During the late 1960s, left-wing American activists faced challenges when trying to find out about what was happening in the Middle East and what their government was doing there. Publications like Monthly Review, National Guardian, and Ramparts sometimes wrestled with the Arab–Israeli conflict by providing their readers with news and opinions from various viewpoints, which reflected the conflicted attitude of much of the Left about how to approach the issue. On the other hand, Old Left newspapers like the Socialist Workers Party's The Militant and the Workers World Party's Workers World were consistently sympathetic to the Palestinians but cleaved closely to their parties’ respective dogmatic political lines in their analyses.Footnote 1 Some valuable reporting appeared in the news packets of the Liberation News Service (LNS), which helped cover events in the Middle East, particularly through the Jordan-based wife-and-husband reporting team of Sheila Ryan and George Cavalletto. Other American journalists based in the Middle East like Tabitha Petran and Abdallah Schleifer also published articles in various left-wing publications.
Yet overall, some activists still felt that by 1970 the American Left suffered from an overall dearth of solid information and regular, independent, critical analysis of the Middle East. As a result, the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) and its publication, MERIP Reports, were established in 1971 to fill that void. However, in many ways the primary impetus for MERIP's formation was not just its founders’ hunger for better analysis of the region, but also the deep impressions made on them by a dramatic and influential trip several of them took to Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan in August and early September 1970. Thus, while it is true that, since its inception, MERIP has shaped the study of the Middle East, it is also true that it was the Middle East that first shaped those who formed MERIP.
The origins of that eventful trip extend back to some activists in the Boston area who had formed a Middle East study group within the Committee of Returned Volunteers (CRV). The CRV was a group of former Peace Corps and other international service volunteers that had been established in December 1966. It grew to be quite vocally critical of American foreign policy over the years, with some in the group calling the Peace Corps “nothing but a graduate school for imperialism.”Footnote 2 Among those in the study group were Peter Johnson, who had lived in Lebanon, and Jean Whilden Townes, who, following a stint in the Peace Corps in Africa, spent time in Israel after the June 1967 Arab–Israeli War. They and others, including Georgia K. Mattison, decided to take a group of left-wing activists and journalists to tour the region so they could see it for themselves and report on what they saw. As part of the process Townes requested help from a student journalist at Wayne State University named Nick Medvecky, who had been speaking on television, on radio, and in person about his own ten-week tour of the Middle East the previous year. Townes asked him about some of his Palestinian contacts, and Medvecky agreed to help her by contacting some activists in Detroit with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers as well as a local women's liberation group. The call to join the trip spread elsewhere as well, including among activists involved with the Atlanta-based underground newspaper, The Great Speckled Bird.
Eventually, seventeen persons received visas from the Lebanese consulate in New York to enter Lebanon on the first leg of their trip: Townes, Mattison, Medvecky, Roger I. Tauss, Orville C. Robinson, Jr., Robert F. Firth, Joseph N. Center, Joseph A. Stork, Catherine B. Tackney, Joaquin E. “Gene” Guerrero, Jr., Peewee “Rufus” Griffin, Mana Claire Zakaria, Randall E. Clarke, Marilyn N. Lowen, Sharon Rose, Susan E.C. Teller, and Charles E. Simmons, 3rd. Griffin and Simmons were black; the rest were white. The journalists among them represented various black, underground, and left-wing publications and news services, including Rat, Liberated Guardian, The Fifth Estate, Sun-Dance, The Metro, The Inner City Voice, Muhammad Speaks, The Baltimore African-American, The Great Speckled Bird, LNS, and the Afro-World News Associates.
