Ford administration. He called it the Black Americans to Support Israel Committee (BASIC). The month that the administration spoke of a “reassessment” of United States policy toward Israel and then held up the aircraft to the Jewish state, Rustin met with a group of Jewish friends. They included, among others, Irwin Suall of the Anti-Defamation League, Rabbi Balfour Brickner, and the Jewish Labor Committee’s Emanuel Muravchik. The men discussed whom in the black community they could invite to join.9 Rustin then joined with the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins and A. Philip Randolph to draw up a BASIC “Statement of Principles” that was shown to a number of prominent blacks in the spring of 1975.

Seventeen people endorsed the BASIC Statement of Principles at first, including three congressional representatives, some labor union officials, and others. By June of 1975, fifty people, plus Randolph and Rustin, had agreed to sponsor BASIC. Twenty of these had signed Rustin’s advertisement five years earlier, in 1970. Among the new names were writer Ralph Ellison, musician Lionel Hampton (who agreed to serve as BASIC’s treasurer), former CORE leader James Farmer, Representative Andrew Young, and Professor Pauli Murray, the civil rights activist who cofounded the National Organization of Women in 1966.

On April 24, 1975, Rustin held a coming-out party for BASIC at the New York City home of Robert Gilmore, treasurer of the A. Philip Randolph Institute. Rustin announced the formation of BASIC and stated what its goals would be. Minorities seeking justice must support democracy, he said, and therefore we as blacks support Israel. He was quick to add, “Our support of Israel does not mean that we do not support self-determination for the Palestinians.” However, he continued, “we are not for the self-determination of the Palestinians if they are dedicated to the destruction of another people.” Randolph added, “It will be a crime for anyone, especially the Blacks of America, not to support the just cause of Israel.” Several prominent Israelis attended the reception, including the Israeli consul general in New York, David Rivlin; his subordinate, Yakov Levi; and the director general of the Israeli oil corporation Paz, Moshe Bitan.10

After spending the summer months building support, Rustin and several others held another press conference in New York on September 11, 1975, to announce the actual formation of BASIC. Flanking him were the aging Randolph, along with the dependably pro-Israel Roy Wilkins and New York City commissioner of human rights Eleanor Holmes Norton.¹¹ As he had done before, Rustin decided to publish an advertisement in the New York Times heralding the birth of the new group. Civil rights activist Arnold Aronson helped raise money. The advertisement, which cost $13,992, finally appeared in the November 23, 1975, edition of the New York Times.¹²

It repeated the “Statement of Principles” that Randolph, Rustin, and Wilkins had drawn up several months earlier and included a clip-out coupon that readers could use to send in donations or seek more information about BASIC. Besides listing the names of Randolph, Rustin, and Hampton, 214 other people signed the advertisement. They spanned the gamut of business leaders, labor leaders, clergymen, academics, politicians from all levels of government, attorneys, and the like. Civil rights figures included Ralph Abernathy, Daisy Bates, Julian Bond, Mrs. Medgar Evers, James Farmer, Ernest Green, Benjamin L. Hooks, Vernon E. Jordan Jr., Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King Sr., Floyd McKissick, Rosa Parks, Wyatt Tee Walker, Roy Wilkins, and Andrew Young. From the world of sports came Hank Aaron, Arthur Ashe, and Roy Campanella. Musician Count Basie and his wife, Catherine, and writer Ralph Ellison added their signatures. So did a host of mayors from large cities, like Los Angeles’s Tom Bradley and Atlanta’s Maynard Jackson. Twelve members of Congress lent their names, including Representative William L. Clay, who had complained after the last time Rustin included his name in a pro-Israel advertisement. Cultural figures Harry Belafonte and Mrs. Louis Armstrong also had joined BASIC by September, but their names were not printed on the advertisement in November.¹³

At least two leading figures in the black community were approached in the initial attempt to garner supporters in the spring of 1975 but refused to lend their names. One was Jesse Jackson, who had worked with Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and was a significant player on his own right on the national black political scene. Jackson apparently thought that the best way to work for Arab-Israeli peace was in a less stridently pro-Israeli manner. According to Harry Fleischman of the American Jewish Committee, “Rev. Jesse Jackson refused to sign because he insisted that he has a different approach to create Jewish-Arab reconciliation.” Another leader who declined to sign on to BASIC was John H. Johnson, publisher of Jet, Ebony, and Black World/Negro Digest, even though he had signed Rustin’s first advertisement back in 1970. Johnson said, in Fleischman’s words, that “he feared physical attack from the Black Muslims if he were to sign such a statement.”14

