AAUG: a personal introspection.

INTRODUCTION

MY REFLECTIONS AND INTROSPECTION about AAUG, the role it played, and the role it did not, or could not play during its active life in the USA, are based on my direct involvement in the Association for six intensive years (1978-1984). During this period and since leaving the U.S.A., I had a number of opportunities to reflect on AAUG and our activism--Palestinian and Arab--on the American scene, and why it appears to have fizzled out! This is "reflection removed;" it is done in a context where the U.S. is overtly and freely dictating what future Palestinians are allowed to have--the very same issue we struggled against, and hoped (naively) to circumvent in the context of AAUG some twenty five years ago!

JOINING

I joined AAUG in 1978 somewhat by accident through an emerging personal contact, camaraderie and friendship with my late friend, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. I knew nothing about AAUG before that even though I was starting my graduate studies in anthropology at Indiana University when the Association was established, and later, during its infancy, when I had started teaching at

It was not until I returned from the year I spent teaching at the University of Haifa in Israel--during which, incidentally, I experienced firsthand racism practiced against me as a Palestinian visiting lecturer--I met Ibrahim while attending a lecture he gave at the University of Minnesota. In that lecture, he summarized and analyzed the deliberations and emerging positions that came out of one of the Palestine National Council (PNC) meetings. He told me then about AAUG, and urged me to be involved.

In 1979 I was elected to the Board of Directors of AAUG and also served as president of the Minnesota Chapter. During 1980, I was urged by Ibrahim to run in the elections for AAUG national president. I did, and was elected to the AAUG presidency for the year 1981. Simultaneously, I also served as Director of the Institute of Arab Studies, an offshoot of the AAUG. I left the U.S.A. for Geneva in 1984 and then returned to Palestine in 1993. Basically, my direct involvement in AAUG affairs ended in 1984, or six years after I had joined it.

STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES

Like any other organization, AAUG had a number of discernable strengths and weaknesses. What follows is what I perceive to have been the most notable among them. I'll start with the strengths:

Strengths

1. It presented, through a series of professional and scientific publications, lectures, seminars, annual conferences and newsletters, pointed analyses of Palestinian and Arab struggles for freedom and independence. The Association sought to make bare the racist and colonial nature of Zionism and Israel. It succeeded, early on, in offering reliable interpretation of Palestinian aspirations in line with the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) national goals.

2. It initiated and organized a number of fact finding delegations of labor unions, academics, mayors, youth and church leaders to get first-hand information about the situation in Palestine and Lebanon, and to transmit what they learned to their particular constituencies in the U.S.

3. Its members in Los Angeles succeeded, through purposeful struggle, to produce an "Appendix on Palestine" and to extract a decision to add it to the course outline on the Middle East, which was given to every history and social studies teacher in the L.A. Unified School District.

4. AAUG chapters were more tuned to local issues and solidarity alliances, and adopted more radical positions than those reflecting national (central) AAUG policy.

Weaknesses

1. No clear strategy for mobilizing membership.

2. The focus of membership was "Palestinian," but the issues addressed were Palestinian, Arab in general, U.S. foreign policy, U.S. domestic policy, etc.

3. No uniformity or clarity in the overall objectives of the organization; not clear why Arab university graduates joined AAUG.

4. No clear identity of AAUG: political advocacy? Intellectual "think tank"? Agency to "market" official Palestinian policy (PLO, Fateh, etc)? Advocacy for Arab human rights issues in the U.S.? Solidifying relationships with the Arab world, or certain Arab countries? A professional "club"?

5. Name and behavior of AAUG's leaders led to general perception of elitism, not activism.

6. No clear position or policy vis-a-vis the U.S., as U.S. citizens and residents.

7. Credibility gap between leadership and membership.

TELESCOPIC REAR VIEW

The main introspective question which I am posing is this: Could AAUG have sustained its structure as it created it in 1967, with its perceived premises? Let's examine the premises of that structure in so far as they were made explicit.

1. A former AAUG president--my friend Naseer Aruri--characterized the rise and mission of the organization as follows: "It was the 1967 war that triggered the establishment of the AAUG. We were the first national Arab-American group concerned with peace and justice in the Middle East to form in the United States. Our focus of attention was the Palestinian problem since it represented the first and major Zionist assault on the Arab national body.... AAUG is unique in its comprehensive approach to Middle East problems.... The AAUG is not a lobby group. We do not feel that lobbying for a particular vote or legislation will be a successful effort in effecting a just solution to the Middle East problem.... We will ... critique present Arab regimes and their policies...." (1)

2. My first action as the elected AAUG president for 1981 was to create a deliberative forum in the AAUG Newsletter whereby I attempted to engage the membership in a reflective discourse about how I saw the mission of AAUG and its raison d'etre. First reaction of the membership was reticence and reluctance to have AAUG adopt "unpopular" political approaches that would have required the Organization to adopt an activist approach.

In my first column of the year in the Newsletter, (2) I argued that AAUG has been always concerned with issues of great public concern ... as they touched the lives of its members in the U.S./Canada or in the Arab World. Whether we are engineers, doctors, business people, university professors, or educators of one kind or another, we are confronted by daily issues that touch our lives and those of millions of others ... that have a political dimension.... Those [members] who argue against 'politicization' are arguing basically against AAUG's involvement and education.... On the most basic level ... we have the right and the obligation to be involved and express our position on issues of public concern.

