Category Archives: Middle East

1978: Protest Against the Camp David Accords

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In November, 1978, the PLO Information Bulletin reported on a PSC-led protest rally at the United Nations. Sheila is quoted as the rally’s organizer, and is shown in the second picture, holding the “No to the Camp David Pact; Yes to Palestinian National Rights.” banner.

PROTEST RALLY IN NEW YORK AGAINST CAMP DAVID

NY Palestine demo

Demonstrators against the Camp David accords delivered messages to the U.S., Israeli and Egyptian missions to the United Nations during a protest march in New York City on September 23. The messages criticized the pact for ignoring the central issue in the Mideast conflict, the Palestinian national question, and declared that this question can only be solved by realization of Palestinian national rights.

The demonstrators protested in particular the role of U.S. President Jimmy Carter in the negotiations; the marchers chanted “Carter, your Camp David Pact won’t bring peace and that’s a fact.” In banners, placards and speeches they demanded that the U.S. government stop its aid to Israel.

The march began with a rally in front of the United Nations, where Hassan Abdul Rahman of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s U.N. office told some 200 demonstrators that only the PLO represents the Palestinian people, and that peace is not possible until the people have their national rights.

NY Palestine demo

Pro-Palestinian Demonstration in New York

The demonstrators bore Palestinian flags and colorful banners, including one proclaiming, “No to the Camp David Pact; Yes to Palestinian National Rights.” As they marched through crowds of Saturday shoppers the protestors chanted, “Carter, Carter, we’re no fools: Sadat and Begin are your tools.”

Sheila Ryan, speaking for the Palestine Solidarity Committee, which organized the event in coordination with Arab community groups, declared that if Carter were genuinely interested in peace in the Middle East, he would stop U.S. aid to Israel and arms shipments to the region. “Carter is a false prophet of peace,” Ryan said. “This is not a peace but a pact for a new kind of war against the Palestinian people.”

— From “Protests Rally In New York Against Camp David“, Palestine: P.L.O. Information Bulletin, Vol. 4, No. 19, Nov 1, 1978. (Screenshot) Archived by New Jersey Solidarity–Activists for the Liberation of Palestine.

Claremont Research and Publications

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From 1978 to 1989, Sheila worked with George on Claremont Research and Publications.

Claremont Research ran a clipping service called Mideast Press Report that collected press reports about the Middle East, indexed and summarized them, and sent out a binder full of photocopies each week to interested subscribers. As the Institute for Palestine Studies described it:

… articles from over 80 publications, including the major US, European, Israeli and Arab English-language press … are contained in Mideast Press Report, a weekly clipping service of Claremont Research and Publications in New York.

Claremont Research also published a monthly news magazine called Update: Mideast, and several books, including one by Noam Chomsky.

Sheila wrote the news analysis section of Update: Mideast every month, as well as a weekly news analysis for subscribers of the Mideast Press Report.

Every week she would read through hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles clippings about the region, come up with a mental synthesis of what it all meant, and sit down at her Selectric typewriter and bang out several pages that coherently summarized everything that had been reported that week, just in time for her report to be photocopied and express-shipped to various organizations and international clients who relied on this service to stay abreast of how their region was being described in global news reports.

As one example, the Iraqi National Library in Baghdad had a subscription for a while, although when they re-indexed their remaining holdings after the chaos and destruction of the war, they seem to have only retained a dozen or so issues from 1981:

Iraqi-National-Archive

1976 Congressional Report: “Extremist Organizations”

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This paranoid report to Congress makes Sheila a member of a far-flung conspiracy to destroy America, run by the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee and the Weatherman faction of SDS:

The Palestine Solidarity Committee, which was established in November 1975, is run by PFOC activitists George Cavaletto and Sheila Ryan. They operate this organization from a post office box in Manhattanville Station, New York. Cavaletto was a member of the Weatherman faction of SDS. He was identified by the Flint, Mich. Police Department as having been in attendance at the Weatherman “War Council” in Flint, Mich. in December 1969. He visited Havana in July 1969, presumably to meet with representatives of the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese. Ryan, who had also been active in the Weatherman faction of SDS, was one of the first members to visit Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade. Ryan and Cavaletto both spent a year in Jordan and Lebanon writing propaganda articles for the Palestine Liberation Organization.

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1975-1982: Palestine Solidarity Committee

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From 1975 through about 1982 or so, Sheila led the Palestine Solidarity Committee, a pro-Palestinian organization in New York City.

(In the mid 1980s, years after the PSC shut down, the name Palestine Solidarity Committee was adopted by an unrelated group, the November 29th Committee for Palestine, which was associated with the Workers World Party, but despite some surface similarities, the two groups were unrelated.)

1970: “A negative image of Yasser Arafat”

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Photographer Jeff Blankfort remembers Sheila having private criticisms about the leadership of the P.L.O. that she was reluctant to share:

Re the Palestinian question, on my first trip to the Middle East in 1970 with the two founders of Liberation News Service, Sheila Ryan and George Cavelleto, we generally had a negative image of Yasser Arafat, but felt, at the time, that it was not our business to be deciding who should lead the Palestinian people, particularly when most Americans knew little about the Palestinians in the first place.

He later felt that Sheila’s Palestine Solidarity Committee was too closely aligned with the P.L.O.

When I returned, I focused on support for the Palestinian people’s rights as opposed to support for the PLO, but was ready to and did work with representatives of all the Palestinian groups in the Bay Area.

When Steve Zeltzer and I founded the Labor Committee on the Middle East, in response to the failure of the Palestine Solidarity Committee to relate to that important issue, and its unwillingness to criticize the Histadrut (the Israeli Labor Federation) among a number of its failings, and became, despite our relatively small numbers, the most active group campaigning for Palestinian rights, we still maintained our distance from Arafat.

— From a posting to the change-links mailing list by Jeff Blankfort, Nov 28, 2000, archived at Yahoo Groups.