The Arab Americans: A History

520 Pages·2005·17.268 MB·English

by  Gregory Orfalea

T A A
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A History
GREGORY ORFALEA
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OLIVE
BRANCH
PRESS
An iuat)rirtf l)i Jnlc.dirti^W>Ushinj| trfoup, Inc.
wwwrinterliHkbfKyks.com

For Matthew, Andrew, and Luke—
unending lone
First published in 2006 by
OLIVE BRANCH PRESS
An imprint of Interlink Publishing Group, Inc.
46 Crosby Street, Northampton, Massachusetts 01060
www.interlinkbooks.com
Text copyright T Gregory Orfalea, 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
O r fa 1 e a, G re go r y, 1049-
Tlie Arab Americans : a history / by Gregory Orfalea.
p. cm.
“Some of this book was published in 198<S, in different form, under the
title Before the flames, by the University ofTexas Press”—T.p. verso.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-56656-644-4
ISBN 1-56656-597-9 (pbk.)
1. Arab Americans—History. 2. Arab Americans—Social conditions.
3. Orfalea. Gregory, 1949—Travel—United States. 4. United
States—Description and travel. 5. Arab Americans—Biography. I. Orfalea,
Gregory, 1949- Before the flames. II.Title.
E184.A650738 2005
305.8927073'09—dc22
2005002841
Eront cover photograph: Kamel and Matilda Awad, with their children, jrom left: Joe, Rose, and Eddie
(infant) at Cooney Eland, XV, in the \H)s
Bach cover photographs courtesy of Mel Rosenthal, from the exhibit “The Arab Americans”:
left: Palestinian woman at a Brooklyn Heights peace march, September 16, 2001;
right: Palestinian girl on rollerblades, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn 199H
Printed and bound in the United States of America
To request our complete 40-page full-color catalog, please call us toll free at
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CONTENTS
Preface ini
Introduction xiii
1. Generations Reunite in Arbeen, Syria 1
2. Seeds to the Wind: The First Wave of Arab Immigration
(1878-1924) 43
The Stuff of Myth: Arab Adventurers in the New World • Ihe Withered Cedar:
W hy the Arabs Left Syria and Dhanon • W ho Aw I? The Syrians Dock in America
3. Transplanting the Fig Tree: The First Generation on American
Soil (1924-1947) 109
The Depression and Syrian Americans • World War II • Making a Xante:
L'irst- CGeneration Xotables
4. The Palestine Debacle: The Second Wave of Arab Immigration
(1948-1966) 151
Syrian Americans React to the Brewing Palestine Conflict • Immigrants from a
Lost Palestine • Other Second Wave Immigrants from Arab Regimes
5. The Third Wave: West Bank Captured, Lebanon Torn Asunder,
Iraq Wars with Iran, Kuwait, and the US (1967-2005) 189
Iraqis, Yemenis, and llgyptian Copts • 7 bird Wave Palestinians and Lebanese
6. The Political Awakening (1972-1981) 213
Ihe Association of Arab American University Graduates (A AUG) • The National
Association of Arab Americans (XAAA) • "Ihe American-Arab Anti-
Discrimination Committee (ADC)
7. Back to Lebanon (1982-1983) 243
Before the Plantes • The Israeli Invasion of Lebanon • All Pall Down
8. Stumbling Toward Peace (1984—2000) 265
Ihe Cases of Alex Odell and the LA 8 • The Coleico Doll and the Pirst Intifada
Ihe Pirst Gulf War'Triggers Hate Crimes • Ihe Oslo Peace Process
Access White House or Affirmative Action? • The Death of Oslo and the Second Intifada
9. After the Flames: Arab Americans and American Fear
(2001-2005) 299
September / I and the Patriot Act • War with A fghanistan and Iraq
Pront and Center • Wliat Do Arab Americans Want?
Ongoing Achievement • To Be or Not to Be Arab American: A Dtok at the Literature
10. A Celebration of Community 347
Center of the World (Washington, DC) • Food Yon Can Trust (Detroit, MI)
Dance oner the Death Home (Brooklyn, NY) • The Slave of Balfour House
(Vicksburg, MS) • The Mosque and the Prairie (Ross, ND)
A Porch in Pasadc}ia (Los Angeles, CA)
Epilogue 434
Appendixes 436
/. Number of Arrivals in the United States from Turkey in Asia, by Sex,
1869-1898
2. Number of Arrivals from Syria in the United States by Sex, 1899—1932
3. Arab Immigration to the United States, 1948—1985
4. Arab Immigration to the United States, 1986-2003
.Arab Pastern Rite Christian, Muslim, and Druze Population in the United States
6. Religious Affiliations of Arab Americans
Notes 444
Bibliography 463
Glossary 474
Index of Names 4 77
General Index 488
PREFACE
once thought—hoped actually—I would never address this
subject again. But history has a way of grabbing a writer—and a
community—by the neck with challenges and trials no one
could ever have imagined. Oh for the days when we were invisible!