In late August 1970, the group embarked on its journey from New York to Istanbul on El Al Israel airlines, and then on to Beirut on a different carrier. While in the Middle East, the Americans stayed in hotels as guests of the General Union of Palestine Students. They spent about one week in Lebanon, visiting Palestinian refugee camps in and north of Beirut, the ancient ruins of Ba`labakk, a Palestine Red Crescent Society hospital in eastern Lebanon, and refugee camps in southern Lebanon on an overnight trip.Footnote 3 The tour members then tried to travel to Jordan overland via Syria, but the Syrians would not let them cross the Syrian-Jordanian border and they had to return to Beirut, from whence they flew to Amman.
The tour group then spent one week at an international student work camp in southern Jordan working on various projects for Palestinians, such as helping to build what ended up becoming a camp for members of the Ashbal (lion cubs), a type of armed Fateh youth brigade. After visiting the ancient city of Petra, some of them visited medical facilities in Shawbak, near al-Karak, that were run by two physicians from Fateh wearing combat uniforms and carrying weapons. Some also donated blood and were given aluminum necklaces that listed the type of blood group the wearer had. After a week, three members of the group eventually stayed behind to work at one of the clinics, mostly just sorting medicine; the others returned to Amman.Footnote 4
Those who went to Amman attended the Second World Conference on Palestine that was held from September 2–6, 1970. Over 1,000 delegates from a host of countries attended the gathering, including revolutionaries from Eritrea, Iran, and South Africa. A Swedish delegation reported that while the world knew much about Sweden taking in immigrants from communist countries, there was little global media attention to the first Israeli who defected and moved there.Footnote 5 Townes recalled “I was impressed by how international the meeting was.”Footnote 6 The conference took place despite rising tension and shootouts between Palestinian guerrillas and the Jordanian army. One of the Americans noted, “This experience was like living in a liberated zone. It was clear that we were having this conference not because of the graciousness of the Jordanian authorities but because the guerrillas were around us with their Kalshinkovs [sic] and their machine guns.” Yasir Arafat, chair of Fateh as well as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), addressed the gathering in Arabic on September 2 to thunderous applause. Years later Charles Simmons said, “I recall observing the popularity of Yasir Arafat among the Arab delegates.” In fact, a photo of Arafat clasping his hands together over his head appeared in the newspaper Fateh; in the background of the photo some of the American delegates could be seen on their feet cheering with raised fists in the air.Footnote 7 At one point, delegates from North Vietnam introduced themselves to the Americans, asking that the group convey their thanks to the anti-war movement in the United States.
Georgia Mattison recalled that everywhere the group went, Palestinians were keen to speak with the three Jewish members of the group – Sharon Rose, Joseph N. Center, and Marilyn N. Lowen. “They wanted them to know that they were not anti-Semitic,” she said. “They had such a more nuanced worldview about all of this stuff.”Footnote 8 For their part, Rose, Center, and Lowen issued a statement from the conference on September 2. When it was published in the United States, their names were “withheld upon request.” In the Arabic-language publication Fateh, however, the statement included their names (Lowen used the name “Maryam Fletcher” while she was in Jordan). Reflecting back years later, Lowen said, “It was me who insisted that Jews be part of the trip. . . . I felt very strongly that we as Jews on the trip needed to speak out and do so at the conference.”Footnote 9
The statement the three issued began, “As revolutionaries of Jewish heritage in the United States of America, we take this opportunity to wholeheartedly support the Palestinian liberation movement.” It went on to describe how their respective ancestors had participated in the Russian Revolution and the anti-Nazi resistance in Europe, as well as the early struggles of the working class in America. As such, the signers noted, “We cast our lot with the Palestinian liberation movement which struggles in [sic] behalf of our semitic sisters and brothers.” The statement continued forcefully:
