Moving toward Home

The Invasion of Lebanon

The June 1967 War marked a discursive opening for race radical movements in the United States to critique Israeli settler colonialism and fashion anticolonial expressions of Palestinian solidarity. These practices, often animated by an antiracist response to Palestinian dehumanization, denaturalized the forms of liberal inclusion that remained persistently sutured both to U.S. racial capitalism and the state’s increasing connections to Israel as part of a Cold War cartography. Such critiques were curtailed and adumbrated during the 1970s. The post-1967 military occupation of Palestinian territories became increasingly permanent; the rightward turn of Israeli political culture paralleled a similar trajectory in the United States; and the anticolonial frames for race radical movements were increasingly repressed and dispersed. The lineaments of U.S. imperial culture had shifted in a little more than a decade, constricting the space from which to speak of Palestinian liberation.

The consolidation of U.S. foreign policy and the intensified deployment of Israeli state violence manifested itself with Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. This event revealed a new set of geopolitical arrangements. The Palestine question reemerged in this context, at least for a brief period, to be desedimented from the commonsensical discourse that buttressed Israel’s exceptional status. Israel’s invasion, named Operation Peace for Galilee, was a notable departure from the narrative logics of Jewish existential vulnerability that had framed the 1967 and 1973 wars. The invasion was recognized widely as an excessive projection of military power to achieve a narrow political objective, namely, the destruction of the capacity of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). At the same time, the geopolitical contours of Israel’s occupation had shifted. The invasion was of a piece with Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula as part of the Camp David Accords signed with Egypt in 1978. It likewise involved a corresponding shift in 1981 to civil administration in the West Bank and Gaza, and the unilateral annexation of the Golan Heights, Syrian territory that Israel occupied after 1967. This major inflection point in the occupation inserted a thick layer of highly localized and isolated Palestinian officials into Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza while expanding the capacity to develop the infrastructure of Jewish territorial settlement. Through the invasion, Israel likewise expanded its carceral regime that used “administrative detention” to manage Palestinian opposition to Israeli rule. In these ways, Israel’s occupation was normalized at the intersection of law, territory, and infrastructure.9

A proposed Israeli peace initiative with Lebanon in 1981 was conditioned on the Begin administration’s desire that the Lebanese government deport members of the PLO, effectively destroying the organization as a functional national movement. Negotiations on the treaty stalled. At the end of 1981 the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) bombed Beirut neighborhoods known to house PLO supporters. At the beginning of June 1982 a PLO rival group attempted to assassinate Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom. Begin’s administration used the assassination attempt to justify invasion, which the IDF commenced days later. Between June and September 1982, the IDF laid siege to Lebanon, and to Beirut in particular, killing tens of thousands of people, even as it effectively forced the PLO into further exile in Tunis.10 In August some fourteen thousand Palestinians, including the PLO leadership, left Lebanon on the U.S.-supported condition that Israel would not enter Beirut and further attack civilians. Nevertheless, in September, one day after the assassination of Lebanon’s newly elected president Bashir Gemayel—an act erroneously attributed to Palestinian militants but later recognized to be carried out by a Syrian nationalist group—the IDF invaded West Beirut.

Contemporaneous accounts suggest two primary targets for this invasion—the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, a presumed stronghold of PLO support, and the Palestine Research Center (PRC).11 Since its founding in 1965, the PRC had amassed a substantial archive of maps and land deeds from Palestine’s pre-1948 Arab villages, among other notable documents of Palestinian history. It had been instrumental in producing knowledge germane to Palestinian resistance movements. During the September 1982 invasion, Israeli forces sacked the PRC and removed its extensive library.

As for the refugee camps, over three days, a Christian Phalangist militia seeking retribution for Gemayel’s death meticulously massacred between seven hundred and two thousand Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.12 Sabra and Shatila, two of the oldest camps, were placed within a cordoned-off zone controlled by the Israeli military, which launched illuminating flares into the night sky and oversaw the massacres from several buildings around the camps’ perimeter. Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon was subsequently found personally responsible for enabling the massacre, and the UN General Assembly denounced the massacre as an act of genocide.13 Operation Peace for Galilee crystallized a deep division in Israeli public discourse about the origins, nature, and efficacy of Israeli state policies. The Sabra and Shatila horrors catalyzed an Israeli Left critical of the Begin regime, invigorated pockets of dissent among Israeli soldiers, and became a point of departure for Israeli sociological and historical research on Zionism’s violent racial and colonial dimensions.14

The invasion’s justificatory narrative was informed by the Begin administration’s investment in the preemptive evisceration of Palestinian liberation struggles as a possible terrorist threat. In this way it converged with U.S. President Reagan’s New Right geopolitical imaginary. The Reagan administration fashioned in its earliest moments in office a “war against international terrorism” that routinely framed Palestinian national aspirations as totalitarian threats to democracy.15 As the sociologist Leah Stampnitzky has recently shown, a moralizing counterterrorism discourse warranted the widespread growth and imbrication of U.S. and Israeli apparatuses of state security circuiting across otherwise incommensurable geographies. The figure of the “terrorist” that trafficked across this terrain congealed a racialized inscrutability elucidated through the shared rationality of U.S. and Israeli state expertise.16 Alongside this intensification of moralizing security discourses, the Reagan administration expanded carceral zones in the wake of deindustrialization, setting the stage for the astronomical growth in prison construction and militarized policing in the early 1980s. This process exemplified what the geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the shift “from military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism,”17 underwriting the figure of the criminal as neoconservatism’s color-blind racial threat par excellence.

The New Right’s geopolitical reordering converged with the rise of the Likud government in Israel. U.S. foreign military aid to Israel increased exponentially during the 1970s; the political strength of Evangelical Christian Zionism to shape “Greater Israel’s” political imaginary found durable allegiances within the Reagan administration.18 By 1982 the material, strategic, and military circuits between the United States and Israel were much more extensive than they had been in 1967. Some U.S.-based Palestine solidarity groups highlighted crucial connections between the Reagan and Begin regimes, evocatively portraying them as “partners in racism.” As one 1983 editorial in Palestine Focus put it, “Israel is a ‘democracy’ that is stamped with its own form of Jim Crow marked ‘for Jews only.’ . . . Americans have seen the same kind of racial discrimination create divisions among working people that hinder the struggle for justice and a better life.”19

Importantly, though, such rhetorical parallels were in reality never so neat. Within Israel, Begin’s Likud party had broken the effective thirty-year hegemony of the Labor Zionist government by exploiting the intra-Jewish racism of the long-standing Ashkenazi and secular ruling elite.20 Mizrahi Jews who had been placed by the Labor elite on Israel’s racialized margins were drawn to Likud’s populism and its unadulterated religiosity. This strategic incorporation of a form of intra-Jewish racial difference propelled the Begin regime to power.21 It provided the ideological warrant and the political constituency necessary to intensify the Labor-initiated regime of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza begun in 1967, a project launched under the double guise of a theological commitment to a “Greater Israel” and an exclusionary commitment to willful separation from the Palestinians under the auspices of security.22 After Begin’s 1977 election, the settlement projects in the Occupied Palestinian Territories proceeded apace. The Israeli state’s nominal recognition and incorporation of non-European Jews into the state apparatus were articulated to expanding and increasingly coercive technologies of Palestinian dispossession and Israeli Jewish settlement. In this sense, nominal intra-Jewish racialized incorporation in Israel and the growth of settler projects in the West Bank and Gaza expanded in conjunction with an increasingly repressive racialized warfare state in the United States.23

The State of War We Live In

These local, regional, and transnational reconfigurations reveal the emergence of a new conjuncture, one that signaled intensified circuitries of state-sanctioned coercion in the United States and Israel, the near decimation of U.S. anti-imperialist movements, and the devastation of the PLO. Paradoxically, the horrors wrought at Sabra and Shatila also revealed an expanded discursive field to contemplate the realities of Palestinian life. In this moment in the United States, the Palestine question and the race question were articulated in especially evocative ways along the contested terrain of feminist thought and action.

