Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Allies of a Different Sort \\ 215
had become a sore spot for African Americans in the Old Left a decade before the
Six Day War. The Israeli occupation of the Suez Canal in 1956 sparked a contentious
debate between Black Communist leaders like Benjamin Davis, Jr. and
Edward Strong, who supported Egypt, and their Jewish comrades who stood
behind Israel and even adopted the slogan "Arms for Israel." For their position,
both Davis and Strong were accused of anti-Semitism, which hurt the former
since his election to the New York City Council had depended heavily on Jewish
votes. Davis not only accused Jewish liberals of pressuring Black newspaper editors
to defend Israel's position, but he insisted that African Americans were right
to support Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. In a letter to the Daily
Worker, another Black Communist called on progressives to "ask themselves, why
is it that Israel is today so completely isolated from the Bandung powers, the colonial
peoples, Negro Americans and the Socialist bloc." 46
Second, Old and New Left Jews of various kinds were ambivalent, if not outright
hostile, toward Zionism. Before the Holocaust, Jewish Communists and
socialists (excepting Labor Zionists) regarded Zionism as a bourgeois ideology.
During the creation of Israel, some Communists had enlisted as fighters and the
Left quite properly credited the Soviet Union with crucial early U.N. support for
the Jewish state. The aftermath of near-genocide and the continuing revelations
of Stalin's anti-Semitism inevitably compelled many left-wing Jews to rethink
their positions on Israel without, however, placing it at the center of their worldview.
Even the social democrats, set upon assimilation and a New Dealish revival,
tended to treat Zionism as a competing ideology—until the 1967 war. 47
During the later 1960s, then, the Jewish-Black relationship turned volatile for
complex reasons often transcending the immediate issues. As Old Left Jews softened
their criticisms of Israel, many New Left Jews echoed the anti-Zionist
attacks waged by their Black militant allies and demanded self-determination for
Palestinians. Others simply argued that Israel was an imperialist state and therefore
should not be supported by any progressive Marxist movement. On the other
hand, Black nationalism and its support for Third World liberation movements
(including that of the Palestinians) prompted some New Left Jews to argue that
support of ethnic nationalisms should extend to Israel. Thus, like the Old Left,
the New Left was somewhat divided on the question. Jewish student journals like
The Jewish Radical and The Other Side ran articles debating the Left's stance toward
Israel, urging readers to embrace their own cultural particularism if they intended
to advocate it among African Americans/' 8
Finally, although left-leaning Black nationalists were fairly uniform in their
opposition to Israel, they did not deserve the blanket condemnation of being anti-
Semitic any more than avid Zionists and other zealous supporters of Israel were
uniformly anti-Black. Some were, no doubt, but many sought to divide anti-
Zionism from anti-Semitism, warning that anti-Semitic expressions weakened
the Black nationalist movement. 7 ' 9 Here, still another irony might be located. As
a stream of former young Zionists from rhe 1950s—60s, including Noam