A Shadow Over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America by Keith P. Feldman (review)

Keith Feldman argues persuasively that U.S. imperialism and domestic racism in the post–World War II era are streams fed continuously by the “entangled history of the United States, Israel, and Palestine” (5). Feldman shows that American exceptionalism, racism directed against African-Americans, and Islamophobia have each been nurtured by U.S. state support for Israel and Zionism. Part two of Feldman’s narrative is the dialectical surge of Arab, Palestinian, and African American voices that have challenged this support. This “contrapuntal” movement is the thrust of Feldman’s book, which is a significant contribution to scholarship on U.S. imperialism.

Chapter 1, “Specters of Genocide,” explains how the 1975 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 deeming that “zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination” set the American state in conflict with African American and Palestinian scholars and activists who helped generate the resolution. The state in turn mobilized its machinery to overturn the resolution in 1991 (the only General Assembly Resolution ever overturned, Feldman notes). Yet as Feldman points out in Chapter 2, “Black Power’s Palestine,” the tide of anti-Zionist protest could not easily be pushed back. Both the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party sided with the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Palestinians during the Six-Day War of 1967, in which Israel annexed parts of Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza. Feldman perceptively locates the war as part of what he calls a “global 1968,” a galvanizing moment of Third World solidarity that conjoined U.S. support for Israel to the former’s war against Vietnam.

Chapters 3 and 4, “Jewish Conversions” and “Arab American Awakening,” demonstrate how Jewish and Arab nationalisms were co-constituted in the U.S. after the 1967 war. Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League imagined “Jewish Power,” perversely, as an analogue to “Black Power,” a symptom of Zionist anxiety about Third World support for Palestine. Feldman smartly focuses on a relatively obscure 1968 essay by Edward Said, “The Arab Betrayed,” as a touchstone for the beginnings of a long Palestinian civil rights movement in the U.S. Said’s classic 1978 Orientalism becomes in Feldman’s narrative, retrospectively, something like the manifesto of that movement.

Feldman’s most inspired chapter, “Moving toward Home,” takes its title from a poem by African American poet June Jordan that was motivated by her outrage at the 1982 massacre, under Israeli military supervision, of hundreds of Palestinians in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The poem appears in Jordan’s 1985 poetry collection Living Room, which includes the line, “I was Born a Black woman/and now am become/a Palestinian.” Feldman shows how Jordan’s poem was also a response to Zionism and anti-Arab racism in the mainstream of the U.S. feminist movement. The chapter brings Feldman full circle to his book’s beginning, James Baldwin’s conversion to Palestinian sympathies after a trip to Israel, and also brings to full flower his theme that contemporary U.S. anti-racist struggle has been nourished by Afro-Palestinian solidarity.

Feldman’s epilogue astutely notes that the current Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel began with activists attempting to reinstate US Resolution 3379 at the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. The cyclical nature of anti-apartheid activism animates Feldman’s general thesis that the “pre-history” of Palestine/Israel entanglement articulated in his book continues to inform present freedom struggles. In this sense, Feldman’s fine contribution to scholarship on Palestine and U.S. imperialism has both roots and wings.