We plan to spread the true facts of the Palestinian liberation movement as the only hope for lasting peace in the Middle East. As American Jews, we will attempt to combat the Zionist propaganda machine which chokes freedom of thought in the Jewish community and prevents Jewish youth from rejecting Zionism and joining the ranks of anti-imperialist struggle. . . . We know that our struggle is to get the Zionists out of the black and brown colonies of Harlem, Chicago and Detroit, and out of Palestine. . . . We thank our Palestinian sisters and brothers for welcoming us here and allowing us to see for ourselves the fascist nature of Zionism and the revolutionary and humane nature of the Palestinian liberation movement.Footnote 10
Tension between PLO forces and the Jordanian army had been growing prior to the trip, and the group's Palestinian sponsors decided to bring the three still at the clinic in southern Jordan back to Amman and join their colleagues at the conference in case war broke out. Those in the south already had experienced the violence of Jordanian-Palestinian clashes. Joe Stork remembered, “it was pretty intense. The Jordanian army hadn't weighed in yet but there was some pretty serious fighting going on. We were inside this clinic, underground, 24-7. It wasn't fun.”Footnote 11 Gene Guerrero was another group member who had worked in the south. At one point the Palestinians told them to sleep with their clothing and shoes on in case they needed to flee suddenly during the night. “They brought us back to Amman. . . in a Land Rover with Kalashnikovs,” he recalled. He had dismissed all the talk of imminent conflict “until we pulled up to a Jordanian army roadblock and the fida'iyyin [Palestinian guerrillas] took the safeties off their weapons.”Footnote 12
Things were not necessarily safer in Amman. Orville “Chris” Robinson and Roger Tauss sent a news dispatch back home to Liberation News Service about having dinner at the Jerusalem Restaurant in downtown Amman on August 30 when a clash erupted between Jordanian troops and Fateh guerrillas, forcing them to hunker down in the restaurant for two hours before they slipped out the back door and returned to their hotel.Footnote 13 Mattison recalled that when it became clear that major fighting was about to erupt, their Palestinian sponsors told group members to write a final letter to friends or loved ones. “They were telling people to write last letters; it was that bad.”Footnote 14
Eventually, vicious fighting – dubbed “Black September” by the Palestinians – did break out while the Americans were in Amman. Sharon Rose recalled the group's escape from Jordan to Syria. She had experience traveling in the region: Rose visited Israel in 1963 and asked herself and those she met pointed questions about the class nature of Israeli society and why Israel's Palestinian citizens lived under martial law. “So I saw that I am not a Zionist,” she later wrote.Footnote 15 When Black September erupted Rose remembered that group members were told to “get in the car now” by their Palestinian hosts, after which she lay on the floor of the car as it sped through the Jordanian-Syrian border; someone later told her that theirs was the last car to get out of Jordan before the border was closed due to the violence.Footnote 16
Susie Teller also recalled the harrowing experience of escaping the vicious Black September fighting. After graduating from college in 1964, she joined the Peace Corps and spent two years teaching in Turkey, after which she returned to the United States, joined the CRV, and became involved in anti-imperialist politics. Teller also worked with the feminist publication off our backs as well as The Great Speckled Bird. Recalling the group's departure from Jordan, she stated “the Palestinians told us, ‘pack your bags; we're going out in the middle of the night.’ We were given fake Syrian passports in a car with tinted windows, and they told us ‘don't talk.’ We got through. We drove all night.”Footnote 17
