This episode with philosopher John Harfouch considers “propaganda” as a keyword for Critical Zionism Studies. We’re looking at the work of Fayez Sayegh — the incredibly prolific Palestinian-Syrian-American scholar who was instrumental in theorizing Zionism and defining Arab American politics. Dr. Harfouch walks us through Sayegh’s studies of how Zionism works as a colonial process in Palestine and as a system of politics and messaging in the United States.
Syllabus: Philosophical Approaches to the Question of Palestine (American Philosophical Association)
Fayez Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (Palestine Research Center, 1965)
Fayez Sayegh, “A Strange Concept of Reward and Punishment” (The Caravan, Mar. 26 1959)
John Harfouch’s diagram of the Zionist movement as theorized by Sayegh
There’s another Unpacking Zionism episode on the work of Fayez Sayegh: Zionism and anti-Zionism with Miriam Osman.
Propaganda with John Harfouch
Emmaia: Welcome to Unpacking Zionism, I’m Emmaia Gelman, director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. These episodes look at keywords to interpret and understand how Zionism works, and this episode is on the keyword “propaganda”. I’m talking to John Harfouch, who teaches philosophy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. And John also writes about race and racism, imperialism, colonialism, and orientalism. At the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, John is the convenor of our workgroup on the writings of the Palestinian-Syrian-American thinker Fayez Sayegh.
As we post this, 119,000 Palestinians in Gaza are estimated dead. 400,000 people and three hospitals in North Gaza are under Israeli siege and bombings, 2,229 people have been killed by Israeli bombs in Lebanon, the US has now sent $18 billion to Israel to carry out this genocide, and although I don’t usually speak particularly as a Jewish person in these podcasts, I’m recording this introduction on Yom Kippur which feels like a day that can no longer conceptually exist. But importantly, we are here together, holding onto knowledge and history and resistance.
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Emmaia: Welcome John, thanks for joining.
John: Thank you. I’m happy to be here on the show.
Emmaia: We’re talking about the scholarship of Fayez Sayegh as an O.G. of critical Zionism studies, looking at the operations of Zionist politics and institutions. His work is sort of the model for that. And we’re also talking about “propaganda” as a keyword. Sayegh spent a lot of time reading Zionist messaging, pointing out what it left out or pretended away, and mapping it out to see what political or social levers it was trying to pull. And he also counternarrated, writing a huge amount of what we would now call “content.” Taking up conversational space for Palestine, to push back on its being erased and talked over.
I want to ask you first to just introduce us to Sayegh, for those who aren’t familiar.
John: He’s born 1922 in Syria. Shortly thereafter, his family moved to Palestine, Tabriya. He’ll go to the United States, he writes a dissertation on existential methodology and gets his PhD in 1950. One of the key themes that comes out of it is an idea that some of us might associate with Sartre, that like philosophical life is an engaged life that you’re engaged in the politics and in the world around you in a concrete way. In 1956 he founds the Arab Information Center, based in Brooklyn. He writes this weekly editorial for an Arab American newspaper called The Caravan. So like 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, he’s more or less writing an editorial every week. In 1965, he founds the PLO Research Center, which is, quite a major operation in Beirut studying, archiving publishing all kinds of materials for the Palestinian cause. And, and really in some ways is a precedent for what critical Zionism studies would be, right?
A lot of the material from that research center was destroyed when Israel invaded Lebanon. They destroyed that research center in 1982. But we still have, these pamphlets, like, if people are listening to this, they might have read Zionist colonialism in Palestine, the PLO Research Center is the publisher. So Fayyaz published some of the first pamphlets and publications looking critically at the Zionist ideology. He’s involved quite a bit in the United Nations throughout the late 60s and the 70s. And that work would culminate in the 1975 UN Resolution 3379, which officially declares Zionism a form of racism. That resolution would be revoked by the first George Bush president.
