For episode 152, Dana El Kurd hosts Geoffrey Levin to talk about his book “Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978“. Levin is assistant professor of Middle Eastern and Jewish Studies at Emory University and the Director of Undergraduate Engagement at Emory’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies.

Our Palestine Question is a new history of the American Jewish relationship with Israel focused on its most urgent and sensitive issue: the question of Palestinian rights. Given the ongoing genocide launched by the Israeli state on the Palestinians of Gaza, this book couldn’t be more timely.

Show notes:

• Fida Jiryis – Stranger in My Own Land: Palestine, Israel and One Family’s Story of Home
• Ezra Klein – “Gen Z Is Listening to What Netanyahu Is Saying. Is Biden?“
• David Klion – “The American Jewish Left in Exile“
• Marjorie Feld – The Threshold of Dissent
• Shaul Magid – The Necessity of Exile

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Episode Credits:

Host: Dana El Kurd
Producer: Elia Ayoub
Guest: Geoffrey Levin
Music: ⁠Rap and Revenge⁠
Sound editor: Elia Ayoub
Episode designer: Elia Ayoub

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Transcript via Antidote Zine:

All of the people I profiled got fired, or failed. What would success have looked like? I’m not confident these people would have solved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They’re Americans. But I think we would be in a much healthier place in terms of discourse in the American Jewish community, and in America more broadly, if this had been dealt with in the way that Peretz and Zukerman were calling for seventy years ago.

Dana El Kurd: Hello everyone, welcome to The Fire These Times, my name is Dana El Kurd. Today we’ll be discussing with Geoffrey Levin, an assistant professor at Emory University, with a PhD in Hebrew and Judaic studies, his book Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978 that’s out now with Yale University press.

Geoffrey, could you tell us a little about yourself? Then we’ll get into the motivation for the book.

Geoffrey Levin: Thank you so much for having me, Dana. I’m a professor here at Emory; I’m jointly appointed in Middle Eastern and Jewish studies; I teach most of the courses here that relate to Israel-Palestine and other modern Middle East topics. I had a long interest in diplomatic history, but ended up very interested in how American Jewish groups dealt with earlier Palestinian rights issues.

DK: Why the motivation for this particular topic? This is based on your dissertation, right?

GL: Yeah. It wasn’t like I set out to write this book; I was a first-year PhD student taking a class on American Jewish history and another one on Palestinian history in Israel, and wanted to do archival research. So I looked at American Jewish relations with Arab American groups, particularly Arab student groups in the fifties and sixties. There’s no diplomatic archives when you’re doing your PhD at NYU, but there are American Jewish archives. I read the research of people like Shira Robinson, Leena Dallasheh, and Hillel Cohen about Palestinian Arabs living in Israel who received citizenship, and learned so much about the great restrictions they faced under military government, and I wanted to see what American Jewish groups had to say—and I could just walk down the street and look in the archives.

And I found all this material, which was for a research paper my first year but ended up becoming a chapter of this book. I was guided by the sources I found. I just looked deeper into whatever I found interesting and then found a way to bring it all together into a book. But it’s also pretty remarkable—we’ve spoken formerly about this research; other people have seen these meetings, as I’ll talk about, between Ben Gurion and American Jewish leaders where they’re pressuring him to change the approach toward the civil rights of Arabs in their country, and people have overlooked them before.

There are reasons for that, but I realized at a certain point that there was no dissertation or book that focused on American Jews and Palestinians. There’s plenty on American Jews in Israel. This obviously is a book about American Jews in Israel, but it tells the story with Palestinian rights as the center, not as something peripheral to the relationship. Scholars have focused on the interwoven ways that you can’t study Israel without studying Palestinian history and the Palestinian experience; I turn that same scholarship on the American Jewish/Israel relationship. You can’t understand this without understanding the centrality of Palestinian rights issues from the very beginning.

DK: That’s fascinating. For the layman, including myself, a non-historian, it wouldn’t have seemed obvious that Palestinian rights, the question of refugee resettlement, all the things you talk about in your book, played a role in how American Jewish organizations and leaders not only dealt with their relationship to the Israeli government but eventually changed their positions. We’ll get into that.

