LOOKING OVER JORDAN
Joseph Lowery, Jesse Jackson, and Yasir Arafat
ON SEPTEMBER 20, 1979, a group of black ministers from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) held a meeting in Beirut, Lebanon, with PLO chair Yasir Arafat. The gathering lasted for three and one-half hours, during which the SCLC delegation proposed to Arafat that the PLO “recognize the sovereignty of Israel” and agree to both an immediate cease fire with Israeli forces in southern Lebanon and a wider “moratorium” on violence from the PLO anywhere. The first request was presented because, the SCLC argued, “the failure to recognize, or the rejection of its [Israel’s] existence, constitutes futile defiance of world opinion and presents a formidable barrier to universal recognition of the role of the PLO in putting forth the legitimate claims of the Palestinian peoples.” At the end of the meeting the delegation’s Henry Gibson, a Methodist minister, offered a prayer in English, which was followed by an Arabic-language prayer delivered by a Roman Catholic priest. The Americans then linked arms with Arafat and sang the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” as the cameras clicked.1 African Americans once more were traveling to the Middle East and meeting with Arafat, but this time they were far more mainstream figures than the Black Power militants who had done so in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
THE SCLC’S “MIDDLE EAST PEACE INITIATIVE”
Andrew Young’s resignation on August 15, 1979, happened to occur while the SCLC was holding its national convention in Norfolk, Virginia. Established by Martin Luther King Jr. and others, the SCLC now was led by another Protestant Christian clergyman, Joseph E. Lowery. Lowery became involved in the civil rights movement, helped King and Ralph Abernathy establish SCLC in 1957, and served as its first vice president. Lowery had known Young personally for many years because Young had worked as SCLC’s executive director in the 1960s.
Lowery was furious about what had happened to Young, not just because of who he was and what he stood for—the top-ranking black in the Carter administration—but also because of the implications of his dismissal. What did it say about the ability of white Americans to accept the fact that black leaders were certainly as capable as anyone else of trying to bridge diplomatic gaps, including between Israel and the PLO? While speaking on the floor of the SCLC convention on August 17, 1979, two days after Young resigned, Lowery dramatically announced that he would carry on with Young’s mission by personally meeting with both Israeli and PLO representatives to the United Nations in the near future. “We must carry on Andy Young’s intent for building bridges of communication because it is morally correct, healthy and productive,” Lowery stated.2 It was the humble beginnings of what would come to be a major, and controversial, diplomatic effort by Lowery that within a month would lead him to the Middle East and the PLO leader, Yasir Arafat.
True to his word, Lowery was in New York within days to meet with both the Palestinian and Israeli ambassadors to the United Nations. He first met with the PLO’s Zehdi Labib Terzi on August 20, 1979. Lowery and six others, including fellow SCLC ministers Walter E. Fauntroy and Wyatt Tee Walker, met with Terzi over lunch for two hours. Among other things, the group urged Terzi to tell Arafat that he should consider recognizing Israel and negotiating with it. Lowery gave a statement afterward in which he supported “the human rights of all Palestinians, the right of self-determination, involving, among other things, their homeland.” Lowery described the meeting as “very interesting and communicative.”3
The following day, the SCLC delegation met with Israeli UN ambassador Yehuda Blum. This time the two-and-one-half-hour meeting was less pleasant. According to an agenda that the group members drew up prior to the meeting, they told Blum that they wished to “Reiterate our support of nationhood of Israel and human rights of all Israelis; Reiterate and clarify our support of human rights of all Palestinians (does not lessen support of human rights for all Israelis); Communicate concerns of Black American’s [sic] about Israel’s relations with South Africa . . . effect on relations with American blacks; Communicate our support and faith in non-violence as most vital means of resolving conflict and affecting [sic] change (discuss bombing raids—Lebanon).4
Blum responded by criticizing Lowery’s statement of the previous day that called for Palestinian self-determination, telling him that he should have listened to both sides first. He also insisted that Israel would not negotiate with “the terrorist PLO,” which was “bent on the destruction of Israel.” Going straight for the jugular, Blum declared that any support the PLO could garner from meetings, such “could only discourage the peace process.” When the delegation brought up Israel’s trade ties with South Africa and Israeli bombardments of southern Lebanon, Blum deflected the questions with the usual diplomatic ripostes expected of someone in his position. Afterward, both sides told the press that the meeting had not been fruitful. “We missed each other somehow” is how one member of the SCLC group told a Jewish press service.5
After the two meetings, the SCLC delegation issued a press release emphasizing that Lowery and the others told both men that “the killing of innocent Palestinian and Israeli citizens both by bombs in garbage cans and bombs dropped from aircraft” must end. “The PLO cannot achieve its good intentions through violence any more than the Israeli [sic] can resolve the Palestinian problem by bombing Lebanon.” The delegation told both sides that it had not come to negotiate “but to communicate the need for an end to the killing.”6
