An Ambivalent Zionism: Walter White, Black Internationalism, and the Politics of Partition

Introduction: White, the Artistic Ambassador

In the summer of 1949, Walter White and Poppy Cannon stopped in Israel on their ‘Round the World Meeting of Town Air tour of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, South and East Asia. Upon arriving at border patrol, the Israeli customs agents greeted White and Cannon with warmth and gratitude, recognizing White as the executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and as an ally of the Jewish state. White and Cannon witnessed the poverty and desperation of Arabs and Jews, the twin chaos of refugees surging into Israel and refugees being expelled from their homes. A member of their party implored, “now that you have seen the conditions here, as a writer, Mr. White, go back and tell the American Jews why their money is While White was mostly known as a political figure—opposed to a literary one—by the mid-century, his perceived political authority was routed through his literary and linguistic contributions. His ability and influence as a writer, rather than his skills as an orator, rendered White an emissary to the Jewish people who could secure diasporic support for the Zionist project. In On Zionist Literature, Ghassan Kanafani’s polemic about the literary origins of political Zionism claims that “the Zionist movement used the weapon of literature in a manner only matched by its use of Rather than shoring up an already existing political movement, Kanafani argues that Zionist literature, like George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), laid the foundation for the ideas and rhetoric which would be later employed by Zionism’s practitioners, such as Theodore Hertzl and Moses Hess. White’s interpolation as a literary representative of the Israeli cause illuminates this submerged relationship with striking clarity. The member of their party implored White to propagandize, not to other African Americans, but to American Jews. This demand speaks to the social capital he possessed as a civil rights activist across the color line. He essentially outsourced to White what Benedict Anderson has called “long distance nationalism,” a nationalism wherein one emigrates to a place of relative safety, such as the U.S., but materially supports sometimes violent nationalist projects back home, even if they have never been With their body in the imperial core and their political and financial investment in the periphery, these long-distance nationalists participate in a “politics without responsibility or As the most public liberal face of White would be the perfect conduit to link a relatively comfortable diasporic Jewish community in the U.S. with its besieged counterpart in the newly fabricated place of origin—Israel. White’s soft power as an “artistic ambassador” was wielded against him, an internationalist made into an unwilling

White’s career falls in a long tradition of Black diplomat-writers including Ebenezer Don Carlos Basset, Frederick Douglass, and James Weldon Johnson, who operated within what Brian Russell Roberts calls Black diplomats aligned with U.S. foreign policy but with understandable suspicion. Internationalism of this kind is distinct from the radical Black internationalism that played out in the realm of mass politics between the 1920s and 1940s, enacted by figures such as C.L.R. James and George Padmore. Radical internationalism emerged through labor unions, political parties and organizations, publishing networks associated with these radical movements, and literary forms such as novels and poetry, rather than through national or international institutions like the United Nations. Roberts examines the ways this diplomatic-literary tradition culminated in, and interacted with, the construction of the New Negro as an international projection of African Americanness. If “the New Negro era eventually came to play a formative and destabilizing role in the racial logic of the United States’ Cold War development of a cultural diplomacy that contributed to an incipient neoliberal world order,” then White was emblematic of this latter kind of His internationalism was not unequivocally positioned against the nation-state, but rather took place under the auspices of the nation-state auspices and “could at some moments undercut U.S. diplomatic intentions; at other moments, however, these connections could be used as a means of promoting the imperial sway of the United In this way, White embodied a liberal Black internationalism that has largely gone under the radar in African American and African Diaspora studies, in comparison to the vast interest in Like Douglass, White’s status as an autobiographer shaped, and was shaped by, his role in the international arena, generating a carefully crafted public image that strategically withheld and revealed his commitments, and which was nevertheless put towards unintended uses. Though White was not officially appointed by the U.S. State Department as a diplomat to any nation, he served as an informal cultural ambassador to nations within the “Negro beat” or “Negro circuit,” which included Haiti, Liberia, and Ethiopia, via his position at the helm of the Having advocated for Haitian independence from the U.S. since its occupation in 1915, White was especially close with Haitian leaders. Though arguably, White had a more consequential role than any Black diplomat-writers who preceded him, having direct, though of course not sole, responsibility for the creation of the Israeli state through his proximity to the institutions of the postwar liberal order, such as the United Nations, an episode in his career that has largely gone unexamined.

Indeed, a representative from the Israeli government that guided White and Cannon through Tel Aviv exclaimed, having read his autobiography, “All Israel welcomes you for we know that you have done a great deal to help in the creation of this State— The woman was referring to an episode in his 1948 autobiography, A Man Called White, which recounts White’s experiences as a consultant to the United States delegation at the United Nations during the partition of Palestine in 1947. Under pressure from Zionist lobbyists and his own uncertainty about the best path for the Jewish people in the wake of the Holocaust, White persuaded the Third World nations opposed to partition—Haiti, Liberia, Ethiopia, and the Philippines—to vote in favor.

However, White’s subsequent reactions to, and deep anxieties about, Israeli society after the state’s establishment are not recorded in his own and widely read autobiographical writings but are mentioned in Poppy Cannon’s 1956 autobiography, A Gentle Knight: My Husband, Walter White, published after he passed away in 1955. Born into a South African Jewish family who moved to the United States when she was an Lillian Gruskin became “Poppy,” eventually becoming active in the NAACP where she and Walter first met in Scholars have paid Poppy passing mentions in their scholarship about White, but her own writing and intellectual contributions have been wholly In fact, Cannon largely wrote, and entirely edited, White’s posthumously published anti-communist tract How Far the Promised Land? (1955). They collaborated on a book and article of the same name, “The Color Line Around the Globe,” and a cookbook of African American cuisine—none of which were ever published. I would argue that there is no way to understand White’s postwar position without considering his and Cannon’s intellectual and romantic partnership. While space and time do not permit full consideration of Cannon’s life in this article, her career is worthy of study in its own right.

