[News] James Baldwin on Palestine

[Anti-Imperialist News]

    Baldwin on Palestine

June 21, 2010 by herrnaphta 
<http://herrnaphta.wordpress.com/author/herrnaphta/>
*http://herrnaphta.wordpress.com/2010/06/21/baldwin-on-palestine/*

I apologize for the rather meager fare which has been on offer here of 
late. A post is coming soon, I promise, on Richard Wright, communism, 
and the blues. Until then, here's a passage from James Baldwin's last 
novel, /Just Above My Head/ (1978), in which he addresses the subject of 
terrorism.

    I was traveling before the days of electronic surveillance, before
    the hijackers and terrorists arrived.  For the arrival of these
    people, the people in the seats of power have only themselves to
    blame.  Who, indeed, has hijacked more than England has, for
    example, or who is more skilled in the uses of terror than my own
    unhappy country?  Yes, I know: nevertheless, children, what goes
    around comes around, what you send out comes back to you.  A
    terrorist is called that only because he does not have the power of
    the State behind him -- indeed, he has no State, which is why he is
    a terrorist.  The State, at bottom, and when the chips are down,
    rules by means of a terror made legal -- that is how Franco ruled so
    long, and is the undeniable truth concerning South Africa.  No one
    called the late J. Edgar Hoover a terrorist, though that is
    precisely what he was: and if anyone wishes, now, in this context,
    to speak of "civilized" values or "democracy" or "morality," you
    will pardon this poor nigger if he puts his hand before his mouth,
    and snickers -- if he laughs at you.  I have endured your morality
    for a very long time, am still crawling up out of that dungheap: all
    that the slave can learn from his master is how to be a slave, and
    that is not morality.

Reading this passage today, one is struck by the force of its 
prescience.  Twenty years before 9/11, Baldwin utterly eviscerated Bush 
and now Obama's pious apologias for the War on Terror.  The contemporary 
relevance of the passage, however, can obscure its own context, which is 
just as notable.  Baldwin's emphases here, on stateless peoples and 
hijackings, make it clear that the occasion for his reflections is the 
Palestinian struggle, which during the 1970s especially took the form of 
hijackings meant to draw international attention to the occupation.

Palestine came to be a prominent issue during the Black Power years, as 
Black radicals who identified with anticolonial movements embraced the 
Palestinian struggle against Israel.  This embrace led to allegations of 
anti-semitism (which were not always unjustified) against Black Power 
figures, ultimately culminating in Johnson Publications' decision to 
shut downBlack World, 
<https://coral.uchicago.edu:8443/display/chicago68/Negro+Digest-Black+World> 
an important Black cultural and political journal, over a supposedly 
anti-semitic article about Zionism.  In this context, Baldwin's writings 
on the subject, though brief, display a remarkable clarity of focus, as 
he unhesitatingly declares that Israel represents imperialism, not 
Jewish self-determination.

Thus in 1972, in his essay "Take Me to the Water," Baldwin recounted his 
reasons for not settling in Israel when he became an expatriate in the 
late 1940s:

    And if I had fled, to Israel, a state created for the purpose of
    protecting Western interests, I would have been in a yet tighter
    bind: on which side of Jerusalem would I have decided to live?

Here Baldwin displays an awareness that, in 1948, most of the Left still 
lacked.  When he made the decision to flee the United States, Baldwin 
realized he could scarcely accomplish his goal by settling in a country 
then replicating our own bloody frontier days.  Indeed, Baldwin's 
clarity on this question stands out from almost any analysis on the Left 
during the period of Israel's birth, with the notable exception of Tony 
Cliff <http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1947/xx/palestine.htm>.

Baldwin's most substantial writing on Palestine came in 1979, with his 
"Open Letter to the Born Again."  This letter was occasioned by Jimmy 
Carter's dismissal of Martin Luther King's former aid Andrew Young from 
his position as ambassador to the UN because of his decision to meet 
with a PLO delegation.  Baldwin is again clear on the circumstances of 
Israel's birth:

    Jews and Palestinians know of broken promises.  From the time of the
    Balfour Declaration (during World War I) Palestine was under five
    British mandates, and England promised the land back and forth to
    the Arabs or the Jews, depending on which horse seemed to be in the
    lead.  The Zionists -- as distinguished from the people known as the
    Jews -- using, as someone put it, the 'available political
    machinery,' i.e., colonialism, e.g., the British Empire -- promised
    the British that, if the territory were given to them, the British
    Empire would be safe forever.

    But absolutely no one cared about the Jews, and it is worth
    observing that non-Jewish Zionists are very frequently anti-Semitic.

Baldwin goes on to speak of Europe's history of anti-semitism, the 
civilizational links between the Inquisition and Franco.  The situation 
in Palestine, he makes clear, is not the result of terrorism or Jewish 
malfeasance, but European imperialism:

    But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the
    Jews; it was created for the salvation of Western interests.  This
    is what is becoming clear (I must say it was always clear to me). 
    The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of
    'divide and rule'  and for Europe's guilty Christian conscience for
    more than thirty years...The collapse of the Shah not only revealed
    the depth of pious Carter's concern for 'human rights,' it  also
    revealed who supplied oil to Israel, and to whom Israel supplied
    arms.  It happened to be, to spell it out, white South Africa.

Baldwin's sharp sense for geopolitics, his grasp of the gulf which 
separates Jewishness from Zionism, and his willingness to locate the 
source of the problem in 1948 ('for more than thirty years') all would 
put him on the Left edge of the Palestine solidarity movement today.  
Thirty years ago, in the United States, he must have felt as if he 
resided in the most desolate political wilderness.  Studied today as a 
writer of sexuality and gender, or of civil rights, Baldwin's 
international radicalism remains in the hinterlands.  Those of us 
struggling too make good on his vision of real justice in the Middle 
East have a right and a duty today to claim Baldwin's voice for our 
side, and in doing so help bring his radicalism the recognition it deserves.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20140723/b937d4fb/attachment.htm>