One thing that really strikes me about his biography is just how active he was. I told you that in the late fifties, he wrote a weekly editorial for the Caravan, this Arab American newspaper. As he is writing his weekly editorials in that four year period, he’ll give, Emmaia, he’ll give 770 public talks in four years, in a two week period in 1956. He delivers 54 lectures. So like in one day in Cleveland, he’ll give three talks. And then the next day he’ll be in Akron, and then the next day he’ll be in Cincinnati, and then the next day he’ll be in Louisville, or whatever, you know, whatever it is. The amount of work and advocacy that he did it’s just, it’s really hard to, to grasp. He had a tremendous influence on student groups in particular.
He was particularly charitable with his time talking with Arab American student groups.
Emmaia: So Sayegh was an incredibly prolific voice analyzing Zionism, looking at the writings and speeches of the Zionist leaders who were at the time establishing the state of Israel. Actually, I love talking about it in the present tense, I’m going to follow you there, John. So in the early 1950s, Sayegh is looking at Zionism both as a physical colonizing project happening in Palestine, and as a political process that’s taking shape in the United States.
In the US, the story that’s being told is about Jews settling Israel — it’s narrated largely as a Jewish story, attached to Jewish American political organizations. Even though U.S. Jewry on the whole is not particularly Zionist at the time. But there’s not a parallel Arab American politics at the time. Sayegh, he’s trying to fill this in: to establish an Arab American narrative. It’s kind of prescient, actually, his understanding that US foreign policy is so shaped by whether the people affected are legible as mattering in the United States itself.
So Sayegh really lays the foundations for critically examining U.S. and UN Zionist politics, and counternarrating from below — from the experience of people who are experiencing Zionism as a displacing, dehumanizing force. In that sense — we haven’t yet gotten to his analysis yet — but he’s already an essential figure establishing a US Arab politics which has been sort of preemptively erased by Zionist discourse, even before it exists.
John: I’ll read you a quote, from this Caravan newspaper. So, there was a period in 1959 where he was in Lebanon, and for whatever reason, I don’t remember to be honest, but he was banned from coming back to the United States. And so, in the Caravan, there’s this huge outpouring, like this letter writing campaign, where people from all throughout the Arab American community are saying, “Hey, we need this guy back here in the United States doing his work. Like, you cannot ban him from the United States.”
He was so engaged with these student groups, teaching them about the Zionist ideology and trying to organize or trying to help organize Arab American response. This is what the Arab Students Association at the University of Southern California wrote into the Caravan, okay. “Many years ago, we left our Arab homeland to study in the United States. with shamefully vague ideas about Arab affairs and how to present them to the American public. This ignorance, on our part, we must confess, would have remained with us until now and would have added to the already slanted picture of Arab affairs in the United States. However, we went to our cause, we were armed with his booklets, speeches, ideas, methods, and personal instructions. Without Dr. Sayegh’s image and voice on television and radio, our Arab cause in the United States is doomed to eternal paralysis.”
And for me, that quote, like that’s, that’s my own study of the Palestine question. I’m Lebanese. That’s my own study of my own history. I understood some things here and there, but part of what draws some of us to philosophy as a field is this, it has a certain way of presenting methods and connecting things together to give you an idea of a bigger picture, some of the foundations, some of the principles, some of the patterns of thinking. And I think that’s what you see these students taking from Fayez’s work, he’s giving them a way to express their point of view. And unanimously throughout all this work, the United States is hostile to this Arab point of view on, on all things like really on all things Arab in the United States. That quote is maybe the best biographical note as to who was it’s really about the impact that he had on, on young Arab people in the United States.
Emmaia: Let’s take a little turn: one of themes that keeps recurring as we unpack Zionism — that’s our job here — is that Zionist narrative is constantly trying to bury things — it says there’s no such thing as Palestinians, they’re just Arabs. There was no Nakba, Palestinians just left. There’s no colonialism so there’s no such thing as Palestinian resistance, Palestinians are just antisemites and genocide is just self-defense. Saree Makdisi writes helpfully about this as denial, and then denial of denial.