Various official quarters monitored the Americans’ comings and goings on the trip. The CIA was monitoring the trip as part of its Operation MH/CHAOS, a program that investigated possible foreign connections with American anti-war and other protest groups, and that also gathered information on Americans’ travel abroad when requested by FBI. Someone, seemingly from within the group, provided the CIA with information about what was transpiring among them.Footnote 18 Teller later recalled problems after their return home. “That trip classified us in a different category with the FBI.”Footnote 19
Governments in the region also kept tabs on them. Townes recalled their failed attempt to cross the land border from Syria to Jordan during the second week of the trip. They waited and waited on the Syrian side but were eventually denied permission to cross. Suspicious Syrian officials told them they had discovered that someone in the group had a relative in the American navy. “My reaction was, ‘how the hell did they know that?’” she remarked years later.Footnote 20 When the group boarded an El Al Israel airlines flight in Istanbul on the second leg of their journey home, Turkish police and military personnel whisked Medvecky off the plane and turned him over to El Al security agents. Medvecky later recalled the Israelis accused him of trying to blow up the plane, and then kept him detained for three days before putting him on a Pan American airlines flight back to the United States and told never to try to visit Israel again.Footnote 21
Despite or maybe even because of the drama of fleeing the intense Black September fighting, the trip proved very influential in the lives of several of those who went. Simmons remembered that “one of the things that stands out in my mind is the evidence of U.S. military support for the Israelis against the Palestinians. We were shown bombs. . . and lots of photographs of Palestinian victims.”Footnote 22 Years later Guerrero summed up his feelings when he noted “The trip was a very powerful trip.”Footnote 23
Some of the group members who went on to form MERIP after their return similarly recalled the impact of the trip. Parts of Townes's experience affected her for years after “in surprising ways.” She recalled being driven in a bus through a valley in Amman with other group members when shooting broke out between Jordanian troops and Palestinian guerrillas positioned on opposite hilltops above the valley. Although they were not in any danger of being hit in the crossfire, it nonetheless frightened a group of Americans unused to combat zones. “We were taken off the bus and hustled into an apartment building” she remembered. “For a significant number of years afterwards, if there was a loud bang or a firecracker, I just hit the ground. It really affected me in ways that surprise me.”Footnote 24
Townes also remembered that when the group was with Fateh in southern Jordan, the Palestinians offered to let the Americans practice shooting some AK-47 assault rifles. “I didn't go. I didn't want to do it,” she said. “Maybe two of us didn't. But the others went to get the experience of operating a weapon.” She recalled being skeptical about these armchair revolutionaries wanting to handle weapons, as if that was something they were going to do back in the United States. As the others went off to fire the guns, she thought to herself:
“You guys aren't going to do this [take up arms back in the United States].” I think it was more bravado than anything else and yearning to come up with something effective [about the anti-war movement]. It was all middle-class fantasy. I think that was part of the appeal of that trip to some people. It was an underground current on the trip.Footnote 25
Mattison was another group member who had experience living in the Middle East and felt that her sense of justice was at odds with her government's policy toward the region. She had joined the Peace Corps after college and was sent to Iran. It was while she was there that she learned that the U.S. government backed the military coup d’état that overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. “This just floored me,” Mattison recalled decades later. “No one had told me this in the Peace Corps. . . . I felt really betrayed by my government. ‘We'll just overthrow your government and then we'll throw you a few Peace Corps volunteers.’” She returned to the United States and “felt really betrayed by the Peace Corps and that my country was doing these things in my name.” Acting in accordance with these misgivings, she joined the CRV.
