Tag: Martin Luther King

MLK: The Six-Day War interview

On By Martin Kramer

As happens each year on Martin Luther King Day, King is quoted to justify this or that position in the present. Many haven’t waited for today, and he’s been fully mobilized since October 7 by supporters of Israel and the Palestinians, who claim to know what he would say now if he hadn’t been assassinated then, fifty-six years ago.

My work on King’s views is often cited, because I did the most thorough study of the subject, from a wide range of sources. If you’re interested, you can follow this link to read all my contributions.

This year, I want to introduce a text that I quoted years ago: an interview of King on ABC’s news program Issues and Answers, June 18, 1967. King, asked whether Israel should return the territory it had taken earlier that month, said this: “I think that for the ultimate peace and security of the situation it will probably be necessary for Israel to give up this conquered territory because to hold on to it will only exacerbate the tensions and deepen the bitterness of the Arabs.”

The Israel-Hamas war has led some to seize upon this quote, and insist that King stood up for Palestinian rights. Garrison Hayes, a reporter for Mother Jones, suggested as much in November. “We don’t have to imagine what King thought about Israel’s relationship with the Palestinian people,” he wrote. “He spoke for himself.” Hayes then highlighted the ABC quote. I corresponded with Hayes before and after he published his piece, and I don’t doubt his sincerity. But I think he’s put an impossible burden on the quote.

“What are your views?”

To understand why, you have to read the whole exchange, which you won’t find today anywhere on the internet. The interviewers were Tom Jarriel (ABC Atlanta bureau chief) and John Casserly (ABC Washington correspondent). The questions about the Middle East followed a discussion of the Vietnam war.

Q: Let’s go to the other war for a moment, Dr. King. What are your views as a Nobel Peace Prize winner on the complex situation in the Middle East?

MLK: Well, it is certainly a very complex situation. I think first that we must work passionately and unrelentingly through the United Nations to try to grapple with this years-old problem in the Middle East. I would hope that the Middle East will not become an arena for power politics, whether we refer to Soviet Russia here, or the United States of America. We have got to achieve peace in the Middle East and in the Middle East achieving peace means two things.

Peace for Israel means security. The world and all people of good will must respect the territorial integrity of Israel. We must see Israel’s right to exist and always go out of the way to protect that right to exist. We must also see that Israel is there and any talk of driving the Jews into the Mediterranean, as we have heard over the last few weeks or the last several years, is not only unrealistic talk but it is suicidal talk for the whole world and I think also it is terribly immoral. We must see what Israel has done for the world. It is a marvelous demonstration of what people together in unity and with determination, rugged determination, can do in transforming almost a desert into an oasis.

But the other side is this, that peace in the Middle East means something else. It means for the Arabs development. After all the Arab world is that third world, a part of that third world of poverty and illiteracy and disease and it is time now to have a Marshall Plan for the Middle East. I think this is going to be finally the only answer. So long as people are poor, so long as they find themselves on the outskirts of hope, they are going to make intemperate remarks. They are going to keep the war psychosis alive. And what we need to do now is to go all out to develop the underdeveloped, and we must see that there is a grave refugee problem that the Arabs have on their hands and the United Nations through all of the nations of the world must grapple very constructively and forthrightly with these problems.

Q:  Should Israel in your opinion give back the land she has taken in conflict without certain guarantees, such as security?

MLK: Well, I think these guarantees should all be worked out by the United Nations. I would hope that all of the nations, and particularly the Soviet Union and the United States, and I would say France and Great Britain, these four powers can really determine how that situation is going.

I think the Israelis will have to have access to the Gulf of Aqaba. I mean the very survival of Israel may well depend on access to not only the Suez Canal, but the Gulf and the Strait of Tiran. These things are very important. But I think for the ultimate peace and security of the situation it will probably be necessary for Israel to give up this conquered territory because to hold on to it will only exacerbate the tensions and deepen the bitterness of the Arabs.

Q: But Israel indicates, Dr. King, that for its own security it should keep certain territory, particularly in Syria, the approaches to Israel, in order to maintain its own security.

MLK: Well, there again I am putting my hope in the United Nations. And I know the United Nations will not be effective if these major powers will not cooperate with it, so I am hoping that they will cooperate with it and that the UN itself will place a peacekeeping force there, so that neither of these forces, whether it is the Israeli forces or the Arab forces, will continue to engage in these brutal battles. And the other thing, I think there is a great need for greater disarmament, not only in the Middle East but all over the world.

The first striking thing about this exchange is King’s exquisite care in formulating his answers. He knew that every word carried meaning in the charged moment, and he carefully crafted a response. As I showed elsewhere, those who now claim that King didn’t know enough about the conflict miss the mark. He had an informed and nuanced grasp of all its aspects.