The fact that we don’t hear much about Sayegh is itself a disappearance that we’ll talk more about later. But in his work, he theorizes the whole machinery — it’s his project to undo the disappearance, the disavowals of Zionist processes, that Zionist politics depend on. Can you tell us about that?
John: He has a pamphlet called On Zionist Propaganda in the United States. This is so much of what Fayez’s work is — walking his reader through the mechanics of each aspect. of the Zionist movement. In the hands of Zionism, what is diplomacy? What is colonialism? How does it work? how does the fundraising part work? And this pamphlet Zionist propaganda in the United States is walking readers through quite comprehensively. It’s like here’s all the arguments that they make. There’s 60 arguments. We can group them into 12 categories, and then he analyzes the style of argumentation according to each category. And then he looks at political influence and how Zionists are trying to stifle discussion of Zionism and Israel on campuses, in politics, in newspapers, et cetera. But then at the end he says, all right, what is our response to this? Arabs in the United States, now that we know what it is, how would we respond? And he says, well, first thing, the first problem that Zionist propaganda has is paradoxically, it’s strength, because the more it occupies, the more it kills, the stronger it is, the less their arguments work, the more unattractive it becomes.
Like you see that now, right? There’s such a show of force and dominance that Zionism has really started to kind of lose the thread, certainly on campuses and to a lesser extent in, in mainstream media, but he says, you know, the other thing that really hurts the Zionist cause is if we just talk about it if our people stop talking about it and stop criticizing it, then we’re doing their work for them and so he’s always trying to encourage, like in academia today, we’re all trying to promote ourselves and read my book and click my link and all this shit. And like, he really was trying to create a collective project where other people are engaged in this critical study.
Emmaia: I’m just thinking about what it actually means that Sayegh’s ideas and contributions have been erased. His work is largely out of print. There’s no published “complete works of Sayegh” as you’ve said. Sometimes his work is resurfaced as a sort of recovery — I just saw that Writers Against the War on Gaza, an important organization that’s producing knowledge about Zionism and Palestine right now, has recirculated Sayegh’s Zionist Propaganda in the United States. But they literally have to call it “Writings unearthed from the archives.”
But I also mean that we’re frozen in much of the same conversation that he was having, like 70 years later. The arguments that he painstakingly laid out, the history he filled in, are basically ignored as if they didn’t exist. To take his work Zionist Colonialism In Palestine as an example, in the very first sentences he situates Zionism in terms of the colonial scramble for Africa. That Zionism doesn’t arise in a vacuum, like we’re not on Mars here, it’s part of an ongoing global history. And now as we’re trying to talk about the genocide, we’re still left trying to restore basic history to the conversation.
John: There’s a few elements of his method that’s really important to touch on. And I think this, this point maybe is like the cornerstone of the whole thing, actually. He says exactly what you just were articulating. Okay? In 1957, he writes this. “Anyone who reads the American press or talks to American audiences could not be unaware of how Americans today are forming their opinions of events in the Arab world. The history, background, genesis, and development of relations and events is entirely ignored. Seldom does one bother even to inquire about them. It is the day’s events that count. And the implicit assumption is that the day’s events can be fully understood. Without reference to what preceded them and without any relation to the concrete historical context within which they evolved.” The theme here is that when you’re talking to an American audience, this technique of erasing history is really effective because Americans don’t care about history. That’s really what he’s trying to say. They don’t, American people don’t have any patience for this stuff. You know, what happened in 1917, who wrote what in 1897? That was a long time ago. What does that have to do with today? That’s how the American audience is manipulated. And Zionist propaganda is very effective at preying on this obsession with the day’s events and this lack of interest in history, right? So he’ll say this in 1958.