For people who haven’t read your book—I’m halfway through; really looking forward to finishing. This discussion of the American Jewish community, it’s relationship to Israel, how much it can pressure Israel, and what positions it can take vis-á-vis Palestinian rights is obviously very timely. This is something people are discussing right now.

Ezra Klein had this op-ed in the New York Times about how the reason why we’re seeing a lot more dissent around Israeli policy, particularly among young people, and particularly among young Jewish people—he characterizes it as stemming from a generational difference. Their grandparents’ Israel struggling to be born, their parents may have seen it strengthened, but still supposedly under attack by different forces—these young people are seeing Israel in a different way: a strong Israel. For him, the argument is that young people, particularly young Jewish people, are newly critical of Israel in a way that their parents weren’t because of this difference in what Israel they are looking at, essentially.

Given the argument of your book, do you agree with this characterization? How would you use your book’s findings to amend that?

GL: As long as there have been liberal-minded American Jews looking very closely at this issue, there have been American Jews who are concerned, disturbed, and upset about what they’ve seen. The fact of the matter is, now there are far more people, from Millennials to Gen Z, who have much deeper exposure to Israelis and Palestinians than Boomers, Gen X, and older generations did.

Older generations were able to have this relationship from a distance; they watched the movie Exodus, and maybe they visited there for a week or two (some of them). But people who are in my age bracket (I’m thirty-four) and younger are far more likely to have been to Israel than our parents’ or grandparents’ generations, because of all these subsidized programs for people going there. We are far more likely to have met Israelis or gone to college with Palestinians, far more likely to eat the cuisine and watch the stuff on Netflix.

I’m not an expert on the present; I’m just an observer. But my book is about people who, in the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies went over there and came to the conclusion that Palestinian rights—whether that means well-being or national self-determination—were something that couldn’t be ignored. And they came to that conclusion often when talking to Palestinians or talking to leftwing Israelis, when seeing that some of the things they thought about the country when they were in America weren’t exactly the same.

Anecdotally (again, I’m not a sociologist focused on the present), I see a lot of people who are very involved in Jewish groups and publications that highlight Palestinian rights—a lot of them have a similar story. Perhaps you can think of people you know who spent a year or two over there—and went over there because they were interested in Jewishness, interested in Zionism, interested in American Jewish identity. There’s definitely elements of that in older generations. What I bring to the table is an underrated aspect of it, but there is so much more of an intimate, warts-and-all exposure that these younger generations have that the older ones don’t.

DK: So because of the availability of information, there is probably a qualitative difference, but there is also still this very long tradition of American Jewish dissent.

GL: That’s the other big thing. I don’t think Ezra Klein has read my book. There have been people since ’48 who have been engaging with these issues, and no one’s really written their stories before. A lot of these names who are the main figures in my book—Don Peretz, William Zukerman—are not people who have appeared in history books before. They are people who have written a lot, but they are not people whose lives have been brought into the conversation since they were active.

DK: I had never heard those names before, and I found it really fascinating to get into their trajectories.

Chapter one of your book focuses on Don Peretz. He’s the son of a Sephardic Jewish Zionist whose family had been in Palestine since after the Spanish Inquisition. He’s a believer in bi-nationalism; he lived in Jerusalem during the events of 1948, eventually leaves and comes back. Can you tell us a little bit more about him and what his story signifies and reveals about these dynamics?

GL: His dad was from Jerusalem; he was raised in the US. He becomes pacifistic, volunteers locally with the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group, gets drafted into World War Two, and won’t carry a gun—he serves in Okinawa as a Japanese interpreter. And then he goes over to Jerusalem on the GI Bill to study at Hebrew University because he’s interested in bi-nationalism, and [Judah] Magnus, and [Martin] Buber, any peaceful synthesis between Jewish and Arab.

He actually falls in love with Zionism there in ’46-’47, Zionism and its creative Jewish identity enterprise. Then the war breaks out, and he gets disgusted by what he sees as the extreme nationalism around him. Shockingly, he gets briefly abducted and interrogated by an Arab militia—and they let him go when they learn about his politics. That just makes him think more deeply about these things, so he ends up leaving in the middle of the war, in ’48, and comes back six months later to be the only American Jew to volunteer with this Quaker group, AFSC, which is aiding displaced Palestinians.