After the advertisement was published, Rustin fully intended to have BASIC continue functioning toward the realization of its goals. This time it would be different from 1970, when he had published a statement in major newspapers and essentially left it at that. Armed with a $12,000 loan from the A. Philip Randolph Institute, Rustin formally registered BASIC as a social welfare organization with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on September 9, 1975. On the “statement of purpose” section of the application to the IRS, BASIC listed seven such purposes for the group: foster better understanding of Israel as a democracy; sponsor exchange visits of American blacks and Israelis; publish literature; make speakers who can discuss Israel available to black audiences; work for improved understanding between Israel and black Africa; work for Middle East peace; and “counter anti-Israel propaganda which characterizes the Israeli people and their government as racist, fascist, imperialist, and the like.” This included, the application continued, “the widespread—and totally false—charge that Israel is an enemy of the emerging nations of Africa.”¹⁵

Rustin and BASIC soldiered on into the late 1970s. For its first two years of existence after the advertisement appeared, BASIC planned activities with two objectives in mind: building support for Israel among blacks and helping them to understand the Arab-Israeli conflict. BASIC held press conferences and sponsored joint black-Jewish receptions for visiting Israeli officials. It had blacks speak at Jewish conferences and even became involved in issues unrelated to Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict, such as participating in demonstrations on behalf of Soviet Jews. BASIC organized study trips to Israel for black leaders, such as the one it held in October of 1977, and gave a scholarship for a one-year study-abroad program starting in mid-1977 at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem to a third-year college student at St. Louis University, Sheila Lynch.16 Rustin spoke at an Israel bonds fund-raiser in Sacramento, California, in April of 1977 held to honor a black AFL-CIO trade union leader. He said, “We have an obligation to defend democracy and Israel is the only democracy left in the Middle East.”¹⁷

How successful were all of these efforts? That depended on how one viewed the situation. Two years into BASIC’s existence, Rustin had reason to believe that his efforts had been in vain. In 1977 BASIC estimated that only 14 percent of American blacks were pro-Israel, compared with 17 percent who were “Third World oriented” and a full 69 percent who were uncommitted.¹⁸ By that measure Rustin was losing his battle for black identity.

BASIC began experiencing other problems. One setback stemmed from the fact that it worked hard to convince members of its core constituency—blacks who were interested in democracy and justice in foreign affairs—that Israel was a progressive country kindly disposed toward black Africa. In April of 1976 South African prime minister John Vorster made this much more difficult by visiting Israel and meeting with Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. This meeting was tailor-made for Black Power advocates, who for years had railed at Israel’s ties with the apartheid regime in Pretoria. It now was becoming exceedingly difficult for pro-Israeli acolytes like Rustin to ignore such ties and claim that Israel cared about black Africa when the bête noire of Africa and African support groups in the United States was cozying even further up to Israel.

Even Rustin sensed the danger. On August 27, 1976, he wrote Arthur Hertzberg, president of the American Jewish Committee, to complain about this. In his letter Rustin expressed his “deep sense of concern and disturbance.” We in the black community, he wrote, support Israel for moral reasons and because Israel is a progressive, democratic society. Why, then, was Israel doing this?¹⁹ The private letter indicates that Rustin was suffering from a serious case of myopia and naiveté. Israeli ties with South Africa were nothing new, as he surely had to have known, and his own long experience in real politik and coalition building should have made him aware that Israel and South Africa needed each other in more ways than one.

Other regional changes presented Rustin and BASIC with challenges, as well. In May of 1977 Israel’s Labor Party failed to win the Knesset elections for the first time in Israel’s history. The new governing party was now the right-wing Likud Party, led by the firebrand hardliner on Arab-Israeli affairs Menachem Begin. Begin’s bellicose attitude toward the Arabs, his categorical refusal to contemplate withdrawing from any of the 1967 Occupied Territories, and his prickly attitude toward his detractors distressed some liberal American Jews. This complicated the formerly “united front” attitude of American Jews and Jewish organizations, let alone a black group like BASIC, when it came to supporting Israel. It also put Rustin in an odd place: as a dyed-in-the-wool supporter of Israel, he had to keep up his pro-Israeli efforts. But as a longtime socialist labor activist who was quite close to Israel’s now-defeated Labor Party and the Histadrut labor federation, Rustin now had to contend with the Likud’s hostility toward Labor, the Histadrut, and socialist politics in general. He also believed that Likud contained a “hard-line bloc” that was “inflexible,” posing a challenge to Middle East peacemaking and did not mind saying so publicly.20

Another change with which BASIC had to contend was shifting American priorities in the Middle East. By mid-1978 Egypt was moving toward making peace with Israel and becoming an American ally, and Saudi Arabia was seeking to buy advanced American aircraft. Peace or no peace, the prospect of advanced American aircraft in Arab hands was of great concern to Israel and its supporters in the United States. When President Jimmy Carter therefore proposed selling military aircraft to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and to Israel, the Israelis objected. Rustin joined with others like the New Republic’s Martin Peretz in forming the Emergency Committee for the Middle East to urge the United States to reject the arms deal “in order to give peace a chance in the Middle East.” Following his marching orders, Rustin thus found himself in the odd position of for once encouraging the American government not to sell planes to Israel.²¹