I have always had an instinct about danger—mysterious, but one
that has been proved accurate enough times to make me take it
seriously.The Arab-American community is in danger, from within and
without. A few people hide among us who harbor hatreds that no one
can fathom. At the same time, the society-at-large, fueled by decades of
stereotyping of Arabs and by the atrocities of 9/11, seems prepared to
pounce, should any more significant terrorism erupt on US soil. The
vast majority of Arab Americans, who are a rather patriotic ethnic group
at core, may pay worse than ever for the isolated newcomers limitless
sense of wrong. Lest anyone think 1 exaggerate, consider that a member
of the Bush-appointed US Civil Rights Commission during a 2002
hearing in Detroit predicted that Arab Americans would be rounded up
in camps in the event of a newr terrorist attack.
It was with this in mind that I returned to the history of my
community, to reinterpret, reconsider, expand: to hold it up as talisman
and warning. This history of Arab Americans is both more political and
more literary than my early book (1988), in which political concerns
were embedded almost imperceptively in the narrative. But the past two
decades are the most political, by far, in the Arab-American
community’s history, and a literary renaissance, if not naissance, is
unfurling by the day. I now confront the growing spotlight on the
community and weight on its shoulders, culminating in the horrifying
events of September 11,2001, and the subsequent and troubling Patriot
Act, which hovers over us still.
Writing history while it is intensely in the making is a challenge,
to say the least. Not a day went by when something on the front page
(or further back) of the newspaper begged entrance to the new
book. I had to be selective, of course, trying to divine what events
and personalities best stand for the Arab-American saga. That story,
once tangential to the wars of the Middle East, is, like the wars
VII
THE ARAB AMERICANS: A HISTORY
themselves, front and center in our country’s fate. The earlier book
did not have to face this extraordinary and perilous moment in
history, on which the future not only of our country, but the world,
may hang. The complex range of the Arab-American component to
the post-9/11 world can be seen in these two surprising anomalies:
there was an Arab-American fighter for bin Laden, and there is now
an Arab American at the head of all US forces in Iraq (General John
Abizaid). To further demonstrate the topsy-turvy changes in the
community, in twenty years Iraqi Americans have gone from casting
votes of virtually no weight here, to being voters whose votes are
front page news—for candidates in Iraq!
I note with sadness the prescience of the last line of the preface
to the first book, which observed that “the fallout of America s
Middle East policy draws ever closer to these shores.” Perhaps the
United States was always at the center of gravity of this conflict and
never knew it until now, if indeed we know it now. I suppose I sensed
that the American-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which
took close to 20,000 civilian lives and ended with spectacular
massacres in Palestinian camps, was going to hurt us. How, I did not
know and did not want to speculate. The terrorist attack on US
Marines in Beirut in 1983, from which many have dated the
downward spiral of fundamentalism in the area, seemed a stiff
enough warning that we were not in tune with justice and there
were people ready to use extreme, violent means to tell us so.
No one could possibly anticipate the monstrosity of September
11. But I have to say I found myself nodding, grimly, at bin Ladens
taped message on the eve of the November 2004 US presidential
election, in which he speaks of first conceiving of an attack on the
“towers of America... as I watched the destroyed towers in
Lebanon” in 1982.1 It gave me a visceral shock to recall that, standing
in the Beirut ruins of Fakhani, where an Israeli bombardment had
taken out a six-story building, I had written, in the first book: “What
would happen if the World Trade Center were hit this way in New
York, or the Daily Planet building in Los Angeles? What would the
world say? What would it do?”2 Well, the world said and did one
thing; our democratically elected president did another.
It goes without saying that nothing justifies the virulent hatred and
destruction of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC.
But our Pontius Pilate hand-wringing concerning the effects of militant
Zionism and Christian evangelism on the Holy Land has placed us in an
untenable situation—we try to boost democracy in the very Arab world
in which our client state makes a mockery of it, at least as far as the
Palestinians are concerned.As the first President Bush noted, this cannot
stand; either we fix the problem, which we have had a large hand in
creating, or the fury of radical Islam will continue to haunt us.
VIII
PREl-ACE
Fixing the Palestine-Israel problem, as 9/11 Commissioner John
Lehman has suggested, is a sine qua non for snuffing the oxygen of
Islamist terror, but not far behind is attention to the widening gap
between the rich and the poor worldwide (it cannot help that half of
all US foreign aid goes to two countries—Egypt and Israel);
cancelling American aid to dictatorial regimes in the Middle East;
and the moral imperative to help the Iraqis get back on their feet.