As differentiated oppressions coalesced around the imbrication of race, class, gender, and sexuality in new configurations of U.S. imperial culture, an array of feminist formations challenged those presumptive normativities that otherwise obscured the violent geographies of an emergent neoliberal order. As Roderick Ferguson demonstrates, relationality as a critical praxis of women of color feminism and queer of color critique was one key strategy through which to denaturalize systemic oppressions. Rather than reify the presumptive singular, coherent, static, and stable subject of Eurocentric patriarchy, women of color feminists understood identity to index a social relation that registers, following Ferguson, the “historical and contingent importance of identity in anti-racist struggles as well as identity’s limitations with regard to those struggles.”24 Women of color feminists situated identity within those lineaments of the state, nation, and capital that secured its immutable juridical, familial, and reified categorization. They offered a critical counterpoint to both the ethnonationalist investments in patriarchal propriety and managerial state vocabularies invested in normative categorizations. In troubling such identificatory logics, women of color feminists produced insights into how processes of racialization were always already gendered and sexualized.

In a brief introductory essay to the 1983 second edition of the acclaimed anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, the queer Chicana feminist playwright and poet Cherríe Moraga lays out the changes that one might imagine in the collection had it been updated from its original 1981 edition. Titled “Refugees of a World on Fire,” the essay charts the necessity to shift the spatial imaginaries of radical women of color analyses and praxis.25 Moraga writes:

[A] 1983 version of Bridge . . . would be much more international in perspective. Although the heart of Bridge remains the same, the impetus to forge links with women of color from every region grows more and more urgent as the number of recently-immigrated people of color in the U.S. grows in enormous proportions, as we begin to see ourselves all as refugees of a world on fire:

The U.S. is training troops in Honduras to overthrow the Nicaraguan people’s government.

Human rights violations are occurring on a massive scale in Guatemala and El Salvador (and as in this country those most hard hit are often indigenous peoples of those lands).

Pinochet escalates political repression in Chile.

The U.S. invades Grenada.

Apartheid continues to bleed South Africa.

Thousands of unarmed people are slaughtered in Beirut by Christian militiamen and Israeli soldiers.

Aquino is assassinated by the Philippine government.

And in the U.S.? The Reagan administration daily drains us of nearly every political gain made by the feminist, Third World, and anti-war work of the late 60’s and early 70’s.26

Moraga’s “international perspective” foregrounds the pressing question of how to “forge links” among women of color to combat the particular spatialized contours of racialized oppression and the corresponding need for an analytic whose geographic dynamism could be attuned to these sites’ constitutive relations. Moraga constellates the intensified rollback of social justice gains in the United States through the moment’s deadly globalizing amalgam of racism and militarism: the early Reagan administration’s strategy of military intervention in Latin America, the persistence of racial dictatorship in apartheid South Africa buttressed by U.S. support, the repressive state violence of authoritarian rule in the Philippines, and, crucially, a recollection of the September 1982 massacres undertaken in Sabra and Shatila. In a flash, for a brief moment, Palestinians enter and exit this notable constellation of U.S. radical women of color.

Moraga’s mapping of differences of location in a shared context of state-sanctioned violence reveals the obfuscated processes of racialization that persistently shadowed U.S. imperialism’s liberal feminist justifications. The relational analytics that crystallized in this moment drew on genealogies of radical internationalism that implicated racialized and gendered oppressions in U.S. imperial culture. Such analytics were animated by the ways, in Ella Shohat’s words, “histories and communities are mutually co-implicated and constitutively related, open to mutual illumination.”27 Women of color feminists infused scholarship and activism with attention to the densely situated, provisional, and contingent practices of women’s struggles against colonial domination, demanding that the hierarchical valuation of difference structuring gendered and sexualized norms be seen in relation to globalized racial capitalism and its localized everyday effects.

Moraga continues in the updated introduction: “Change don’t come easy. For anyone.” The challenge was to move a vision of radical women of color feminisms out from between the covers of the anthology into the world of praxis. As Grace Hong and Roderick Ferguson have compellingly shown, nationalist and identitarian rubrics for social transformation, were, by the early 1980s, severely hampered by the interlocking forces of neocolonialism, incorporative logics of multiculturalism, and severe state repression. The contours of U.S. imperial culture had shifted. “But this state of war we live in, this world on fire provides us with no other choice.”28 Different modes for imagining forms of relation, new ways to “forge links,” necessitated remapping the emergent conjuncture’s field of power. Moraga’s “world on fire” gives one name to such a mapping: the end of “formal” colonization and the unfinished work of decolonization; late–Cold War proxy battles and counterrevolutionary action across Central Asia and Latin America; the emergence of the U.S. domestic penal state; and mandates for “structural adjustment” and deindustrialization in the infancy of the age of Reagan and Thatcher.

This was nothing less than a “state of war we live in.” Rather than presume “war” solely signified the projection of military violence between sovereign national-state actors, confined to stable geographies and temporalities, Moraga articulated the warfare state in the multilayered sediment of imperial violence that disrupted any stable parsing of the scales of the intimate, the domestic, and the international. Her pressing demand for analytical clarity, captured in the language “we have no choice,” not only suggests the need to animate a radical woman of color analysis of war but also presses for an alternative terrain of knowledge production, one tasked with producing an alternative episteme.

Moraga pointed toward such knowledge through the figure of the refugee.29 The refugee figures the paradigmatic political subject through which to make legible everyday practices of survival in a context in which other possible political subjects—human, woman, worker, juridical rights-bearing citizen, or the “domestic” in both private and national senses—have been eviscerated by state and para-state violence. The refugee in Moraga’s sense is defined by her displacement from home, with little recourse to the legal protections that are the sovereign state’s promise. She is a permanently temporary figure working toward fashioning home. She is also crucial to the imagination of Palestinian histories and Palestinian futures.30

Palestine’s Absent Presence

This Bridge Called My Back’s interventions into hegemonic white and women of color feminisms’ fields of racial meanings clarified the tense relationships between Jewishness, whiteness, and Zionism—tensions I render as a part of the post–World War II genealogy of the incorporative modalities of racial liberalism. A common concern at the time This Bridge was published was how to fashion a Jewish feminist, and often a Jewish lesbian feminist, identity out of this tension, elucidating its cultural and historical specificities and its communal capacities to enact practices of collective social transformation.31 In this context, Israel and Palestine were necessarily elements in discourses investigating racism’s relations to patriarchy and gendered capitalism. Given the intensified articulation of U.S. and Israeli moralizing frameworks and geopolitical imaginaries, Zionism as a project of national self-determination, Jewish securitization, and settler colonization were always close at hand, sometimes in shadowed form, often as heated arenas of debate and contestation.

In the immediate years after the June 1967 War, the Jewishness/whiteness tension was palpably registered in competing nationalist, third world, and diasporic masculinities, a tension in which investments in exceptional moral and military supremacy seemed warranted by a deep sense of existential vulnerability. The neoconservative production of Cold War Jewishness drew on heteromasculinist tropes of militancy and toughness, calibrated for defense against Black and Arab insurrections alike. The substance of Jewish manhood as a stable agent of history mattered, even if it did not always articulate itself as such. By the late 1970s, in contrast, feminists critiquing patriarchy centered gender and sexuality as operative axes through which to map and contest women’s oppression. This meant the gendered tensions between race, Jewishness, and Zionism were persistently crosshatched by Israel’s intensifying racialized regime of rule, one that reached an apogee during the Lebanon invasion, an event that signaled broadly across the Israeli and U.S. Left the paucity of the existential vulnerability narrative to legitimate military violence.