The even more serious problem facing BASIC by 1977 was financial. The main reason for this was the dearth of contributions it received. Despite Rustin’s efforts to impress potential Jewish donors in particular that some blacks were pro-Israeli after all, donations did not roll in at nearly the level he needed. This was because contributions to BASIC were not tax deductible under American tax law—always a major liability for any group soliciting funds in the United States. BASIC’s mounting financial problems can be seen in the fact that for the fiscal year ending on August 31, 1977, BASIC’s total income was $22,118, while its expenses totaled $29,462. At the end of that fiscal year the group was not only spending more than it received; it still owed the A. Philip Randolph Institute $18,783 that it had received in loans. Thereafter, BASIC stopped receiving or spending any money.22 BASIC essentially was moribund after just two years of existence.

Rustin pressed on, and BASIC continued to function, barely, throughout the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, although black participation at meetings dwindled compared to Jewish participation. At the November 24, 1980, BASIC meeting in New York City, for example, Rustin and eight other blacks attended, whereas sixteen Jews were there.²³ By that point BASIC seemed more like an extension of the pro-Israeli establishment in the United States and less like a group of “black Americans in support of Israel.” It was a testament to Rustin’s inability to gain support among blacks for his vision of black-Jewish amity based around mutual support of Israel.

Also complicating Rustin’s mission were events in the Middle East. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon that Prime Minister Begin ordered in June of 1982 prompted some new BASIC actions that suggested that Rustin was beginning to worry about the fallout over the war and the way it could rebound in the PLO’s favor politically. Israel’s encirclement of West Beirut as its forces tried to bombard besieged PLO fighters into submission, and the concomitant devastation wreaked on Lebanese and Palestinian civilians trapped in the city, was being broadcast daily on television channels all over the world throughout the summer of 1982. Israel was looking to some like an aggressor.

As early as two weeks after the invasion began, Rustin sent a telegram to Begin on June 21, 1982. Its guarded language seemed to suggest that Rustin was already worried about the negative political fallout for Israel if the Israelis continued the war. In the telegram Rustin encouraged Begin to begin shifting from Israel’s overwhelmingly dominant military efforts to neutralize the PLO to political and diplomatic ones: “Now that the military threat to Galilee is ended, we in [the] Black Americans to Support Israel Committee are eager to support exhaustive diplomatic and political efforts to achieve both stability in Lebanon and peace with secure borders in Israel. Shalom, Bayard Rustin, President, B.A.S.I.C.” Ever mindful of his efforts to show Jewish groups that blacks cared about Israel, Rustin made sure to send copies of the telegram to a number of Jewish groups in the United States. Whatever Rustin’s intentions were in the telegram, Begin wrote back as if Rustin had congratulated him and Israel for the invasion and was extending his full support. “Dear Friend,” Begin wrote, “I thank you from the heart for your words of solidarity and support for Israel’s just cause in carrying out Operation Peace for Galilee.”24

If Israel was now perceived as a bully in 1982, many in the world conversely saw the embattled PLO as the underdog. When the PLO finally withdrew its battered forces from West Beirut that September, thanks to indirect American diplomacy, and American, French, and Italian troops entered to oversee the operation, the PLO managed to balance its obvious military defeat with the backhanded legitimacy it received from all the global attention. Thereafter, President Ronald Reagan soon issued a plan for a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Arafat even met with Pope John Paul II on September 15, 1982, shortly after leaving Beirut. All of these events elevated the PLO’s profile and its potential role in a diplomatic solution to the conflict, giving even more legitimacy to it than it already had accrued in the 1970s. Rustin was concerned.

In October of 1982 he and BASIC’s Charles Bloomstein wrote to Uri Bar-Ner of the Israeli consulate in New York about an idea they had to write a pamphlet on the PLO. Their purposes would be to show “that the P.L.O. should not be recognized by any Western democracy as representing the interests of the Palestinian people—and certainly not be accepted as the sole representative of the Palestinian people.” Bloomstein and Rustin asked Bar-Ner to provide them with information to help them write the pamphlet, including a list of PLO terrorist activities in Israel and other countries, documented information about PLO behavior in Lebanon since 1970, and documented data about the PLO’s training of terrorists seeking to attack countries other than Israel. The two seemed to want to write something showing how much the PLO’s presence in Lebanon had presented a threat to the entire world. Rustin and Bloomstein also told Bar-Ner that after they had written the pamphlet, they would telephone him for his “reactions” to it. SNCC’s use of Arab government propaganda and public relations material in 1967 had been roundly condemned in some quarters, but apparently Rustin had no qualms about resorting to such material as long as it came from Israeli sources.²⁵