With all due respect to our soldiers, our current military involvement
appears more counterproductive on this account by the day Our
very presence incites. As General Abizaid himself has said,3 getting
the water, electricity, and roads in working order is a far more
important task than the report of guns whose exercise gives us, at
best, questionable returns. Political economist Hilton Root has put
the trouble with US foreign policy even more succinctly:
“humiliation.” The humiliation at the bottom of our policies that we
have either refused or don’t care to see conies back to haunt us.
I have tried to piece together suggestions from the Arab-
American community about how we might extricate ourselves from
the grim cul-de-sac our country finds itself in, and record as honestly
as I could both the community’s disgust with terror as an approach
to perceived injustice and its attempt to navigate as Americans in a
decidedly paranoid atmosphere.
This book is new. Even the earlier material about the history of
the early Syrian immigration to and settlement in America has been
cut, updated, and rewritten in parts with new research and interviews.
Underpinning Hie Arab Americans are interviews I conducted with 140
Arab Americans spanning a period of a quarter century, including
second interviews separated sometimes by many years.
“The Political Awakening” (Chapter 6) has an interesting history
in itself. The chapter looked at the major Arab-American
organizations that grew into being after the 1967 war, and the
University of Texas cut it entirely, saying it was “too political.” I
restore much of it now as it offers an unusual glimpse of something
not often discussed: how American Middle East policy is shaped on
Capitol Hill. For a time, a weak but nascent Arab-American lobby
battled it out with quirky foreign-policy aides who were bombarded
at the same time by the Israel lobby. What struck me when I first
blew dust off this lost chapter was how current the debate still is, for
example, over settlements. The chapter gives an up-close look at the
first (and last) time Congress tried to cut aid to Israel over the West
Bank and Gaza settlements, through Senator Adlai Stevenson, who
paid for his ill-fated effort with his career.
Chapter 8, “Stumbling Toward Peace,” follows the roller-coaster
ride the community took along with the Middle East in what
appeared to be a peace breakthrough in Madrid and Oslo, then the
IX
THE ARAB AMERICANS! A HISTORY
precipitous decline in that process after the assassination of Rabin,
the hopelessly over-billed and over-rushed Camp David talks at the
tail end of the Clinton era, and the rise of Ariel Sharon to power in
Israel. Here, too, I look at the alarming spikes in hate crimes against
Arab Americans and those who look like them during the 1991 Gulf
war and after the Oklahoma City bombing. Stereotyping in the
media, film, books, advertisements, and so forth, grew exponentially
in this period and is responsible in part for the unleashing of a
subliminal hatred or fear of the Arab in US society.
To draw attention to “American fear” in the subtitle to Chapter
9 (“After the Flames”) may be misleading, because there is also a lot
of American kindness after 9/11 that I have tried to represent. But
the violent, at times Orwellian, backlash some in the community
have had to endure is recorded, along with the strange tentacles of
the Patriot Act. I look at the new demographic patterns and their
implications. For example, the community, for a long time 90 percent
Christian, is now about 75 percent Christian, 25 percent Muslim.
The two community portraits in Chapter 10, Detroit and
Washington, DC, are deeply concerned with 9/11 and how it has
affected the community, from the singing of the Star Spangled
Banner at the Comerica Park baseball stadium in Detroit by an Arab-
American Muslim woman, to seven Arab Americans’ narration of
“that black day” in the US capital. I do not hide my own.
Even a few years before my first book was published, 1 had
dropped out of political activism on behalf of the community. I have
written elsewhere about this, but suffice to say here work in that
vineyard is relentlessly punishing. It is shocking to the system and the
heart to see how thoroughly Arab and Arab-American leaders can
subvert, muscle out, and otherwise screw each other. The instincts of
a “street fighter,” as one Arab-American leader described the
requirement of success in American politics, I’m afraid I lacked.
Though like Nikos Kazantzakis I tried to fuse the man of action with
the man of contemplation, ultimately, like him, I ended up giving
myself over to trying to understand as a writer what forms there were
in the swirling dust and smoke, and where they were headed. Edward
Said’s exemplary life as both brilliant literary critic and engaged
revolutionary stands so tall to all of us who loved him, but even
Edward, I think, would have admitted his own life ultimately stood
with the power of the pen.
This book is not about Middle East policy, per se; it does recount
in several ways the Sisyphean attempt by one community to try and
help, however much it has all seemed a crying in the wilderness. After
the death of Arafat in 2005, there seemed hope that negotiations
between Palestinians and Israeils would get back on track and that,
wonder of wonders, Ariel Sharon might be preparing Israelis for a