Second, King’s position on Israel is forthright: “Peace for Israel means security.” Not only did he praise “marvelous” Israel, he defended Israel’s “territorial integrity” and its “right to exist,” while rejecting the “unrealistic,” “suicidal,” and “terribly immoral” call to destroy it.

The third striking thing, from today’s perspective, is that he didn’t mention the Palestinians. That’s because in 1967, the Palestinians weren’t an independent party to the war. The territories occupied by Israel in 1967 belonged to Egypt (Sinai and Egyptian-administered Gaza), Syria (the Golan Heights), and Jordan (the West Bank and East Jerusalem). At the time, all proposals for Israeli return of territories meant giving them back to these states. King specifically emphasized the conditions for Israel’s return of the Sinai to Nasser’s Egypt, Egypt being the leading Arab state and Israel’s primary enemy.

Palestinians, however, had a different demand. For nearly twenty years, they had insisted on their return to Israel proper, from which they’d departed as refugees in 1948. King avoided saying anything that could be construed as endorsing that “right.” He acknowledged that there was a “grave refugee problem,” but the solution lay in economic development, promoted by “the United Nations through all of the nations.” (Later, in September, he alluded to the Palestinian demand as “a stubborn effort to reverse history.”)

So it’s rather misleading to state that the ABC interview reveals “what King thought about Israel’s relationship with the Palestinian people,” or that “King said that Israel should return Palestinian lands.” Neither then nor at any time did he speak of “the Palestinian people,” but only of “refugees.” Nor did he ever use the term “Palestinian lands.” King spoke of Israel “probably” returning territories taken from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria earlier that month, with international guarantees for Israel, as a pragmatic measure to alleviate “tensions” and “bitterness.”

A blind eye?

King was right: 1967 “deepened[ed] the bitterness of the Arabs” of all nationalities. But as he knew (from visiting Beirut, East Jerusalem and Cairo in 1959), they were bitter before that. To make peace, they too would have to change. That’s where he’s fallen short in the eyes of Palestinians. A prime example was the Palestinian thinker Edward Said, who said this in a 1993 interview:

With the emergence of the civil rights movement in the middle ’60s—and particularly in ’66-’67—I was very soon turned off by Martin Luther King, who revealed himself to be a tremendous Zionist, and who always used to speak very warmly in support of Israel, particularly in ’67, after the war.

Said’s nephew, the historian-activist Ussama Makdisi, put it more bluntly: King “turned a blind eye to the plight of the Palestinians.” These formulas do sound bitter, but I can see why Palestinian activists like Said and Makdisi would make them.

In any case, much has happened since 1967, and it’s idle to speculate what King would say today. It’s not unreasonable to take some inspiration from his words, and draw contemporary conclusions based on a personal understanding of them. That’s why the wall behind his monument in Washington is etched with quotes. We’re invited to read them as points of departure for thinking about the present.

But it’s quite another thing to put words in King’s mouth. And there’s one word he never uttered: “Palestinian.” We will have to get through the present crisis without his specific guidance.

Header image created by DALL-E, OpenAI’s image generation model.

The MLK Day bundle

On By Martin Kramer

Once again, it’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and time to bundle my studies of MLK’s relationship to Israel and the Palestinians.

1. What about this quote, attributed to King around the time of the Six-Day War? “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism!” Is it authentic, and if so, what did he mean? What did he think of that war, and why didn’t he ever visit Israel? I answer these questions in this article. Update: And here is the previously-unpublished Six-Day War interview of MLK.

2. If King left no quote in favor of the Palestinian cause, it’s because he didn’t know much about it, correct? Wrong: he saw it up close, in Jerusalem and the West Bank, and still left no quote. I explain, in this article.

3. Well, if King tilted toward Israel, it’s because he depended on Jewish donors, didn’t he? Well, he did, but that isn’t the whole story, or even the main story. I look at King’s closest rabbinic allies, and their positions on Israel, in this article.

Let’s be clear: no one knows what King would say about Israel or the Palestinians today. Polemicists on both sides have cooked answers, but for a historian, it’s not even a legitimate question. All that a historian can do is demonstrate what King said, and perhaps infer what he thought, all those many years ago. Some of the issues which were then on the table still sit there today, although much of the context has been transformed by subsequent events.

So share this bundle with your friends, and if you think your elected representatives might benefit from it, send it to them too. The purpose of the day is for thoughtful people to reflect, and to draw conclusions for the present and future. But they should do that in full awareness of the known facts of the past.

Martin Luther King and Israel, then and now

On By Martin Kramer

Not a year goes by without an attempt by someone to associate the name of Martin Luther King, Jr. with the Palestinian cause. It’s particularly striking because while he lived, no one had much doubt about where he stood. Here, for example, is the late Edward Said, foremost Palestinian thinker of his day, in a 1993 interview:

With the emergence of the civil rights movement in the middle ’60s—and particularly in ’66-’67—I was very soon turned off by Martin Luther King, who revealed himself to be a tremendous Zionist, and who always used to speak very warmly in support of Israel, particularly in ’67, after the war.