Largely absent in Jewish feminist anxiety around Israel were substantive engagements with Arabs and Palestinians as subjects endowed with a complex personhood, subjects that moved beyond the stereotypical orientalist visage of either the gendered other in need of benevolent rescue or the accomplice to an inscrutable form of terror. Arab and Arab American feminist perspectives were thus often registered as spectral at best.32 The same was true about This Bridge Called My Back. Indeed, the single line about the Sabra and Shatila massacre hardly constituted a substantive engagement with Palestine in the archives of radical women of color. In fact, the persistence of the Palestine question was a spectral presence in the anthologies that have come to shape much of the hegemonic literature of U.S. women of color feminisms.

Nada Elia has pointed out how Arab, Arab American, and Palestinian feminists are notably absent from This Bridge Called My Back, consigned to a racialized invisibility that casts Arab Americans as feminism’s “white sheep.”33 It was not until 1994’s groundbreaking Food for Our Grandmothers that Arab American and Arab Canadian feminism found a substantive publishing outlet, and this only after the end of the Cold War, the First Gulf War, and the dawn of the Oslo peace process; and while Food for Our Grandmothers notably centers transnational affiliations to Palestine and critiques of Zionism, and Israeli and U.S. state violence, its impact was largely not registered as a contribution to the literature of U.S. women of color feminisms.34 As scholar-activists in the collective INCITE! Women of Color against Violence demonstrated in a 2001 essay in advance of the World Conference against Racism, Zionism remained a “forgotten-ism” in much antiracist feminist social justice work.35

When told as a story about anthologies, then, the narrative of radical U.S. women of color feminism’s engagements with Palestine seems like a belated intervention, one crystallized by the dual crises of the war on terror and the second intifada. However, such a narrative obfuscates how the Palestine question was sedimented precisely where Moraga figured the hard work of fashioning coalition, namely, in the mix of feminist debates about racism and imperialism of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and intensified after 1982. As the proliferation of letters to the editor, position papers, and debates at conferences in the late 1970s and early 1980s bears out, some U.S. women of color feminists persistently addressed the special relationship between Zionism, anti-Semitism, and racism as inflected through the vicissitudes of U.S. imperial culture. Reading this alternative genealogy, following Ferguson, as “critically historiographical maneuvers . . . [addressing] the reality of dissension, conflict, and heterogeneity within anti-racist formations” clarifies how the identitarian polarizations that Palestine produced, intensified, or rearticulated were treated in the United States within feminist debates about racism and imperialism.36 This archive of dissensus illuminates where and how self-identified Jewish feminists and lesbians broached the critical vocabularies invested in combating systems and structures of racial privilege and racial violence.

Feminism’s Anti-Semitism and Anti-Arab Racism

While the National Women’s Studies Association’s inaugural 1977 conference held a series of panels on Jewish feminisms, the debate about the relationship between American feminism and Zionism grew substantially after the 1980 United Nations Mid-Decade Conference on Women in Copenhagen. Five years before, the UN’s conference on Women in Mexico City adopted a resolution calling for the elimination of Zionism along with colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism.37 The Mexico City declaration was a key precedent for the General Assembly’s adoption of Resolution 3379, condemning Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. The 1980 Copenhagen meeting likewise included a denunciation of Zionism. The conference’s official report included a paragraph on the “struggle to eliminate imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, zionism, racism, racial discrimination, apartheid, hegemonism, and foreign occupation, domination and oppression.”38 Some U.S. participants reported a palpable distress at the vocalized expression of anti-Semitism in the meetings.39

Among the most high-profile jeremiads about the Copenhagen conference was Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s “Anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement,” published in the June 1982 issue of Ms. Magazine, but appearing on newsstands prior to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Pogrebin’s widely circulated essay elucidated five reasons why “anti-Semitism remains the hidden disease” of the women’s movement.40 For Pogrebin, the Copenhagen conference exemplified the pervasive manner in which anti-imperialist critiques of racism were producing a dire sense of insecurity for Jewish feminists on the international stage. Pogrebin distinguished between those who viewed “the Israeli-Palestinian problem as a conflict between two national movements with complex historical origins” and those who viewed it as “a clash between European imperialism and Third World anticolonialism.” For Pogrebin, given the past and present “intransigence of worldwide anti-Semitism,” the former view, of competing nationalisms, informs her own liberal support for Zionism. In her estimation, Zionism was “simply an affirmative action plan on a national scale.” Israel’s Jewish Law of Return was the liberal internationalist equivalent of “legal remedies . . . in reparation for racism and sexism.” The discord between Jewish and Black feminists, a concern with a long-held purchase on the U.S. post–civil rights imaginary, was a tinderbox for the expression of a viral anti-Semitism presumed to await its activation. In this way, the polemic that Pogrebin’s essay advances effectively drew on threads already elaborated in antiracist struggles since the late 1960s, linking post-1967 existential insecurity expressed by Jews on the left to a resolutely liberal idiom of the women’s movement. This framework likewise centered the Holocaust as the paradigmatic event—real in the past, possible in the future—that morally justified a commitment to Israel’s paramount existence as a Jewish state and reactivated the notion of anti-Semitism as a transhistorical disease. Pogrebin’s competing nationalisms narrative and the moralizing deployment of Holocaust memory tidily obfuscated Zionism’s exclusivist settler origins, the post-1967 military occupation, and the expanding regime of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Pogrebin’s essay circulated widely in the leading monthly magazine of the white liberal women’s movement. It was thus notable when Ms. ran an ad hoc “forum on anti-Semitism” several months later that substantively critiqued Pogrebin’s essay. One letter, cosigned by several self-identified Jewish feminists, argued that the growing attention given anti-Semitism in the women’s movement was “disproportionate.” It reflected a defensive “competition for victim status” in response to “constant charges of racism from Third World and white women alike.”41

The Black novelist Alice Walker contributed a lengthy letter to the forum, dated May 19, 1982. Walker identified the conspicuous absence in Pogrebin’s essay of a discussion of Jewish settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, a silence that Walker chalked up to the omission of “imperialism” as a keyword in Pogrebin’s analysis (15). “I think it would help our dialogue,” Walker writes, “if we could say for instance: yes, Israel must exist—because Jews, after heinous world maltreatment, deserve affirmative action . . . —but when it moves into other people’s lands, when it establishes colonies in other people’s territories, when it forces folks out of their kitchens, vineyards, and beds, then it must be opposed” (15). The garrison-style settlements in the West Bank “where indigenous people already live” echoed settler colonization in the United States. They “look chillingly familiar” to “all those forts that dot the American plains” (15). The haunting presence of the Indian wars as a persistent feature of American settler nationalism served as a notable referent through which Walker conceptualizes Palestinians’ dispossession and displacement. Centering the practice of colonization and the logic of imperialism would prove instructive for Jewish feminists, Walker averred, because it would clarify the perspective of “we who have lost whole continents to the white man’s arrogance and greed, and to his white female accomplice’s inability to say no to stolen gold and diamonds” (16). By the same token, Jews’ pervasive “fears of another Holocaust and of being left without a home at all” would be instructive for people of color. “After all,” Walker notes, “that is our story too” (16). Walker’s retort to Pogrebin thus activates what the literary critic Michael Rothberg calls “multidirectional memory,” one invested less in the zero-sum logics of comparison or competitions over victimhood status than in triangulating minoritized identities around foundational enactments of Euro-American state-sanctioned violence.42

Another iteration of this debate unfolded on the pages of Off Our Backs (OOB), a smaller, more radical magazine devoted to coverage of the women’s movement. Its July 1982 issue juxtaposed two competing position papers, both of which were written before the Israeli invasion but surely were read through its context. These statements framed the magazine’s discursive parameters over the coming months. The first position paper, titled “Taking Our Stand against Zionism and White Supremacy,” was written by the San Francisco–based group Women Against Imperialism (WAI). The brief statement embraced the PLO’s commitment to a single secular state “where Jews and Arabs can live in peace.” WAI centered a structural analysis of U.S. racism, asserting that those in the women’s movement who claimed third world status for and as Jews “ignored the fact that Jewish people in America, despite anti-semitism, are part of a white supremacist social order that holds down Black, Chicano-Mexicano, Native American and Puerto Rican peoples.” WAI claimed that the logic and practice of U.S. counterinsurgency fashioned to contain national liberation movements was nothing other than a “strategy of genocide.” Israeli state violence was linked to an order of American settler colonial racism that “has built Israel into a bastion of white supremacy throughout the world.”43