Most of the AFSC is in Gaza, helping refugees there. He’s stationed in Akka/Akko/Acre in the north, with a contingent that’s focused on aiding displaced Arabs. He hears about how Arabs are getting kicked out, even ones who are attempting to come back; he’s briefly mentioned in one of Benny Morris’s books. From this experience, he goes to grad school, and does the first PhD dissertation anywhere that focuses on Israel’s policies towards Palestinians—mostly Palestinian refugees but also Palestinians who during the fifties become citizens of Israel.

What is surprising is that he gets hired by a mainstream American Jewish group, the American Jewish Committee, which at the time calls itself non-Zionist but is pro-Israel, and has the most access to the Eisenhower administration of any American Jewish group. And they hire him because they want to do something about the Palestinian issue. They end up commissioning him to do a philanthropic interfaith initiative that’s not focused on refugee return at all, but even that is too much for Israeli diplomats.

So I found this person’s life—I literally went through his widow’s filing cabinets and found all these letters, and reconstructed his life from one angle. But I also found all these Israeli diplomatic files on him, where they’re plotting against him and the AJC. They do not want the AJC to be involved in Israeli policy on Palestinian questions. I document the response to him and how it eventually it gets him pushed out of the organization, including a role by Benny Morris’s father. I also document how he argues in the fifties that American Jews need to discuss these issues, like the refugees, in a serious way—not dismissively or propagandistically.

Some of his letters to his colleagues or his family seem so resonant to a lot of American Jews today. He’s not a radical, which is what is so interesting; he’s someone who is trying to change American Jewish politics. But that’s not something that could be tolerated, ultimately, even though for a moment it looks like maybe it could.

DK: We’ll get back to the role that the Israeli diplomats play in eventually distancing him and others. But lets get to why Peretz was interested in this question, and also why the AJC, the American Jewish Committee, was interested in this question.

You used the term non-Zionist. Can you explain what that means? And what was their motivation for even wanting to have a discussion about the Palestinian refugee issue?

GL: There are people from all political perspectives who are Jewish and who are concerned about these things for humanistic, liberal reasons. Some are in different organizations; Peretz is someone for whom this is personal, and there are some others in the AJC. But as an organization, the AJC at this time does not believe in Jewish nationalism. They posited, when making the case against antisemitism and for Jewish civil rights in the US, that Jews are just a religion, and that they are loyal to the US. This goes back to the Reform Jewish declarations in the nineteenth century.

So when we say they are “non-Zionist,” they initially are not a big fan of the whole idea of Jewish statehood; very hesitant to get on board until basically it’s happening. After ’48, they keep the label of non-Zionist. They say, We’re not going to support Aliyah, we’re going to stay here; we’ll support the state—in fact, being non-Zionist makes us more well-placed to advocate fairly in the American discourse, because we are loyal to America. So they are not as invested in the project as some American Jews are, and they’re viewed as a bit elitist and aloof. But they are led by people who have money and influence.

They are driven to address the issue not because they think suddenly it’s a moral issue they need to deal with, but because other groups are bringing it up domestically: Christian groups and some Arab groups, including Arab diplomats—as well as this organization called the American Friends of the Middle East, which is sponsored secretly by the CIA, which is trying to get American public discourse to be more critical of Israel and supportive of an American Arab agenda as it’s trying to woo the Nasser regime in Egypt in the mid-fifties.

The AJC are reacting. They’re trying to grapple with what Israel means for American Jews: Is this going to increase antisemitism? That is their concern. But they’re not addressing this issue until the mid-fifties, when Arab diplomats are bringing up Kafr Qasim, the massacre of Arab citizens of Israel in ’56, so they are forced to deal with it. That’s around the time when they hire Peretz to do something interfaith with Chrisitans. They’re concerned if they don’t address this, it’ll increase antisemitism.

And they go to Ben Gurion, and they say, You should probably start treating Arabs better, because it’s bad for Israel and Israel’s PR, and it’s also bad for us in America, because it makes Jews look bad. They are addressing it as an institution from this angle, even though there are people who maybe have a deeper human, interpersonal, ideological level of concern.