“Those who enjoin both parties to exhibit equal readiness to compromise from now on virtually ask the dispossessed to surrender more than they have already lost while recommending that the dispossessor be rewarded for past wrongdoing.” In another pamphlet, called the Palestinian View, he opens with this analogy to two, two children having to fight and you just walk in and see, see two kids arguing and you adjudicate just based on the last event that you saw, the point is just that an ahistorical approach lends itself to injustice, awards aggression. A big part of what he’s trying to do is to study Zionist concepts, historically, so like when we study diplomacy, militancy, when we study the fundraising aspect of Zionist movement, we want to make sure that we track them through time, track their patterns of motion through time. That’s really an essential theme.
Emmaia: John, let’s turn to a field that I know absolutely nothing about. You’re a philosopher and Sayegh is a philosopher. What should we understand about Sayegh as a philosophical thinker on Zionism, and what it means actually to have lost sight of him as that kind of a thinker?
John: There’s a way where you can write about philosophers. Like, you could read a biography of Michel Foucault, and he did this, and he was born here, and but like, in philosophy, we don’t just write about the philosophers, we think with them. You know, we still ask like, does this speak to my experience today? When Fayez was alive and showing up on campus and imparting these methods and techniques to these students, they were engaged with him as a thinker, right, they were thinking along with him. There’s a question of how to recover his works, like whether or not we recover his works. But then there’s a question of how we recover it and my field, philosophy, isn’t all that interesting right now in recovering this thinker in the same way that we would engage other 20th century thinkers.
Philosophy as a field really is still caught up in this idea that Arab philosophy is, you know, a thousand years old. It’s al Kindi, it’s al Farabi, it’s Ibn Sina and not to take anything away from those thinkers or people that study those thinkers of course, Arab people have thought about their own life and death over the last hundred years, quite a bit. There’s been quite a bit of Arab death. And Arab philosophers have thought about it. So, Fayez is one example. For those of us in the United States, he’s kind of an obvious example because he was also here in the United States. He wrote a lot in English. He wrote a lot in Arabic as well. He’s a figure that we should engage and try to think with. And so, one thing that Fayez was really adamant about in his work was that we need to study Zionist writings closely. So like, for instance, as he’s traveling around giving all those 770 talks in four years, one thing that comes up in a radio interview that is really astounding is that every night before he went to bed he studied David Ben Gurion, you know, he was really immersed and so like when you study, writings you end up having to read what he read.
So like I find myself buying all these books like this, like this interview with David Ben Gurion that I would never read it, but because Fayez is kind of like my guide to study of Zionist ideology, he’s showing me, okay, John, you need to buy this book, you need to read these chapters, and these are the important chapters. He’s almost in that way, like a teacher, when you engage his writings, he’s really trying to guide you and show you how to read Zionist writings. And so like, when he talks about Zionism, he doesn’t bring his own opinions from the outside. It’s never, well, the Zionists say this, but I, I think that, and it’s like a conflict of two opinions. He’s always saying, look, Zionist tries to present itself as a national liberation movement, for example, but don’t listen to me via Sayegh, go read this David Ben Gurion book, he’ll tell you what Zionism is, he’ll tell you it’s a colonial project, read Chaim Weizmann, he’ll tell you it’s a colonial project. Here’s Herzl in his diaries writing a letter to Cecil Rhodes saying this is a colonial project. You’ll understand what I’m doing. Come, come help me with this colonial project. That’s his method at every point. And if, you know, as an Arab in the United States, he knows. That he doesn’t just get to go on TV and talk, and people are going to listen to him. His perspective is going to be orientalized, you might say. It’s going to be misinterpreted. He’ll let the Zionists do the talking for themselves. And he had an amazing ability to memorize quotes, to memorize dates, and just reproduce them on the spot. So an interviewer would say you know, how do you respond to this idea that Arabs attacked Israel in 1948 and what happened in May, 1948 was an act of self-defense. He’ll say, well, read what Ben Gurion says. And he’ll quote it by memory, that’s not what they say. So like, for instance, in the speech that he gives for that 1975 UN Resolution 3379, he’s really clear, like, right from the beginning, I’m not bringing my definition of racism to the table here. I’m going to work with the UN’s definition of racism. I’m not going to define Zionism. I’m going to let the Zionists define Zionism. You guys say racism is this, Zionists say Zionism is this. The conclusion? Zionism is racism. That’s like a key aspect of his method.
