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論文題目：グローバル化するアラブ・イスラエル紛争と1970 年代アメリカ ――人道主義、平和、人権、フェミニズム
著者：佐藤 雅哉 （SATO, Masaya）
博士号取得年月日：2018年1月17日
The Arab-Israeli conflict has been globalized for several decades because it
was placed at the crossroads of the East-West and North-South divisions and
because Jewish and Arab/Palestinian diasporas actively involved in the conflict. This
dissertation aims to examine the American front of the globalized Arab-Israeli
conflict in the late 1960s and 1970s. It demonstrates that that the Arab-Israeli
conflict and the domestic and international debates over it were of crucial
importance in shaping American politics and society of the transformative decade.
The controversy over the Arab-Israeli conflict coursed through different areas and
themes that comprised central aspects of post-1968 America. It started with
humanitarian discussions on Palestine refugees, but soon spread into the politics of
peace that sought for a just solution to the hostilities between Israel and the Arab
nations, then into the human rights debate centering on the legality of the Israeli
occupation and its methods, and finally into domestic and international feminism.
This dissertation broadens the analytical framework of these themes in 1970s’
America to include the Arab-Israeli conflict, as encompassed by Cold War politics
and post-colonial struggles.
International norms for securing peace and human rights in the Middle East
served as the frameworks of reference for American progressives, or left-liberals,
who wrestle with the Middle East problem and its consequences from the viewpoint
of humanitarianism, peace, human rights, and women’s equality. The United Nations
and its various committees and the travels to and from the Middle East functioned as
major conduits through which many American liberals and leftists experienced the
Arab-Israeli conflict. For American conservatives, however, the United Nations was
not a neutral but a dangerous place where the Communist block and the Global
South were collectively collaborating against the West; for them, anti-Zionism in the
United Nations was closely associated with extremism and violence stemming from
the decolonizing world. Many liberals including “dawks” and feminists also sensed
the “corruption” of the United Nations in the Arab-Israeli conflict, forging a strange
relationship with American conservatives, a relationship that helped solidify the
consensus over American and Israeli exceptionalism. This dissertation concluded
that the transnational framework of reference to the conflict accelerated the
fracturing of America in the age of identity politics and the ideological battle. At the
same time, these transnational resources helped U.S. peace and human rights
activists in establishing their perspective distinguishable from that of the nationalist
forces and the superpower’s interests, a perspective through which that the
tightening U.S.-Israeli relationship was contested.
Structured both thematically and chronologically, this dissertation is
organized from six case studies, each of which delves into the formation of the
American front of the debate over the Arab-Israeli conflict with a specific focus on
the role of progressive Americans. Chapter 1 examines the interaction between the
politics of humanitarianism and the Arab-Israeli conflict. It focuses on the American
Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a peace and humanitarian organization led by
American Quakers. After tracing American Quakers’ activities in the Middle East
since the mid-19th century and placing them in a wider historical context, this
chapter then scrutinizes the AFSC’s rescue work for Palestinian refugees in Gaza in
the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and then analyzes the shift of the AFSC’s
primary concern from refugee relief in the Middle East to peace advocacy in the
United States, a shift occurring after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. The chapter portrays
the politics of humanitarianism in relation to the Arab-Israeli conflict by delving into
the organization’s history and the ways in which the committee came to terms with
the political and military milieu in the region and with Cold War tensions regarding
refugee relief.
Chapter 2 explores the development of Middle East peace activism in the
United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war,
strong nationalist sentiments came into surface in Jewish and Arab/Palestinian
diaspora communities in various parts of the world. Each group mobilized their
respective supporters, who expressed senses of solidarity with Israelis or Arabs and
Palestinians. The global confrontation between Jewish and Arab/Palestinian
nationalisms infiltrated American society. This infiltration inevitably produced
heated debates on the conflict at a time of identity politics and ethnic revival in the
United States. To carve out political space in this tense situation, many American
peace organizations tried to find their own languages for interpreting the conflict,
languages that differed from those of nationalists and cold war strategists. The
American peace community relied on the framework of the United Nations and on
transborder interactions with dissidents in the Middle East, while avoiding the
language of solidarity based on racial, ethnic, class, and religious identities. This
chapter concludes that, after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, American peace groups
started pressuring the U.S. government to intervene in the regional strife and move
forward negotiations for a comprehensive settlement; although such policy had had
a chance to be pursued by U.S. officials between 1969 and 1971, most American
peace groups had been silent on the Middle East crisis during that critical moment.