DK: I didn’t mean to suggest there was necessarily a binary. It seemed from reading that chapter like those organizations were engaging on the Palestine question for strategic concerns about their role in American life, and how Israel might reflect on that, whereas someone like Don Peretz sounds very internationalist to me. He says oppression must be fought everywhere, whether in America, Czechoslovakia, or Palestine. I don’t have the exact quote in front of me.

We’re talking about the American Jewish Committee because Peretz was involved with that, but there was also Breira. Could you tell us a little bit about that organization and their vision for the conflict?

GL: Most of my book is pre-’67 history, which I call the first generation of Jews to be interested in Palestinian rights. It’s not a huge number of people; that’s part of what I like about it, because I can go into these deep stories. I have a person or two per chapter. After ’67, obviously, Israel is occupying the West Bank and Gaza, and other territories, and this is becoming an issue people can’t totally ignore, the Palestinians and the refugee issue and the domestic Israeli situation. The Black Power movement is bringing this up; the New Left is bringing up the Palestinian cause. It’s becoming a bigger thing at the UN; the PLO has become something that big.

There are some American Jews who get involved in Palestinian rights, are radicals and reject Jewish politics entirely, and get involved in leftwing politics. They’re important even though they’re not central to my story. I’m interested in American Jews who are in Jewish politics for this book. There are some who say, We can reconcile our radicalism with our Zionism, and go in that direction.

Israel had a crisis after the ’73 war, and some younger American Jews, people who were in their twenties, occasionally in their early thirties, many of them who had spent a few months or a year or two over there, came together and founded this organization called Breira, which lasted from ’73 until ’77 or ’78. One of their main issues (not their only issue) is recognizing Palestinian aspirations. This is very vague at the beginning, but by the end of its time, it’s pretty clear that they support more or less what we now call the two-state solution.

This is the first of many American Jewish groups to advocate nationally for the two-state solution. This is very provocative at the time. This is when the PLO and Arafat and Fatah are the devil, and the two-state solution was far from the consensus anywhere. They are also interested in other diasporic issues and so on, but this is really central from the beginning. They position themselves as “nice Jews,” people who are really involved and invested in Jewish community, who pose themselves as caring about Israel, and they do.

Some of this has been written about before, but what I show is these people who were leading it were deeply influenced by the Israeli left, by their time in Israel and the Middle East, by meeting with Palestinians, talking to Arabs, talking to Israelis, and that’s how they come to these conclusions. I show this as a really transnational story, and highlight the ways in which their rhetoric is constantly referring to the Israeli left, the small factions in Israel that are supporting negotiations with the PLO.

Ultimately they hear that some Israeli factions are meeting with the PLO, and then some of them meet with the PLO, along with some other American Jews. When this becomes an issue of controversy because Israeli diplomats leak information about it (to Wolf Blitzer, funnily enough), Breira defends the fact that Jews should be meeting with moderate voices in the PLO. I met one of these moderates, Sabri Jiryis, who’s still alive—he doesn’t remember it. But it became this huge controversy, and while they were kind of tolerated for several years, it’s one of the factors that leads to greater pressure.

They get labeled “Jews for Fatah,” because two people met with two moderates (Derek Penslar, who’s won the Association for Israel Studies lifetime achievement award, signed something that references apartheid, so the Wall Street Journal calls him the “apartheid professor” now). They were trying hard to get Jewish legitimacy—but they made one misstep, when they felt like they were following Israeli leftists. There are other reasons they fell apart, but the main reason is they get ripped apart for this engagement with Palestinians.

DK: That’s incredibly resonant.

I’m not going to go chapter by chapter; I’m just trying to highlight some stories and we’ll bring it all together at the end. But the second chapter talks about William Zukerman. There are ways in which his trajectory mirrors Don Peretz, but maybe you can give us a brief overview of his trajectory as well.

GL: I don’t frame it this way, but one way to think about this book is that the mainstream American Jewish left is trying to find the red lines on these issues. They know there are really outspoken anti-Zionists like Elmer Berger (and he’s not anti-Zionist because of Palestinian issues, initially) who the mainstream American Jewish community doesn’t like. But there are also people like William Zukerman.

