It’s nighttime now on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but the day has not gone by without a lot of folks talking and thinking about Palestine.
USA Today has a big piece on how King’s legacy is being carried on today in the U.S. by leaders of #BlackLivesMatter, including Phillip Agnew of Dream Defenders (which was founded after the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012). Reporter Rick Hampson notes one of King’s strengths, and Agnew’s:
- The internationalist. His ability to elicit support from abroad – and shame Americans with segregation’s inherent contradictions — resonates with Agnew, who recently traveled to Palestine with other activists.
Dream Defenders lately held an action in Nazareth.
Speaking of King’s internationalism, Jamil Dakwar writes:
“If you wonder what #MLK’s position on #BDS would be read this newly found 1964 London speech.”
BDS is of course the international movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions of Israel. Dakwar links to this speech reported on DemocracyNow today in which King addressed racial injustice at home and abroad in 1964 and called for boycotting South Africa:
Our responsibility—our responsibility presents us with a unique opportunity: We can join in the one form of nonviolent action that could bring freedom and justice to South Africa, the action which African leaders have appealed for, in a massive movement for economic sanctions. In a world living under the appalling shadow of nuclear weapons, do we not recognize the need to perfect the use of economic pressures? Why is trade regarded by all nations and all ideologies as sacred? Why does our government and your government in Britain refuse to intervene effectively now, as if only when there is a bloodbath in South Africa—or a Korea or a Vietnam—will they recognize a crisis? If the United Kingdom and the United States decided tomorrow morning not to buy South African goods, not to buy South African gold, to put an embargo on oil, if our investors and capitalists would withdraw their support for that racial tyranny that we find there, then apartheid would be brought to an end. Then the majority of South Africans of all races could at last build the shared society they desire.
Electronic Intifada reported that speech excerpt some years ago, as well as a letter that King wrote in 1962 along with Albert Lutuli, a leader of the African National Congress. Key sentence:
The apartheid republic is a reality today only because the peoples and governments of the world have been unwilling to place her in quarantine.
Israeli supporters are promoting the fact that King also said nice things about Israel– calling it one of the outposts of democracy in the world (youtube clip here). Avi Mayer also tweets this photo of MLK Street in central Jerusalem.
But Dakwar is surely on target here. King was martyred when Israel was still Plucky Israel in the eyes of the west, before the occupation took real form. And it is the treatment of Palestinians under occupation that has driven the BDS movement in the west. There’s no question that if King were alive today, he would be in lines with that movement. Besides, think of how far America has come since King’s death. Diversity is today widely celebrated, and some establishment institutions are actually fostering diversity.
[Update: King canceled a planned trip to Israel in September 1967 in part because of political misgivings over the annexation of Jerusalem. He reportedly told his aides in a conference call:
[“I’d run into the situation where I’m damned if I say this and I’m damned if I say that no matter what I’d say, and I’ve already faced enough criticism including pro-Arab. I just think that if I go, the Arab world, and of course Africa and Asia for that matter, would interpret this as endorsing everything that Israel has done, and I do have questions of doubt… Most of it [the pilgrimage] would be Jerusalem and they [the Israelis] have annexed Jerusalem, and any way you say it they don’t plan to give it up… I frankly have to admit that my instincts – and when I follow my instincts so to speak I’m usually right – I just think that this would be a great mistake. I don’t think I could come out unscathed”]
Brooklyn for Peace urges folks to support negotiations with Iran— “Dr. King knew that war abroad means misery at home”– and is pressing activists to get on the campaign to pressure that NY City delegation to Israel not to go. From NYC2Palestine’s Facebook page:
Join us on Thursday, Jan 22nd at 1pm in City Hall Park to tell New York City Council members – Don’t Tour Apartheid Israel!
New Yorkers are outraged by 15 New York City Council members’ decision to take an all-expenses-paid propagandatour of Israel, organized by the Jewish Community Relations Council and United Jewish Appeal in February 2015.
Multiple social justice groups and organizations participating in a press conference on the steps of City Hall this past Monday told the New York City Council: #DontTourApartheid. We, the people of NYC, need to do the same.
Also, on Fresh Air today, Eric Foner spoke of the importance of solidarity to the antislavery movement, whites and blacks joining together. What was a difficult thing that was to achieve in the 1850s:
You know, the barriers between black and white were far higher than they are today. And overcoming that in order to work in a collaborative way, cooperating with each other in a, I think, noble cause of trying to assist people who were escaping from slavery and trying to undermine the institution of slavery and, eventually, bring about its abolition. And I – you know, I think on Martin Luther King Day, it should lead us to remember that the civil rights movement had antecedents in our history. It had, you know – that this was a great social movement of the mid-19th century and that these are the things that inspire me in American history – the struggle of people to make this a better country. To me, that’s what genuine patriotism is.
Of course Martin Luther King built that sort of coalition with considerable care in the 1960s, and today we should be thankful for the transformative coalition that we and so many others are building across racial and religious and national lines to free Palestinians (and Israelis), and lift a glass to MLK.
Thanks to Annie Robbins, Allison Deger and Alex Kane.
Many, many thanks to all of you for this. Martin was a great man.
I’ve posted relevant things other places on MW today, and now I have the pleasure of reading this fine article.
Sadly, I’ve read some terrible things elsewhere on this day as well wrt MLK. The US still has a long way to go. So do a lot of other “democracies”. Rampant Islamophobia is on the rise, too.