After the 1970 trip, Mattison recalled “I felt we were all very brave, maybe foolhardy.” Mattison also remembered a negative experience on the trip, one stemming from popular anger at U.S. foreign policy. The Americans had visited a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon just two months after the American diplomat Joseph Sisco had visited the country on an American peace initiative. When the American group came, the camp dwellers began angrily chanting “Sisco, Sisco” at them and even beating some of them.Footnote 26
Despite the bad reception in that one refugee camp, Mattison considered the overall experience “fantastic.” “We went over and got an earful. We learned a lot,” she recalled. “I came back with a great appreciation for the Palestinian point of view and how wrenching it was for them, or anybody, to be thrown out of their land.”Footnote 27 At the same time, Mattison probed the Palestinians she met and asked them hard questions. She encountered much rigidity and partisanship and pressed them hard to determine how sophisticated their worldviews really were. “I asked a lot of sharp questions during the trip: did they really understand that the Zionists and all of these poor refugees from the Holocaust had been set up too, that the British had set up all of these conflicts?”Footnote 28
Stork felt that the trip was an important step in propelling him further into work related to the Middle East. He, too, already had some experience in the region. After completing college he served in the Peace Corps, which dispatched him to Turkey from 1964–66. He returned to the United States to pursue graduate studies and helped found the CRV. Growing up he had no strong feelings one way or the other toward the Arab–Israeli conflict, but in the Peace Corps, he had an experience that left him puzzled about American foreign policy. During a vacation trip to Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, he and some colleagues visited the Jordan Valley, both sides of which were then under Jordanian control. A Palestinian refugee camp there had recently come under attack by Israeli aircraft. The group was told by some colleagues who worked inside the camp that they, as Americans, could not enter because of the level of popular anger at Israel and the United States. Decades later, Stork recalled, “When I think back – it's almost fifty years ago – I was impressed that there was someplace I couldn't go as an American. I thought, ‘wow, what's going on here?’ Most places one went in those days, being an American opened doors. Here was a place where the door was closed.”Footnote 29
Upon returning from the 1970 trip, Stork published an article called “Palestine is a Revolution” in the first issue of the CRV publication, Two…Three…Many. He reported on the group's trip to Wahdat, a Palestinian refugee camp just east of Amman, describing it as follows: “We drove to Wahdat, a large refugee camp of 55,000 persons on the outside of the city, known as the ‘Republic of Wahdat’ for its complete autonomy from government control.”Footnote 30
That fateful trip to the Middle East affected several group members in another way that would have a profound impact on the future academic study of the region. About six weeks after the group's return to the United States, Rose, Mattison, Townes, and Stork joined with two others who had travelled with them, Cathy Tackney and Robert Firth, at a meeting in a cabin in New Hampshire in late October 1970 to share their frustrations with the lack of reliable news about the Middle East. Peter Johnson, who had helped organize the trip but did not go, joined them. They were anxious to provide more and better information about the Middle East in the wake of the trip. Mattison recalled, “it was extremely serious that this information should get out. It reaffirmed our focus on the magazine.”Footnote 31
They also discussed what they perceived was the reluctance of many in the New Left to include the Middle East in its critiques of American foreign policy. In addition to having just toured the Middle East, most of those gathered in New Hampshire also had been involved with the CRV and had grown frustrated trying to convince their fellow CRV-ers to include the Middle East within their sphere of concern. They believed that CRV reflected the typical “Israel exceptionalism” that affected much of the Left: Israel and the Palestinians were somehow not part of some leftists’ critical analysis of imperialism and global politics. “MERIP came together as a New Left project,” Stork recalled, “like CRV had been.” As members of the New Left themselves, the group set about to prompt their left-wing colleagues to take a stand on Israel and the Palestinians by providing them with information, much as the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) had been doing to educate activists on Latin America since 1966.Footnote 32
Beyond that, the seven activists lamented the type and quality of information criticizing Israel that was circulating within the Left. An example of this was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)'s famous summer 1967 newsletter piece denouncing Israel, which they felt was just a rehash of the heavy-handed propaganda put out by the Arab states.Footnote 33 They also dismissed newspapers and pamphlets on the Middle East published by Old Left parties as too doctrinaire and too consumed with upholding the political line of each respective party. They all agreed that what the Left needed was good, independent, critical, “trenchant” analyses with which to confront the Left about the plight of Palestinians. At that first meeting, the activists therefore decided to produce a publication whose main focus would be analysis of the American role in the Middle East and the wider political economy of the region. MERIP was born.Footnote 34
Initially MERIP was run as a collective and maintained offices in Washington and Boston staffed by members of the collective: Rose, Stork, and Tackney worked in the former, with Johnson and Townes working alongside Ed Freeman and Henry “Buzz” Theberge in the latter. The first issue of MERIP Reports came out in May 1971 and was an informal affair geared toward the existing radical/alternative press. It featured only three articles and consisted of six pages that were mimeographed and stapled together. This format reflected the fact that it did not view itself as a magazine or a journal in its own right but rather a source of information about the Middle East for left-wing publications and activists.