He’s a former Yiddish journalist who grew up in Chicago, was based in Europe for a while, was born in the Russian empire, very international. But in 1948 he switches from Yiddish journalism to start his own publication in English called The Jewish Newsletter. It circulated pretty widely. His writings are republished through Jewish news agencies, and many Jewish newspapers outside of The Jewish Newsletter. He says he’s not anti-Zionist, initially; he’s pro-Israel and anti-nationalist. But he’s writing in this liberal independent way, as he’d frame it, about issues like the Palestinian refugees, and highlighting these stories and reporting news from Israel about how some Israelis think this is a big moral issue.

It’s all about how these laws Israel is passing in the early fifties are taking land from people who happen to be Arab, and he doesn’t think that’s right, and it needs to be brought up. He’s writing about other things, Yiddish in Israel—but what’s fascinating is, he’s getting read. And there’s a reference to Richmond in the text: these Israeli diplomats who are charged with advancing Israel’s image are going to Jewish communities and having to answer questions from American Jews who have read Zukerman’s publication. One diplomat writes to the future ambassador Abe Harman, and says, In Richmond I’m talking to some Zionists and they’re asking all these questions—we need to do something about this William Zukerman. He’s confusing Zionists!

He’s messing with their stories. In this early fifties period—I found these files on Zukerman in the Israeli archives, and they really have to push American Zionists to act against Zukerman, because he has decades of credibility as a Jewish journalist. He’s in his sixties at the time. You can tell he cares about mainstream Jewish life. And the American Zionist leadership before ’48 didn’t feel like it was its job to police these things, didn’t feel like it was taking orders from anyone who lived in the Middle East—and now suddenly there’s a state and their role has changed.

That’s important to understanding why there’s some lack in this role, but it’s a fascinating angle. What’s so interesting about this post-’48 period that I’m dealing with is that everyone is adjusting themselves. What does it mean that there’s an Israeli state? What does it mean that Israel isn’t letting refugees back? What does it mean that there’s restrictions on people moving there? We see this struggle happening among non-Zionists, but also anti-Zionists and Zionists. That’s part of the story with Zukerman and the response to him.

So they get him kicked out of a lot of publications, and he ends up much more peripheral by the late fifties than he is at the beginning.

DK: At some point, correct me if I’m wrong, it was Zukerman who describes Israel as a “miracle.” There is this sense from reading about these figures that they’re adjusting and they don’t know what this new situation with an Israeli state actually existing will mean. I think that’s really interesting, because from the Palestinian side, there are Palestinian scholars from the get-go who are describing Israel in certain ways—I’ll get to that when we get to chapter four. But it’s interesting how people like Zukerman, who are well-established, are still trying to learn about what this new reality means.

But let’s go back to what you said eventually happens to him: he is entirely sidelined from the papers he writes in. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s essentially because of Israeli harassment campaigns, getting lots of complaints against him.

GL: He was the New York correspondent for Britain’s premier Jewish newspaper, and they nudged him out of that. It seems pretty clear they urged the London Jewish Chronicle to fire him. He was covered by all these mainstream Jewish newspapers, in Philly, Boston, and beyond, and suddenly he’s out. And he’s really upset about this. I have letters from him—by the time he dies in ’61, he wouldn’t call ’48 a miracle anymore. His politics have gone another direction.

To understand that, something that’s worth thinking about—American Jews and lots of people perhaps didn’t realize how long lots of things that happened in ’48, ’49, and ’50 would last, these restrictions over Arabs in Israel; there’s a war. They last until 1966, but in 1950, maybe American Jews especially thought these issues would go away. The Palestinian refugee issue—if you told American Jews in 1949 that this issue would still be a huge one in 1975, maybe they would have been a little more active about it. But they were told, and the narrative from Israel was: the numbers are less than what you think; they’re just generic Arabs.

DK: There is no Palestinian nationality.

GL: Right. Peretz is polite; he’s a scholar—he’s outspoken in rebutting what he can in the ways he can, but he gets pushback from people who think they know better than him because they’ve been fed the Israeli official diplomatic story. Zukerman writes in Harper’s that there are 750,000 Palestinian refugees, and its like, Oh no, that’s crazy, it’s 500,000.

Part of understanding why liberal-minded American Jews didn’t engage is because they thought the problems would just go away. And obviously they haven’t. And there are people who really called for dealing with this; Peretz and Zukerman were talking about this in a serious way. Not even polemically, but seriously. And they’re pushed out.