The story this article tells is twofold: (1) how White was, willingly or unwillingly, conscripted into Zionist agendas during the last approximate decade of his life and (2) how he resisted this conscription and navigated the nascent commonsense of unquestionable support for the state of Israel. In the first part of this article, I examine White’s relationship with the controversial Zionist conglomerate, the Bergson Group, throughout the 1940s, and his role in the partition of Palestine at the United Nation. I then analyze Cannon’s recounting of their experiences in Israel after partition in 1947, and how this visit activated what I am calling an ambivalent Zionism. This essay uses the term ambivalent because White’s critique of the Israeli state was motivated less by an ideologically coherent anti-colonial politics of the Nasserist, Pan-Africanist, or communist variety, and more by liberal anti-segregation politics which ultimately precluded him from imagining alternatives to Jewish Attending to White’s fundamental ambivalence about Israel—as an individual, as a public figure, and as a writer—might return some small measure of historical contingency to a national project too often described as inevitable.

Importing anti-segregation politics to a global context, White astutely linked Jim Crow, Nazism, and Jewish nationalism in his recollections of the partition vote and visit to Israel. What is striking about White in the postwar era is that he maintained a critique of partition as a colonial project, while linking European antisemitism to U.S. racism. He both viewed anti-Semitism as a grave social ill that would have implications for people of color around the world while maintaining skepticism about Jewish ethnonationalism as a response to anti-Semitism, even if he capitulated to its demands in the international arena. When tasked with persuading hesitant nations to vote in Israel’s favor at the UN, he refused to weaponize Jewish trauma. Interestingly, he toggled between liberalism and anti-colonialism in a way that sometimes placed him outside of the Western imperial and Black political common sense that supported the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, while remaining committed to the institutions of the liberal world order. In the final section, I situate White’s complex and often contradictory perspective within the broader landscape of mid-century Black Zionism and anti-Zionism to argue for a historiography that locates Black anti-Zionism before 1967. Re-periodizing Black anti-Zionism to the immediate postwar period (though there are earlier instances) reinforces what is becoming increasingly clear to the global public today: that inklings of the colonial nature of Israel’s creation were felt long before our contemporary moment.

White, Anti-Colonialism, and the NAACP

White is most remembered as a towering figure of the Civil Rights movement, serving as the executive secretary of the NAACP from 1929 until he died in 1955. Being able to pass as a white man, he famously went undercover in the South to investigate lynchings until his alias was discovered, and he was forced to flee the South. White also tried his hand as a novelist during the Harlem Renaissance, publishing The Fire in the Flint in 1924 and Flight in Less appreciated amongst scholars is the fact that he was a significant player in internationalist circles from the 1920s to the 1950s; his political concerns stretched much farther than the U.S. borders, a fact apparent in his travels to, and writings about, Haiti, India, and the He served as a delegate to the second Pan-African Congress in 1921 where he heavily criticized loyalty to the In fact, White was set to attend the 1955 Bandung Conference, which brought together representatives from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to forge an anti-colonial bloc that was unaligned with either the capitalist west or the Soviet Union, but he died the month before.

Any study of White must contend with the contradiction at the heart of his career: his internationalist and anti-imperialist perspective combined with a fervent anti-communism which long preceded the With regards to his work in Haiti, Millery Polyné has illuminated that Cold War pressures and a desire to stay close to Washington D.C. meant that White capitulated to “larger U.S. foreign policy White was thus an outlier among early to mid-twentieth century Black internationalists. While W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay (almost every Black writer from the period, as William J. Maxwell has shown) moved through and around the Communist Party USA, White always maintained a clear As Maxwell, Mary Helen Washington, and Jesse McCarthy have demonstrated, anti-communist state surveillance indelibly marked early to mid-century Black writing, extending as far back as McKay’s 1922 Harlem Shadows, the first published work by a Black author to draw the interest of the nascent Federal Bureau of As the head of an explicitly anti-communist civil rights organization, White was one of the few spared by J. Edgar Hoover.

As Carol Anderson has thoroughly demonstrated in Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960, the NAACP’s anti-communism did not preclude it from advancing anti-colonial politics, despite conventional histories of the White was exemplary of this paradox. However, the issue of Israel/Palestine is largely left out of Anderson’s study, likely due to the fact that the NAACP was publicly and explicitly a Zionist organization. As an anti-colonialist, White was imbricated in the Zionist movements from both the U.S. and Palestine from the early 1940s onwards, albeit not without reservations.