Emmaia: It’s actually really compelling to hear his approach described in the terms of a sort of logical machinery. In the present, I think it’s actually not a tactic that political organizers would agree with — for example, taking the UN’s definition of racism and saying “okay, this is what we’re going to work with.” Because part of the organizer’s work is to say “your definition of racism is completely inadequate, it’s part of the problem.” But it does help us examine the machinery that exists, and that’s permitting these violations of norms and rights that institutions like the UN, and the United States government, claim to uphold.
As you’re looking at Sayegh’s work, you’ve pulled out this diagram that he conceptualizes about how Zionist politics work, kind of a taxonomy of the different aspects of Zionism. You’ve made it visual — and it’s amazing, we can share it in the show notes. Can you walk us through it?
John: Yeah, he describes in one of his pamphlets what he calls the Zionist plan of action. And it’s like a metaphor for the Zionist movement. And he’s saying, all right, this relationship, of the whole and parts and how the Zionist movement has to be studied in time, like his concepts are dynamic and the image that he brings forward is a person on crutches.
He says there’s seven elements, right? You’re going to have two arms, two crutches, two feet, that’s six, and then there’s the brain. And the brain is the general Zionist policy, which activates the whole program. What’s the whole program? The whole program is to establish a Zionist state in Palestine and its neighborhood, the area they call the quote unquote land of Israel, to transfer the Jews of the world to this area. After evicting its original inhabitants. And lastly, to guarantee the continuance of that state and its prosperity and success.
That was a quote from this pamphlet, Zionist Diplomacy. So that’s the brain, right? That’s the, it’s what activates the whole thing. Now you have the appendages, right? So there’s two arms. The first arm is diplomacy. The second arm is colonization. So like if you’re listening to this podcast and you read Zionist colonialism in Palestine, okay, you maybe thought that that was like a comprehensive study of Zionist colonialism in Palestine.
No, you only read about one arm, okay? There’s two feet, and that’s organization is one foot, and the collection of funds is the other foot. And then there’s two crutches. One crutch is propaganda, and one crutch is military action. So again, going back to our themes as to how Fayez is trying to think philosophically about Zionism, we have all of these parts, and there are pamphlets and writings and dozens of essays committed to analyzing each component part.
It’s really helpful for me because he’s really emphasizing in that image, not just that there are components of, Zionist movement, but he’s trying to, like you said, taxonomize, but then you have to really emphasize if you’re going to use that word taxonomy, a taxonomy could be kind of stagnant. But he’s really emphasizing that these concepts, these aspects of the Zionist movement, they’re not at all static. Take their meaning from their interaction with the other parts of the movement. Like, if you just understand one arm, You didn’t really get it. You need to understand how it moves in coordination with the other arm. And so maybe the way to think about it is. the difference between an anatomy and a kinesiology.
Anatomy you study like a corpse, right? The body doesn’t move. You just know the parts. But in a kinesiology of the Zionist movement, you’re actually trying to study those parts. As they interact with other parts, how does the movement progress?
And Fayez wants to understand how these, parts or appendages of the Zionist movement are coordinated and working together historically, so that he can in a way kind of predict where they’ll go and how things will emerge. And that’s, when you read Zionist colonialism and you read Zionist diplomacy together, you get a picture of how, These two arms, the colonial arm and the diplomatic arm, move together to achieve this territorial expansion.
That’s what we mean when we say in philosophy that the whole would define the parts and the parts would define the whole. It’s the same way that if you were going to study my hand, You really need to understand how it’s movements are defined and made possible by its relationships to the other parts of my body.