On August 22, 1979, two days after Terzi met with Lowery and the others, Arafat formally invited them to visit Lebanon and meet with him at his headquarters in Beirut. Lowery leapt at the chance. He and nine others traveled to the Middle East four weeks later, hoping to visit both PLO and Israeli leaders as part of what they called the “SCLC Middle East Peace Initiative.” SCLC’s peace initiative specifically sought two things of all parties to the Arab-Israeli conflict, notably Israel and the PLO: “First, that each declare a moratorium on acts of violence. And second, that the PLO become a part of the Camp David peace process, with both Israel and the PLO prepared to recognize mutually all the rights of Israel and the Palestinians to peace within the secure and recognized borders of a homeland.”7
The group arrived in Beirut on September 17, 1979. Leading the SCLC delegation were Lowery and Fauntroy, who served as SCLC’s chair of the board and also was the congressional delegate from Washington, DC, in the House of Representatives. The delegation also included the seasoned civil rights veteran C. T. Vivian and several others. While in Lebanon, the group visited Palestinian schools, refugee camps, and hospitals in Beirut. According to press accounts, at one point Lowery donned a keffiyeh headdress made famous by the Palestinian guerrillas (and Arafat personally) and posed for pictures holding a toy gun handed to him by a boy in one of the refugee camps in Beirut. Fearful of the fallout from this rather undiplomatic act, were images of it to be published, the SCLC’s Reverend Al Sampson and a PLO official seized the cameraman’s film.8 The group also traveled to South Lebanon, stopping by the town of Damur before heading to Nabatiyya and the PLO military position at the medieval Beaufort Castle, known in Arabic as Qal‘at al-Shaqif. At one point Lowery suggested that Palestinian refugees should stage a civil rights–like march from Nabatiyya to the Israeli border.9
The visiting Americans were treated as dignitaries while in Lebanon and held meetings with top leaders such as President Elias Sarkis, Prime Minister Salim al-Hoss, and Foreign Minister Fuad Boutros. They also met with representatives of various political groups, from the Lebanese National Movement, which was friendly to the PLO, to Maronite Catholic political leaders Pierre Gemayel and Camille Chamoun, who very much were not. As members of the clergy, the SCLC group also met with representatives of the Middle East Council of Churches and the Islamic Council of Lebanon.10
The highlight of the trip was the delegation’s meeting with Arafat in Beirut on September 20, 1979. The meeting lasted for three and one-half hours. It was then that the Americans proposed that the PLO issue a moratorium on all violent actions both in Lebanon and elsewhere. Lowery and the others explained it to Arafat this way: “Even with an understanding of the causes, we do not believe that the PLO can achieve its objectives through continued violence. Moreover, we believe that a moratorium on violence is a powerful initiative with the potential for dramatically shifting the moral advantage to [the Palestinian] side in the eyes of the world, and make possible some relief for those Palestinians now suffering from the violence of Israel.”11
Arafat did not agree to the request to recognize Israel, and he refused to accept UN Security Council Resolution 242, which offered an indirect recognition of Israel. He was more circumspect on the request for a moratorium on violence, arguing that the two sides were not equal in that respect, but agreed to consider the idea.12 Lowery also asked Arafat if he would come to America and address the first of what Lowery hoped would be several SCLC seminars on the Middle East (the Israeli press later quoted the American State Department as saying that if Arafat tried to obtain a visa to enter the United States, such a request would be denied).13
The reaction from the government of Israel to the idea of meeting with Lowery and his colleagues was markedly different, however. SCLC had asked Israeli officials in the United States before the group left if the delegation could visit Israel and meet with Israeli officials on their trip. They were anxious to meet with both sides, much as they had met with both Terzi and Blum in New York. On the last day of their mission to Lebanon, however, the delegates found out that Israeli foreign minister Moshe Dayan had advised Prime Minister Menachem Begin not to meet with the delegation. They then flew back to the United States without having traveled to Israel.14
Back home in the United States Lowery issued a statement: “We believe that our mission has been successful because we went as Children of God, carrying a message of peace through non-violence which was heard by many of the parties to the conflict . . . in Lebanon and the rest of the Middle East.” Regarding Begin’s refusal to meet with him and his colleagues, Lowery expressed his disappointment in no uncertain terms: “If the Israeli government does not wish to hear our proposals for a moratorium on violence, and to discuss our moral initiative, then the responsibility for the deficit is theirs. It shall in no way, however, deter us from the aggressive pursuit of peace with justice for all persons in the Middle East.” He also announced that the SCLC intended to follow up on the trip with a series of educational fora in at least ten American cities and would try to meet with national leaders as well as UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim.15 Lowery clearly believed in what he was doing, but his announcement also was a clear jab at those he believed were trying to muzzle black participation in the making of American foreign policy.