The Bergson Group

Long before Hitler’s rise to power, White was deeply concerned about anti-Semitism domestically and globally. In A Man Called White, White recounts the impact left on him as a young man when he witnessed anti-Semitic violence. An early chapter, “A Jew is Lynched,” details White’s memory of the lynching of Leo Frank. Frank was the Jewish manager of a pencil factory in Atlanta, who was convicted of murdering Mary Phagan, a factory employee, in 1913. After the governor commuted Frank’s death sentence, a mob stormed the prison and lynched him. White recalls that “because of Frank’s religion and place of birth the case developed into a clash of prejudice in which anti-Northern and anti-Semitic hatreds had been whipped to such a frenzy that the usual anti-Negro prejudice was almost He goes on to describe the mob of spectators, many of whom were “openly armed,” that filled the courtroom of Frank’s trial. Foreshadowing his later investigations into the lynching of African Americans, White recalled that “I never dreamed at the time that five years later I would investigate a trial similarly dominated by a

In the early 1940s, White’s concern over anti-Semitism would be channeled through his relationship with the Bergson Group, a highly consequential yet overlooked organization within the mid-century Zionist movement. White’s relationship with the Bergson Group, the extent of which is currently unclear due to a lack of archival evidence, illustrates the difficulty of his position as the face of the Civil Rights movement. White, along with Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, A. Philip Randolph, and Paul Robeson, supported, to differing degrees, Peter Bergson’s Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe. The Emergency Committee formed in 1942, when news of the full extent of Hitler’s genocidal campaign reached the U.S. Spearheaded by the Lithuanian-born Palestinian Jew Bergson, born Hillel Kook, the Emergency Committee applied pressure to the Roosevelt administration while advocating for an autonomous Jewish army to fight Nazi Germany. Hurston, Du Bois, Hughes, and Randolph were among the 1,500 hundred people who signed Bergson’s November 1942 open letter, “The Proclamation on the Moral Rights of Stateless and Palestinian Jews.” The statement is not a plea for the West to save Jews under Nazi rule, but an affirmation of the right for the diaspora and Palestinian Jews to take up arms against Hitler and fight for freedom and democracy themselves. The statement recognized “the right of these Jews to return to their place among the free people of the earth” and “the right of the dispersed, disinherited Jews of Europe and the proud Jewish people of Palestine, to fight as fellow partners in this war against our common Within the demand for an autonomous Jewish army is an early articulation of the notion of the “New Jew.” Whereas the “Old Jew” of Europe retreated into his cloisters of rabbinic study, the “New Jew” was an explicitly politicized and militarized subject who would fight for his homeland. White’s name does not appear on the Proclamation, but he did sponsor Bergson’s July 1943 Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe. The program lists White as a speaker for the “Public Opinion” panel in his capacity as the executive secretary of the

On its face, the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe was an earnest humanitarian mission to pressure the U.S. to stop Hitler’s crimes. Perhaps unbeknownst to White and his fellow artists and intellectuals, Bergson was a disciple of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionist movement and founder of the Irgun, a Zionist terrorist group (1931-1948) which sought to carry out Jabotinsky’s vision for a British-free and Arab-free Palestine. The progenitor of the modern Israeli Likud party, the Irgun carried out terror attacks against Arab villages—most notoriously the massacre at Deir Yassin—with the aid of the Jewish paramilitary groups the Haganah and In addition to raising funds and creating political pressure within the U.S. to aid European Jews, Bergson acted as an emissary to spread Zionist propaganda and support illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine. To that end, The Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe was just one of five organizations, clustered under the heading of the Bergson Group, which Bergson founded to serve various ends of his mission: American Friends of a Jewish Palestine, Committee for an Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, the American League for a Free Palestine, and the Hebrew Committee of National The Bergson Group decided to officially disassociate with the Revisionist movement to ward off criticism within the American Jewish sphere, which found Revisionism extreme; however, the members never ideologically withdrew from Jabotinsky’s

The little scholarship that exists on Black cultural figures’ imbrication with the Bergson group has, unfortunately, overstated their ideological commitment to the project, which from the available documents is very difficult to ascertain. Within these works it is either purported that Black support for the group validates its project as morally righteous or is taken as a sign of the writers’ ideological flaws. The fact that White supported Bergson’s organization and even sponsored a campaign event should not be read as expressive of totalizing support for the overall movement Bergson Indeed, only a few years later White would condemn the Irgun after their alleged attempted assassination of his close friend Ralph Bunche. There is no evidence suggesting that White was aware of Bergson’s true ideological motivations which, in the U.S., he largely masked. That being said, it is not possible to know the content of the discussions that took place at the Emergency Conference and whether they possessed a purely humanitarian orientation or were tinged with colonial aspirations. Eri Jabotinsky, Ze’ev’s son, spoke at the Emergency Conference, possibly to the listening ears of White. In my estimation, the real story involves the Bergson Group’s instrumentalization of Black artistic and political social capital as a concerted project to shore up support for, ultimately, Zionist agendas. White’s and Du Bois’s involvement are not so surprising, considering they were official representatives of the NAACP which, it is worth remembering, was partially founded by the most prominent American Zionist, Stephen S. Wise. It is not so clear how Hughes and Hurston became involved, but it is known that Stella Adler was a fixture of the Bergson group and recruited artistic support within her circles. In a May 9th, 1944, telegram, Adler invited Hughes to a “cocktail party” so he could meet “two representatives of [the] Palestine freedom

An October 1944 exposé reveals Bergson’s dubious tactics of generating support from politicians, artists, clergy members, and American Zionist Bergson even went so far as to include names of public figures in published lists of supporters without their permission. American groups such as the Labor Zionist Organization of America and American Zionist Conference explicitly disavowed the organization after learning of Bergson’s nefarious tactics, such as concealing his affiliation with the Irgun. The Executive Secretary of the American Student Zionist Committee referred in a letter to one of Bergson’s organizations, American Friends of a Jewish Palestine, as a “near-fascist minority” with a “black” history of “strike-breaking, attacks upon innocent Arabs, failure to participate in united efforts of the community, attempts to break national Jewish institutions, and frequent Revisionist activities in The American Zionist Conference described the Emergency Committee to Save the Jews of Europe as a “series of fronts” that presumed to speak for all Jews and resisted calls to “exercise disciplined restraint at the time of the Arab riots.” According to the American Jewish Conference, “many men and women of good will, moved by humanitarian sympathy with the plight of the Jews of Europe, have been misled into believing that these committees represent the Jewish