Articles that appeared in the new publication initially were written by members of the MERIP collective themselves. Beyond pieces that analyzed the political economy of the Arab–Israeli conflict and other items and places of interest in the Middle East, early issues of MERIP Reports also offered up for sale Palestine support buttons, posters, and a slideshow of photos taken during the 1970 trip. They also contained reports of additional trips that members of the MERIP collective made to the region – an indication of how formative the idea of seeing the region up close and personal had been.
In the summer of 1971, three new trips took place. Rose and Tackney from the Washington MERIP group spent a month traveling in Israel, the West Bank, Golan, and Gaza. In northern Israel they saw the ruined Palestinian village of Kufr Bir`im. The village had been captured by the Israeli army in October 1948, which expelled its inhabitants and forbade them to return even though most of them ended up sheltering within the borders of the new Israeli state. Despite an Israeli Supreme Court ruling that the expellees could return to their village, the army nonetheless destroyed the village in September 1953. Elsewhere, they noted that “artist's [sic] colonies in at least five cities – Jaffa, Safed, Rosh Pina, and Jerusalem – were once the centers of Arab cities. Now they are fancy tourist traps. The Arabs are gone – driven out.” In Gaza the Americans were given a tour by an official of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and observed the “sullen Arabs” living there. After returning they wrote that “The spirit we saw and felt in Gaza's camps this year was completely different from the spirit we found in the camps in Lebanon and Jordan last year [1970].”Footnote 35
Two other trips in 1971 were made by members of the MERIP group in Boston: Mattison traveled to Lebanon and Iran while Theberge and two other Americans went to Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. While the latter were in Jordan, they were arrested by government forces while visiting the Wahdat refugee camp, which no longer was the independent, pre-Black September “Republic of Wahdat” about which Stork had written months earlier. On another occasion they were chatting with a Jordanian soldier when they noticed he was wearing a cartridge belt plainly marked “U.S.” When the trio pointed to it, the soldier said, “Yes, we are the American army in Jordan.”Footnote 36
In early 1973, the MERIP collective decided to switch gears and began issuing an actual journal containing short articles that would appear on a regular basis instead of the quasi-underground format that had characterized the publication. Although MERIP's main audience always had been the Left, the collective also tried to provide frank analysis of the region for Middle Easterners who lived in the United States. In this way such persons could understand their own part of the world beyond relying on conspiracy theories to explain developments in their home countries. Focusing on putting out the magazine henceforth would become MERIP's priority, although it still offered speakers for public events.
Increasingly both the group and MERIP Reports assumed a more professional nature as the 1970s wore on. Some in the collective moved on to assume other tasks or jobs. As part of this change MERIP closed the Boston office in 1975 and hired two individuals from outside the collective to work alongside the existing collective members at the Washington office. In 1977 it expanded by opening an office in New York City under Jim Paul, mostly to assist in fundraising. More and more articles were solicited from people outside the collective, and MERIP and its journal – later called MERIP Middle East Report starting in early 1986 and simply Middle East Report beginning in early 1990 – became respected and important sources of political economy analysis of the Middle East for academics and activists alike.Footnote 37
MERIP hit the ground running after that impactful 1970 trip and never has looked back after half a century of work. How important was that trip in terms of MERIP's formation? “It flowed directly from this trip” Mattison recalled years later, although adding “it wasn't the only factor.”Footnote 38 Stork also reflected on this question and concurred: “It was part of a process,” he noted. “One thing happened after another. Would MERIP have happened if the trip never had happened? Looking back, probably. But at that time in our lives, it was a big deal.”Footnote 39 What is certain is that in the five decades since that influential trip in 1970, MERIP and its publication have remained important sources of information and analysis about the Middle. During that time, MERIP surely has affected attitudes toward the Middle East, just as the Middle East affected its founders those many years ago.
