The Movement and the Middle East – How the Arab–Israeli Conflict Divided the Am…

The Movement and the Middle EastHow the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left\nAuthor(s): Michael R. Fischbach\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Stanford University Press, United States\nImprint: Stanford University Press\nISBN-13: 9781503610446, 978-1503610446\nSynopsis\nThe Arab-Israeli conflict constituted a serious problem for the American Left in the 1960s: pro-Palestinian activists hailed the Palestinian struggle against Israel as part of a fundamental restructuring of the global imperialist order, while pro-Israeli leftists held a less revolutionary worldview that understood Israel as a paragon of democratic socialist virtue. This intra-left debate was in part doctrinal, in part generational. But further woven into this split were sometimes agonizing questions of identity. Jews were disproportionately well-represented in the Movement, and their personal and communal lives could deeply affect their stances vis--vis the Middle East.\n\n The Movement and the Middle East off.