Arab Activism in America | The Early Years and the Myths of Israel
About 3,500 people took part in this gathering, hosted by the convention center in Detroit under the name “The People's Conference for Palestine” and organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement. It brought together many organizers of the student movement from the sit-ins and demonstrations at American universities, and hosted activists and participants, from within the student movement and beyond it, in the protests against the genocide being committed by the Israeli occupation against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Among the most prominent of these allies were many Jewish American activists, whether opponents of the Zionist settler-colonial movement or advocates of justice and peace. With them, too, were women from feminist movements, activists from some African American organizations, and veteran protesters from the American left and the student movement, some of whom lived through the Vietnam War and protested against it, and many of whom continue to protest the influence of money and the arms industry on the American electoral process.
It was heartening that the organizers of this huge conference, its hosts and its speakers, were young people in their early twenties. At the conferences of Arab organizations in America, which I attended often over the decades, I had grown used to age groups ranging from fifty to seventy!
Some fathers and mothers of the student movement's young people came to the conference in Detroit, proud of what their children had achieved despite the fears the parents carried from our Arab world about practicing politics. They found in the independence, stubbornness and idealism of the young ones something worth supporting, after the world acknowledged the stand taken by their sons and daughters, an achievement the parents themselves had been unable to realize in their home countries or even in the lands of the diaspora, while struggling to make a living and find “stability”!
A Movement Between the Myth and Its Negation
What moved Arabs to begin organizing themselves in the United States was the myth of “invincible Israel,” after its victory in the 1967 war and its occupation in six days of what remained of historic Palestine, in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, in addition to Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and the Syrian Golan Heights!
As for the second and strongest political movement of Arab Americans, it is the current youth movement, which came in response to the shattering of the myth of “invincible Israel” in the events of the Al-Aqsa Flood, which defeated the Israeli army with ease, not only through resistance militias, with no need for Arab armies or superpower armament, but through the ability to keep fighting for more than eight months.
In the early 1990s, with the end of the Cold War and the launch of Oslo, the activity and influence of the Arab American pillars receded
The first organizational movement came after the June defeat and the Arab citizen's disillusionment with the usefulness of the ruling Arab order, attempting change from abroad by raising awareness of the Palestinian cause and its centrality to the Arab-Israeli conflict, so that it would not turn into just another proxy battle in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, as Israel began to be handed full functional responsibility as the West's policeman, tasked with protecting its interests in the region.
Among the most prominent names in organizing associations defending the Palestinian cause and Arab rights in America are the Palestinian-born American university professor Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (1929-2001), who in 1968 founded the Association of Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG), together with the Lebanese-born American lawyer Abdeen Jabara (84), who later, in 1980, co-founded and chaired the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), with support from Arab American Senator James Abourezk (1931-2023).
The Arabs' first association of American university graduates laid the foundation for organizing activists' political work against the pro-Israel pressure groups, which had been pioneers in Zionist activity at least a quarter century before their state was established in 1948.
This organization and political activity drew the attention of American security agencies, including the FBI, which trailed and surveilled them, whether under the pretext of the communist danger during the Cold War, or over nationalist leanings opposed to American foreign policies that, after Israel's sweeping victory over the Arab armies and the shattering of the Nasserist threat to America's friendly Arab regimes at the time, no longer hid their alliance with Israel.
These organizations reached their peak after the mid-1970s and through the end of the 1980s, as their grassroots bases expanded along with their pride in the October victory, and as some Arab countries, after their oil revenues improved, began supporting those associations, especially on shared nationalist causes.
The Years of Defeats and Decline
But Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the Arab split over the American military intervention against Iraq in 1991 marked the beginning of the end for many of those organizations, whether because Gulf funding was cut from the nationalist ones that opposed the American military intervention, or because of the division of opinion and country loyalties among their activists from the Arab communities engaged in organizational work.
And in the early 1990s, with the end of the Cold War and the first Iraq war, then the start of the Oslo process, which caused another split among the Palestinians themselves, the activity and influence of the Arab American pillars who had led the first political movement of American university graduates receded. As their associations faded, the activity and popularity of American Muslim organizations grew, especially those supported by Republicans friendly to the Gulf states such as President George H.W. Bush, as the Gulf states came to support the Islamists rather than the nationalists among them.
But the events of September 11 and then the second Iraq war ended the largest, Saudi, support for those associations, and George W. Bush turned against the Islamic associations his father had welcomed, while Arab Americans were preoccupied away from the Palestinian cause, defending their lives and families against the fierce wave of hostility toward them, a wave in which the Zionist organizations found a cover to hunt down any political activity by Arab American associations, whose membership dwindled and whose activity receded until it was limited to cultural evenings and political statements that no one reads.
Things remained this way until the second and most important movement of Arab youth in the United States for Palestine began, a movement facing many challenges, but that is a story I tell in the next article, about what happened in Detroit.
First published in Manassa on May 29, 2024. Published on Mahjar Post on October 17, 2026.