Just over a week later, on October 1, 1979, Terzi sent the SCLC a telegram informing the group of several developments that occurred in the wake of the trip. First, he reported that twelve hours after the delegation left Beirut on September 21, the PLO announced a unilateral cease fire in southern Lebanon effective at 11:00 p.m. However, the Israeli air force soon shot down some Syrian aircraft, effectively ending the cease fire from the PLO’s point of view. Later in the week, the SCLC received confirmation that the PLO had indeed declared a cease fire in southern Lebanon but that this did not cover Palestinian actions in the West Bank and Gaza. Second, regarding the SCLC’s request that the PLO recognize Israel: Terzi’s telegram stated that the PLO supported UN General Assembly Resolution 3236 on Palestinian self-determination and would support UN Security Council Resolution 242, which effectively would thereby be recognizing Israel, when 242 was paired together with 3236.
In light of these developments the SCLC perceived that Arafat had not fully accepted important components of its initiative. Disappointed, the SCLC decided on October 7 that that was not good enough. It therefore decided not to invite Arafat to come to the United States after all and to cancel its plans for a series of fora on the Middle East around the country. As Fauntroy said two weeks later, on October 15, “We cannot and will not reward that refusal.”16
For all intents and purposes, then, the “SCLC Middle East Peace Initiative” was over almost as soon as it began. The group nonetheless considered it a success, particularly in demonstrating that American blacks had a constructive role to play in American foreign policy just like any other ethnic group did. The group summed up their efforts: “We were successful in illustrating by our mission that we take seriously the material costs to us as Black Americans in any area of the world where the U.S. has a vital stake and that we will not be silenced or excluded from participation in those decisions which affect our lives and the well-being of this country.”17
For his part, Lowery waxed biblical in a speech called “All Children of Abraham,” which he gave at the national conference of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign in Washington on September 21, 1979, the day he returned from Lebanon. In it, he stressed the personal ties he shared with the Middle East and its peoples by virtue of his Christian faith:
As a Christian, I lay claim to the Holy Land (Palestine, Israel) as part and parcel of the heritage of faith. My Jesus was born there, and in that lovely land he opened the gates of God through which millions have marched. . . . And while I may not, as Jews and Arabs do, call myself a direct, blood descendant of Abraham in the “begat” sense of the Book of Matthew, he is a father of my faith which is Judeo-Christian in its roots and fruits. So my brothers, the Jews, and my brothers the Palestinians are mine and I am theirs and no manner or matter of disavowal can change it.18
Black politics had moved in a different direction since the demise of Black Power militancy, but it still claimed a connection with the people of the Middle East.
Both as chair of the board of SCLC and as a sitting congressman, Walter Fauntroy was also visible in the days after the delegation returned. Fauntroy was a Baptist minister who began his work with SCLC in 1960 and later became chair of its board of directors. In 1971 he was elected to the House of Representatives as the nonvoting congressional delegate from the District of Columbia. Fauntroy admitted that he traveled to the Middle East for both religious and political reasons. “I went to Lebanon as a minister of the gospel, as an ambassador of goodwill, committed to a ministry of reconciliation,” Fauntroy was quoted as saying. Yet he also pointed out that his search for peace served a more temporal purpose rooted in his life in the black community of Washington. He said that if a war ever broke out in the Middle East, black soldiers would be disproportionately affected. He was also quoted in the Jewish press as saying, “For me, Killing is Killing. Bombs dropping out of the sky are as terrifying as bombs in a shopping center. Whatever you call it, I want the killing to stop.”19
On October 11, 1979, Fauntroy gave a report on the trip to his colleagues in Congress. While he said that he had traveled to the Middle East in his capacity as a minister and chair of the board of directors of SCLC, he nevertheless was a sitting congressman and used the prerogatives of that position to make his report. He frankly admitted that he and SCLC considered the state department’s ban on talks with the PLO to be an “ill-conceived” policy. “We [SCLC] resolved to exert moral leadership with the strong support of a unified Black leadership in opposing what we consider to be an ill-conceived policy of our government—with respect to the Middle East,” he said. “That policy presently prohibits any contact with the PLO.” Continuing, Fauntroy noted that the American assumption that the PLO was just a terrorist group was wildly off the mark. “Our visit to these [PLO] facilities also gave striking evidence that the PLO is not the one-dimensional ‘terrorist organization’ we have been led to believe that it is, but contains all the infrastructure of a nation in exile.”20
Fauntroy’s report also took aim at another American government policy: supplying Israel with advanced weaponry that it used against Lebanese and Palestinian civilians. “To our outrage, we saw unmistaken evidence of the use of American weapons on non-military targets,” his report stated. Fauntroy actually brought home pieces of American ordnance the group had found during its tour of southern Lebanon, and his report noted, “I have returned with shrapnel, parts of exploded shells and cluster bombs, which I lifted from the ruins of bombed-out Palestinian and Lebanese villages in Lebanon.”21 The trip clearly was leading to deepening SCLC sympathy with the Palestinians much beyond the nuanced SCLC position articulated in the late 1960s by Martin Luther King Jr.