OOB juxtaposed WAI’s statement with one on the facing page written by a newly formed group of self-identified progressive Ashkenazi Jewish lesbian feminists organizing under the name Di Vilde Chayes (Yiddish for “The Wild Beasts”).44 They expressed outrage at the idea that “to fight for Jewish survival is antithetical to working against racism and for Third World liberation.” Noting how they were “painfully aware of the complexities” of Israel’s emergence and Palestinian dispossession, group members nevertheless aligned themselves with many Israelis who were “critical of the racist, classist and militaristic policies of the current Israeli government.” Di Vilde Chayes insisted that such criticism of state policies was not anti-Zionism, a notion that was in their estimation nothing but a screen for anti-Semitism. They took umbrage with WAI’s implication that “Zionism is racism,” especially given that, from their perspective, more than two-thirds of Israel’s Jewish population were people of color. Hence the accusation of racism was erroneous. They insisted that WAI’s ostensibly false assertions inhibited the women’s movement’s capacity to “be proud enough to feel that Jews deserve a country where we can be safe, and at the same time to be a committed fighter against imperialism and racism.”45

Bodies Ripped in Two

The polarized dispute between WAI and Di Vilde Chayes crystallized a broader set of debates on feminism, race, and empire. Jewish lesbian radicals joined rich and heterogeneous coalitions among Black, Chicana, Native, and Asian women in the United States throughout the 1960s and 1970s, coalitions that named and contested the differentiated forms of oppression wielded by white supremacist racial capitalism. These debates were prominently elaborated with the growth of feminist organizations like the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA). In an effort to address the institutional absence of substantive accounts of race and racism, in 1981 the NWSA conference focused on the theme “Women Respond to Racism.” The organization held a substantial set of preconference workshops a few months prior around the same topic.

One workshop in particular, on women of color and Jewish women, was especially fraught with a polarized conception of anti-Semitism and racism. In her poetic reflections on the workshop for the organization’s newsletter, Rosario Morales narrates a scene of irreconcilable competition that tore her Ukrainian Jewish Puerto Rican body in two.46 In Morales’s telling, the workshop’s participants replaced a critique of structures with that of individuals, with “oppression thrown at each others’ faces like slaps.” There was no space to enunciate precisely the complexity of Morales’s own familial history (157). Morales juxtaposes those Jewish participants in the workshop whose history and future were wracked by the nightmares of genocide, alongside those women of color who drew attention to their own impossible access to the security granted white skin privilege: “I am dark in a racist society,” one voice announced, “and I have no place to hide. Now. This minute. And all the minutes of my life” (158). After this exchange, Morales returns home, she writes, to “sew myself together with the thread we’d spun, my jewish girlfriends and I.” Morales engages in reparative work made of memories of Yiddish-Spanish accents, of shared games and food, of intergenerational narratives of Central European dispossession, of “the feel of our arms around each other.” Morales poetically narrates spinning the healing work of a complex memory from the specificity of a genealogy whose admixture troubled the stark binaries on offer in the framing of racism and anti-Semitism. She completes her project of healing with thread left over, the surplus of which she promptly decides to give away. Recalling the regenerative power of such memory-work, she concludes matter-of-factly, “I can make more.”

In a follow-up letter responding to the same workshop, Moraga, Julia Perez, Barbara Smith, and Beverly Smith underscored the need for women of color, as part of their struggle within a “white-dominated feminist movement,” not to “fall into the trap of countering racism on the part of Jews with anti-Semitism.” The seeming irreconcilability registered in the workshop, as in Morales’s poetic telling, should not be seen as “an impasse, but rather as a moment of harsh enlightenment—reckoning with the extent and depth to which we are separated from each other. . . . we must refuse to give up on each other.”47

At the national NWSA conference a few months later, Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other contributors launched the newly-published anthology This Bridge Called My Back. As documented in a report by Chela Sandoval written on behalf of the NWSA’s Third World Caucus, the conference did more to reveal the structural racism sedimented in the women’s movement than to “respond” adequately to it.48 In her keynote address, Audre Lorde elaborated how her response to racism was anger, an anger fueled by “exclusion, unquestioned privilege, racial distortions, silence, ill-use, stereo-typing, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and co-optation.” To truly contend with the violence of racism and its uptake in an expanding project of Reagan-era militarization required recognizing how feminist investigations operated “in the teeth of a system for which racism and sexism are primary, established, and necessary props of profit.”49 Adrienne Rich used her keynote address to center the animating importance of disobedience for the work of women’s studies. Taking up racism as a thematic concern for feminist thought and praxis of necessity disobeyed the institutionalization of women’s studies in U.S. universities. It also troubled the naturalized privileges of white women, even those, like Rich herself, who routinely theorized an antiracist praxis.50

The Forgotten Minority

Among the outgrowths of this dissensus was a major plenary session sponsored by the Third World Caucus at the NWSA’s 1982 conference. The plenary was titled “Race, Class, and Sex Interactions: Perspectives by American Women of Color.” Held during the third week of June 1982, it would have been difficult not to grapple substantively with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the violence to which Arabs and Palestinians were being subjected, as pervasive news coverage of the invasion saturated large-scale and alternative media outlets alike. Carol Haddad, founder of the newly formed Feminist Arab American Network (FAAN), did just that, in a presentation titled “Arab-Americans: The Forgotten Minority in Feminist Circles.” Haddad shared the plenary stage with Sandoval, Anzaldúa, Nellie Wong, bell hooks, and Carol Lee Sanchez—scholar-activists whose intellectual and political contributions were crucial scaffolding for U.S. radical women of color feminism.

In remarks subsequently reprinted in OOB, Haddad narrates her own recognition of race consciousness. “As recently as last year,” she states, “I did not identify myself as a woman of color. Having grown up in a white working class suburb of Detroit, I knew that I benefitted from white skin privilege enough to be able to live in that suburb in the 1950’s and 1960’s without having crosses burned on my family’s front lawn. . . . But the more I get in touch with my anger about anti-Arab racism in America, the more I realized how much I have internalized my own racial oppression. The memories return.”51 In Haddad’s autobiographical telling, her becoming a woman of color was catalyzed by a recognition of anti-Arab racism’s remarkable prevalence, a situation inextricable from U.S. imperial culture. Haddad proceeds to analyze how the blanket of stereotypes, misinformation, and silence about Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians “has not been dropped accidentally.” Rather, anti-Arab racism serves the interests of three powerful entities: the American military-industrial complex, American oil companies, and the state of Israel and its Zionist supporters in the United States. “The founding of the state of Israel,” asserts Haddad, “its acceptance by the world community, and its economic and military support from the U.S. is heavily dependent upon promotion of the myth that Palestine was a country without a people, a cultural wasteland. . . . These facts unveil one of the greatest moral ironies of our time—that survivors of the Holocaust themselves participated in the attempted annihilation of the Palestinian people.”