DK: I’m struck by what Don Peretz says on the debate regarding Israel’s policies; he characterizes the discussion as totalitarian, and he worries that it’ll impact Israeli and American Jews, and what happens to him and Zukerman is essentially what happens: they are pushed out, they are policed, they lose their jobs, and the conversation about Palestinian refugees and things like that is dropped by the American Jewish organizational leadership.

GL: This is in a letter to the executive board of the American Jewish Committee: there needs to be a platform to discuss these things which affect Israel but in the long run will also affect American Jews. It’s just fascinating.

DK: And it’s really disconcerting that we still have the same problem, essentially. I’m not a historian, but it seems like because of the failure of that moment to push the conversation, we’re still having the same problems; we’re still having the same conversations and we’re still having a lot of that policing around the discussion of Israel’s policies and how it relates to American politics.

GL: People ask me—all of these people I profiled got fired, or failed; what would success have looked like? I’m not confident these people would have solved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They’re Americans. But I think we would be in a much healthier place in terms of discourse, in the American Jewish community and in America more broadly, if this had been dealt with in the way that Peretz and Zukerman were calling for seventy years ago.

DK: I know this is not the focus of your book, but I’ve read elsewhere about the organizations of the American Jewish community prior to the creation of Israel—they are very important to the creation of Israel, and Ben Gurion comes and lobbies American Jewish Zionists. Again, not suggesting that they would have solved the problem, but they did have some weight.

GL: It’s huge in this period. There’s aren’t Christian Zionist groups like there are today. Israel desperately needed money during these periods when there was mass migration from Arab countries in the fifties, and they were getting it from these people. That’s why they were so hyper vigilant about these American Jewish groups doing anything that would shift things away from enthusiasm. They don’t just want support, they want enthusiasm. And they’re still concerned in the fifties that America is going to push them to take back 75,000-100,000 refugees. It’s not all-or-nothing; America wants a better relationship with the Arab world, and one of the tasks of American Jewish groups is to try and prevent there from being too much pressure on any given issue.

DK: That’s really fascinating. At some point in your book you also turn to the figure of Fayez Sayigh, the brother of Anis Sayigh, one of the founders of the Palestine Research Center, and the interesting connection he has with people like Peretz.

Before reading your book, I didn’t know anything about Zukerman or Peretz or any of these figures; Fayez and his family are known on the Palestinian side for asserting very early on that apartheid stems from what he calls Israel’s settler-colonial nature. For the Palestinian researcher, the Palestinian scholar—and these are of course a certain stratum of elite, but nevertheless they are the ones engaged in the conversation on this—it was predetermined, in their eyes, that this would stem from the creation of Israel.

So tell us more about how someone like Fayez figures in the American Jewish story, and his relationship with someone like Peretz, and also how American Jewish groups react to someone like Fayez Sayigh. I know there are different Jewish groups, like the AJC versus the ADL. But how did they react to his worldview?

GL: He’s so fascinating. Born in 1922, same year as Peretz. In the past ten-fifteen years there have been scholars engaging with him. He died in 1980, so he’s been gone for a long time. But generally I don’t think he’s been that recognized or known for his importance in Palestinian discourse. And those who have been approaching and dealing with him in the past have mostly been intellectual historians, because he has these writings like Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, which he wrote for the Palestine Research Center.

He is the person who—it’s hard to find all the details on who wrote what, but he’s a leading figure advocating for and possibly having written “Zionism is racism” at the UN in ’75. So his writings are coming to attention; someone wrote an early-life biography about him before ’48. But no one has published any biographical research on his post-’48 life. He had this fascinating episode—I feel lucky to be the first one to cover this because I happened upon his papers: he was the leading spokesman for the Arab cause in the 1950s in the United States.

This is not so well known, but before Edward Said, he’s someone who—he comes from this family: his brother Yusif is an economist who’s well known; Rosemary Sayigh is his sister-in-law, also well known; Yezid is his nephew; Anis is his brother. He comes from a Presbyterian family: his father is a Syrian Presbyterian minister and his mother is Palestinian; Fayez is born in Syria and Anis is born in Tiberias; they grew up there, and Tiberias in northern Palestine is their home.