JESSE JACKSON’S MISSION TO THE MIDDLE EAST
The issue of America’s lack of relations with the PLO, and of black determination to play a role in Middle East policy, led another important civil rights leader to visit the Middle East as a result of the Andrew Young Affair: Jesse Jackson. In fact, there seemed to be a veritable race to see which black leader could get to Arafat first. Jackson was already a controversial figure among SCLC stalwarts by 1979, and there was no love lost between them. Jackson first began working with SCLC as a young man in 1965. The April 1968 murder of SCLC’s Martin Luther King Jr. had left a void in terms of who would replace King as the “top” spokesperson for black Americans. Jesse Jackson had considerable ambitions in that direction, which brought him into conflict with King’s replacement as SCLC president, Ralph Abernathy. Even King had noted Jackson’s ambitions, and after King’s death Abernathy was particularly leery of Jackson’s intentions. Tensions came to a head in December of 1975, and Jackson left SCLC to form People United to Save Humanity (PUSH) in Chicago.
Now that Lowery was head of SCLC and Jackson was head of PUSH, the rivalry continued, although Walter Fauntroy’s spokesman, Eldridge Spearman, denied to the press that there was a rivalry between SCLC and Jackson. “They are not in conflict,” Spearman said.22 But they clearly were. Both Jackson and Lowery had attended the August 22, 1979, meeting of black leaders at the NAACP headquarters in New York, which took place just forty-eight hours after Lowery had met with the PLO and Israeli representatives to the United Nations. Jackson, too, decided to initiate a public effort to provide a bridge between Israelis and Palestinians by meeting with Israeli and PLO representatives in the United States. This did not take place until mid-September, however, at which time Jackson met in Washington with the PLO’s Terzi at the congressional office of Representative Paul Findley (R-IL) and with Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ephraim Evron.23 By the time Jackson decided to travel to the Middle East, Lowery had already announced the upcoming SCLC trip. Jackson was playing catch-up.
The rivalry even extended to the national conference of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, which was under way on September 21, 1979, the very day that Lowery returned from the SCLC trip and at which Lowery spoke. Jackson, too, addressed the gathering that day. He was just days from traveling to the Middle East himself. Jackson delivered a speech titled “The Challenge to Live in One World,” in which he denounced the American policy prohibiting talks with the PLO: “The no-talk policy toward the PLO is ridiculous. The public has a right to know the whole story in the Middle East. . . . The national interest of the United States is jeopardized by a no-talk policy. A no-talk policy against anybody at the United Nations is an international absurdity. It is an affront to the civilized community. The most important link in civilization is communication; so we affirm communication.” Jackson also addressed the wider black concern that the Andrew Young Affair represented an attempt to sideline blacks from the foreign policy process: “There is and has been for a long time a concerted effort to isolate Black Americans and challenge the audacity of black involvement in foreign affairs. Witness the experiences of Dr. [W. E. B.] Du Bois and his Pan African efforts; Paul Robeson and his social, economic, and political analysis made within an international context; and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s stand against the war in Vietnam. Black Americans have an interest in a just and lasting peace. . . . We have a stake in peace in the Middle East.24
Despite lagging behind Lowery and the SCLC in picking up the reigns of black diplomacy vis-à-vis Israel and the PLO, Jackson did have one leg up on Lowery: both his wife and a high-ranking official of Jackson’s PUSH organization had already been to Lebanon and had met Arafat, just months before the Andrew Young Affair burst onto the scene. Even though he would arrive at Arafat’s headquarters a full month after Lowery did, he would arrive as a known entity and with contacts. Jackson’s wife, Jacqueline, had just recently visited Lebanon in June of 1979 in the company of the director of PUSH’s international affairs department, Jack H. O’Dell. O’Dell had been around. Nearly twenty years Jesse Jackson’s senior, O’Dell joined the Communist Party in 1950. He served as an adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. and SCLC beginning in 1961, but he left soon thereafter when President John F. Kennedy and others pressured King to dismiss O’Dell because he had been a communist. He then worked as an editor for the influential black journal Freedomways before working with Jackson and PUSH.
