AAUG: a memoir.

• Author: Aruri, Naseer H.
• Position: Association of Arab-American University Graduates

THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER OF 1967, I barely left the television for even an hour or two lest I miss the news that the United Nations had arranged Israel's withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories. I wanted to hear it as soon as it happened, not one minute later. What a contrast now, forty years later, when I hardly turn on the television or even bother to read a daily newspaper. The internet has emerged as my primary source of news and analysis. It seems to have totally replaced the mainstream media, which is more complicit in Israel's transgressions and daily crimes than ever before.

The news of withdrawal never arrived, of course, and gradually I and my Arab colleagues began to get accustomed to a more permanent occupation and to ponder ways and means to mount our own struggle for Arab liberation here in North America. The informational arena was the only battlefield open to us, and we began to consider how to enter it.

Meanwhile, with a new semester underway (Fall 1967) at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (then known as Southeastern Massachusetts University), I was able to arrange an invitation for a speaker to address the University faculties and students as well as the local community on the cataclysmic events in the Middle East. My choice for that lecture was the well-known anti-Zionist Rabbi, Dr. Elmer Berger, a choice which infuriated the local Zionists and motivated them to try to nip my anti-occupation activities in the bud. The late Elmer Berger, who became a close friend, was a founder of the American Council on Judaism [and later American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism--AJAZ], which became the principal opposing Jewish voice to Zionism in the United States. He accepted my invitation on behalf of the University and came to North Dartmouth. The substance of his talk was that the super powers and the United Nations must check Israel's aggression if Middle East stability was to be maintained. His presentation was scholarly, compassionate and hard-hitting in an environment where an 11th commandment ruled that "thou shalt not criticize Israel," and if you do, thou shalt forever be branded an anti-Semite. Dr. Berger, however, was not only a Jew but also a rabbi. His criticism of Israeli policies represented a unique challenge to a conservative and rather parochial Jewish community in the New Bedford-Fall River metropolitan area. A local rabbi who attended the lecture made a pathetic attempt to challenge Dr. Berger. He tried to do so by summoning the more virulent capabilities of the Boston branch of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization which excels more in defaming critics of Israeli policies and actions than in combating defamation. I came to find out through friendly University sources that an envoy from Boston had come down to persuade my University President, Joseph Leo Driscoll, that I had crossed the line. Driscoll, a former Marine officer who was having his own battle with the anti-Vietnam war dissidents on campus, dismissed the ADL mission as a minor issue. Facing a major challenge on academic freedom regarding Vietnam on our Dartmouth campus, as well as in the Massachusetts State Government in Boston, Driscoll did not consider a Rabbi's lecture on his campus as an evil act. The whole thing was dismissed as a tempest in a teapot. Nonetheless, appealing to the Boston ADL was to be repeated in later years.

I knew that in order to be effective I would have to extend my activism beyond the University and the metropolitan area in which I lived. The late Ibrahim Abu-Lughod taught at Smith College (1962-1967) next door to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst where I had completed my Ph.D. before being appointed to the Southeastern Massachusetts University faculty. He called and told me about a group of Arab-American intellectual/activists who had met in Ann Arbor, Michigan during the Summer 1967 Orientalist Studies convention in reaction to the 1967 war. Subsequently, the Association of Arab-American University Graduates, Inc. (AAUG) was formed at the October 1967 meetings of the Middle East Studies Association in Chicago. The first Administration was formed at that time. Later, Ibrahim asked me and Elaine Hagopian, who had taught at Smith during the same period as Ibrahim, to become involved. The three of us ran on a 1969 slate (second year of AAUG) with him as President. Elaine and I were designated candidates for the offices of Secretary and Treasurer respectively.

The AAUG was premised on the assumption that Arabs in North America were voiceless and lacked a forum, while the Zionists seemed to enjoy a near monopoly of the popular and scholarly literature on the Middle East. We believed there was an overwhelming need for the "dissemination of accurate and scientific knowledge about the Arab world" and that providing the public with the necessary information for an informed assessment of critical Arab and US relations would have a positive effect on American public opinion. By embarking on that course, we hoped public opinion would be transformed from its reflexive pro-Israel stand to a balanced approach towards the needs and interests of the Arab and Palestinian people. We further assumed that such information would also "foster enlightenment among policy-makers" and thereby strengthen good relations between the Arab and American communities.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF ARAB-AMERICANS: THE JUNE 1967 WAR

During the late Sixties most of my Arab colleagues born abroad did not even identify themselves as Arab-Americans. To say I was Arab-American was a huge concession to the advocates of assimilation. It was almost sacrilegious to include the "American" label, even in second place after the hyphen in my identity. It produced discomfort and a feeling of disloyalty--disloyalty of course to Arabism, to Arab causes and to Palestine in particular.

There came a time, however, when my generation with birth roots abroad had to struggle with its identity. We experienced then an identity crisis. Perhaps the catalyst for our transformation by which we embraced the hyphenated description was the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war. The shock of that war had awakened us to some bitter realities. As soon as we turned on the television in those days or read the newspaper, we would see our culture debased, our motives impugned, our values distorted and our character maligned. The leaders back in our home countries were portrayed as irrationally aggressive, blood thirsty and beastly adventurers, though ultimately losers. It was during this early post-1967 war that Edward W. Said, a young assistant professor of comparative literature at Columbia University wrote his first essay on politics, "The Arab Portrayed," the theme that eventually led to his seminal and famous work on Orientalism.

Israel in America's mind was the David to the Arab Goliath--as simple as that. We were the devil incarnate in a society long accustomed to seeing the world in a Manichean fashion where good and evil were clearly separated. That was the era of the Cold War in which the Soviet Union and communism represented all evil, while America was the good fighting that evil and leading the so-called free world into a bright era of liberal democratization and free enterprise.

The 1967 onslaught against the Arab world and its culture awakened my generation to the reality that our community in the United States had neither the forum from which to correct the information gap nor the spokespersons who could speak the language Middle America understood. The earlier Arab community, which immigrated decades earlier than my generation, identified itself primarily as being originally of Syrian or Lebanese nationality. They had come together around dabke dance, kibbee and grape-leaves but were almost totally removed from politics. Hence, the community's identity was organized on a common denominator of nationalism based more on cuisine than on politics and the rich Arab cultural legacy. That legacy consisted of established and recognized traditions of great literature, inspiring and evocative poetry, graceful and elegant art, science, medicine, mathematics and philosophy. Arab civilization had developed at a time when the rest of the world was in the dark ages.

The June war had changed all that. When a group of young academics and professionals came together and established the AAUG, we, the more recent Arab immigrants, became presumably Arab-Americans for the first time. The Association held annual conventions, published books, monographs, fact sheets, special reports and eventually a journal, the Arab Studies Quarterly. Never before in the history of Arab immigrants in North America was there an organization that published or...