Even after the Emergency Committee dissolved in June 1945, White remained in touch with various corners of the Bergson Group. In 1946, the Bergson Group sponsored Ben Hecht’s play A Flag is Born, about a family of besieged Holocaust survivors trying to move to Palestine. Hecht had been a committed member of one of Bergson’s organizations, the American League for a Free Palestine (ALFP). Starring actors like Marlon Brando, the ALFP used the proceeds from the play to fund an illegal expedition of Jews from Europe to Palestine, which British authorities stopped in Hecht, the ALFP, and the NAACP collaborated when the theatre in which Flag would be performed for its Baltimore run insisted on segregating African Americans to the balcony. After the NAACP threatened to show up with a picket line, the theatre allowed ten African Americans to attend in orchestra seats. White wrote to the ALFP on February 13th, 1947, thanking the organization for intervening on behalf of the Civil Rights This moment begs multiple tempting interpretations, the most dubious of which takes the ALFP’s anti-segregation stance as proof of their overall One might also read this moment as an instance of White’s close affiliation with and commitment to Bergson’s movement. Instead, I read this brief convergence of the Zionist and Civil Rights movements as an instance of realpolitik on both sides, and in this moment each party became pragmatically useful to one another. The NAACP’s support provided moral cover for the ALFP, while the ALFP furthered the cause of integration. Significantly, this moment foreshadows White later succumbing to political pragmatism when faced with the question of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Considering the lack of archival records documenting this convergence, it is difficult to determine an exact takeaway from White’s involvement with the Bergson Group. But what this episode illustrates is the value of White’s cultural capital as possibly the most prominent civil rights activist of the 1940s to provide moral cover for ethnonationalist designs. What also comes to the fore is White’s susceptibility to this kind of manipulation, which would have devastating consequences for the Palestinian people, their displacement and dispossession.

Reckoning with Partition

At the end of the decade, Walter White would move from the margins of the Zionist movement to becoming a central actor as a consultant to the U.S. delegation at the United Nations, accompanied by Du Bois. White described feeling enthralled at the founding meeting of the UN in 1945 in San Francisco, ready to discuss “finding a way for the different races of men to live together in But after the U.S. delegation announced that they would not support a human rights declaration, he “remembered the Jews in Palestine, the impoverished Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, and particularly the black natives of African had told me of their dreams of a world after the war which would live up to at least some of the beautiful phrases of freedom in the Atlantic When asked about America’s relationship to its colonies—such as the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands—the U.S. delegation went silent, and it began to dawn on White that the UN would only be a vehicle for the U.S. to continue its hypocritical global policies.

White would later attend the 1947 meeting of the UN when the question of partition arose. “The increasing importance to world peace of the problem of racial minorities, and the inextricability of all race hatreds, one from another,” White wrote, “were emphasized by events centering around the controversy in the United Nations over the partition of Palestine, when once more the United States needed the help of black For White, the international reckoning with Nazism and the partition of Palestine had implications for people of color around the world, particularly the role of Black and Brown nations in the new liberal world order; but it also revealed the extent to which Hitler’s anti-Semitic propaganda had permeated American society. As a member of the Citizens Committee on Displaced Persons, White advocated for bringing Jews as refugees to the U.S. rather than to Palestine because he felt that the U.S. had a moral obligation to rescue those fleeing racial persecution. After writing a few newspaper columns in support of the refugee bill, he observed that “the reaction to some of these columns had been startling, to put it mildly, revealing widespread and intense anti-Semitism… it was nauseating to see how effectively the vicious propaganda of both the Adolf Hitler of Nazi Germany and the native American Hitlers had poisoned with hate the minds of so many Partition provided a window into the prismatic relation between domestic racism and anti-Semitism in the U.S., as well as its colonial presence in the Caribbean and beyond. Exerting its geopolitical power over Haiti and Liberia, the U.S. could export its Jewish refugee problem to Palestine.

Haiti, Liberia, Ethiopia, and the Philippines refused to vote for partition, viewing it as a settler-colonial plan. In his verbiage, White was then “bombarded” by Zionist lobbyists, individuals, “and one highly placed government official” to “persuade Haiti to change her In a draft of A Man Called White, a crucial clause is crossed out prior to this statement: “Laboring under the delusion that I could influence the vote of either Haiti or Liberia, I was bombarded by pro-partition organizations and individuals in the United States and one highly placed American official importuned me to do what I could to persuade Haiti to change her vote” (my While it is not possible to determine the clause’s exact intention, it indicates either White’s vehement opposition to partition or Haiti’s steadfastness in the face of political pressure. The dangling modifier creates further ambiguity: is it White, or the “pro-partition organizations and individuals,” who are “laboring under the delusion”? In another deleted section, White states, “I bluntly but courteously told this individual that he would be more effective if he directed his attentions to the State Department and to the American financial companies who were keenly eyeing the oil of the Middle East.” The fact that these sentences were omitted in the published version serves to obfuscate White’s agency and ideological position; he was merely a pawn for, rather than an adversary of, the political forces attempting to influence him and the defiant nations.