O’Dell and Jacqueline Jackson traveled to Lebanon at the invitation of the Association of Arab-American University Graduates. The group was in Lebanon from June 12 to June 20, 1979. While there, they visited medical facilities of the PLO’s Palestine Red Crescent Society, as well as social and rehabilitation workshops of the PLO’s Dar al-Sumud and SAMED organizations. They visited Palestinian refugee camps near Tyre and witnessed the damage inflicted by Israeli air raids on the town of Nabatiyya. In Beirut O’Dell and Ms. Jackson met with high-level Palestinian officials, including such senior figures as al-Fateh Central Committee member Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), PLO Political Department head Faruq Qaddumi, and Yasir Arafat himself. Ms. Jackson described Arafat as “a most moving individual.” On their return she encouraged PUSH to become more involved with the Palestinians. Both she and O’Dell also met with then-American ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young to communicate their findings. They reportedly urged him to make informal contacts with the PLO. It would be only about a month later that Young did just that by meeting with the PLO’s Terzi in New York, setting the entire brouhaha in motion.25
O’Dell also returned a friend of the Palestinian cause. He later spoke of having supported the creation of Israel in 1948, something fully in line with the policy of the Communist Party, but “those of us who were present at the birth of Israel, and who went to rallies supporting it,” he noted, “knew nothing of the Palestinians.” He continued: “We thought that, given the great human rights traditions of the Jewish people, an answer to the Holocaust that took the form of a state in the Middle East would certainly play a positive role in the region. When we found that, wait a minute, there’s folks there called Palestinians, who are people of color and Arab, some of us felt that we needed to be better acquainted with that.”26
A year after his trip, O’Dell explained why he and other blacks identified with the Palestinians: “The response of Black Americans to the Palestinian appeal for justice is one of sensitive appreciation, for we too know what it is to be dispossessed, exploited, lied about, insulted and ignored.” He also criticized American aid to Israel by comparing what that money could be used for if spent at home in the United States: “Our taxes are used to facilitate the wanton destruction of human life [by Israel]. The international community would obviously have more reason to respect the U.S. if that tax-money was being used to provide a decent public transportation system for the people of Watts, or to reopen the coal miner’s [sic] medical clinics in Kentucky and West Virginia that have been closed for two years.”27
With O’Dell and Jackson’s wife recently having traveled to the region, Jesse Jackson announced shortly after his visits with Terzi and Evron in Washington that he, too, would act on behalf of black Americans to advance the cause of Middle East dialogue and peace by traveling to the Middle East. Jackson then flew to Israel, arriving on September 24, 1979—just three days after Lowery and the SCLC delegation arrived back in the United States from their trip to Lebanon. Jackson had requested a meeting with Prime Minister Menachem Begin during his visit with Evron in Washington. When Jackson and sixteen others arrived in Israel, he immediately found himself facing a firestorm of controversy. Evron had indeed passed along Jackson’s request to meet with Begin. Perhaps still stinging from Begin’s refusal to meet with Lowery earlier in the month, some Israeli politicians and diplomatic personnel were eager for Begin or someone else in the Israeli government to meet with Jackson in order to avoid having the government appear disrespectful in the eyes of American blacks. Begin still refused, but given the pressure for someone to do so, three top officials in the opposition Labor Party eventually agreed to meet with the visiting Americans: Shimon Peres, Yigal Allon, and Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek. Kollek led Jackson on a tour of Jerusalem’s Old City and a hospital, where they comforted Israelis recently injured in a Palestinian attack.28
Jackson then traveled to the West Bank and met with Palestinians in the Qalandiya refugee camp on September 25, 1979. While there, Jackson said he felt a “sense of identification.” “I know this camp,” he said. “When I smell the stench of open sewers, this is nothing new to me. This is where I grew up.” He applauded when some of the elderly refugees who gathered around him said that the PLO spoke in their name. The next day, Jackson traveled to Nablus, the biggest town in the West Bank, where he spoke before a gathering of several hundred people at the municipality building. He told those assembled there that the Palestinians should halt terrorism and adopt civil rights–style tactics instead. He also led the crowd in his trademark “I am somebody!” chant, and was carried aloft by youths shouting, “Jackson, Arafat!”29
The PUSH leader left Israel and the West Bank after three days, crossing into Jordan, where he visited a Palestinian refugee camp outside Amman on September 27, 1979. The following day he was in Lebanon, touring another refugee camp near Tyre and meeting with Palestinians in the seaside town of Damur before arriving in Beirut. The PLO welcomed him there with an honor guard, complete with band members playing bagpipes in their camouflage uniforms. Jackson met with Arafat for two hours, returning later for an evening meeting with the PLO leader. Jackson told Arafat that he needed to dispense with any talk of doing away with Israel and just come out and say clearly what it was that he really wanted. Arafat reportedly replied, “The West Bank and Gaza,” in reference to the idea of establishing an independent Palestinian state just in those two parts of historic Palestine. Jackson responded, “Well, say that.” As during Lowery’s visit nine days earlier, Jackson was photographed with Arafat, awkwardly embracing him.30
From Beirut, Jackson flew to Cairo, where he met with Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat, who six months earlier had signed the first peace treaty between an Arab state and Israel. Jackson returned to Beirut, reportedly carrying a message from Sadat to Arafat, whence he finally left to return to the United States on October 5, 1979. His exhausting schedule included a total of eleven days traveling to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria (where he met with President Hafiz al-Asad), Israel, and the West Bank. The trip also took a physical toll on him: he twice fell ill, once having to be hospitalized in Beirut. While there, he received a special bedside visitor: Yasir Arafat.31
THE DRAMA CONTINUES
Back in the United States, the visits and diplomatic aims of both Lowery and Jackson were quickly overshadowed in the fall of 1979 by criticisms about black leaders meeting with PLO officials. It was a replay of the controversy back in August, when news of Young’s secret meeting with Terzi first emerged. Charlotte Jacobson of the World Zionist Organization and the venerable rabbi and activist Joachim Prinz criticized Lowery’s visit in letters published in the New York Times in late September of 1979. SCLC also received many angry letters from Jews, especially those on the group’s mailing list who had received its fall 1979 fund-raising letter.
