Martin Luther King Jr.’s unlikely stand on Palestine if he had lived
Commentary by Nick Gier | FāVS News
If Israel decides to give full rights to only one ethnic group and fewer rights to others, it loses its democratic soul and, with it, its Jewish one. — Jeremy Ben-Ami, The Forward (Jan. 3, 2025)
What began as a terrible trauma and a justified war of defense turned into a campaign of killing and revenge that has no end.
— Uri Misgav, Haaretz (Jan. 9, 2025)
The Israeli Army has no reason to remain in Gaza, other than fulfilling messianic settlement wishes.
— 837 Parents of Israeli soldiers
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
On Jan. 26, 2005, the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon thought he was quoting Martin Luther King Jr.: “You declare, my friend, that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely anti-Zionist. And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God’s green earth: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews.” You may think that this sounds like Martin Luther King Jr., and it does come from a “Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend,” but this has been found to be a forgery.
King on Palestine (If he had lived)
King praised the Jews for support in the civil rights movement, and he did support Israel’s right to defend itself in the 1967 Day War, for which he urged a quick negotiated settlement. He was also right to criticize the vicious antisemitism that many of us found in the speeches of Stokely Carmichael, Malcom X and others.
I am confident that he would have agreed with me, and many others, that those who criticize Israel’s various governments are not antisemitic. (That would make, reductio ad absurdum, millions of Jews antisemitic as well.) I also believe, if he lived long enough to see the decades of suffering of the Palestinian people, he would have joined us in calling for justice for the Palestinians in their own land.
Just as the radical Palestinians do, Zionists also use the slogan “from the [Jordan] river to the sea” to reclaim the land of biblical Israel. An extreme Zionist map of “Greater Israel” recently shown on Israeli social media even includes parts of Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Jordan. This position is one that no international court would ever uphold. In fact, the Palestinian claim has far more legal validity.
King on South Africa’s apartheid
King spoke out strongly, as early as 1948, against the apartheid (“separateness” of the races) regime in South Africa. He understood why, after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre that took the lives of 70 nonviolent protesters, the African National Congress established an armed wing that participated in destruction of infrastructure across the country. King insisted, following Gandhi, that nonviolent means such as a world-wide boycott could convince the racist government to reform.
King on Vietnam
King’s advisers had long exhorted him to speak against the Vietnam War. Finally, in an address at the Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, King declared that “I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted.” When he asserted the “brotherhood of man” goes beyond national allegiances, the undisputed implication is that these words above also apply to the Palestinians and other oppressed peoples of the world.
The 1978 Camp David Accords
Jimmy Carter’s original plans for Middle East peace were to reconvene the failed 1973 Geneva Conference where representatives from the U.S., the Soviet Union, Egypt, Jordan and Israel had met to negotiate. A place for Syria was set but never occupied, primarily because the Syrians insisted on the presence of a Palestinian representative. The U.S. and Israel objected to this provision and this, unfortunately, was the case for 15 long years until the Oslo Accords of 1993.
Even when Carter met with Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat for 13 tense days in September 1978, he still wanted to include Palestinian issues. As former Carter adviser Stuart Eizenstat explained: “As early as March 1977, Carter had called for a Palestinian homeland (not a state). He told me he saw Palestinians as akin to the Black population of the South, whose discrimination he had witnessed firsthand.” The Camp David Accords ended with no agreement on any Palestinian demands.
Terrorist Menachem Begin
In 1977, before the Camp David talks, Begin and Sadat had a preliminary meeting at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel. On July 22, 1946, Begin, on behalf of the Jewish Irgun militia, led a terrorist attack on this hotel and 91 were killed and 47 were injured. (Arabs, Britons and Jews were among the casualties.) The hotel was the headquarters of the Mandate for Palestine authority as well as the British Army. Begin considered it a legitimate military target and such exceedingly expedient justifications became the rule for Israeli military actions, which, under international law, constitute war crimes.
“I’m proud of our boys”
Chaim Weizmann, soon to be the first president of Israel, declared: “I can’t help feeling proud of our boys.” The hypocrisy of condemning Palestinian violence with this history of Zionist terrorism is incredible. This attack was just one of many Israeli terrorist attacks and targeted assassinations for the next 78 years.
