Black Panthers demonstration in Ashod, Israel (1973) | Dan Hadani collection / National Library of Israel / The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection / CC BY 4.0
Historian Oz Frankel’s new book, Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets: Israel in the American Orbit, 1967–1973 (Stanford University Press, 2024), examines the multifaceted and contradictory presence of the United States in Israel during a short but significant period of history. In a conversation with Claire Potter, Frankel shares the often unexpected consequences of these encounters, from the influence of the Black Power movement to Israeli productions on Broadway. And as Potter and Frankel discuss, looking closely at this relationship helps us understand the less-discussed factors at play in Israeli politics today. “On the eve of the October 7,” explains Frankel, “you could see in the debate over judiciary reform that both sides of the aisle borrowed American idioms and American ideas to argue for their positions.”
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Claire Potter: Let’s start with how you decided that 1967 to 1973 was the window of time you wanted to examine in the Israel-United States relationship.
Oz Frankel: So, the book started many years ago with a smaller, article-length project about the Jerusalem Black Panthers, a story quite well-known in Israel but not in the United States. When different audiences, Jews and non-Jews, hear about the 1971 Black Panthers in Israel, the proverbial jaw usually drops. It’s a titillating topic: the supposedly wounded relations with Black activists in the late 1960s are still a preoccupation for many liberal Jews in the United States. And in Israel, the name itself—the Black Panthers—scandalized Israeli society at the time.
So, who were they? A group of young people, some teenagers, from a poverty-stricken Mīzrahī neighborhood. Calling themselves Black Panthers, they asked for a permit to demonstrate in Jerusalem. The request went all the way up to the Prime Minister, Golda Meir, who sat with her ministers to discuss it. And why this overreaction? Because the Black Panthers represented antisemitism, and it seemed like a dangerous axis: poor Mīzrahīm aligning themselves with an enemy of Israel. So, not only was the permit request denied, but police vans were also dispatched to arrest a small group of individuals.
The arrests catapulted the Panthers to the soft center of public attention in Israel. You must also understand that the Israeli public at the end of the sixties was inundated with reports from the United States, not just about the Black Panthers, but also other forms of Black activism, such as the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville school strike in New York, that were characterized as antisemitic in some circles. Such events portrayed American Jews as a beleaguered community surrounded by antisemitism and created an unusual concern: that perhaps millions of American Jews would come to Israel and change its character as a nation.
At the very same time, Israel was becoming more dependent on support from the Jewish community in the United States, and the American Jewish community emerging as politically influential because of its support of Israel.
Potter: How did you go from an article on the Jerusalem Black Panthers to the larger scope of a book about a cultural contact zone between the United States and Israel?
Frankel: Well, it occurred to me that I could examine all the complexities that had emerged from the history of the Jerusalem Black Panthers by moving sideways and thinking about other kinds of encounters between Israel and the United States: identity politics, culture, society, technology. Focusing on a very short period allowed me to look at the entire society, to the best of my ability, and see different points of contact between things, ideas, and people.
I wanted to reveal a society at work. There was a lot of talk in Israel about the problem of Americanization in the 1990s, and going back in time showed that what counted as Americanization changed over time, in part because society in the United States was also changing.
Potter: One of the things you discuss at the beginning of the Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, & Phantom Jets is that for the first two decades of its life as a nation, Israel was much more dependent on France for things that could be manufactured in Israel, including military equipment. So, there’s a shift toward the United States after the 1967 war that, as you just said, produced ambivalence in Israel about whether closer ties to the United States put the nation’s unique national identity at risk.
Frankel: Right. Beginning in the mid-1950s, Israel and France were allies. The Israeli military was equipped with French tanks, airplanes and other equipment. But also, the general disposition was Francophone. Israeli music at the beginning of the 1960s sounds a bit French, and Israeli intellectuals cluster in Paris for a while. All of that disappeared after 1967, or much of it, in part because there was a rift between Israel and France over the Israeli decision to engage in preemptive warfare in June 1967.
The United States was also involved with Israel from 1948 on, and as a movement, Zionism relied on American support from the early 20th century. So, 1967 isn’t the beginning of that relationship, but the rift with France permits an intensification of United States-Israel contacts that allows me to bring exchanges between the two nations into focus. After 1967, not just politically or geopolitically, but also culturally, Israel was moving towards the United States. Then, there is the attraction and excitement of 1960s culture—the counterculture, rock n roll—that comes more from San Francisco, New York and London than from Paris.
We see America becoming more alluring. But throughout the story, in every chapter of the book, there’s also ambivalence, partly due to cultural hierarchy. Israeli cultural elites, intellectuals, pundits, critics were very cautious about American influence because they shared their European counterparts’ contempt for popular culture.