In quick strokes, Haddad narrates a convergence between Zionism’s settler mythos, U.S. investment in Israel, and the lacerating conjunction between the survival from intra-European genocide and the ethnic cleansing of Europe’s externalized others. Given the pernicious imbrication of U.S. geopolitics in Israel and Palestine, Haddad calls on American feminists to detach from anti-Arab racism through a self-conscious Arab and Arab American knowledge project. FAAN was to be one avenue for such a project, providing a space to move “beyond traditional and visible sources of information.” FAAN could be one node through which to “seek out Arab and Arab-American feminists, and integrate the perspectives of these sisters into feminist thought and debate. Our survival,” she concludes, “as a movement, and as a civilization, depends on it.”52

The most heated debate at the 1982 NWSA convention focused on how the association should respond to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. On the floor of the delegate assembly, the Third World Caucus put forward a resolution opposing Israel’s “genocidal” incursion. As reported by Deborah Rosenfelt, herself a signatory on the Ms. letter criticizing Pogrebin’s claims, some people in the delegate assembly claimed that “to single Israel out as an aggressor was anti-Semitic,” while others urged the need to “distinguish between anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel or anti-Zionism.” The final resolution removed any mention of Israel and instead moved to condemn genocide generally “within and outside the United States” and underscored the need for the NWSA to “distribut[e] information concerning genocidal practices taking place around the world” (10).

Soon thereafter, Di Vilde Chayes produced a second statement, written in the midst of the summer 1982 bombardment and signed, by among other people, Adrienne Rich. Published in the October 1982 issue of OOB alongside the NWSA conference report, the “open letter to all progressive peoples and movements” equated the group’s outrage at Israel’s attack on Beirut with their outrage at the “world-wide anti-Semitism that has been unleashed since the invasion of Lebanon.” Despite their “abhorrence of the Israeli aggression,” they assert their unwillingness to participate in protest activities because of the fashioning of “a cartoon-like simplification of Israel as an imperialist, exploitative, inhuman Jewish machine.” Using the language of “genocide,” or comparing Israel to “Nazis” or Beirut to “another Warsaw Ghetto,” is a sign, the statement alleged, of having “our oppression . . . used against us.” Di Vilde Chayes imputed a comparative deployment of Holocaust memory as a zero-sum practice of equation and displacement. They write, “What is being said is that the Holocaust and the centuries of persecution and pogroms preceding it are now equalled and cancelled out and, therefore, that Israel, founded on the Holocaust’s grief and need, is no longer in order.”53

The Di Vilde Chayes statement’s exceptionalizing of Holocaust memory is echoed in an “editorial note” appended to the report on Haddad’s presentation included elsewhere in the OOB issue. Under the heading “military conflict not a holocaust,” the OOB editor Jeanne Barkey inferred that Haddad had “structurally compared the Holocaust with the current Palestinian-Israeli military conflict. . . . In particular, her use of the words ‘annihilation’ and ‘genocide,’ words indivisible from the historical tragedy of the Holocaust, was grossly inappropriate.”54 In a subsequent letter to OOB, Jane Creighton (who was involved in executing the “Moving towards Home” reading) offered a rejoinder to Barkey’s footnote. Creighton argued to restore to the terms annihilation and genocide their incontrovertible meaning by maintaining a “deep awareness” of how the Holocaust perpetrated on the Jews by Nazi Germany “must not obscure what has for many years been happening to the Palestinians, that is, dispossession of their homeland, exile, fierce discrimination, and escalating during this summer and fall, attempted annihilation by people with the military and political power to inflict it.”55 Holocaust memory cannot serve as a screen, Creighton intimates, and exceptionalizing its vocabulary would do more to obscure than reveal current conditions.

Haddad amplified Creighton’s critique in her own letter published in March 1983, framing Barkey’s editorial note as exemplifying a broad American fear of contending with the substance of Arab and Palestinian claims. Barkey’s note, combined with the pattern of OOB misidentifying Haddad’s name as either “Azizah al-Hibri” or “Carol Habib,” unwittingly illustrated the point that Haddad had made in her NWSA presentation: the hegemonic discourse of American feminism retained a pervasive anti-Arab racism that made the complex personhood of Arab and Arab American women illegible. Haddad advised OOB to solicit writings by more Arab and Arab American women in the future, requested that her comments from the NWSA be reprinted in full, asked that OOB publish the Preliminary Statement of Purpose of the Feminist Arab-American Network, and bade the editors to ask for permission from June Jordan to reprint her poem “Apologies to All the People of Lebanon.”56 OOB complied with all of Haddad’s requests.

Structures and Agents

Growing directly out of a response to this debate, the 1983 NWSA conference featured a plenary session titled “Racism and Anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement.” There, the Lebanese American philosopher Azizah al-Hibri offered a scathing critique of the “hidden face of racism.” She calls her analysis an “unveiling” to critique the persistent orientalist investments in “issues” like the veil and clitoridectomy advanced by the “white, Christian, Western women’s movement.” Al-Hibri recalled the 1982 assembly floor debate, where, “tearful and sincere,” she expressed how she “did not know as I was talking to you whether my family was alive or dead.” In contrast to the growing movement of dissent in Israel, she stated plainly, “you—as we stand here amongst you—have not found it in your hearts or minds to recognize us as part of the feminist concerns in this country except in the most distorted ways.”57

One of the key organizers for Di Vilde Chayes, the radical Jewish lesbian Evelyn Torton Beck, responded with a defense of Pogrebin’s concern over the need to underscore “Jew-hating” as a foundational and persistent oppression, a term analytically and politically sharper than anti-Semitism. In “No More Masks,” Beck emphasizes the historical experience of Jewish survivalism and the intergenerational fear sedimented over millennia, in the face of “torture, murder, active persecution, and institutionalized efforts at annihilation” (11). She registers concern at how a newly drafted NWSA constitution asserted the organization’s position against anti-Semitism, “as directed against both Arabs and Jews” (13). As a “slippery prejudice,” Beck is compelled to chart fifteen practices of anti-Semitism present in the women’s movement: these include singling out Israel, homogenizing Zionism, equating Jews and all Israelis, and “using the Holocaust against us.”58

In her comments, the Black feminist Barbara Smith conceptualized the “tension” registered in the conjunction of racism and anti-Semitism as an outgrowth of “the Middle East and the role of Israel as a state in the destruction of the Palestinian people.” While such concerns were true and real, Smith argues, “criticisms of Israeli policy” have nevertheless been enunciated through a rhetoric of anti-Semitism. To confront that elision requires distinguishing structures of power from the actions of individual agents. A critical lens must be “able to separate what Israel does when it functions as a white male-run imperialist state from what individual Jewish people’s responsibility in relation to that situation can be.” Smith likewise emphasizes how the juxtaposition of anti-Semitism and racism against one another has had the tendency to enact a paralyzingly static comparative victimhood approach: “One reason for this weighing, comparing, and equating is that often in a feminist context oppression is understood solely as how people treat each other.” Rather, theorizing the systemic and interlocking forms of oppression at work demands an analysis of “how oppression occurs in the society as a whole.” Smith closes by asserting that “if we begin to deal with each other with some integrity and with some sense of the complexity of all of the horror, all of the pain, all of the violence that we hold within ourselves and that has been visited upon us by the systems of oppression under which we live, then I think there might be the beginning of some hope between us.”59 In this way, Smith holds out a relational analytic attuned to interlocking and internalized oppressions alike.

Writing about the NWSA’s Women of Color caucus in the early 1980s, Sandoval says, “after ten years of struggle the issue of racism has finally surfaced within the white women’s movement.”60 Importantly, racism surfaced in this context partly by mediating the entanglement of the United States, Israel, and Palestine in the age of Reagan. Racism was glimpsed as an outgrowth of a historically contingent linkage between new racial and gendered normativities and exclusions in the United States and the violent expression of Israeli security. It was registered historiographically in profound ways in the texture of dissent and debate about the unresolved differences shaping the transnational and comparative circuits of Arab racialization. In this sense, Palestine emerged, sometimes as a silence or an absence, as part of an alternative archive of radical women of color feminism, and in doing so disrupted governing paradigms of knowledge and produced new lines of sight and struggle.