After the Six Day War Israel offered to return all lands that fell to it during this war which began with Nasser moving tens of thousands of Egyptian troops into Sinai & demanding U.N. peacekeepers to withdraw .And Egypt closing the Straits of Tiran to all Israeli shipping. And six Arab countries deploying more than 230,000 troops close to Israel’s boundary lines. At the beginning of June 1967 President Aref of Iraq declared “Our goal is clear – to wipe Israel off the map”
After the war the leaders of thirteen Arab states gathered at a summit conference in Khartoum, Sudan from August 29 to September 1, 1967. There they pledged to continue their struggle against Israel. Influenced by Nasser, “their conditions were quite specific: no peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel, and ‘maintenance of the rights of the Palestinian people in their nation.’ The Khartoum Declaration was the first serious warning to the Israelis that their expectation of an imminent ‘phone call’ from the Arab world might be a pipe dream” (Sachar).
This “warning” was reinforced on October 21, 1967 when an Egyptian missile boat sunk the Israeli destroyer Eilat, killing 47 people. It was confirmed in November and December 1967, when the Arab states repeatedly rebuffed attempts by Sweden’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, Gunnar Jarring — serving as the U.N. secretary general’s special envoy – to induce them to join talks with Israel. In fact, the “three no’s of Khartoum” held for a dozen years, until Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel — at which point the other 20 member states expelled it from the Arab League
As hatred grew on the Arab side Israel out of fear of losing a buffer between themselves and the haters held onto to the territories. The Arabs in the territories, Arab Palestinians , did
not imaginatively see this as an opportunity to understand and work with their new benign neighbors. The “old neighbors” the Jordanians and Egyptians had occupied and harshly ruled these same territories since 1948 the Palestinians Arabs didn’t dare complain about Jordanian Egyptian occupation.
Excerpt from Susannah Heschel;What Selma Meant to Jews Like My Father
Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/forward-thinking/212971/what-selma-meant-to-jews-like-my-father/?#ixzz3PLI8qHQx
My father arrived in 1940 as a refugee from Nazi Europe, where all too many Christian theologians were declaring Jesus an Aryan, not a Jew, and throwing the Old Testament out of the Christian Bible because it was a Jewish book. It seemed miraculous for him to discover Martin Luther King, Jr., placing the Exodus and the prophets of Israel at the center of the civil rights movement.
Marching out of Selma felt like a reenactment of the Exodus, but in a new way. Not only were the Israelites leaving Egypt, the place of enslavement, but also the Egyptians, because there was a hope at Selma that white America was repudiating its racism. My father had written, “The tragedy of Pharaoh was the failure to realize that the exodus from slavery could have spelled redemption for both Israel and Egypt. Would that Pharaoh and the Egyptians had joined the Israelites in the desert and together stood at the foot of Sinai
Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/forward-thinking/212971/what-selma-meant-to-jews-like-my-father/?#ixzz3PLGtIqsf
@Phil
I’ll question it. King was always quite loath to associate with radical groups. For example King certainly allowed his mentor Bayard Rustin to be drummed out of the civil rights movement because of his past Communist Party affiliations and homosexuality. Or for example when Paul Robeson (an American superstar of the late 20s with strong Soviet affiliations) attended the prayer pilgrimage King wouldn’t meat with him.
The fact is that King cleared the decks of almost all the previous generation of civil rights leaders for the same reasons, even though the Communist party was pretty common among civil rights advocates of the 1930s and 40s it was simply an unacceptable affiliation. King was a man who took the civil rights movement and made it respectable to average Americans. He challenged Americans to do what they already believed was the right thing to do. He didn’t try and overturn society and threaten them with a cause they didn’t believe in. Equality for blacks was a cause he championed, ending Jim Crow was a cause he championed. Uniting the working class globally was a cause he opposed.
If you want to use that analogy the BDS movement is far closer to what the civil rights movement looked like in the 1930s than what it looked like in the 1950s. The BDS movement goes out of its way to cause offense. Fundamentally it is trying to offend people (particularly Jews) and provoke a reaction which then creates attention to the cause. It also isn’t really looking for mainstream acceptability. It tends towards demonization and imagines utopian goals. Remember King started with eliminating just one Jim Crow law, not demanding a total remaking of society. That’s the opposite of what BDS does.
I have to say I think if the 2010s MLK were Jewish he’d be a J-Streeter. He’s much more Jeremy Ben-Ami than you. If he were Palestinian I think he’d be affiliated with something like IPCRI. He’d be aggressively trying to get Palestinians to support a Meretz government and working with the Israeli left on a fair and just peace. He’d oppose any attempts to force the Israelis into change externally since that would tend to produce resistance (i.e the entire philosophy behind non-violence). His peace movement would start with very minor actions that most Israelis could support like maybe ending housing segregation or going back to unrestricted movement. He would be advising Palestinians that at the current level of fear and tension there is no just solution to long term problems that Jews are going to accept. 130 years of violent conflict have created hatreds on both sides and the oppressor needs to be able to see past his fear for justice to emerge. For King the first step is to create a relationship of goodwill with the antagonist. Your movement rejects that.
So no I don’t think he’d be a BDSer. I don’t think he’d be an Abbas supporter either however. I think he might very well agree with you on an eventual goal of a one-state solution with full equality and an end to Zionism but he would totally disagree with you on how to achieve it.
Overheard at a Northridge Ca. eatery, on MLK day:
Diner: “I need some breakfast, big day ahead”
JeffyB: “What’ll you have?”
Diner: “Short stack, two ever easy, and some encouraging words”
JeffyB comes back from the kitchen and put his petite dejuner before him.
Diner: “How about those encouraging words I ordered?”
JeffyB: “Sure, mister! Don’t eat the eggs!”