As Cannon records in A Gentle Knight: My Husband, Walter White, White had obtained the votes from these countries with “some reservations” as he, “on principle”, was “against segregation, whether imposed from within or A Man Called White elaborates on these “reservations”:

In my own opinion both the wisdom and the practicability of partition were doubtful. But no other solution had been devised or discussed. I did not like the self-segregation of Zionism, nor did I approve of the attitude of many Jews who had made it a sacred cult. But I reluctantly supported partition only because Palestine seemed the only haven anywhere in the world for nearly one million Jews of

White imports his integrationist politics, forged in the Jim Crow South, to the context of Israel/Palestine, recognizing the potential for the very apartheid system he had been fighting at home. He also intimates the ultimately ambivalent nature of his Zionism, a movement in which he wavered between being an active participant and a reluctant conscript. White’s support for partition ironically did not derive from ideological conviction but rather from a lack thereof: an inability to imagine an alternative possibility. To the extent that White had any vision for the future of Palestine or Israel, it merely entailed an American style democracy. As he clarified in a letter drafted to the Herald Tribune in 1948: “I replied that in my opinion a unified state in which Jew, Arab or anyone would be granted equal opportunity would be the only lasting solution. I pointed out that the greatness of the United States was in large measure due to the contributions of individuals of every race, creed, color or place of Drafts of the autobiography once again reveal a more principled stance that did not make the final edit. A deleted section mirrors the language used in the Herald Tribune letter. He explains that his “attitude on [the] partition of Palestine was both dubious at its wisdom and doubtful of its success. I did not believe that a compromise of that character was either the best of a lasting solution to the age old conflict between Arab and Jew in the It is not possible to determine what exactly precipitated the softening of White’s political positions in his autobiography, whether it was due to his own self-censorship or editorial input. That said, the version of A Man Called White read by the Israelis he would later meet tells a different story than the one he had initially

The version of White in the official record presents him falling prey to the ideological trap of partition as a form of political pragmatism. As Joe Cleary writes in Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine, “Partition is often defended by its advocates on the basis that it is the only practicable solution in situations where two antagonistic national groups with conflicting aspirations to self-determination inhabit a shared In reality, the “violence does not end with the act of partition: violence is not incidental to but constitutive of the new state arrangements thus But the version of his political self that White deleted was more principled and decisive, even if his analysis of partition ends with liberal democracy. It would be easy to uphold a strict dichotomy between the public and the private in the case of White’s complex relationship to Zionism and anti-Semitism, and argue that his archived or undisclosed writings wholly undermine his public stance on the creation of a Jewish state. Given that White was a prominent figure from the time he was in his early twenties until his death, it is impossible to clearly demarcate where his private self ended and his public persona began. The notion that the archive provides a transparent window into private truth where the public record obscures it operates on the assumption of a unidirectional relationship between the two, that the private exists prior to, and cut off from, the public. I would argue that White’s contradictory stances and actions arose from his own uncertainty that was intrinsic to his liberalism which opposed colonialism but could not grasp its origins or solutions. In other words, I am interested in what kinds of politics emerge from the absence of conviction or vision. Yet, White’s pragmatic, rather than ideological, support for the creation of a Jewish state made possible a more critical stance than his radical contemporaries. These contradictions would come to a head during White and Cannon’s visit to Israel in 1949, when White would see his fears confirmed.

Although White ultimately persuaded the deciding nations to vote for partition, he expressed his uncertainty in a telegram to the Liberian delegation:

On Palestine issue and conscious of shortcomings of the United States with respect to admission of homeless displaced person, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People does not consider proposed partition plan for Palestine a final or correct solution. However, we take liberty of suggesting to Liberian delegation thoughtful consideration of implications affecting minorities everywhere involved in Palestine

It is not clear exactly what convinced Haiti, Liberia, and the Philippines to vote for partition, but according to White, theirs was the deciding vote. On December 1st, 1947, two days after the vote, White “bared his soul” in a confidential memo to Jewish leaders expressing his frustration with how the vote was handled, which he never In the memorandum, White details the anti-Black and anti-Arab comments made to him by Zionist activists lobbying him for the vote. He surmised that:

[A] very dangerous attitude which underlay much of the above was the obvious condescension bordering on contempt for Haitians and Liberians because they are black and poor with almost the same attitude towards India. The language used in many of the anxious calls which flooded my home and office from early morning until long after midnight seemed clearly to indicate that the speakers felt that the Haitians, Liberians and Indians should obey orders without question from those who desired partition of Palestine.

White intimates how postwar international institutions like the UN reproduced colonial power dynamics between the global South and the global North, between wealthier nations and poorer nations. His account of Zionist lobbying efforts reveals the myth of diplomatic equality for peripheral nations on the world stage. Perhaps at this moment, White began to have an inkling that Zionism was not a progressive movement aligned with oppressed people around the world but rather viewed those people as political pawns. He describes the geopolitical dynamics as the refraction of U.S. Jim Crow around the world: “In one or two instances the racial arrogance toward the small countries because they were black and poor was little different from that shown by the most intransigent Southern politicians toward The fact that he never sent the memorandum is not only indicative of his restraint but the limitations of his position as the Executive Secretary of the NAACP, an organization which had largely remained silent about Israel-Palestine until recent

In the Promised Land

Even before his visit to Israel, White had been deeply affected by the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish United Nations diplomat who, along with Ralph Bunche, traveled to Israel on a peace mission after the 1948 war. On September 17th of that year, Bernadotte and a French UN officer were assassinated by Zionist extremists thirty minutes before Bunche was scheduled to meet him. On September 20th, 1948, White wrote to Cannon from a Paris-bound ship: “Mood aboard ship is heavy—Bernadotte’s assassination and the news from Berlin having created a considerable pessimism that anything can be accomplished in Cannon records how a year later White questioned their guide about the assassination on the way from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, insisting that Bunche was supposed to be assassinated as well, having been mistaken for the French officer who was also of African descent. White and Cannon were close friends with the Bunches, so Ralph’s near-death and the disintegration of the Arab-Israeli peace process were personally as well as politically disillusioning for them. He remained concerned about Bunche’s safety after the Arab-Israeli war had ended. On February 5th, 1949, White wrote to Cannon about the need to keep Bunche’s selection for the Spingarn Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the NAACP, “confidential” out of fear of reprisal from “extreme