Potter: Was that true across society?
Frankel: I think the masses in Israel were much more open to those cultural influences. But they too had concerns and fears about Americanization. One that I describe is the fear of being invaded by all kind of unwanted visitors, and even permanent residents, from the United States. For example, the American gangster Meyer Lansky comes to Israel in 1970 seeking refuge and asking for citizenship. After two years, he was kicked out of the country in part because there was a fear that if he was allowed to stay, hundreds of American Jewish gangsters would make Israel the center of global crime.
Then, there was a small, deeply religious, African American community that believed they were descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel. The Black Hebrew Israelites originated in Chicago, began moving to Liberia, then jumped to Israel in 1969. Initially they arrived in small groups, and were first accepted with open arms and some curiosity. Then, more groups arrived, and some Israelis started to imagine that millions of African Americans were going to come to Israel.
So, Israel engaged the rest of the world, especially the United States, but also developed a kind of claustrophobia as a country under siege and with a siege mentality. Fear of being changed, particularly by the United States, was part of that ambivalence. By the end of the 1960s, Israelis’ engagement with the United States was broad enough that they were aware of its cultural and political turmoil, and had a general sense that the social order was falling apart. The thinking was: We should follow the United States in some respects, but we should be also very, very careful about becoming another America.
Potter: Let’s get to the Coca-Cola and Phantom jets part too. Together, the phenomena you write about make it a real American studies book, as well as a history of Israel-United States relations. But these encounters are similarly complex, right? Coca-Cola, for example, becomes an object of desire, and visitors want it, but in 1967, Coca-Cola represents a political problem as much as a commercial opportunity.
Frankel: Right. Coca-Cola, first and foremost, is not a win for consumerism, but a victory in the geopolitical struggle against the Arab boycott that began in the 1950s, something that is relevant to our contemporary boycott discourse. Because of that boycott, some big corporations were concerned about marketing goods in Israel; one of them was the Coca-Cola company.
The company made all kinds of obviously fabricated excuses about why they could not open a plant in Israel, and so there was a public campaign, led by American organizations like the Anti-Defamation League to convince them to reverse that. So, it’s an interesting sixties story, in the sense that Israel’s consumerism was simultaneously being politicized as part of a broader civil rights movement int he United States.
These organizations, including the Teamsters, threatened Coca-Cola with a Jewish boycott, and Coca-Cola agreed to build a plant just outside of Tel Aviv. Then, the question was: how to convince Israelis to drink Coca-Cola? That turned out not to be very hard. They fell love with Coca-Cola, and you see all kinds of techniques to domesticate it; for instance, making it into a good drink to have during Jewish holidays—there was a whole campaign about Coca-Cola for Sukkot and Coca-Cola for Rosh Hashanah; and another that coined a slogan in Hebrew equating Coca-Cola with the taste of love, or the reason of life.
So, Coca-Cola launched new types of professional advertising and publicity techniques in Israel. But there were also problems. Unlike Americans, Israelis had small refrigerators, and the big bottle could not stand up in them. But if you tipped the bottles over, they leaked. The company had to bring engineers to redesign the cap of the Coca-Cola bottle, inventing a Hebrew word to describe it, and using it endlessly in the campaign to reassure consumers that they wouldn’t have Coke spilling all over the refrigerator.
Coca-Cola was a major success and as a result, the entire soft drink industry in Israel grew exponentially, beginning in the 1970s.
Potter: And where do the Phantom jets fit in?
Frankel: Just as Coke wasn’t just a drink, Phantom jets were not just state-of-the art war machines: they became affective objects that Israelis literally invested in. There was a campaign to collect money to buy those jets; little children washed cars and donated whatever the money they got for their Bar Mitzvahs.
Israelis became emotionally invested in the idea that the Phantom, and only the Phantom, could guarantee national security. But they also became the basis for cultural exchange. Israeli pilots and air crews traveled to the United States to learn how to fly and maintain the jet. Officers forged friendships between the two countries that endured as they moved up the ranks, and strengthened the military relationship over time.
Potter: The Phantom was also part of a bigger technology transfer, in which Israelis were getting things like dishwashers, refrigerators, and other household appliances: things that were common in the United States, but not in Israel. The ownership of American technologies rose.
But the thing I loved about the Phantom was its role as a symbol of national masculinity: It reminded me of seeing Exodus as a child, a movie that featured gorgeous young men in tiny shorts. But Israeli pilots become symbols of masculinity in the United States too, because they knew a lot about flying that American pilots didn’t.
