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<h2>Baldwin on Palestine</h2>
<p class="post-info">June 21, 2010 by <a sl-processed="1"
href="http://herrnaphta.wordpress.com/author/herrnaphta/"
title="Posts by herrnaphta">herrnaphta</a><br>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://herrnaphta.wordpress.com/2010/06/21/baldwin-on-palestine/">http://herrnaphta.wordpress.com/2010/06/21/baldwin-on-palestine/</a></small></small></b><br>
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<p>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, <em>Just Above My Head</em> (1978), in
which he addresses the subject of terrorism.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 down<a sl-processed="1"
href="https://coral.uchicago.edu:8443/display/chicago68/Negro+Digest-Black+World">
Black World,</a> 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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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 <a sl-processed="1"
href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1947/xx/palestine.htm">notable
exception of Tony Cliff</a>.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>But absolutely no one cared about the Jews, and it is worth
observing that non-Jewish Zionists are very frequently
anti-Semitic.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
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