Jews were not alone in criticizing the visits with Arafat. Some mainstream black leaders also took Lowery and Jackson to task. The NAACP’s Benjamin Hooks was cautiously critical. James Farmer, former head of the Congress of Racial Equality in the 1960s, offered up another circumspect critique in a speech he gave on October 15, 1979: “I have also been troubled by recent statements of some black leaders regarding events in the Middle East. A passionate concern for the social, political and economic freedom of all peoples must of course, include the Palestinians. But that is not the issue. The issue here is, simply put, is [sic] whether a unilateral, pro-PLO stance, with its implied opposition to the nation of Israel, serves the cause of that freedom, or whether it might not escalate hostilities and limit the opportunity for a peaceful resolution of these long-standing conflicts.”32
The National Urban League’s Vernon Jordan laid into Lowery and Jackson. Calling their actions “ill-considered flirtation with terrorist groups devoted to the extermination of Israel,” Jordan insisted that “the Black civil rights movement is based on non-violent moral principles. It has nothing in common with groups whose claims to legitimacy are compromised by cold-blooded murder of innocent civilians and school children.” He also denounced the trips as a “sideshow” that diverted attention from the real issues that mattered to blacks: “In the past several weeks we’ve seen more concern exhibited about Palestinian refugee camps than about American ghettos. We’ve seen more concern about the PLO’s goals than about Black America’s aspirations for equality. And we’ve seen more concern about Yasser Arafat’s future than about the future of millions of little black children growing up in poverty.”33
In response to the uproar Lowery and Jackson each reacted in his own style. For his part, Jackson pithily defended himself against the charge that by merely meeting with Arafat, he was supporting or endorsing PLO violence. Nearly two years later, when Jackson looked back, he said, “My talking with Mr. Arafat should not be construed as endorsing terrorism any more than Dr. King’s talking with President Johnson should have been seen as endorsing U.S. terrorism in Vietnam.”34 Lowery waxed diplomatic in a statement he released on October 16, 1979. Responding to the criticisms of Jordan and others, he said that the SCLC already had heard much of what they had to say during meetings it had held with Jewish leaders. We agree with them, and with the Jewish leaders, the statement noted, that Israel must “be secure in her nationhood.” Lowery’s statement opined that where they differed with Rustin and Jordan was on the policies of the government of Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. He stated that SCLC urged them to challenge the Begin government to recognize the human rights of the Palestinians.35
If Lowery was restrained in his comments, SCLC board member Wyatt Tee Walker was not. A writer, activist, and minister, Walker was strong-willed and ready to speak as he lived—without fear. He had helped Martin Luther King Jr. found SCLC and served as its first full-time executive director from 1960 to 1964. Walker first visited Israel and the West Bank in 1976 with a group of black clergy and described discovering things about the Arab-Israeli conflict that the mainstream media omitted. He would return frequently thereafter as a firm believer that the Palestinian people needed justice.36 For example, even before the SCLC trip had taken place, Walker told a gathering at his congregation at the Canaan Baptist Church of Christ on August 21, 1979, “All you have to do is visit a refugee camp one time and you will know that the Palestinians are the niggers of the Middle East. The Palestinians deserve justice in the Middle East.”37
Later that month, Walker reacted to Vernon Jordan’s sharp criticism of Lowery and the SCLC trip by writing his own strong comments in an open letter to the National Urban League leader. The letter was later adopted by the Progressive National Baptist Convention, a group of black Baptists formed in 1961 by Martin Luther King Jr. and others who parted ways with more conservative Baptists. Jordan’s denunciation, Walker wrote, “brought an end to the masquerade of the Urban League as a civil rights organization and of you as a civil rights leader.”38
BLACK SUPPORT FOR SCLC AND JACKSON
A number of religious and secular black organizations jumped into the fray. While not always explicitly defending the trips and visits with Arafat, they contributed to the growing chorus of black groups demanding that blacks be included in the discussions about the nature and direction of American foreign policy, as well as adding their voices to calls for dialogue and negotiations as the way to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Black religious organizations and figures adopted official stances in this direction. In fact, some weighed in shortly before the Young affair broke out. Ralph Abernathy, for example, endorsed a call in early 1979 for the State Department to dispatch a fact-finding mission to the Occupied Territories to investigate allegations of violations of Palestinian human rights by Israeli security forces.39
