Arab American activism drew surveillance paralleling Red Scare treatment of Jewish leftists

Evidence

When Israel occupied the Sinai, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and Gaza in the 1967 war, Arabs in America organized protests and called on businesses to divest from Israel. Pamela Pennock’s work shows the increasingly leftist turn of Arab American organizations after the occupation of Palestine. The concurrent rise of Black nationalism brought together Third World nationalist Arab Americans and leftist and African American activists. Although Arab American leftists were a growing minority within the Arab American community, alliances with Black nationalists along with support for the Palestinian liberation movement marked Arab immigrants (regardless of their religion) as radical, subversive, and anti-Semitic. Moreover, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was depicted in the American media and churches as the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy and a fight between David and Goliath, thereby giving the US government license to target Arab activists. Mirroring the experiences of leftist Eastern European Jews during the Red Scare, Arab political activists became increasingly surveilled, deported, and prosecuted by US law enforcement—setting the stage for racialized national security enforcement after 9/11. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 652

Categorization

• XREF: Strong parallel to how Muslim Americans today are surveilled; also connects to the Red Scare history of repressing leftist Jews. The ‘David and Goliath’ biblical framing of Israel shades into what we see in evangelical support for Israel today. — connects to: A legal-technical limit on federal power steered the Red Scare against foreigners — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1361; The Red Scare made Jews concrete symbols of foreign radicalism. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1688; Counter-subversive measures built for leftists get redeployed against Arab and Muslim Americans — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 631
• SEED: An essay angle: how biblical-prophecy framing in American culture supercharges foreign-policy support for a settler state, giving repression of domestic dissent religious cover.