Recasting Silences

In June 1982 the African American poet, essayist, scholar and activist June Jordan, then based in New York and teaching at SUNY–Stonybrook, was not at the NWSA conference because she was in and out of the hospital. She had been tangentially involved in organizing a major mobilization in New York City in support of nuclear disarmament in general and against President Ronald Reagan’s policies of increased militarization in particular. Initially a largely white-organized event, a group calling itself the Third World and Progressive People’s Coalition insisted that the antinuclear demonstration explicitly call for an end to U.S. interventions in Latin America, a shift from military spending to social services, and an end to institutionalized forms of racism. After some debate among the organizers, speeches and slogans along these lines were eventually (or as one historian says, reluctantly) allowed during the June 12 demonstrations.61 The only taboo topic was anything having to do with the Israeli military invasion of Lebanon that had begun one week earlier and was garnering significant international media coverage. Reports note that the taboo was largely adhered to, save for a speech by Noam Chomsky at the New York rally, and several notable speeches and placards at the coordinated march in San Francisco. The then relatively new Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, an organization that had grown out of the Association of Arab American University Graduates two years earlier, sponsored a small prop plane to trail the San Francisco march with a banner protesting the Israeli invasion.62

This quasi-mandated silence, particularly among feminists and progressives, became June Jordan’s point of departure. Much of Jordan’s writing to that point had focused on giving form and language to those subjects silenced by processes of gendered racialization. Her Lebanon writings, which she commenced that summer, address the modes through which language was being used to shut down critique of state-sanctioned violence across an array of scales. An alternative poetics was necessary. In a contemporaneous essay, “Problems of Language in a Democratic State,” Jordan registers a critical concern with the capacities of democracy’s “shared currency”—language—to animate movements for those people subjected to the everyday precarity of racial capitalism.63 Reagan administration policies produced “an economic system protected by the state rather than state protection against economic vagaries and depredations” (225). One of these policies cut into the pedagogical infrastructure meant to support the crafting of incisive language as part of the lifeblood of democratic practice. While “Problems of Language” focuses almost exclusively on the United States, Jordan’s prime example of people forging “an outcry against the language of the state” was Israel’s September 1982 mass protests in which four hundred thousand people had “plunged into the streets of Tel Aviv to demand an investigation of the massacre of Lebanon.” In the wake of the Sabra and Shatila atrocities, Israelis “demanded another kind of language” beyond the Begin administration’s passive voice constructions. The “uniformity of state language” was appalling, yet when the word “massacre” finally “broke through the foggy mess of American mass media,” the response was muted at best. Who took to the streets instead? Israeli citizens, whose mass action became the catalyst for envisioning how citizens respond when realizing that “the passive voice in a democracy means something evil beyond a horribly mixed metaphor” (230).

Jordan’s Lebanon writings fashion a language of action predicated by agential subjects. She makes visible how the abstractions of state discourse mask the violence of state practice. Yet her writings do not simply elucidate the forensic documentation of atrocity—à la the journalistic reportage of the news media, the juridical discourse of human rights, or the empirical data of the “factual” rendering of state and capital. The lexicon to account for post–civil rights atrocity struggles to retain a purchase on a morality whose paradigmatic figure, the Palestinian, remains in the United States an absent presence. Edward Said, in his postinvasion essay “Permission to Narrate,” rebukes the mode of critique that frames its knowledge of the Lebanon atrocities through a “history-transcending universal rationalism.”64 Rather, the register of Jordan’s Lebanon writings situates atrocity in a dense sociality limned by a narrative intent on reckoning with its historical conditions of possibility. They make available a spatial imaginary for justice that governing language otherwise obscures, engendering a line of flight toward a different kind of home. In this way her writings express what, in addressing the 1982 conjuncture, Edward Said called “some perceived or desired or hoped-for historical narrative whose future aim is to restore justice to the dispossessed” (46).

Jordan’s place making in the face of the deadening domains of state-sanctioned violence marks a countermodality of witness, an anti-imperialism that refused the emancipatory seductions of a minoritized settler nationalism. Jordan dedicated Living Room, her 1985 poetry collection that culminates in “Moving towards Home,” to “the children of Atlanta / and / the children of Lebanon.” The conjoined proximity of Black and Palestinian life to the devastation of state and state-sanctioned violence exemplifies a poetics of relation that Living Room elaborates throughout, culminating in the oft-quoted closing lines of the collection’s last poem: “I was Born a Black woman / and now am become / a Palestinian.” The collection’s dedication turns on the paradigmatic figure of innocence—children—as not only the objects of racial terror but also as the vehicle to a reflexive vulnerability on which readers are called to account. In “The Test of Atlanta 1979,” Jordan documents the names and ages of the eighteen Black youth, between the ages of nine and sixteen, who were either found dead or had gone missing. The list at the core of the poem “brings out the dead,” in James Baldwin’s pointed provocation.65 It serves as a fulcrum between the rhetorical question, “What kind of a person would kill black children?” that contains and individuates the perpetrator, and a collective interrogatory that addresses the reader and the poet simultaneously: “What kind of people are we?” (122). In this way the poem at once mobilizes the figure of the Black child as a stand-in for innocence while forestalling a desire to bracket collective accountability. When the book’s dedication is read back into the collection as a whole, its conjunctive relationality does similar work. The shared figure of children at once invites and forestalls simple analogy. It activates difference not as a yawning gap concealed by the blandishments of liberal innocence or moral outrage but as a recognition of one’s own complicity in and responsibility for U.S. imperial violence.

At a June 30, 1982, press conference arranged by the American Friends Service Committee, Jordan stood alongside faith leaders and members of the Israeli Peace Now movement, including Shulamith Koenig, who had been instrumental in politicizing Jordan around Israel, and to whom Jordan would dedicate her poem “To Sing a Song of Palestine.” At the press conference, Jordan names unequivocally the Israeli campaign a “genocide,” one that implicated the United States insofar as the campaign was “conducted with American arms and American diplomatic support.” Jordan activates Holocaust memory to underscore her critique, recalling the Americans who stood idly by in the face of Nazi Germany’s “obscene slaughtering of six million Jews.” In contrast to such paralysis, Jordan urges that “we cannot afford and we must not allow a repetition of such unspeakable disgrace in our time.” In her brief remarks, she queries whether the scarce response in the United States is an effect of racism. “Is it because the men, the women, and the children of Lebanon are not white? We should know by now the horrifying consequences that result from the valuing of one kind of life above another.”66

At the end of July, New York’s free weekly newspaper, the Village Voice, which had begun to cover the Israeli invasion in great detail, published Jordan’s poem “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon.” (In critiquing the persistence of anti-Arab racism in the U.S. feminist movement, Haddad will request that OOB reprint this poem the following year.) Dedicated to “the 600,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who have lived in Lebanon since 1948,” the poem renders legible the continuing vulnerability of Palestinians wrought by the ongoing structure of the Nakba. The poem recounts the rhetorical figures of narrative legitimation enunciated by Israeli Likud government officials alongside the violent material effects on everyday existence in Lebanon.

Jordan links the geographic expansion of Israeli security to Holocaust memory. The former invests in the incapacitation of Lebanese infrastructure, while the latter is revealed as a figure of tragic irony called on to mystify the violent dimensions of Arab displacement. The apology to which the title refers indicates the speaker’s realization of her own unwitting complicity in the invasion. It is an apology not only for taking the Israeli state and the U.S. media at their word and therefore reproducing a discursive erasure of the Palestinians but also for recognizing that a portion of the poet’s taxable earnings was funding the Israeli military. The poem’s closing lines, “I’m sorry / I really am sorry” are less an expression of accountability or guilt than a sidelong critique of a different form of empty rhetoric—one in which well-meaning Americans immunized themselves from the devastation of complicity through a discourse of apology.