They’re educated at AUB; he gets involved in the Syrian Social Nationalist Party—he plays an interesting role there, but that’s not really my focus. Then he goes for a PhD at Georgetown, and he’s there in ’48. so he’s a refugee in that he has no place to go back to, but he wasn’t physically kicked out. He gets involved, two or three years out of Georgetown, in advocating for the Arab cause, briefly working for a Lebanese delegation, working for other Arab delegations, and he gets some support form this secretly CIA-funded American Friends of the Middle East, who look at him as perfect—the Ideal Arab.

Because he’s Christian. Not only Christian, but Presbyterian, which a lot of American elites are. He’s Georgetown educated; his English is—he’s a genius. He’s hardworking. It’s hard to look at someone who has been so cheated by history, who, whether you love or hate his politics, is so underrated. Anyway, they hire him. On Cold War stuff he was to the right. The party he was involved with in Lebanon was rightwing. He’s anticommunist so they highlight him. He gets speaking engagements, is becoming somewhat well-known, and makes friends with some anti-Zionist Jews (Elmer Berger) and they influence each other, so he’s starting to understand how to articulate even more clearly and in a deeper way the differences between Judaism and Zionism, because that’s his friends’ project.

When the Arab League is opening a new PR office in the US, the Arab League secretary general asks him to write up the plans. So he writes up the plans for this Arab League office in New York. He’s not hired to head it; he’s the deputy head. It goes to some Egyptian bigwig who is incompetent. But the guy gets sick, and he’s running it as acting director throughout ’56 and ’57. He is the chief Arab League spokesman in America during the ’56 war. He goes on these tours where he visits seven states in three weeks, and goes on Mike Wallace.

And his office gets attacked as antisemitic by the ADL. He goes on the radio to defend his organization, and says, Look, not one word here is antisemitic; there are some Arab diplomats not from my office who say things that are really problematic, but my office? Look for one word. If you want dual-loyalty antisemitism, look at this book by Ben Gurion! And he gets a quote from Ben Gurion that’s really problematic about American Jews not being loyal to America.

So AJC, which is non-Zionist and much more cautious a group than ADL, actually meets with him (I think Peretz arranges it). And they have a really fascinating meeting where they’re trying to sort out their differences. Sayigh says, I’m sorry this was offensive to you; I won’t say anything again that highlights American Jews not loyal to the US. And they give him some material, and he asks, How can I advocate for my cause in a way that’s not antisemitic? And they can’t really give him a clear answer, and he can’t really give them a clear answer on—maybe Israel can exist, and you know…

So there’s lots of good intentions and positivity during the meeting, they end on a good note—but they don’t actually get anywhere. And it’s a fascinating moment, because Sayigh, who ultimately gets pushed out of his office because of corruption and nepotism, despite working very hard (he’s a workaholic, and not easy to have as your boss), goes from this point where he’s in America trying to get an Arab American coalition, where he’s anticommunist, to write, less than ten years later, Zionism and Colonialism in Palestine, does the UN thing, and is an architect in getting the “Third World” onto the Palestine program, and connecting intellectually there.

And again, he becomes this villain in ’75 with “Zionism is racism.” And the AJC is far more Zionist twenty years later, almost indistinguishable from the ADL. But there had been this moment where they’re thinking about these things. So Sayigh, intellectually, is at a different place in the fifties than where he is when he writes these things in the sixties and seventies.

DK: He was hardened, perhaps.

GL: He was very hardened, especially in the seventies when he sees the Arab world—he was very invested in the Arab cause more broadly, and then the Arab world betrays the Palestinian cause time and time again, and the book’s last reference to him is his being embittered by Camp David and all these things.

It’s so metaphorical. We can almost look at his trajectory as a metaphor for the Palestinian international struggle: looking maybe to the West, having maybe some hopes and falling through, but being at the intellectual vanguard—maybe not in the public sphere, but he’s writing for the PLO about how Zionism connects to settler-colonialism in ’65, before anyone else was using colonialism as a ‘slur’ for Israel, which is just fascinating.

DK: Truly fascinating. The Palestine embedded in a regional cause, and that falling through—we are seeing all of that continuously in 2024, today.

