Lobbying for Diaspora: Analyzing the Fragmentation of the National Association of Arab Americans (NAAA) via the American Task Force for Lebanon (ATFL)

Abstract

The National Association of Arab Americans (NAAA) was an Arab American lobbying organization that existed between 1972 and 2000. As an organization that was founded based upon a political consciousness of pan-Arab solidarity and Arab American unity, the National Association experienced an episode of fragmentation when an internal project known as the American Task Force for Lebanon (ATFL) emerged in 1987 and shortly thereafter split away from it in 1989. The research question aims to understand the internal and external dynamics that led to the NAAA’s fragmentation via the ATFL, asking to what extent their separation was unavoidable. The thesis addresses the question by analyzing data collected from interviews with seven interlocutors and archival analysis of primary and secondary source textual materials collected about the NAAA. The thesis argues that the individuals shaping the fragmentation were instrumental in setting the fragmentation in motion, but that ultimately the ATFL’s separation was unavoidable considering the circumstances of the NAAA and ATFL’s projects of diaspora – which were incompatible with one another – as well as the independent networks of support that both organizations were able to maintain. The thesis also argues that the organization’s insistence upon moderation and even-handedness, informed by its investment in practices of lobbying, was fundamentally in tension with the NAAA’s own pan-Arab political consciousness that defined its foundations, due to the hostile landscape of the US political mainstream towards Arab Americans and Arab American political organizations. This particular sliver in the history of the NAAA is ultimately an important episode within the larger history of Arab American organizational politics in the United States, which goes back to at least around the turn of the 20th Century and is an extremely important part of the fabric of the United States.