Rustin’s desire to write a pamphlet denouncing the PLO reflected more than just an immediate need to contend with the group’s high profile after Israel invaded Lebanon. It also reflected Rustin’s long-held and deep hostility toward the PLO that predated the Israeli attack. His hatred of the PLO matched his hatred of Black Power. He often expressed this hostility in opinion pieces. After the PLO achieved two political victories in the fall of 1974—Arafat addressed the United Nations, and the Arab League recognized the PLO as the sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people—Rustin tried to parry these public relations successes by writing a December 1974 opinion piece titled “The PLO: Freedom Fighters or Terrorists?” In the piece Rustin argued that by calling the PLO freedom fighters instead of terrorists, the world had seriously warped words like liberation, racism, and peace. The best example of this was the “fundamental surrendering of political and humanitarian principles” on the part of the UN General Assembly when it enthusiastically greeted Arafat. What “legitimate struggle” was Arafat representing, Rustin asked? “It is a struggle being waged with the tactics of calculated violence, where military targets are avoided, but women, children, athletes, diplomats, airline passengers—the defenseless and uninvolved—are sought and struck down.”26

He also dismissed the PLO’s call for creating a secular, democratic state in Palestine. Rustin conceded that the Palestinians had a right to a homeland, to “self-determination,” but so did the Jewish people. Whatever he may have thought of multiculturalism at home, Rustin clearly believed that ethnic segregation was what was called for in the Middle East. He ended his piece: “At a time when so many appear willing to accept lies as the truth, to reach dishonest conciliation with terrorists, to barter away the most basic ideals of justice and compassion, Israel more than ever deserves the support of people of good will and common decency.”²⁷

By 1983 Rustin still fervently supported Israel, but Begin’s controversial tenure as prime minister had caused him to become fairly forthright in some of his criticisms of the Jewish state’s actions. An example was a noteworthy opinion piece he authored that appeared in the August 4, 1983, Los Angeles Times. In the piece Rustin still accused the Arab world of being the main obstacle to Arab-Israeli peace by its stubborn refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist. He lamented that American foreign policy was not more clear-sighted and that it was failing to exert the proper pressure on the Arabs to do so. Yet what was remarkable about the article was the forthrightness with which Rustin criticized three particular aspects of Israeli policy. The first was the construction of Jewish civilian settlements in the occupied Arab territories of the West Bank and Golan Heights (he did not mention Gaza). Rustin claimed that Israel’s policy of building settlements was “misguided from the outset”—an interesting observation given that his Labor Party friends like Prime Ministers Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, and Yitzhak Rabin had overseen the establishment of the first settlements.28

He also addressed “charges of Israeli mistreatment of Arab residents,” which, he conceded, “regrettably are true.” He did not specify whether he was referring to the 20 percent of Israeli citizens who were Palestinians, or the Palestinians subject to Israeli military rule in the West Bank and Gaza, although elsewhere in the piece he said that Israel could be faulted for treating “its Arab population as second-class citizens.” Finally, and most remarkably, Rustin noted that another criticism that could be leveled against Israel is “that it has expanded its borders by conquest.”²⁹ He offered excuses for all these blemishes: Israel had lived for decades with war and terrorism. Its human rights record was better than that of other countries faced with such pressures, but his criticisms were there nonetheless, in black and white, for all to read.

Despite this, pro-Israeli groups once again were thrilled by Rustin’s piece. Chris Gersten, political director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), wrote to him saying, “Terrific article in the L.A. Times. I am pleased to have been able to circulate it around AIPAC.” The national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, Nathan Perlmutter, sent him a note about the piece, saying, “Editorially it is useful, logically it is sound; and I have every intention of plagiarizing its reasoning.” Finally, Commentary magazine’s editor, Norman Podhoretz, wrote to Rustin and crowed, “I have just read your piece in the L.A. Times on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and my only comment is Bravo!”³⁰

Four years and twenty days after his opinion piece appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Rustin died. He had come a long way in terms of owning up publicly to Israel’s faults since he first began acting as “Israel’s man in Harlem” in the late 1960s, although he remained firmly convinced in the justice of its cause and the need for Americans, black and white, to support the Jewish state. Rustin’s reign as the undisputed champion of pro-Israeli activities among mainstream black civil rights leaders represented the most vigorous and long-lasting effort to counteract black support for the Palestinians at the expense of Israel. Rustin’s hatred of the Black Power movement, its revolutionary internationalism, and its Third World identity politics drove him further and further into the arms of mainstream liberal, labor, and Jewish organizations that were fighting back against militant black denunciations of Israel. Rustin strove long and hard to demonstrate to Jewish allies that not all blacks accepted Black Power perspectives on Israel or the American system. This was part of his crusade to assure Jews that more moderate blacks still cared about their concerns and were still good Americans—not Third World radicals. It was a question of identity, and for Rustin that clearly meant locating black identity within the mainstream of political acceptability.