And, if you were to study my motion as I walk, you need to understand how when my right leg moves, my left arm has to move to offset that motion. He’s really trying to demonstrate this movement and then of course, create, a concomitant resistance to each movement of each of these parts. That’s maybe like the best summary we have of what he was attempting to do. Of course, there’s other, he was involved in so many other activities. But, from a philosopher’s standpoint that’s the place we’d start if we were trying to understand who is this guy as a philosopher.
Emmaia: It’s pretty genius as a political education tool. I can see how it’s a product of its time in a sense, like, if we were building the model now, it would have to include Christian Zionism and closer attention to the solidarities between settler colonial states. But it’s also really clear, and it’s a model for how to think about these things.
Which helps make sense of narratives that appear contradictory like Israel is vulnerable, Israel is strong, Zionism is a Jewish thing, Don’t saddle Jews with responsibility for what Israel does, things like that.
John: I think it’s a useful picture for me just in the sense that there’s so much, he has so much material and I need a starting point to organize things and then maybe eventually get away from this model. If you were trying to put together something more or less comprehensive, critical study of the Zionist movement, where would we begin, in a lot of ways I’m a product of these institutions. There is no critical study of Zionism in philosophy. The race studies that we have are more or less gatekept and dictated by Zionists.
And so that the idea of there being any criticism of Zionism is hard to find in our field, although it does exist, right? There’s people I would certainly agree. Name who have done some great work in our field. But I mean, it’s not a regular part of the curriculum. And, you know, to go back to that statement from those University of Southern California students.
I think, like, even as faculty, like, I’m 45 years old and associate professor, I really relate to their situation. How do you how are we supposed to talk about this? How do you go to a philosophy conference or, speak to students? About about Zionist ideology, about the Zionist movement. And I think it’s, I think I find his work to be useful.
Even though, as you said, certain things have definitely changed. I do think that he, at times, really downplays settler colonialism in the United States. Although other points, I actually, I, Show you some points where he brings it up that I find it. Kind of interesting. He does talk about U. S. history and how Zionism kind of plays off U. S. history to its advantage. It’s, it’s pretty interesting.
Emmaia: Okay, so let’s put ourselves into this picture. What do we excavate of Sayegh’s work? What should people read?
John: well most of his work is still in an archive. Okay. And it’s not particularly accessible unless you go to the archive.
However, a group of philosophers, we got together and we made something kind of like a syllabus or a kind of guide to help our colleagues in the field talk about the Palestine question with a little bit of groundings and some history and some important texts.
And so, of course Faiz’s writings show up on that syllabus. And you can access that syllabus through the website of the American Philosophical Association. You’ll find there two units where we highlighted Fayez’s work. The first unit deals with Zionism and racism. And the text that corresponds to that unit, is the speech that he gave in 1975 at the United Nations which resulted in the Declaration of Zionism as a form of racism.
And then the other is a 1966 article that he wrote in a journal called the Middle East Forum. And it’s the, non colonial Zionism of Mr. Abba Eban, and it’s a response to this Israeli diplomat who is trying to claim that Zionism is not a colonial project and Fayez really just takes that argument apart.
He’ll walk the reader through all the times that scientists have called their project a colonial project, and why that’s not a coincidence or a haphazard offhand remark. It’s actually essential to the Zionist movement that it be colonial. bThose two pieces would be a great place to start if you wanted to read more of Fayez’s work. Of course, if you’ve got beyond Zionist colonialism in Palestine, which is pretty available on the internet.
Actually, I just remembered this unit 12, you get this Stokely Carmichael keynote statement at the Arab Students Convention. That’s an awesome, he gives awesome talk.
Emmaia: Okay fantastic — thank you for this history, this analysis, and this restoration of Sayegh to us. John, I’m so appreciative of your work and so jealous of your time in the archives.
Listeners, you can find these resources from John Harfouch in the show notes, including a link to the syllabus which does give you the texts themselves as well. All of these resources and many more are on our website at criticalzionismstudies.org.
Till next time, solidarity from the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.