Shortly before embarking on the ‘Round the World Meeting of the Town Air together in 1949, White and Cannon solidified their decades long affair. They first met at a Harlem party in 1928 with artists and NAACP activists, of which Cannon was one. They maintained a close friendship and intellectual partnership, though Cannon hedges on how innocent this friendship was while White was married to Gladys Powell. She claims in A Gentle Knight that, after the death of White’s father, he came to Cannon for comfort rather than Powell, distraught that his father died in a segregated hospital with subpar treatment. White became estranged from his children after leaving Powell for Cannon. Their marriage in 1949 was a national scandal, the Black press considering White, a prominent face of the Civil Rights movement, a traitor for marrying a white woman.

Upon arriving in Israel, White encountered the very troubling reality he had feared. When going through customs enforcement, White and Cannon paused at the border patrol’s intense security measures. They were surrounded by impoverished and traumatized Jews on the one hand and emboldened Zionist extremists on the other, meeting several Israelis who illuminated the extent of Israeli white supremacy. The representative from the Israeli government guiding them through Lydda immediately recognized White, and asked Cannon, “‘And the gentleman over there is Mr. White? I would have recognized him from the pictures in his book, A Man Called White. I would be so honored to meet She told the surrounding Israelis about White’s role in the partition of Palestine and how he had secured the necessary votes from opposing nations. When he tried to explain that “I did what I did with some reservations,” she spoke over him, thanking him for making possible the “flying carpet” that brought Jewish refugees to Israel “from all over the After the guide introduced them to a group of beleaguered refugees arriving in Lydda, White told Cannon: “‘Darling, let’s go… I have a feeling that if it were possible we should leave Israel now and not stay longer, for I think we have seen the best there is to see here’” (original Eventually they broke away to a refugee camp unmonitored by their guide to witness a far more disorganized scene.

On the way to Tel Aviv from Lydda, White and Cannon noticed the signs of violence the guide had been trying to hide, which had made the influx of Jewish refugees to Palestine possible. They questioned their guide on the destruction of Arab villages and whether the Stern Gang and Irgun—the latter of which was affiliated with the Bergson Group—were members of the Israeli parliament. White asked their guide: “‘Is it true that many of the Arabs lived here in Israel for eight hundred years before partition?’” He continued, “‘We have been told that many of the Arab homes and villages were bombed after hostilities were supposed to cease. Is that so?’” The driver merely responded, “‘Israel cannot harbor enemies within her borders.’” When they arrived at the home of one of the two Arab members of the Knesset, he was reminded of the conditions African Americans endured back home. In the Arab neighborhood, he saw impoverished and ill people who were skeptical of their presence. When assured that “those are friendly Arabs,” he responded, “‘I’ve seen that look too often on the faces of colored men down South who are supposed to be happy with their While staying with friends in Nazareth, White and Cannon learned that Yemenites and Moroccans live in a “special section” and are perceived as violent criminals. Their friend marveled at the fact the “even in the Promised Land they need an NAACP and a Walter The various levels at which white supremacy was operating in the newly created Jewish state, a white supremacy only marginally distinct from that in the US, were becoming clear to White and Cannon.

White and Cannon’s most disturbing encounter during their trip occurred when they met with two young American Jewish men in Tel Aviv visiting from New York University. When asked what he thought of Israel, White tersely responded, “‘I don’t approve of The two boys insisted that African Americans should follow in Israel’s footsteps and “‘build their own nation in Liberia where they too can be free.’” White refused this comparison, bluntly telling them he does not agree with their assessment. The two young men replied with, “‘You Negro leaders are wrong… Look at what Israel is doing. Take a lesson from us.’” Rejecting their support for nationalist and recolonization projects, he pondered whether he made the right decision advocating for the state of Israel. He thought aloud to Cannon: “‘I still don’t know the answer but I wish that nationalism were not so fierce here. I wish there was not so close a relationship between church and state. I hope that Israel is not setting a trend to be followed all over the world… I hope that barriers, somehow or other, can come down instead of new ones They later met a Jewish man who had been living in Palestine for thirty years who validated their growing unease with the Israeli situation. He explained to White and Cannon: “‘… But there are others who, being victims, now victimize. Some of them have been too long exposed to the master racism of White concurred that “‘I have seen here some evidence of that master-race psychology, especially towards the Arab minority.’”

When White and Cannon returned to the U.S., he did not quite heed the call to proselytize to American Jews for financial support, nor did he become a vocal supporter of the Palestinian people. Though White’s analogizing of American segregation with the partition anticipates Ta-Nahisi Coates’s comparison by seventy-five years, White’s shift in perspective did not follow the same trajectory. Coates devotes a significant portion of his 2024 memoir-travelogue, The Message, to describing his reorientation towards the state of Israel and Like White, Coates immediately recognizes the military control over Palestinian life as a form of segregation, but White never published any of these views; they are only recorded posthumously in Cannon’s autobiography. White’s most extensive writing about Israel occurs in an unpublished column debunking anti-Semitic myths of Jewish miserliness based on his experiences in Israel and Lebanon, explaining that they experienced exploitative behavior from merchants “in the same proportion” in both He described Israel as an “anthropologist’s paradise for in it can be found every conceivable physical type from the blondest ‘nordic’ Scandinavians to swarthiest Though White briefly mentions the conditions of white supremacy which Yemeni Jews endure, he presents Israel as a place where the myth of racial difference is thrown into crisis, completely eliding the Palestinians that Cannon would later describe as a primary concern in her autobiography.