Bayard Rustin’s tireless and ultimately failed efforts on behalf of Israel demonstrated that both 1960s-era Black Power positions on the Middle East and events in the Middle East in the 1970s had shifted the goalposts, and Rustin desperately tried to stay in the game playing by the old rules. The Palestinian problem and pro-Palestinian viewpoints had become part of mainstream American public discourse. By the time of his death in 1987, acceptance of the notion that the Palestinians deserved at least some type of national and human rights had come increasingly to be accepted in the American body politic, among both blacks and whites. Even Rustin was forced to concede that much. And given his concern for moving from “protest to politics,” the changing black discourse about the Arab-Israeli conflict became increasingly clear in 1979 with the eruption of the Andrew Young Affair, the consequences of which caught many in the American mainstream by surprise by the torrent of black outpourings of understanding of, if not outright support for, the Palestinians.

ANDREW YOUNG AND THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT

The statement delivered to the United Nations Security Council on August 24, 1979, by the American ambassador to the United Nations, a man who just twenty-three days earlier had assumed the rotating position of president of the Security Council, was as remarkable as any of those assembled that day had ever heard. The man, Andrew Young, announced that he would be leaving his position on the Security Council because just days before he had resigned from his post as US representative to the United Nations. Having read the newspapers, no one seated around the table that day was surprised. The hushed delegates knew this moment had been coming; the die had been cast the previous month. For when Young walked out of the New York City apartment of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United Nations on July 26, 1979, after secretly having met with the PLO’s permanent observer to the United Nations, in defiance of a 1975 American governmental ban on any contacts with the PLO, Young had sealed his fate as the highest ranking black in the administration of President Jimmy Carter. Despite having been forced to resign some three weeks after that meeting, Young was hardly contrite in his final remarks to his Security Council colleagues. “So I leave this Council,” he stated in his farewell address, “with no regrets for the fact that perhaps we broke the comfortable diplomatic channels and we violated some long-ago made agreements that are ridiculous.”31

Despite Young’s relatively graceful comments, all hell broke loose, and a major domestic scandal befell the Carter presidency revolving around blacks, Jews, and American policy in the Middle East. As the 1970s were coming to an end, the Arab-Israeli conflict still cast a shadow over black politics in America, as it had done in the previous decade. The conflict once again was a major feature in the black American political discourse and the search for place and identity within the country. Adding to that was black insistence that African American voices mattered just as much as those of any other ethnic group in terms of offering input into the directions American foreign policy should take.

Equally significant, the key actors in what came to be called the “Andrew Young Affair” in 1979 could hardly be described as Black Power radicals. The protagonists, in fact, were Christian ministers, congressional representatives, and leaders of mainstream black organizations. The question of the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict clearly had taken root within conventional national black politics in America that motivated not only revolutionary Third World–oriented blacks but also those seeking greater power and influence within American society. Black Power may have waned, but its demand that blacks had a right to speak about or with the Palestinians clearly had not. It was another example of the staying power of the Palestinian issue in American racial and identity politics.

Andrew Young in the 1970s was already a noted civil rights figure.³² He had been Martin Luther King Jr.’s trusted associate in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and knew something about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Young had spoken with many Israelis and Palestinians on his 1966 trip to the Middle East and was on good terms with pro-Israeli black stalwarts Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, even serving on the executive board of the A. Philip Randolph Institute. When Rustin’s pro-Israeli advertisement ran in the New York Times in June of 1970, Young was running for Congress as a Democrat. He was asked to add his name to the statement by Samuel W. Williams, another figure in Atlanta’s black community. Young apparently declined because his name did not end up appearing in the advertisement.33

Young issued his own two-page statement on Israel, as well, for he no doubt thought it expedient to release a supportive statement about Israel in advance of the elections in November of that year. The document advocated sending military aircraft to Israel, and it laid out for the public what he wanted them to know about his commitment to Israel. Young stressed three particular themes: his emotional attachment to Israel; his concern that as an ally, Israel could help stop the Soviet Union from gaining increased influence in the Middle East; and his belief that the Republican administration of President Richard Nixon was not fully committed to Israel, as evidenced by its “vacillation” and willingness to “dangle” the promise of aircraft in front of the Israelis to get them to adhere to American policies.

The statement affords a fascinating insight into what Young thought—or what he was willing to say publicly, at least—about Israel in 1970. It offered a ringing endorsement of a very mainstream, conservative cold war attitude about foreign policy:

The United States must support Israel for strategic reasons, as well as moral ones. The Middle East is a critical area for the security of the United States and especially for our European allies. If the entire area were to come under Russian influence, the Soviets could employ an economic stranglehold on Western Europe whenever they wished. For this reason it is vital to our own interest to guarantee Israel’s survival as an outpost of democracy in the Middle East.