With the passage of time and memory, some have suggested that King would have supported the Palestinians, if only his life hadn’t been cut short by assassination in 1968. So argued New York Times columnist Michelle Alexander on last year’s Martin Luther King Day. Her conclusion: “If we are to honor King’s message and not merely the man, we must condemn Israel’s actions.”

But as I pointed out in an essay last March, King didn’t lack opportunities to condemn Israel while he lived, during the twenty years between 1948 and 1968. Instead he praised it.

Not only that: he knew the “plight” of the Palestinians perfectly well, having visited Jordanian-held East Jerusalem in 1959, where he got a tutorial over dinner from the leading lights of Arab Palestine. Yet he never left a quote in support of any aspect of the Palestinian Arab cause.

This is a source of Palestinian frustration on every Martin Luther King Day, since supporters of Israel have their pick of King quotes that favor Israel (“an oasis of brotherhood and democracy,” in King’s words). A few years back, I myself validated the origins of one of the most contentious of these quotes: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism!”

It’s not that King didn’t have a solution in mind for the region. He believed that the Palestinian refugee problem, if not the Arab-Israeli conflict as a whole, could best be resolved through “a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, where we lift those who are at the bottom of the economic ladder and bring them into the mainstream of economic security.” Today that would be called “economic peace,” and it’s had a succession of champions, up to and including Jared Kushner.

On one occasion right after the 1967 war, King echoed the proposition that Israel should trade land for peace with the defeated Arab states: “I think for the ultimate peace and security of the situation it will probably be necessary for Israel to give up this conquered territory because to hold on to it will only exacerbate the tensions and deepen the bitterness of the Arabs.” (This was in a televised interview on June 18.) His position was in line with the emerging American view that Israel’s conquests, while neither illegal nor immoral, should be exchanged for peace.

And this was pretty much the outer limit of King’s vision for the Arabs. True, his carefully worded support of Israel wasn’t ebullient, and he never got around to visiting it. (The 1967 war scuttled his one concrete plan to do so.) There is also clear evidence that he wished to be seen as balanced in his approach to peace. But he regarded Israel’s creation as just (he said Israel had “a right to exist”), and whatever cost it involved was an unfortunate injury that needed repair, not a moral blight on the scale of Vietnam or segregation.

A Reciprocal Deal?

It’s sometimes claimed that King kept his silence on Israel to win Jewish financial or political support for the civil rights movement. That’s the claim of UCLA historian Robin D.G. Kelley in a recent article. King was “growing more critical of Israel but remained silent” for fear of “losing valuable allies and financial support.” He didn’t want to “further jeopardize what was already a dwindling funding stream.”

One imagines that King’s advisers never lost sight of the money. But this notion of a quid pro quo takes no account of the spiritual dimension of King’s ties to Zionist Jews. The two who were closest to him were refugee rabbis from Hitler’s Europe, who regarded the creation of Israel as redemption. And just as the Holocaust drove their passion for civil rights, it steeled their devotion to Israel.

The first was Joachim Prinz (1902-1988), a social activist, pulpit rabbi, and Zionist organizer, who personally knew nearly all of Israel’s leaders. Prinz allied himself with King in 1958, and at the 1963 March on Washington, he spoke in the slot before King’s historic address. The following year, Prinz consciously emulated King’s protest tactics by getting himself arrested near the Jordanian pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. (The pavilion featured a “bigoted” mural putting the blame for the Palestinian refugee problem on Israel.) That summer, Prinz told Golda Meir: “It is the greatest tragedy of my life that I did not come to Israel.”

The second was Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972), philosopher and theologian at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and an heir to one of the great Hasidic dynasties. King described Heschel as “a truly great prophet,” who famously marched in the front line with King in Selma, Alabama in 1965. Immediately after the 1967 war, Heschel wrote one of the most ecstatic Zionist tracts ever compiled, his Israel: An Echo of Eternity (1968). “One of the insights learned from the great crisis in May, 1967,” he wrote,

is the deep personal involvement of every Jew in the existence of Israel. It is not a matter of philanthropy or general charity but of spiritual identification. It is such personal relationship to Israel upon which one’s dignity as a Jew is articulated.

For King, these men were not “supporters,” they were fellow visionaries, with whom he shared prophetic values. They spoke too as personal victims of racism, and gave voice to the millions who had perished in the Holocaust. The idea that their eloquent commitment to Israel didn’t affect King underestimates both him and them.

What would King think of Israel today? It’s an idle question. But he thought well of Israel then, and its flaws in his day weren’t far fewer, nor were its virtues much more numerous, than they are in ours. Whether he deserves to be called “a tremendous Zionist,” as Edward Said claimed, is a matter of perspective and definition. But the attempt to make him into an advocate for Palestine is an offense to history.

(Cross-posted at The Times of Israel.)