In the public realm, White aligned more with mainstream liberal Zionism but never denounced the extremism he witnessed firsthand, namely the destruction of Palestinian villages. In November 1949, only a few months after his world tour, White agreed to serve as the only non-Jewish member on the nominating committee for the Stephen S. Wise Awards by the American Jewish Congress. The award was to be given to individuals in four categories: “the extension of civil rights and civil liberties in America, the promotion of Jewish culture and education in this country, the defense of Jewish rights and status around the world, and the development of White’s service on this committee demonstrates his inability to take the misgivings he experienced in Israel to their fully anti-colonial conclusion—a rejection of any support for Israel, not only its most extreme forms.

Privately, White had written to Bunche a few weeks prior seeking advice for a column about U.S. military assistance to European allies. The column raised concerns about Middle East geopolitics and the potential for new wars to arise from conflict in the region. In the wake of the British attempt in 1949 to unite Iraq and Syria and to create an East Africa Federation by consolidating mandates, White urged the U.S. to condition military aid on British conduct in the Middle East and Africa, or else the threat of World War III would Rather than viewing the Arab-Israeli conflict as an ancient feud over religion and culture, he assigned blame to the global powers that have generated chaos in the region to further their economic interests: “In a sense both of them [Israel and the Arab League] are pawns in the grueling struggle not only between East and West but in the battle for markets, raw and strategic materials like oil and uranium, and for military White continued to write about the international implications of global powers stoking conflict in the region: “Machinations by the British, oil interests, Russia or anyone else to arm Arab nations or Israel and set them at each other’s throats while national or economic groups get away with the booty can bring war and destruction to the entire world.” That said, White’s analysis ends at the U.S.’s indirect contribution to the conflict rather than the conflict itself. His ultimate fear was not the ascendance of U.S. imperialism or the acceleration of Israeli apartheid policies, but rather the “irreparable harm to American prestige in Asia” and the spread of communism throughout the East.

Cannon and White’s world tour ironically consolidated both their Cold War and anti-colonial stances. As Cannon wrote in a draft of A Gentle Knight, “Colonialism, particularly as it affected the fate of the darker peoples, became especially [important] in the past few years of Walter’s ruling interests. He was an ardent advocate of self-government but at the same time, as might be gathered from his reactions to Israel and Pakistan, often wary of fervid nationalism and Elsewhere, Cannon’s language mirrored Du Bois’s internationalist language he used, for example, in “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto”: “Other provincialisms faded also… As we fly towards the expanding East and the global perspective widens, local problems assume their proper scope. No one has breath to waste on personal Cannon adopted the rhetoric of radical internationalism but for far different purposes than Du Bois. Indeed, the book that Cannon and White co-authored, “The Color Line Around the Globe,” inspired by their ‘Round the World Meeting of the Town Air tour, framed modern colonialism in terms of the need to shore up the capitalist West’s moral authority. By their logic, if the U.S. continued to enforce racial segregation at home and the exploitation of “darker peoples” abroad, an increasing proportion of the world’s population would drift towards communism. They wrote of the success of Soviet propaganda across Asia and Africa: “Moscow radio and Communist agents industriously and gleefully play up every instance of racial and religious discrimination with deadly effectiveness as proof that people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America will be subjected to the same sort of treatment if they cast their lot with the democracies instead of the While it's unclear the extent to which White and Cannon were imbricated in official Cold War institutions and policies, the archival record makes clear that Cannon and White maintained some level of correspondence of Allen Dulles while he was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, with Cannon sending him a copy of How Far the Promised As such, their desire to secure American democracy’s global influence pushed their anti-colonial sentiments into the background.

In a 1976 interview with David Levering Lewis, Cannon recounts how their editor was livid about one of the two chapters she wrote for “The Color Line Around the World” about their experience in Israel. According to her, the editor wanted to steer the book in a less political direction. Drafts of the chapters, to my knowledge, do not exist, but her statements to Lewis intimate what she might have written: “What we see in Israel, too—how the oppressed take on the characteristics of the Would this deleted chapter become the content of A Gentle Knight? Is it possible that A Gentle Knight, framed as a tribute to White and as a story of their romance, allowed Cannon to smuggle much of their political perspectives into the public realm under the radar? After White’s death in 1955, Cannon became known as a homemaker personality who authored cookbooks, and her activism was quickly forgotten. One wonders how Cannon’s Jewish and South African heritage informed her visit to Israel shortly after its creation, the subsequent Suez Crisis in 1956, and the Six-Day War in As a passionate anti-segregation activist at home and abroad, apartheid in all its forms no doubt morally shook her.

It is not possible to say definitively why White moderated his private stances towards Israel in the public sphere, or why his views expressed premortem contradict Cannon’s posthumous account of their experience in Israel. Had White lived to see the second half of the twentieth century his story might be different. But what seems clear is that both were ideologically situated at the crosshairs of divergent geopolitical priorities. By the 1950s, both Cannon and White were embroiled in the anti-communist politics of containment, which perhaps took precedence over other global concerns.

