Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

360 // GARY E. RUBIN
The most visible lightning rod on Israel, as on several other issues in Black-
Jewish relations, has been the Rev. Jesse Jackson. In 1979, Jackson made a highly
publicized trip to the Middle East, where he embraced Yasir Arafat at a time
when most Israelis and American Jews considered Arafat an unacceptable terrorist.
Shortly after his return, Jackson made a heavily reported speech declaring that
Zionism was a "poisonous weed" that was choking Judaism. The great majority
of American Jews considered Zionism an integral part of their Judaism. 13
At the same time as these events were occurring, however, several Black leaders
were publicly embracing Israel. In 1975, a group of prominent African
Americans led by veteran civil rights leader Bayard Rustin founded Black
Americans in Support of Israel (BASIC). Members of this group included Clarence
Mitchell of the NAACP, David Dinkins, who would later become Mayor of New
York, and then-Congressman Andrew Young. BASIC condemned the United
Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism, opposed terrorism, and
encouraged the Black Congressional Caucus to back aid for Israel. 14
Among Black leaders promoting a positive view of Israel, Jesse Jackson, ironically
enough, emerged as the most prominent in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Reversing his previous stands, Jackson described Zionism as a national liberation
movement and conducted an official and positive visit to Israel in 1994. 15
Despite the evidence of both positive and problematic attitudes toward Israel
by Black leadership, it is often the negative statements that figure most prominently
in histories of the period. The Young, Lowery, and Jackson incidents took
place during a time of disenchantment between the two communities and were
perceived as contributing to growing tension. The support for Israel by important
African American voices seemed lost in a welter of pronouncements on the weakening
of the historic Black-Jewish coalition.
The third type of evidence cited for African American hostility toward Israel
focuses on the writings of Black intellectuals. Dominating this field is the towering
figure of Harold Cruse. In his landmark 1967 work, The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual, Cruse includes a chapter on "Negroes and Jews—The Two
Nationalisms and the Bloc(ked) Plurality." In his analysis of Black and Jewish
intellectual and political trends, Cruse writes, "Thus, pro-Zionist influences within
Negro civil rights organizations are strategically aiding and abetting Negro
integration (assimilation), albeit, Zionists, themselves, do not believe in integration
(assimilation) for Jews." 16 In this passage, as in the book in general, Cruse
focuses on the power and independence of Black political and intellectual leadership.
But his treatment of Zionism as purely a movement for power rather than a
just realization of the aspirations of Jews for their own state after centuries of exile
has offended many Jewish readers. To them, Cruse and his followers represent one
more instance of the failure of African American leadership to understand the centrality
of Israel for Jews.
How significant are these pronouncements on Israel by Black nationalists,
mainstream leaders, and intellectuals? Do they amount to a full-scale crisis in