The U.S. Left has historically been a shining exception to American support for Israeli Zionism and Israel as a settler-colonial project, but not without conflict and contradiction. In The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left, historian Michael Fischbach describes in impressively researched detail how virtually every political formation of the Left came to define itself in part by its position on Israel's siege and occupation of historic Palestine. In particular, he focuses on how the 1967 “Six-Day War” was a pivot point between an older generation of communists and socialist Zionists who supported Israel, and a new generation expressing solidarity with the Palestinian self-determination struggle.

Fischbach is also the author of Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color (Stanford University Press, 2018). In that book, he does an excellent job documenting the way leading elements of the Black Power movement, like...

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