Rethinking Black Zionism and Anti-Zionism

White’s first-hand experiences in Israel produced a critical perspective that was at odds with, in Vaughn Rasberry’s words, an “African American genealogy of orientalist discourse on Palestine/Israel, one that acknowledges to varying degrees the legitimate claims of Arabs and Jews on the land but tends to attribute backwardness onto the former group and modernity the White refrained from making claims about Jews’ inherent entitlement to the land or value judgements about Arab and Jewish culture. Rather, he saw partition for what it was: yet another form of racial segregation imposed by global imperial powers. Conversely, Du Bois’ 1948 essay “The Case for the Jews,” originally titled “The Ethics of the Problem in Palestine,” is paradigmatic of this “orientalist discourse.” He infamously described how “among the million Arabs [in Palestine] there is widespread ignorance, poverty and disease and a fanatic belief in the Mohammedan religion, which makes these people suspicious of other peoples and their Later that year, Du Bois wrote “America’s Responsibility to Israel,” addressed to the American Jewish Congress. The address both condemns Britain for reneging on its 1917 plan for a Jewish homeland in Palestine and apologizes on behalf of all African Americans for Ralph In this address, he endows international Jewry with a modernity he does not grant to Arabs, while simultaneously positioning Jews as the dialectical antithesis to imperialist modernity: “before it [Zion] was carried out, the world had been welded into a commercial and industrial unity dominated by the United States and the British Empire. Immediately an independent Jewry, with capital, skills, and intelligence, became an obstacle to the group of imperialists who planned to own the Du Bois did not see, as White had, that Jews were perhaps, in fact, becoming the very imperialists that they had supposedly opposed. It was not until the Suez Crisis in 1956, when Israel, France, and Britain invaded Egypt after nationalizing the Suez Canal, that Du Bois shifted towards an understanding of Israel’s presence in the region as an adjunct of Western

James Baldwin, too, was an early supporter of Israel, beginning as an ardent supporter sympathizing greatly with the need for a Jewish state after the Holocaust, until later became one of its most vociferous critics in the late 1960s and early Living into the 1980s, Baldwin was able to not only witness the Suez Crisis, as Du Bois did, but also the Six-Day War in 1967 and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Baldwin also visited Israel before White and Cannon, in 1948, and had a far different perception of the young state. Baldwin wrote about his visit in a 1963 essay, “Letters from a The essay can be read as an attempt at a balanced and measured account of the Arab Israeli conflict, sympathizing with both the Jewish and Muslim perspective on the establishment of Israel: “Furthermore, the Jews, who are surrounded by forty million hostile Muslims, are forced to control the very movements of Arabs within the state of Israel. One cannot blame the Jews for this necessity; one cannot blame the Arabs for However, Baldwin’s early visit to Israel also planted seeds of doubt about the state’s capacity to maintain equality for all its residents, for he observed the unequal treatment, as White did, of Jews of Arab and African descent. Two decades later, Baldwin would align more with Black Power rhetoric regarding the Black freedom struggle in the U.S. and the Palestinian liberation struggle in essays such as “A Report from an Occupied Territory” (1966) and “Open Letter to the Born Again” (1979). In the latter essay, Baldwin made his oft-quoted polemic that:

The state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me). The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’ and for Europe’s guilty conscience for more than thirty

Baldwin’s earlier understanding of Israel as an imperfect haven for Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust became a critique of Israel as an adjunct of western imperialism. Where he once had a moralist analysis of Israel, he later developed a geopolitical one; the “collapse of the Shah of Iran,” Baldwin wrote, “revealed who supplied oil to Israel, and to whom Israel supplied arms. It happened to be, to spell it out, white South By the mid-1960s, Baldwin began gesturing towards a critique of Israel as aligned with the maintenance of global white supremacy.

Where figures like Du Bois and Baldwin celebrated Israeli independence in 1948, even if their views later changed, White saw its colonial implications before and during the moments of its creation. Perhaps being at the center of Zionist machinations allowed him to see the project of Jewish statehood in an unvarnished light. If, as Nadia Alahmed argues, “1948 can be justly viewed as the peak of the ideology that was created by Black nationalists like Martin Delaney and Edwards Blyden in the nineteenth century and later reinforced by Marcus Garvey and many other Black nationalists and intellectuals alike,” then White defied this For White, 1948 marked not the apotheosis of long-held Black support for Jewish nationhood but the continuation of the very colonialism he had been opposing around the world. But White’s story is also a cautionary tale about the limits of enacting political transformation or anti-colonial politics through public figures and liberal institutions. White embodied a moderate, and sometimes anemic, form of internationalism vulnerable to outside pressure. However, his wavering between sometimes opposed ideological positions—anti-colonialism, anti-communism, internationalism, pro-Americanism—allowed more critical perspectives about Israel/Palestine to emerge through the cracks.

As Du Bois’s and White’s disagreements demonstrate, Black Zionism and anti-Zionism in the postwar period were far from settled or consistent, even for such prominent figures affiliated with the same organization (before Du Bois resigned from the NAACP in 1948); where one fell on the political spectrum—communist, liberal, or conservative—did not necessarily determine one’s orientation towards Israel. As Alex Lubin and Michael Fischbach have shown in their respective studies of Black politics, Zionism, and the Palestinian liberation movement, widespread African American support for Israel sharply declined after 1967 when Israel seized Gaza from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank from Jordan, and conversely, Jews left the Black freedom struggle Thus, the “strong bond within the U.S. civil rights movement uniting African Americans and Jews” broke down, and “support for Palestinians changed within a relatively short time from something expressed solely by radicals to something embedded within mainstream black Re-periodizing Black anti-Zionism to the immediate postwar period (though there are earlier instances) reinforces what is becoming increasingly clear to the global public today: that consent for Israel’s establishment and thus the dispossession of the Palestinian people was not a consensus later undone, it was manipulated and extracted by political forces to cover over a project that was—in the first instance—colonial.