Weizmann was famous for this declaration that the goal of the state of Israel was to make it as “Jewish as England is English.” That end appeared to justify any means to achieve it. Weizmann gives us the simplest and most direct definition of Zionism: taking all of Palestine for the Jews with no rights for the Palestinians.
Israel’s apartheid regime
The most controversial writing that Carter ever did was his book “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.” It received negative reviews across the board, including 14 Jewish members of the Carter Center. In their resignation letter they stated that the book “biased, inaccurate, misleading, and missing key historical facts.” Perhaps Carter should have vetted the manuscript with his closest colleagues.
Carter admitted that some of his words were “completely improper and stupid,” and he apologized for a “terribly worded sentence which implied, obviously in a ridiculous way, that I approved terrorism and terrorist acts against Israeli citizens.” Unfortunately, Carter never published any corrections to the book.
The most contentious issue was Carter’s use of the word “apartheid” and the implication that the Israelis ruled the nation in a way similar to South Africa’s racial regime (1948-1994). I believe, along with many others, that apartheid is indeed the appropriate word.
Even three former Israeli leaders agree that Israel is, or would be, an apartheid state. In 2002, former Israeli Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair declared: “We established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories.” In 2010, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak stated: “If millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.” In the same year former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert asserted: “If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, we then have a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights.”
On Jan. 3, 2025, Jeremy Ben-Ami, former Clinton adviser, observed that after Israel’s actions in Gaza, “apartheid is increasingly in common use — even by some Israelis and friends of the country, who more and more see the fork in the road Israel faces in the way Carter did.” Noting that there are more non-Jews than Jews in the contested areas, Ben-Ami predicts that if a two-state solution is not reached, “millions of non-Jews are going to be permanently deprived of their rights.” Current Israeli leaders have categorically rejected a two-state solution, and some are threatening to annex both Gaza and the West Bank.
Many Israelis regularly use racist terms for the Palestinians, and one statistic about water distribution in the West Bank is sufficient proof of a state of apartheid. On average each Jewish settler has access to 247 liters every day. West Bank Palestinians survive on 26 liters per day, but their brothers and sisters in Gaza are near death at 3 liters per day. The 2021 Human Rights Watch report on this issue can be found at bit.ly/4hgHbDJ.
In July 2021, a Jewish Electorate Institute poll indicated that 58% of American Jewish voters were against the West Bank settlements and they insisted that the Biden administration suspend all U.S. aid until the expansion stops. The same poll found, significantly, that 25% believed that Israel was an apartheid state and 22% believed that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza.
Zionists as colonizers
The Jews once lived, with few exceptions, in peace with their Arab neighbors for about 1,300 years. Then European Zionists proposed that, with the permission of Britain and with no consultation with the Arabs, that Palestine become their homeland. (It was their land only in biblical times.) The 1917 Balfour Declaration does not mention the Palestinians by name, and it only promised that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”
In a speech to an American audience in 1948, Jordanian King Abdulla I concluded with a compelling observation. Britain, France and the U.S. had refused to take but a few Jewish refugees, but they expected Palestinian Arabs to receive them. The Jewish population of Palestine in 1917 was 6% but it grew to 30% by 1939.
A common argument goes like this: both the Jews and Palestinians are indigenous to the area, so both have an equal right to the land. The correct parallel, however, is that with British support, European Zionists became colonizers with all the attendant repercussions.
In the early days after the Balfour Declaration a British official admitted that the “British government was not the colonizing power; the Jewish people are the colonizing power.” The British soon realized that they could not control the activities of the Jewish settlers, and that, according to Rashid Khalidi, “by the end of the 1930s it was too late to change the lopsided balance of forces that had developed between the Jews and the Palestinians.”
With very few exceptions colonial administrations have never given up their power, and those colonized, after decades of oppression and patient waiting, have resorted to violence to gain their independence. Our very own country is a good example. Martin Luther King Jr. sums up this truth: “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
Nick Gier of Moscow taught religion and philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years. He is a long-time member of the Latah County Human Rights Task Force. He is indebted to Rashid Khalidi’s book “The Hundred Years War on Palestine” for many insights. Read other articles on this issue at nfgier.com/?s=israel+palestinians. Read excerpts from his Gandhi book at bit.ly/3ZxaHO1. Email him at [email protected].