Jordan’s poem reflected much of the Village Voice’s editorial tone in its war coverage. Managing Editor Nat Hentoff featured critical coverage of the invasion from a range of sources, and Alexander Cockburn and James Ridgeway devoted their “Annals of the Age of Reagan” column to the invasion. Early on, Hentoff used his editorial column to lambaste what he called “the silence of American Jews”—a position he subsequently recanted later in the summer. “There’s something new in the air. Something terribly shameful. And no amount of revising the grisly statistics of the invasion of Lebanon will reduce that shame.” Hentoff chalked up the impact of that column to its being “the first piece in a general publication by a Jew and Zionist who was horrified by what Israel was doing in Lebanon.”68 Elsewhere he lauds, as Jordan will, the outpouring in Tel Aviv of four hundred thousand Israelis—“the other Israel”—demanding an independent commission and the resignation of Begin and Sharon.69

The critique that Jordan’s poem received in the letters published in the Voice spoke to the epistemic trouble that Jordan’s poetics could elicit. One letter writer called “Apologies” “misinformation, evasions of fact, inversions of truth.” The poem substituted “naked untruths” for “facts,” and the reader seemed scandalized that the poem used a polarizing pronoun structure of “they” and “you.” “Political works of art, it seems to me, require a more scrupulous adherence to the facts because their appeal to emotion and intellect, their aesthetic blending of the two, can confuse with particularly vicious consequences.”70 In her response, Jordan clarifies that “Apologies” has no metaphors; it simply “chronicles the Israeli invasion and the various, always changing, explanations offered by the Begin government.”71 The poetic mode of chronicling the language and the practice of state violence carried over into “Moving towards Home.”

Moving toward Home

The November 28, 1982, UNICEF poetry fund-raiser for the children of Lebanon was held at New York City’s Ethical Cultural Center under the title “Moving towards Home.” According to media accounts, more than five hundred people attended the event organized by Jordan, the poet-activists Kathy Engel and Sara Miles, and the Palestinian artist, translator, and art historian Kamal Boullata. Boullata had met Engel at the Blue Mountain Center Writers Retreat in upstate New York earlier that summer. The reading was covered in the New York Times and in local television news broadcasts, and an audio recording was subsequently broadcast on WBAI radio. Reading alongside Engel, Miles, and Jordan were Stanley Kunitz, Thulani Davis, Ori Bernstein, James Scully, Galway Kinnell, Tuvia Reubner, and Shulamith Koenig (who read poems by Yehuda Amichai). The Lebanese and Lebanese American poets Etel Adnan and Gregory Orfalea were also on the program, both of whom had participated in an ADC-sponsored poetry reading earlier in the summer that Orfalea had been instrumental in organizing. (The slim pamphlet produced for the ADC reading, “Wrapping the Grapeleaves,” proved to be the kernel of the first anthology of Arab American poetry, published several years later.)72

Many of the selections read that evening were included in And Not Surrender: American Poets on Lebanon, a book of poetry hurriedly assembled over the summer by the relatively young Arab American Cultural Foundation (AACF). Boullata was the book’s editor. Born in Jerusalem in 1942, in 1968 he moved to the United States and took up residence in Washington, D.C. By 1982 Boullata was an accomplished figure in the field of Palestinian cultural production. He had provided the illustrations for two early bilingual anthologies of Palestinian poetry translated into English, A Lover from Palestine (1970) and The Palestinian Wedding (1982). In 1977 he provided the layout and artwork for the AAUG’s commemorative tenth-anniversary book. In 1978 Three Continents Press published his edited collection of modern poetry by Arab women, Women of the Fertile Crescent. He had provided line drawings for the Arab writers Adonis, Yusuf Idris, Elias Khouri, Halim Barakat, Nagib Mafouz, and Ghassan Khanafani, as well as Sahtein, a Middle East cookbook published by the Arab Women’s Union. He produced political art for the General Union of Palestinian Studies in France, for Fatah, and for the Palestine Research Center’s journal Shu’un Filastiniya. By 1982 he was an active member of the Program Committee for the AACF, an organization founded several years earlier by Hisham Sharabi, professor of political science at Georgetown University. Under the guidance of Executive Director Claudette Schwiry, the AACF produced a handful of publications, launched arts exhibitions and poetry readings, and opened its own space in Georgetown to host cultural events—the first of which was an exhibit of artwork by the Lebanese poet and painter Etel Adnan.

In his opening remarks at the Moving Towards Home reading, Detroit congressman John Conyers (who also served as master of ceremonies for the event), emphasized the primacy of culture work for reckoning with geopolitical contestations. He stated that “the poets are doing what no experts, no legislators can do. They are attempting to bring us together, to talk, to recognize each other. To share the language of real people across the barrier of ideology.”73 The Moving Towards Home fund-raiser and the AACF poetry collection do indeed take up this investment to demonstrate for a broad American audience the specificity of Arab and Arab American writing alongside that of “American” and “Israeli” authors. The pressing need to perform ethnonational attachment shaped the rhetorical framing of the reading. However, rather than combat the manifold falsehoods of anti-Arab racism through asserting the need to recognize the authentic truths of a singular ethnic identification, the poetry written and read by Arab and Arab American poets homed in on the terror and violence, the confusion and the specificity, of living a thick relation to the Israeli invasion’s human devastation.

This lived materiality of warfare was registered as much in who was present at the reading as who was absent. The renowned Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was also slated to read at the fund-raiser. Darwish had been living in Beirut at the time of the invasion.74 His absence from the stage was described in an addendum to the printed program through the regulatory idiom of the state: “The United States has classified him as ‘inadmissable’ under the Ideological Exclusion Clause of the immigration laws and refused Darwish’s entry to join MOVING TOWARDS HOME.”75 In response to Darwish’s absence, Kathy Engel read a short statement from the stage that was collectively signed by all the participants:

When any poet is labeled inadmissible, when any voice is silenced, when freedom of speech for any of us becomes negotiable, then each of us is threatened. We are diminished by the absence of Mahmoud Darwish from this stage tonight. Our poems cannot be complete while his voice is banned. We speak as poets despite the attempts of different governments to separate and silence us. We raise our voices here with the voice of Mahmoud Darwish whose spirit is with us moving towards home. The poet has been barred, but the poem continues. The poems will not stop.

The statement transmutes the specificity of Palestinian inadmissibility in the American consciousness into a generalizable concern via an American logic of freedom of speech. It takes the grounds of the First Amendment as the moral force to challenge Darwish’s physical absence, even as it celebrates the capacity of the poetry’s circulation and translation to evade capture by the state. Boullata proceeded to read translations of three of Darwish’s poems, “Passport,” “Palestinian Wedding,” and “On Fifth Avenue,” each of which reckons with the intimate and embodied relation between and among Palestinians differentially located by state power.

Jordan closed the evening with two poems, both of which recalibrated a Black feminist spatial imaginary to recast Palestine as a question of language and of home. “To Sing a Song of Palestine” begins with the “wildly dreaming schemes / of transformation” that are the militarized expression of men desiring to “fit / themselves how fast / into that place.” Jordan thematizes the perception of an absence given over to nature itself (“there are no natural wonders”) as driving a violent investment in land settlement. In contrast is the figure of the woman’s body, of the maternal, “the ribs the breathing muscles and the fat.” This figure serves as a reminder of the embodied practice of “home,” insofar as home “starts and ends with face / to face surrendering to the need / that each of us can feed or take / away.” The poem’s closing stanza narrates the praxis of writing itself amid the “burning day / that worked like war across my / empty throat.” It is in the poetic that the practice of writing reconciles itself to the interpersonal imbrication of mutuality. It is there, in the turning to the practice of writing, that the poet “thought to try this way / to say I think we can: I think we can.”76

“To Sing a Song of Palestine” elucidates an embodied horizon across scales, one that holds out the possibility of a different kind of future. “Moving Towards Home” continues and expands this practice. The poem’s first section addresses the “unspeakable events” of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, providing specific details of human suffering that constitute the poem’s dialectical work of witness. The poet gives form and language to precisely what one does not desire to have been hailed to provide form and language for:

The negative desire to account for embodied destruction makes plain how the excess of human devastation cannot be contained: soil cannot cover it, sounds of terror are carried in the air and escape their otherwise flat grounds, and kin are passed to strangers. The second section addresses the relationship between these events and the state and media language used to negate and justify them. It returns again to the refrain of a massacre whose evidence cannot be covered up, erased, or silenced. The limbs persist, their presence evidence of embodied devastation. Such unspeakable events must follow, writes Jordan,

To proceed from a place of genocidal dehumanization, Jordan seeks to wrench language from the clutches of normalized violence and turn it toward other ends.