We’re about to wrap up, but I wanted to get your opinion about a couple of things here. David Klion wrote for the New York Review of Books an essay about the “exile of the American Jewish left.” I don’t know if you happened to read it. But essentially he talks about how despite this activism right now, the #CeasefireNow and the Rabbis for Peace and Jewish Voices for Peace and all these things, at the end of the day the majority of the community stands with Israel; there’s polling to suggest this. His argument is that to be an American Jew and leftist on Palestine is perhaps to admit they’re outside the fold, outside the community.

What do you think of that argument?

GL: Yes and no—with polling data, it’s all about how you phrase a question. I think American Jews are closer and feel more intertwined with Israel than ever before, but if you talk to lots of Jews there’s lots of complexity in these feelings and lots of “dissatisfaction” (to say the least) about how this war is being waged. There’s interest in “defeating Hamas,” but there’s also polling data from a few years ago that twenty-five percent of American Jews don’t oppose the word apartheid being used.

What is going to have to be dealt with for anyone who considers themselves interested in there being anything called a “united” Jewish community is the fact there’s going to be a diverse number of perspectives. Right now there’s a war, so obviously there are people on the streets giving all they can to get a ceasefire. At a different point in the book, those are the majority. But there are lots of American Jews who see Israel going to the right. Look at polling for Netanyahu; look at polling for where Israel seems to be going, politically, in a religious-right direction. The liberal American Jewish majority is not happy with that.

So I don’t know where we are after this war, which gives so many intense feelings. I don’t know where the American Jewish left is, too—now a lot of these activist groups are doing all they can for a ceasefire, but right after October 7 the American Jewish left was upset by seeing how many on the left were applauding October 7 to a certain extent. I don’t know if that’s in the back now, or if that’s something the American Jewish left is dealing with when the violence is slowed down. But there’s going to be a lot to grapple with.

That big chunk of people who are maybe for Israel if it’s Israel versus Hamas are still trying to reconcile these images they’re seeing coming out of Gaza, the people starving and all this. There’s a lot underneath the surface, even if there are a lot of people who aren’t on the streets.

DK: Yeah. I will finish the entire book—I encourage anyone to pick it up, it’s fascinating. It’s not just about the American Jewish community; we’re talking about Fayez Sayigh for example. We often have a way of dismissing people; we say, Oh, they don’t represent the community, or They’re a particular kind of elite; What they were talking about wasn’t really incorporated, and we think that’s the end of it. But the people who are involved in these questions are already such a small subset of society. You used the term “intellectual vanguard.” That’s kind of who is ever talking about anything. It’s a small subset of people.

It seems to me that even if somebody like Peretz or Zukerman or Fayez was sidelined towards the end of their life, they’re still part of that tradition, and they’re not tangential to the history. They are at the core of it, even if maybe they weren’t representative of public opinion. So I really appreciated your book, because for me it is mostly a known history but the work it does to unearth and bring these people back into the discussion—this is part of the tradition, too. So maybe David Klion’s argument is more pessimistic than it needs to be, I’m not sure.

Just to wrap up, do you want to give recommendations for readings for people who are interested in more of this topic?

GL: There’s so much you can learn about community by looking at the people who are not tolerated in it, or cast out. I want to pivot that: there are a number of people who are writing books related, and a couple more that are coming out. Marjorie Feld’s Threshold of Dissent is a history of American Jewish anti-Zionism. Oren Kroll Zeldin has a book—these are both coming out in June—on contemporary issues of activism and these questions. Another scholar, Matthew Berkman, is also dealing with related topics.

There’s so much great stuff to read. Something I’m reading right now is by the daughter of someone I interviewed for the book, one of the PLO moderates, Sabri Jiryis, who American Jews met with in 1976. His daughter Fida Jiryis has a book about their family’s fascinating story. If you’re interested in transnational histories of this, Jonathan Gribetz has a book coming out on the PLO Research Center that deals with the Jiryises and Sayighs.

There’s a lot coming out. What’s already out besides my book is Fida Jiryis’s book—there’s no lack of great books to read on these topics.

DK: I’m so glad that this is available scholarship now. I’m going to look for all of those.

Thank you so much, Geoffrey. This was a fascinating conversation.

GL: Thank you, Dana.