3. In my second column of the year in the Newsletter, (3) I advocated for AAUG to work "toward an alliance of the oppressed". I argued that "now we can elucidate the connections that tie Palestinian oppression under Zionism with the oppression of the Egyptian people [under Sadat], Blacks in the U.S., Blacks in South Africa, Haitians, El Salvadorans, etc. The new-old emphasis on 'terrorism' by the current American administration is nothing more than another attempt to de-legitimate and invalidate the ongoing and difficult struggle of liberation movements for self-determination the world over.

"Since one of our goals is to inform ourselves and the public about the nature of Arab struggle by exposing the inherent racism in Zionism, it becomes imperative for us to expose and oppose other racist ideologies that feed on and nurture Zionism. Instead of assuming an apologetic posture about the so-called 'global network of terrorism', we need to take the initiative in exposing the actual global network of racism, oppression and militarism in which the Zionist state and the 'moral majority state' play pivotal roles."

4. I summed up my year as president of AAUG in my address to the annual convention, under the title "Arabs in America: Image, Identity and Institutions". This was my personal reflection on the nature of AAUG, its achievements during the year, and what I saw as its agenda for action (4).

* As an Arab-American Association, whose goal is to produce and disseminate accurate, scientific and activating information on the Arab World and Arab struggle, we continue to be preoccupied with our two worlds: that of our origin and cultural identification, and that of our residence and work. Events in both worlds continue to concern us and impel us to act ... The increasing militarization of the Middle East and its conflicts ... highlights that our two worlds may be on a collision course.

* Throughout our work here we are confronted almost daily by a complex set of realities that, so far, are not of our making and yet pertain deeply to our image, identity and institutions. Because of our involvement in the struggle of our people, and because of the antithetical nature of that struggle to currently deemed U.S. interests ... we find that our image, as individuals and collectivities, is created for us and imposed on us.

* That part of our reality that pertains to our identity and image as Arabs in the U.S. is similar to the reality of our Palestinian people under Zionist occupation. In both cases, the immediate forces that mould our reality lay outside our control. Thus, it seems to me, the thrust of our action should be on the institutions we create and sustain, because in these, we can forge crucibles to both accurately understand and transform our reality.

* Our institutions in the U.S. should aim to undermine the fundamental logic that has attempted, and at times succeeded, to de-legitimize and invalidate our history, culture, and political vision for the type of future we seek.

* The task and challenge for our Arab-American institutions are much more radical than the mere rebuttal of negative images and stereotypes; it is much more radical than shallow international campaigns whose goal is to equate and balance American imperial interests with those of the Arabs. Official American logic aggresses upon our legitimacy and historical continuity as a people and as a nation.

* Our institutional and organizational work here should aim at transforming the content of the images that have been imposed on us--first among ourselves and then among others.... With our planned and serious institutional work, we can succeed in turning a 'terrorist' into a freedom-fighter, a 'fanatic' into a defender of indigenous culture against foreign penetration, a 'rejectionist' into the energy of steadfastness and struggle.

Obviously, my interpretation of AAUG's role then in 1981 and my advocacy that the work should have been activist, non-accommodating to U.S. plans for the region, and radical, did not reflect the position of the rank-and-file membership of AAUG at the time. In the absence of an alternative view for AAUG, other Arab-American organizations filled the gap and their "politically safe" programs were more attractive to Arab-American professionals.

In a recent personal reflection, (5) I claimed that the effectiveness of the AAUG was low, and that the impact of its intellectual and political efforts was not much felt due to the fact, in part, that it was a "mirror-image" organization of Fateh, the dominant political faction within the PLO. In my view, this resulted in a lack of intellectual and political coherence among its members, reflecting the lack of intellectual and political coherence among the different components of the PLO. It was not clear whether the mission of the organization was to assist in protecting the Palestinian and other Arab communities in the U.S. from racist practices and policies, for example, or to advocate for the PLO fluctuating and ambiguous political position, vis-a-vis Israel, the U.S., Arab states, etc.

This ambiguity in AAUG's identity, and lack of clarity in its vision and mission, hindered it from going beyond the act of producing and disseminating well-reasoned, academic, politically-committed literature, and building on it an activist program of action. Thus, AAUG could neither sustain its stated mission of seeking "peace and justice in the Middle East", nor justify the structure it created; it had to give way to others to do what it could not do itself.

ENDNOTES

(1.) AAUG Newsletter, January-February 1983.

(2.) 4 January 1981.

(3.) 31 March 1981.

(4.) Newsletter, October, November, December 1981.

(5.) Khalil Nakhleh, In Search of a Palestinian Identity. Jerusalem: PASSIA, 2005.

Khalil. Nakhleh is currently the Team Leader of Mu'assasat, a multi-donor secretariat for the support and strengthening of Human Rights and Good Governance in Gaza and the West Bank. Nakhleh returned to Palestine after 30 years of studying and working in the U.S. and Switzerland. He has published widely. His latest book is The Myth of Palestinian Development: Political Aid and Sustainable Deceit. It was published in Arabic by Muwatin, the Institute for the Study of Democracy, Ramallah, and in English by PASSIA, Jerusalem, 2004.