Interview with Jeffrey Blankfort (Part 1)

from San Francisco Independent Media Center

20 November 2006

SF-IMC: Tell us how your personal history shaped your politics. Did you have an epiphany one day or did you figure it out a step at a time?

Jeffrey Blankfort: I come from a political background. Both of my parents were political activists. My father was involved with the civil rights movement before there was a civil rights movement. He was a screenwriter, later blacklisted, an unfriendly witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. My mother was among the first people working for the farm workers. So I grew up in a very political household. Unlike some political households, both of my parents, my mother and my father, shared their politics, and what they were doing and why, with my sister and myself. This, to me, was really important.

So there was never an epiphany. We were brought up to believe, essentially, that all human beings are equal, and to fight for justice. And I saw both of my parents doing that and not having double standards. There were no double set of books, and I saw that both of them took risks and had personal courage and were not ready to sell out to the establishment. And so they were role models.

Also my father said to me: "Question everything."

Sometimes, he said, jokingly that he regretted that, but in any case, when it came to the question of Israel and Palestine it was quite interesting because my father supported a bi-national state, and he actually was working for a bi-national state. We had, in the early days, some of the important Israeli leaders, Jewish leaders, stay at our home, including Moshe Sneh, who was the head of the Haganah, and also a member of the Israeli communist party.

Well, Sneh asked my father if he could arrange for him to meet with some wealthy Jews in Beverly Hills, and my father did that, and they went out to visit these wealthy Jews in Beverly hills, many of whom had been socialists when they were young, and they kind of liked the idea of a socialist Israel. Not a socialist United States, but a little socialist Israel would be fine. And so when some of these wealthy Jews in Beverly Hills asked Moshe Sneh, when he wanted them to invest their money in Israel,"Aren't you going to have a socialist Israel?" And Sneh said to them, "By the time we're socialist, you'll have your money back ten times over."

So when they were leaving, my father turned to him and said, not friendly like, "You're talking out both sides of your mouth. What kind of a socialist . . . what kind of a communist are you?"

And he told me this story, my father did, and I remember it because it impressed me, the contradictions between preaching and practice. Then, in the early fifties, we had a number of Israeli Jews visit our house. All of them had immigrated from Israel because they did not want to live in a racist state, racist because every time there was an attack by what they called the fedayeen, the Palestinian guerrillas who had been fighting to get back in their own land from which they'd been dispossessed, every time that there was an attack, there would be what they called a "pogrom," what Jews call a "pogrom," on the Arab villagers in the Galilee, who had remained. And so these Israeli Jews said, "We can't live in a country like this."

So then I went to Europe, and I didn't know the history, and I wasn't curious about the history, but I went to Europe, and I ran into Israeli Jews who told me the same story, about their parents leaving, or they had left because of the racism towards Arabs. It was years before I met an Israeli who had anything good to say about Israel. And that didn't bother me. It wasn't really a problem for me because I had never really made a connection between Israel and the Holocaust. The Holocaust was very traumatic for me when I found out about it, and I had this irrational, though I didn't think it irrational at the time, an irrational hatred toward Germans, which I subsequently no longer have and haven't had for about thirty-five years.

But I didn't make the connection. I didn't transfer my feelings about the Holocaust to Israel at all. I had no feeling one way or the other about Israel, except in 1967. When Israel triumphed in the Six Day War, I was appalled at the triumphalism of the Jewish community in North Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley. You would think they had gone to fight the war, and there was something about their reaction that, as a human being, I found appalling, and, subsequently, I was to find that my reactions were the right reactions.

Even then, it wasn't until 1970, when I was living in London that I started thinking about the Palestine issue. The Vietnam War was going on. I'd worked with the Black Panthers. I'd photographed for the Black Panthers almost from the beginning. I'd done Vietnam War work. I was active, but the Israeli/Palestinian issue was not in my mind.

I had left the US in 1969. I was kind of disgusted with the movement. In fact, when the Chronicle was telling a more accurate version of events happening here in the Bay Area than was the Berkeley Barb, I knew it was time to leave. So I left for a year-and-a-half, and I happened to be in London when I was asked by Liberation News Service, the news service for the new alternative media, which I was shooting pictures for, if I'd be interested in going to Lebanon and Jordan to photograph a book about the refugee camps and the fedayeen, the Palestinian movement, and did I have any problems as a Jew doing that?

I had some other possibilities of things I was going to do, such as go back to Sardinia, where I had been, with an Italian team to photograph the US bases that nobody knows about, that are in Sardinia, like the Strategic Air Command base. But I decided, no, I'm going to go to Lebanon and Jordan. That sounded very interesting, but I was intent in going as a journalist, not as a Jew. People don't believe me when I say this, but this is true. My thought was that this was interesting stuff; I'm going to go there.

And so I went there, and that was the epiphany in terms of this issue. When I went to the refugee camps and saw people living there who had been forced out of their country by people, including relatives of mine, who had never been oppressed a day in their lives, there was something radically wrong. And when I went to the Lebanese/Israeli border, and stood there looking down at a town . . . in which, it turned out, my sister's brother-in-law [and his wife] were living . . . standing next to two Palestinians, who were born in Palestine, and here I am, an American, a Jew, an American Jew, and I have a US passport in my pocket, and I have more legitimate rights to live in that country than these two Palestinians, for me there was something immoral about that. It was immoral then, and it's immoral now.

A moral wrong does not become a moral right, no matter how many years pass. What happened to the indigenous people of this country at the hands of white settlers was morally wrong. It was a crime then, and it's a crime today. Can't do anything about it, but it's still a crime.

And so my experience of four-and-a-half months in Lebanon and Jordan, and talking to Palestinians about what had happened to them, and seeing the Israeli planes flying over in the morning trying to find Palestinian fedayeen sleeping outside, so we had to sleep in caves to avoid them. We'd sleep outside and then when the sun came up we'd have to move into a cave, so the Israelis, when they flew over, they wouldn't see us. Otherwise, they would fire.

And you saw in Lebanon, civilian cars all over the place that had been blown apart from the air by the Israeli air force. So when we drove around southern Lebanon, we had to drive with our head outside the car, looking for Israeli planes. We were told that if we see a plane, we had to get out of the car right away because they would shoot people in cars. This was at a time when "nothing was happening." These were unreported stories in the media. So I decided that when I came back, I was going to work for justice in Palestine.

In '71, I came back, and I started speaking to former friends of my parents, people who were on the Left, and who said that I was "the man from Standard Oil." Palestinians!?! They thought I had joined the Nazis. This was a major contradiction, and remains a contradiction, within the American Left, which is very heavily Jewish and Jewish dominated. And this is one of the reasons that there is no movement here today, thirty-five years later, because most American Jews, even those on the Left who sympathize with the Palestinians,carry around so much baggage that they can't come out and say, "Israel is wrong, was wrong from the beginning, and the way to solve the problem now, since there is no military solution, is to sanction Israel.

One state or two states, for me is not the issue. That's for the Palestinians to decide. If I was a Palestinian, I wouldn't want to live next to an Israeli. Understandable. But I don't think that's the argument right now. I think the argument is for sanctions, which, for me, is a litmus test, and those people who oppose sanctions, oppose divestment, oppose boycotts, are essentially taking a position on the other side of the barricades with Israel, no matter what they say about a two state solution, justice for Palestine, or whatever.

(snip)