The Black Theology Project also had addressed the Palestinian issue just days before the Young affair erupted. The project was an interfaith organization that grew out of an initiative of the National Council of Churches. It was established in 1976 and was led by Sister Shawn Copeland, the Reverend Charles Spivey, and the Reverend Muhammad Kenyatta. At its third national convention in Cleveland, the group adopted a resolution on the Palestinians on August 4, 1979. The Reverend Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, who was also a musician and, before he embraced nonviolence, one of the founders of the armed civil rights protection force called the Deacons for Defense and Justice, served as chair. Those who attended the meeting approved a forceful resolution that equated the Palestinians’ struggle with that of oppressed blacks in southern Africa:
As black Christians committed to the fight for liberation of the oppressed whether they be in South Africa, Israel, the occupied Arab territories, or in the U.S., we see the essence of the struggle of the Palestinian people as the same struggle for freedom of our Black Brothers and Sisters in southern Africa. . . . The indigenous people of both lands have been displaced by violence or forced to live as oppressed people in their own countries. The human rights of the indigenous people of Southern Africa are violated because of apartheid, and the human rights of the indigenous Palestinian Arabs, Christian and Moslem, are violated because of Zionism.40
It sounded like vintage 1960s Black Power internationalism. The resolution also expressed support for Palestinian national independence and the “right of return to their homeland,” noting that “there can never be peace in the Middle East until the Palestinian people can regain their inalienable rights and live as a free people in their homeland.” The theologians’ statement ended with a call for ending American support to Israel and South Africa: “Therefore, as Black Christians in the U.S.A., we are opposed to the United States’ providing aid to South Africa and Israel as long as these two regimes violate human rights, international laws, and those basic ethical principles enunciated in the Holy Scriptures of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic faiths. . . . We oppose U.S. military and economic aid to Israel.”41
More Black Christian groups affirmed their support for the Palestinian struggle as well, an interesting change inasmuch as the Nation of Islam and other Muslims had been the ones championing the Palestinians just a decade earlier. One such group was the National Black Pastors’ Conference. The conference was a new group established in 1979 by William Augustus Jones, who at the time was president of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, to bring together black clergy persons from both the Protestant and Roman Catholic traditions. At the conference’s first national meeting in Detroit, a five-day affair that ended on November 16, 1979, the approximately one thousand members of the clergy assembled there adopted resolutions calling for recognition of the PLO, the internationalization of Jerusalem, and condemnation of Israel’s “persistent denial of human rights to the Arab inhabitants of occupied territories.” They also called on Israel to refrain from bombing southern Lebanon and to withdraw from the Occupied Territories.42
After the conference in Detroit, the National Black Pastors’ Conference decided that it, too, would dispatch a delegation to Lebanon to meet with the PLO. The group toured various PLO institutions and issued a joint statement with it in Beirut on February 14, 1980. The declaration noted that the delegation “observed striking similarities between the Palestinian refugee camps and the urban ghettos of the United States” and that it and the PLO “recognize[d] the black masses in the United States as an oppressed people.” The two sides then enunciated several principles, among which were “their commitment to and solidarity in their common struggle against racism and oppression” and their desire to “condemn Israel as an international outlaw because of its repeated violations of United Nations resolutions and its support of the racist regimes in southern Africa.”43
The groundswell of black support for Lowery and Jackson grew when secular black organizations also joined the call for a new American approach to the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict. One such organization was TransAfrica, an advocacy group established to raise awareness of Americans about Africa and the African diaspora. Established in July of 1977, TransAfrica played a leading role in the antiapartheid struggle in the United States. The group sent a letter to President Jimmy Carter after the Andrew Young Affair that stated, “We hope that the country will now seize upon this first opportunity we have had in our national discourse openly and fully to consider on their own merits the issues of the rights of the Palestinian people,” as well as, it noted obliquely, “the role of whatever organizational or individual spokesmen they may freely choose to put forward to represent their interests.”
TransAfrica then put forth in clear, strong terms the reasons why it believed that Americans had not dealt forthrightly with the Palestinian question in the past: “For whatever reason, Israel and its most ardent supporters have been able virtually to dictate the terms of reference of such a debate, and have allowed Israel unilaterally to compound its political and territorial ambitions with its legitimate security needs, and to define the Palestinian issue as one of refugees. Each sovereign state has a right to define its own policies, but that does not mean that Americans have to follow them slavishly, still less to finance their implementation.”44 TransAfrica’s letter to Carter also offered a reasoned, politically and historically based statement of support for the PLO, even while accepting Israel’s right to exist.