In the printed version of the poem published in Living Room, the page breaks at this point. On the following page, the third section begins by enacting the beginning of another beginning. The repeated “I do not wish to speak” is replaced with the phrase “I need to speak,” to speak about living room, about the redemption of language from the genocidal rubrics it had enabled, about moving from the negative desire of witness to the affirmative necessity to imagine an alternative future, to produce and inhabit a space of social interchange, social reproduction, an unromanticized and undomesticated home.

The Black woman becoming Palestinian thus names a relation to the gendered racialization that impedes dwelling in spaces of living even as it points up the tenuous possibility of crafting something otherwise. It signifies a practice of being in relation that is wholly mundane—not only in its recognition of the terrifying suffering produced by liberal democratic states but also in the commitment to the merely human practice of making home, a space to dwell and laugh and thrive and resist. Jordan’s poem stages an elaboration of a future becoming, a project of constructing a practice toward dwelling in common. The pivot between Black woman and Palestinian is a recognition not of interchangeable reified identity categories, juxtaposed through a logic of equivalence or comparison. Rather, they are recognized as a set of positional congruencies in relation to the lacerating force of imperial violence. In so doing, the poetic juxtaposition of Black woman and Palestinian refuses to be bound to the static nationalist structure of equivalence organizing the reading itself, replete with its framing of American, Arab, and Israeli poets. The poem fabricates a project of making home in a manner of collective accountability and reciprocity. Home becomes a spatial practice of conviviality, one that reckons with the already contorted national cartographies of the foreign and domestic, toward a mode of relationality in which difference itself might thrive.

Life after Lebanon

In an essay written in the months after the UNICEF fund-raiser, Jordan recasts the context in which “Moving Towards Home” emerged. Initially subtitled “On Racism and Militarism,” Jordan wrote “Life after Lebanon,” an essay that revealed how an ethical engagement with Palestine of necessity reckoned with the persistence of, and persistent struggle against, gendered white supremacy. The essay opens with a “good feeling” that ironizes the loyalty oaths of American anticommunism: “I am not now nor have I ever been a whiteman.”77 As the essay proceeds, the “whiteman” figures neither a static identity nor a transhistorical one, but one that indexes a praxis and a relation. The “New Manliness” names an ideological predisposition that produces a subject “who maintains a system of unequal power relations in order to preserve his own domination” (188). The “whiteman” through which the New Manliness expresses itself is on display in how early-1980s political discourse drew on the racialized gender tropes of the nineteenth-century myth of masculinist American settlement. This masculine figure ostensibly “pit[ted] himself against much greater odds than he can ever see—pestilence, drought, outlaw bands of cattle thieves, and corporate encroachment upon his lands.” This settler “manliness” was exemplified by a figure in the White House whose cinematic Wild West persona lent a sheen of late–Cold War vigilantism to his militant anticommunism. It was provided a justificatory frame to prey “upon his wife, his children, his Black coworker, the poor, the elderly, Grenada, Nicaragua” (188).

To exemplify a contrast to the New Man’s circuitries of racialized and gendered violence that wound their way between the family, the workplace, and what the historian Greg Grandin would later call the new “workshops” of American imperialism,78 Jordan reflects on the community of women activists and organizers, the “New Women,” that sustained her during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. These are the “people with whom I kept my witness, and wept, and worked, that summer.” Jordan emphasizes that many of these “New Women” were Jewish: Vivian Stromberg, who initially alerted Jordan to the devastating effects of the Israeli invasion, and American complicity; Shulamith Koenig, who made legible the large Israeli movement opposed to the invasion and the massacre of the Palestinians, and who put into context that the “ulterior purpose of the invasion was Israeli settlement of the West Bank”; and Jewish lawyers who were threatened by new Reagan legislation “intended to eliminate basic freedoms of dissent.” Jordan elucidated how in conversation with these women over the summer they came to realize that mobilizing Americans to intervene and stop the massacres in Lebanon could not be achieved simply through demystifying “misinformation” and providing “the truth of things.” Mobilization based on facts alone was a nonstarter. Rather, the problem was epistemic and adumbrated by the racialized and gendered limitations of the category of the “human”: “The problem was that the Lebanese people, in general, and that the Palestinian people, in particular, are not whitemen: They never have been whitemen. Hence they were and they are only Arabs, or terrorists, or animals. Certainly they were not men and women and children; certainly they were not human beings with rights remotely comparable to the rights of whitemen, the rights of a nation of whitemen” (191). The elucidation of facts and empirical truths required critical supplementing, to wit, the turn to organize and mobilize what would become the Moving Towards Home poetry reading, an event that would contest the “male white rhetoric about borders and national security and terrorism and democracy and vital interests,” while providing material support via UNICEF directly to the children of Lebanon victimized by the invasion.

Importantly, for Jordan in retrospect, the summer of 1982 revealed a split in the American political Left, including the “feminist community of North America,” that clarified the anti-Arab racism sedimenting the entanglement between the United States, Israel, and Palestine. “There were those,” she writes, “for whom Israel remained a sacrosanct subject exempt from rational discussion and dispute, and there were those to whom Israel looked a whole lot like yet another country run by whitemen whose militarism tended to produce racist consequences; i.e. the disenfranchisement and subjugation of non-white peoples, peoples not nearly as strong as they” (193). What would “life after Lebanon” be like, given that the only “supposedly legitimate persons” provided discursive space in the media to express views on “Lebanon/Israel/Palestinians/U.S.-Middle East- polices” were “whitemen”?

“With the construction of an ultimate taboo,” writes Jordan, “a taboo behind which the fate of an entire people, the Palestinians, might be erased, how could there be an intellectual, a moral life after Lebanon in this country?” Here, Jordan echoes language from a letter written to her by Etel Adnan on the occasion of Living Room’s publication, one that put into broader context the vitriol that Jordan’s Lebanon writings had received. Adnan writes, “You know that ‘Beirut’ divides the world in two. It is one of the most untouchable ‘taboos’ for some. . . . They never forgive you for thinking that Arabs are human beings.”79 Given such a baleful situation, Jordan answers her own question this way: “Because many people in the United States and around the globe are not now nor have they ever been whitemen” (193). The fabric of a “moral life” was to be located in the mesh of those people structurally positioned outside the racialized gender norms that persistently reproduced the violence of the imperial state, whose positionality enabled insights into modes of conviviality that worked to forestall the deadening horizons of the new conjuncture.

“Life after Lebanon” closes with Jordan deploying a relational analytic to surface the growing community of New Women and their various organizations, “discovering each other with a happiness and a resolute purpose of survival that will surpass all the weird and fatal bewitcheries of traditional power” (194–95). In Jordan’s hands, this practice of discovery is catalyzed by a praxis of love that will “carry me across the borders of my own tribe.” Drawing from Adnan’s novel about the terrors of gendered violence in Lebanon, Sitt-Marie Rose, Jordan latches onto an ethical need to “stand up to our brothers to defend the Stranger.” Only in crafting a persistently transnational relational analytic, in refusing the “narrow cold light” of a violent tribalism, writes Jordan, “will we find our way into a tenable family of men and women as large and as invincible as infinite, infinitely varied, life” (195). The horizon of heterogeneity uncontained, the refusal to submit to the deadening enclosures of a new militarism, the willingness to forge links of relation through longtime commitments to solidarity and transformation: these are the capacious possibilities animated by life after Lebanon.

They are possibilities that endure.