Frankel: It’s important to note that Israel came out of the 1967 war with great self-confidence. Specifically, the Israeli Air Force demonstrated immense capacity in aerial battles, at a time when the United States was mired in the Vietnam War. At that time, American pilots were not well-trained to engage in dog fights. So, while Israelis went to California to to learn how to fly the jet, they also taught their instructors.
A kind of give-and-take in military affairs emerges from this by the 1970s. Israeli advice shaped the American Air Force, and more recently, practices initiated by Israel—drone attacks on individuals, assassination from the air—were adopted by the United States during the war on terror. The military relationship was never one-sided: information and know-how flowed in both directions.
Israeli pilots also brought a strong sense of professionalism back with them.Even the word “professionalism” becomes part of Israeli culture as a way of approaching problems and behaving in the world: in the Air Force, but also in the theater, and the staging of musicals. A famous American immigrant to Israel, Todd Brody, brought professionalism to basketball in Israel, even before the sport became fully professional, in the sense that it was fully commercial.
Potter: But it isn’t just a one way exchange, right? In 1964, the musical Fiddler on the Roof debuts Broadway, and the movie is released in 1971—so that creates a broader audience for Israel in the United States too.
Frankel: Yes, and Israeli then began to export its own artistic and cultural achievements to the United States. By the late 1960s, there was even a sense that maybe Broadway was too saturated with Israeli performances, dance groups, and singers. There’s an Israeli play, Kazablan (1966), which is a riff on the American Broadway hit West Side Story. It became a movie, was exported globally, and was quite successful.
Cultural products created curiosity about Israel in the United States—among American Jews, but others as well. As Israel sent plays, performances and films abroad, cultural entrepreneurs began to produce them with an eye to the American consumer. An interesting dynamic emerged in which Israel became highly preoccupied with the way it was seen from abroad, then internalized this “outsider’s look” as it thought about, and produced, itself.
Potter: I imagine that because of the current war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, there are a lot of Americans who are more curious about Israel than we have been in a long time. What would you want people to take from this book and bring to their thinking about the relationship between the two nations and peoples today?
Frankel: That’s complicated. So, I finished this book in the summer of 2023, and after October 7, I had an opportunity to change a paragraph or so. I resisted making changes, in part because I didn’t know where the war was going to lead; you don’t want to make a book irrelevant down the road. But I did make a few remarks about what preceded the summer of 2023: the rift in Israel over the so-called judicial coup, and the political cross-fertilization between the two countries.
On the eve of the October 7, you could see in the debate over judiciary reform that both sides of the aisle borrowed American idioms and American ideas to argue for their positions. There’s a reason for that: key political movements and tendencies have their origins in the United States. To look at two very different ones: Marcia Freedman, one of the pioneers of Israeli feminism and elected to the Knesset in 1973, was an immigrant from the United States. [Editorial note: Freedman is also the only out lesbian to have served in the Knesset.] Meir Kahane, the racist, ultra-nationalist rabbi, was from Brooklyn and the founder of the American Jewish Defense League.
The other thing you see in Israel at the turn of 1970s is the beginning of the split between fundamentalist religious, nationalist Israel and liberal Israel. Political figures like Kahane and Freedman are incredibly important to the history that brought us to that moment. Kahane made a powerful mark on politics. Initially, in the 1970s and 1980s, he was not very influential, but he proposed transferring entire Palestinian populations away from Israel and the West Bank. He was assassinated some 35 years ago, but a few of his disciples are now members of the government, and we can see that Kahane’s ideas are more powerful than ever.
Potter: Those early fears that the relationship with the United States might change Israel fundamentally, and shape its history, were well-founded.
Frankel: Well, yes, but understand: America also inspired the creation of the Israeli ACLU, environmentalism, feminism, and gay rights. The Black Panthers gave a group of marginalized youth in Jerusalem a language and a symbolism that was incredibly effective. And remember part of the dynamic of a contact zone is mistranslation, right? Things move from one country to another, but they never land in the same way, and there can be a level of hilarity to those transformations that I try to retain in the book.
Let me say something else. It’s hard today to go back in time and talk about Israel outside the context of the crisis in Gaza. But the present also calls our attention to what is excluded from our contemporary conversations. This book tries to move away from seeing everything about Israel as connected to the Israel-Arab conflict, and towards the idea of a society in the making and a process that is somewhat different from other societies that went through with “Americanization.” Race and ethnicity became very important to mainstream American culture in the 1960s and 70s: It had ripple effects on Israel, and on the triangular relationship between the United States, Israel, and the rest of the world.
And we are still feeling those ripples today.
This interview was first published on Claire Potter’s Substack on December 27, 2024. Reprinted with permission.