It is therefore imperative that the United States continue to do all that is necessary to maintain Israel’s security as a nation. . . . [The United States and the West] should supply the Israelis with the necessary means to defend themselves. We ought not dangle aircraft in front of Israel’s nose, hoping for greater fidelity to our policies. We must make a firm commitment to provide Israel with the fighter planes and technical and economic assistance it so urgently needs.³⁴

As for the Palestinians, Young had learned of their plight from those Palestinians he had met in East Jerusalem in November of 1966. This, along with statements he made to Martin Luther King Jr. on June 8, 1967, to the effect that the Arab perspective on the situation rarely was heard in the United States, all indicate that he was well aware of the aspirations of the Palestinian people.35 Young’s statement therefore did mention them, although he argued that a solution to the refugee problem was resettling all of them to a new Palestinian state that would be carved somewhere out of the Arab world, not for Israel to allow them to return.

Young did not win the election but succeeded in 1972 and was a member of the House of Representatives by the time the United States Senate confirmed him as American ambassador to the United Nations on January 26, 1977. Young became the first black ever to hold that position and also became the highest ranking black official in the Carter administration.

THE FATEFUL MEETING WITH THE PLO

Two and one-half years later, in July of 1979, Young was faced with a dilemma. He was about to assume the position of UN Security Council president beginning on August 1. He also was informed that the council was set to discuss a report by the UN Division for Palestinian Rights and that the deliberations would lead to the submission of a draft of a Kuwaiti resolution calling for recognition of an independent Palestinian state. The American government was anxious to delay any such resolution being brought before the council and ordered Young to try to block it. After Young discussed the matter with some Arab UN ambassadors, they agreed to support his efforts to take the report off the Security Council’s agenda provided that the PLO approved such a decision. Young faced a quandary: to advance American diplomatic needs, he would be forced to meet with the PLO’s Permanent Observer to the United Nations, Zehdi Labib Terzi, and sound him out. Yet stemming from a September 1975 American pledge to Israel that the United States would not negotiate with the PLO until it recognized Israel’s right to exist and accepted UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, American diplomats were forbidden to negotiate with or even meet PLO representatives. Young decided to meet Terzi anyway, in secret.

On July 26, 1979, Young walked from his home in New York City to a party at the apartment of Kuwait’s UN ambassador, Abdullah Bishara. Waiting among other guests, as planned, was Terzi. Young and Terzi quietly excused themselves from the other guests and discussed the matter in another room in the presence of both Bishara and Syria’s UN ambassador, Hammoud Elchoufi. Thanks to Young’s chat with Terzi, the PLO agreed to a postponement of the issue, and the Security Council took it off the agenda for three weeks.

Young thought he had succeeded, until Time magazine’s bureau in Jerusalem, based apparently on Israeli intelligence sources, found out about the meeting and asked the State Department for comment before publishing the story. On being queried by the department about the press inquiry, Young said (apparently somewhat jokingly) that he indeed had met Terzi at Bishara’s apartment, but accidentally, and the two did not discuss anything beyond social pleasantries. Time published the story. Israel sent a formal protest to the American government, claiming that Young’s actions violated the 1975 agreement not to negotiate with the PLO. The die was cast.

American Jewish groups had already been angry with aspects of Carter’s Middle East policy, notably statements made by Young earlier in the year that were seen as supportive of the PLO. Now they were further upset on learning that Carter’s UN representative actually had met with a PLO official. Several Jewish groups issued strong statements, although only Joseph Sternstein, head of the American Zionist Federation, actually called for Young’s dismissal. American Jewish Committee executive vice president Bertram Gold came close, hedging his language somewhat by saying, “If Andrew Young indeed did talk with the PLO on his own, he should be fired,” leaving open the possibility that Young may have done so under orders from Carter.36 Amid the outcry, Young’s story quickly fell apart. According to Carter’s published diaries, the president wrote on August 13, 1979, that “this [meeting with Terzi] is understandable because Andy is president of the Security Council.” Carter’s diary entry noted, however, that “when interrogated about it by the State Department he told them a lie. . . . This is an almost impossible problem to resolve without Andy leaving.”³⁷

On August 14 Carter and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance agreed that Young would have to resign and take the fall for the brouhaha. Young immediately wrote his letter of resignation, which he presented to Carter at a White House meeting the following afternoon. Carter’s diary entry for that day reveals that he, too, thought that not being able to talk to the PLO was “ridiculous” but believed that America’s reputation was at stake: “Andy was not penitent at all, saying he had done what he thought was right. It is absolutely ridiculous that we pledged under Kissinger and Nixon that we would not negotiate with the PLO; but our country’s honor is at stake, and we will do the best we can. I instructed Cy [Young] and Zbig [National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski] not to make any more reassurances that we were not meeting with the PLO; if the Israelis couldn’t trust us, they could find another ‘trustworthy’ partner.”38 Writing several decades later, Carter claimed that Young would have been allowed to stay had he not lied about the meeting with the PLO representative. Young ended up staying in his post for another month, until September 23, to give time for a replacement to be found.³⁹