Chapter 3 analyzes so-called “dawks,” lawmakers with dovish views on
Southeast Asia but hawkish views on the Middle East. While Chapter 2 traces the
rise of Middle East peace activism at the grassroots level, Chapter 3 investigates the
impact that this grassroots initiative had on national politics. In the first half of the
1970s, 1960s’ activists from various movements were able to find allies in Congress.
Sustained by suburban, issue-oriented, and college educated supporters, and new
cultural forces such as women’s and gay rights movements, the “New Politics” wing
of the Democratic Party tried to overturn Cold War liberals’ dominance of the party
and stop the war in Vietnam. On one hand, many “New Politics” Democrats
pressured the U.S. government to cut off funding for military operations in
Southeast Asia and to reduce aid to U.S. allies in the Third World. On the other
hand, they were often enthusiastic supporters of Israel and tried to solidify Israel’s
military might with U.S. aid. Chapter 3 explores how the seemingly contradictory
efforts of liberal lawmakers could coincide and compares their view on the Arab-
Israeli conflict with that of the neoconservative wing of the Democratic Party.
Fourth and fifth chapters investigate the place of the Arab-Israeli conflict in
U.S. and international human rights politics in the decade of the human rights
“revolution.” Substantial human rights’ violations in Gaza and the West Bank,
territories occupied by Israel, were reported to the United Nations and other
international agencies soon after the occupation started in 1967. The U.N.
Commission on Human Rights, international NGOs such as the International
Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International, individual journalists, and
various newspapers and magazines began to accumulate information on the
allegations of consistent practices of torture, arbitrary arrest, destruction of property,
and other violations of human rights. This information soon reached the United
States. The fourth chapter examines the ways in which the American human rights
movement responded to the accusations of Israel’s human rights violations. It
focuses on Amnesty International USA (AIUSA), one of the most famous human
rights groups in the United States, and, to a lesser extent, on the International
League for Rights of Man. The chapter demonstrates that the accusations of rights
violation in the occupied territories reflected grave concerns of human rights
activists in the United States but failed to lie at the heart of their agenda, remaining
peripheral in the first half of the 1970s.
The domestic and international norms of human rights, however,
increasingly became an important component in the American debate on the
Israel/Palestine question in the second half of the 1970s. Chapter 5 demonstrates that
human rights provided a schema through which those concerned with the Middle
East crisis for various reasons and from various perspectives were able to come
together to cultivate a common cause of action, making a space for protest within a
limited political opportunity. After portraying the place of the Middle East in Jimmy
Carter’s human right diplomacy, the chapter points out that the administration’s
responsiveness to the Palestinian plight encouraged a loosely connected group of
those concerned about the Middle East crisis to act together. A mix of peace groups,
church organizations, Arab American activists, legal leftists, and other individuals
started considering the Israel/Palestine question from the perspective of human
rights and tried to include it in the long list of human rights problems, taking
advantage of the “boom” of human rights as a foreign policy issue.
Chapter 6 examines a complicated relationship between the feminist
movement and the Arab-Israeli conflict by focusing on Bella Abzug, a prominent
American feminist, and her dedication to Zionism and feminism at home and
abroad. The chapter explores Abzug’s struggle at the International Women’s Years
(IWY) conference in Mexico and subsequent conferences held during the U.N.
Decade of Women. Originally designed to promote women’s unity all over the
world, the U.N.-sponsored women’s conferences served as a site of Cold War
confrontation. Bitter exchanges over what constituted “women’s issues”
characterized the official IWY conference. Dismissing the antagonism as a male
conspiracy to undermine female solidarity, Abzug struggled to break down barriers
between the First, Second, and Third worlds by identifying a “Forth world” of
women. The Middle East question, however, cast a shadow over her effort. When
Abzug faced criticism of Zionism from Arab and other Third World women, she
committed herself to the battle over Zionism by following, or deliberately using, the
official U.S. line that tried to disconnect women’s issues from “politics.” The
chapter concludes that in order to support Zionism, Abzug, a steadfast Cold War
critic, capitalized on the U.S. Cold War tactics of eliminating the Communist
influence from the feminist movement.