As a Jew, and a fairly liberal one, I’ve not taken a public position on the Israeli-Palestine war. Nor am I about to now, although I do welcome the cease-fire, if in fact there is one. But I have been struck by the enormous, world-wide reaction of progressive Jews against Israel, including in Israel itself. And I want to make a few observations that involve our own politics in Oakland, and particularly with respect to progressive Black politicians who identify with the Black Panthers. That would include Barbara Lee, Carroll Fife, Pamela Price and Cat Brooks, all of whom are of a certain age, and who came up in the racial struggles of the 1960s-1970s, or identify with it, and who support the Palestinians.
The connection between the Gaza situation and our local Black activists was brought home for me when I read an article in Jewish Currents, a progressive magazine. The article consists of a Q&A with a Jewish intellectual and writer, Laura Whitehorn, like me a native New Yorker (she’s Brooklyn to my Bronx) who’s about my age. It’s no secret that Jews were instrumental in the rise and success of the Civil Rights movement during its formative years; Laura’s parents were themselves rather socialist in their politics, and raised her to see that, in her words, “What was happening to Black people in the United States was not that different from what had happened to marginalized groups under the Nazis.”
Laura, fresh out of Radcliffe in the mid-1960s, became involved in the leftwing politics of the decade: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Anti-Vietnam War movement, the Weather Underground, and, through her husband, the Black Panthers. She was militant; she believed militancy is necessary at times in the fight against fascism. Eventually, Whitehorn’s militancy extended from theory to action: she was found guilty, along with six others, of bombing the U.S Capitol, and received a twenty-year sentence. She was released on parole in 1999, after serving fourteen years behind bars.
We were so similar, Laura and I, yet so different. We probably knew the same people. But for whatever reason/s, I never went the full leftist route she did. I was always, to use a modern political adjective, centrist. Nowadays, at 80, she continues her struggle as a full-time pro-Palestinian activist. In the Q&A she uses the same terminology over and over we hear today from Lee, Fife and Price: transformative change “in whatever forms are necessary,” the “brutality that underlies” the American system, anti-imperialistic organizing. She cites Che Guevara and Fred Hampton and other icons of the Sixties and Seventies. Caught still in the thinking and rhetoric of her youth from 60 years ago, Laura urges her fans to continue to struggle—armed if need be: “We must have courage and not run for the hills.”
Laura, Barbara Lee, Pamela Price, Carroll Fife, Cat Brooks: all rather elderly ladies whose ideology was formed and inspired by the 1960s. All militant, whether or not they come out and admit it. All pursuing a political agenda that History already has quite rightly rejected. All convinced that God has appointed them to be our Joan of Arc, armed with fiery sword to smite the evil opponent and restore His kingdom. All are in the last gasp of their political careers, and all are tragically, horrifically wrong. They should retire now, and let Oakland get on with healing from the stab wounds they gave us.
Steve Heimoff