That was the background to Young’s farewell statement to his UN Security Council colleagues on August 24, 1979. He held his head high during his remarks and expressed no regrets. Young began his statement by saying that he had not expected to leave the council, especially given the fact that he was its president at the time. “And yet,” he continued, “I have no regrets for what has occurred; in fact, I see it as a part of a plan of the work of this Council, a part of the work of this Council which I intend to be associated with long after I have left you.” He conceded that he knew what he was doing when he had met with Terzi and therefore had not been “set up by my Arab or Israeli friends. . . . I think that whatever happened leading to my resignation was something that I entered into very much with my eyes open,” he continued, noting as well that his action was the culmination of “a fundamental disagreement with a policy, one that I sought to run from for two and a half years, for I never agreed with it.” Therefore, despite the risk of his job, Young noted, “it was no great decision on my part to visit the home of my friend and to meet another friend.”⁴⁰

Young also took the opportunity to attack publicly the American government’s prohibition on talking to the PLO, as well as certain policies of both Israel and the Arab world. He said, “I hope that in some small way it may have opened up a question to the American people that will call attention to some of the tragic history of our nation as a result of the refusal to communicate.” Young continued: “And it was because I felt that not talking would contribute to violence and bloodshed that I thought the risks of talking to the PLO were nothing compared to the risk” of further violence. Turning his critical comments toward the Arabs and Israel, Young said that if it was “ridiculous,” as he put it, for the United States or Israel not to talk to the PLO, it was equally ridiculous for some of those sitting on the council not to talk to Israel—a clear reference to Kuwait’s ambassador, Abdullah Bishara. He admonished the Palestinians by saying that their attempts to destroy Israel had cost them moral capital but countered by saying that Israel had done the same through the violence it had wreaked in Lebanon, as well as “in the building of settlements where perhaps while affirming [Security Council Resolution] 242, the very act violates 242.”41

Young continued to serve for another month after delivering his oration to the Security Council, officially leaving his post as US ambassador to the United Nations on September 23, 1979. As if to prove a point, Young went out of his way during the subsequent forty-eight hours to meet with PLO officials. He dined the very next evening, September 24, with top PLO officials Faruq Qaddumi and Shafiq al-Hut, who were visiting New York to attend the sessions of the UN General Assembly. The evening after that, September 25, Young attended a dinner that included Terzi.⁴² He continued to insist that he had done nothing wrong, reiterating publicly a few days later what he had told his colleagues on the Security Council: “I really don’t feel a bit sorry for anything that I have done. And could not say to anybody that given the same situation, I wouldn’t do it again almost exactly the same way.”⁴³

That was hardly the end of the affair. The top black official in the Carter administration had been forced out over what many African Americans saw as his actions in response to a flawed policy vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict. Black leaders from across the political spectrum were livid. Some of the fiercest reactions came not from radicals but from mainstream black leaders from all levels of political life. Gary, Indiana, mayor Richard Hatcher called it a “forced resignation” and “an insult to black people.” Benjamin Hooks, the executive director of the NAACP, said that Young was “a sacrificial lamb for circumstances beyond his control.” Black anger increased when it was discovered that the American ambassador to Austria, Milton Wolf—an industrialist and prominent member of the Jewish community in Cleveland, Ohio—himself had held a total of three meetings with the PLO’s Isam Sartawi several months earlier, in the spring of 1979. Two had been “social” meetings, but the third involved more substantial matters. More to the point, the Carter administration had known about them.⁴⁴ Why, black leaders asked, was a Jewish diplomat not forced out for talking to the PLO, but a black one was?

ERUPTION OF BLACK ANGER

On August 16, 1979—the day after Young resigned—a group of black leaders met in New York City. Among them were Coretta Scott King, Bayard Rustin, and Vernon Jordan—hardly pro-Palestinian activists. Yet they issued a statement that questioned the different treatments meted out to Wolf and Young, and they hoped that the incident would not harm black-Jewish relations. That proved to be wishful thinking. The Andrew Young Affair marked a return to the black-Jewish tensions over the Middle East. It also showed the staying power of the Question of Palestine among blacks as the 1970s drew to a close.45

Black sensitivities were worsened by the widespread perception that Carter had caved in to Jewish pressure to fire Young. Jesse Jackson noted a “tremendous tension in the air around the nation over the forced resignation,” and he claimed that black-Jewish relations were “more tense than they’ve been in 25 years.”⁴⁶ Joseph Lowery, head of the SCLC, weighed into the controversy, as well. Lowery spoke for many blacks when he addressed the perception that blacks were still in a subservient position to Jewish financial patrons who provided support for the civil rights movement but expected blacks to stay quiet about Israel. Lowery addressed Jews by saying, “If we have to maintain your friendship by refraining from speaking to Arabs, then that friendship must be reassessed.”⁴⁷ In the wake of the Young affair sociologist Kenneth Clark said that blacks finally felt free to discuss black-Jewish relations more honestly, without fear of the withdrawal of Jewish financial support.⁴⁸ A major controversy about the Arab-Israeli conflict had broken out that enveloped mainstream black leaders.