Another black organization contributing to the growing calls for changing American policy toward the PLO and the Middle East was the venerable NAACP. In September of 1979 the NAACP board of directors called for negotiations. Despite Benjamin Hooks’s critiques of the visits made by Lowery and Jackson to the PLO headquarters, the statement noted that the United States government should not shut out or otherwise limit the participation in the peace process of any “bona fide Middle East entity”—an indirect but unmistakably obvious reference to the PLO. The NAACP also called on the Carter administration to reexamine the government’s 1975 understanding with Israel that the United States would not talk to the PLO and supported self-determination and a homeland for the Palestinians.45 This represented a sea change since the days when Roy Wilkins mounted his forceful defense of Israel at the NAACP in the 1960s. It was another example indicating that what had been considered radical thinking about the Arab-Israeli conflict among blacks in the 1960s had become more mainstream by the late 1970s.
For a few months from the late summer of 1979 through the spring of 1980, it seemed like black Americans from across the political spectrum were rushing to meet Arafat on his home turf. Some did so in solidarity with Young, some to burnish their own foreign policy credentials, some for these and other reasons. Even figures formerly associated with the Black Power movement did so, as well, although their trips generally occurred under the media radar given that the movement had largely faded from public consciousness by that time. Stokely Carmichael went to Lebanon in the summer of 1979 to meet with PLO officials. The PLO invited Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton to do so as well. Traveling in April of 1980, he, too, posed for the requisite photograph with Arafat. It was ironic that two of the most famous early Black Power supporters of the Palestinians and critics of Israel were sidelined by the media as it focused on mainstream black leaders who traveled to meet with Arafat. It was another testament to how far the American political landscape had shifted since the heady days of Black Power in 1967.
The Andrew Young Affair and the meetings with the PLO also engendered a solidly pro-Israeli, anti-PLO tour of the region on the part of at least one senior black leader. The venerable Bayard Rustin once again stepped up to the plate to take a spirited lead in Israel’s defense. At age sixty-seven Rustin was still adamant not only about Israel’s virtues but in his desperate need for America’s blacks to support the Jewish state, reject the PLO, and thereby remain true, in his opinion, to the civil rights–era partnership with American Jews. He had just been on a two-week visit to former Nazi concentration camps in Poland and the Soviet Union, but to counteract the negative impact on both the Israeli government and American Jews that was caused by the Middle Eastern trips made by SCLC and PUSH, Rustin very quickly rounded up some black political allies and set off on his own trip—but only to Israel, not Lebanon. Shortly before departing the United States, Rustin said, “Speaking for myself, I want to make it clear to the Israelis that there are great numbers of Black people who want the United States to give Israel whatever support it needs.”46 The delegation was headed by William S. Pollard, director of the civil rights department of the powerful AFL-CIO labor union. Other delegates included the National Urban League’s vice president, Ron Brown, and the NAACP’s Althea Simmons. They were guests of the Histadrut, the Israeli labor federation.
This time, the Israeli leadership was only too happy to meet with the visiting black Americans, in marked contrast to its attitude toward the visits of Lowery and Jackson the previous month. The group arrived in Israel in mid-October of 1979, and Prime Minister Menachem Begin himself met with the delegation in Jerusalem on October 17. If Rustin thought his stalwart support for Israel over the years meant that Begin might be amenable to hearing the group’s ideas about constructive Israeli steps toward peace, the prime minister quickly disabused him of such hopes. When the group expressed its concerns about the Israeli government’s decision of a few days earlier to expand settlement building in the Occupied Territories, Begin would have none of it. He retorted, “Jewish settlements in this land are no obstacle to peace.” Afterward, Pollard reaffirmed Rustin’s long-standing goal by saying, “We want to cement the relationship between blacks and Jews and Israel.”47 The degree to which Rustin succeeded over the years in his struggle to forge a safe-and-sane, mainstream black identity by vigorously championing Israel was questionable and offered further evidence of the staying power of the Arab-Israeli conflict as an animating force among people of color in their efforts at forging their identity and vision of political struggle within America.
The various trips to the Middle East made by mainstream blacks in the wake of the Andrew Young Affair showed that the Arab-Israeli conflict remained a lightning rod for expressions of black grievances and concern about identity, place, and political action in America at the dawn of the 1980s. The Palestinian question provided the spark for a revival of the 1960s-era demand that blacks be able to develop and pursue their own analyses of international issues and American foreign policy questions without being challenged or held back by whites, including erstwhile liberal supporters. Just like SNCC had done more than a decade earlier, groups like the SCLC insisted in the wake of the Young affair that black Americans had just as much right to independent thinking and action in the realm of foreign affairs as any other ethnic group. If Jews could claim a stake in America’s attitudes toward the Arab-Israeli conflict, then so could blacks. Nothing less than the very political identity and freedom of movement of American blacks was at stake in the drama that unfolded after Young’s resignation in 1979.
Perhaps the most significant takeaway from the affair and the black responses to it was just how much understanding of the plight of the Palestinian people had moved from the radical fringes to the mainstream of black American politics since SNCC first made its case publicly twelve years earlier. Black Power was essentially dead and gone by the waning years of the Carter presidency, yet its belief that the Palestinians were a fellow people of color that deserved their support, not to mention its vision for robust black participation in foreign policy matters dealing with the Middle East, remained.