A number of major public figures sprang into action. The small group that gathered in New York City on August 16, 1979, paved the way for the NAACP to issue an invitation to scores of others to attend a much larger meeting at the group’s headquarters in New York on August 22. Some 230 persons ended up attending, including a number of “heavyweights” among black leaders. Besides the NAACP’s executive director Benjamin L. Hooks, other major black civil rights and political figures included Joseph Lowery, Wyatt Tee Walker, and Walter Fauntroy of the SCLC; Vernon Jordan of the National Urban League; Jesse Jackson of Operation PUSH; Gary, Indiana, mayor Richard Hatcher; and Georgia state senator Julian Bond. Hooks opened the meeting by telling the assembled leaders, “Because of our background, heritage and tradition, there is a natural tendency for many black Americans, historically, to have tremendous sympathy with people who are deprived wherever they are.” He added, “This is true of the Jewish people, the Arab people, the Palestinian people.”49

Beyond the actual issue of the substance of Young’s dismissal and the reasons behind it—the PLO, Israel, and Middle East negotiations—what was clearly uppermost on the minds of those in attendance was the manner in which Young was so abruptly fired and the speed with which Carter came to that decision. The assembled group unanimously adopted a statement at the conclusion of the meeting that said, among other things, “Black Americans strongly protest the callous, ruthless behavior of the United States State Department toward Mr. Young.” The statement went further: “We demand once more to know why the American Ambassador to Austria was given a mere reminder about U.S. policy prohibiting meetings with the P.L.O. while Mr. Young was harshly reprimanded. We call upon the Carter Administration to account for this gross double standard.”⁵⁰

Another particularly sensitive black grievance that arose during the Young affair was the perception that blacks were being marginalized in terms of the country’s foreign policy decision-making process. Many blacks thought that Young, a black man, had been attacked for daring to interpret what was in the best interests of American foreign policy, whereas other Americans from various ethnic backgrounds, notably Jews, felt perfectly free to interpret, discuss, lobby, and try to shape American foreign policy without sanction. This sentiment was reflected in several sharply worded phrases in the final statement. Noting that blacks had fought and died in all of America’s wars, and would again were the United States to become involved in a war in the Middle East, the statement declared:

Nevertheless, the involvement of blacks and their concerns in foreign policy questions is repeatedly questioned. . . . Clearly, the stakes for minorities in the conduct of American foreign policy continues to be high. . . . Neither Jews, Italians, Germans, Irish, Chinese, British, French or whatever other ethnically or nationally identifiable group has any more right to be involved in the development of United States foreign policy than Americans of African descent. If there is any single area where the melting pot concept applies, it is with foreign affairs. For we either all pursue the common interests of this nation or help it sink separately.⁵¹

It also stridently stated: “We summarily reject the implication that anyone other than blacks themselves can determine their role in helping to shape and mold American foreign policies which directly affect their lives.”52 The black leaders keenly resented being told by whites what issues lay within their purview to discuss. They would set their own agenda. Questions of race, identity, and place within America clearly animated those at the meeting, and the context once again dealt with the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The final statement also reflected the leaders’ anger toward Israel and the American Jewish groups whose incitement, they believed, had been a major contributing factor in Young’s dismissal. Turning to Israel and its demand that the United States not speak to the PLO, the assembled leaders said, “We join with Ambassador Andrew Young in rejecting the notion that any foreign nation should dictate the foreign policy of the United States.” They also asserted that “Black America is also deeply concerned with the trade and military alliance that exists between Israel and the illegitimate regimes and oppressive racist regimes in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia.” Turning their obvious anger on American Jewish groups, among others, the leaders stated that “the overreaction by the national news media, some of the Jewish community, the Carter Administration and some congressional leaders was a regrettable consequence of the double standard by which this nation judges its black leaders. . . . Blacks, however, were deeply affronted by the inherent arrogance in the attacks upon Ambassador Young by certain Jewish groups and the news media for his having dared to place the interests of the United States above all other considerations.”⁵³

Clearly, the Andrew Young Affair had touched a black nerve, one already made raw by past grievances and tensions, including black-Jewish friction over Middle East policy that in some ways had lain dormant since the heyday of Black Power several years earlier. Some high-profile African Americans, in fact, quickly began to mobilize for action that would illustrate dramatically the right of blacks to participate fully in the national discussion about America’s Middle Eastern policy, even if that meant challenging the country’s opposition to talking to the PLO. The fierce 1960s Black Power resentment against what black activists had believed was whites dictating to blacks what they could or could not say about the Middle East was being repeated now by more mainstream black leaders in 1979. They differed from Black Power activists in that they believed their identity was American, not Third World. Yet precisely because of that, they keenly resented what they saw as their marginalization from the realm of foreign policy. They were mad as hell and were not going to take it anymore.