John Lewis, the civil rights icon and Georgia congressman who died five days ago, was also a celebrated figure in the organized Jewish community, with many Israel lobby groups mourning the death of a steadfast supporter. Lewis described Israel as a refuge for Jews whose history was shaped as black people’s history is, by slavery and genocide, and being “uprooted involuntarily from their homeland.”
Lewis was “one of Israel’s strongest advocates in Congress,” David Harris of the American Jewish Committe said in a eulogy to America’s “moral conscience.” Lewis traveled to Israel “on numerous occasions,” the AJC’s Atlanta director noted. While AIPAC remembered Lewis’s support for Israeli occupation:
Congressman Lewis was a steadfast ally of the Jewish state who was instrumental in gaining passage of The Jerusalem Embassy Act.
Arab America’s obit says that Lewis was historically deferential to the Israel lobby but revised his views somewhat in recent years.
Lewis came to the Palestinian human rights later in his life, especially after a lifelong allegiance to Israel.
Notably, Lewis a year ago was an early co-sponsor of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s bill in Congress to affirm that boycott is a free speech right in the pursuit of human rights abroad. The bill was aimed at countering legislation to punish BDS supporters. Lewis justified the sponsorship by speaking of the importance of boycotts in the civil rights movement in the South; though at the same time he opposed BDS and supported legislation that characterized the BDS campaign as antisemitic.
FL Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz gushed over John Lewis’s backing of Israel on an AJC webinar yesterday dedicated to Lewis’s progressive achievements.
He was a stalwart supporter of Israel and understood that two states for two peoples was absolutely critical, that everyone, every group that has an identity, deserves to be able to have a state, to have a touchstone, a place that they can call home, that is a refuge. And that’s certainly what Israel has been for Jews, and the essential need to preserve that safe haven after thousands of years of persecution, John really understood that. And understood it also in terms of his support for a two state solution where the Palestinian people need and deserve a state as well, and continuing to advance and press the two communities to return to the negotiating table, and engage in direct bilateral negotiations.
Arab America‘s obit by John Mason quotes a Palestinian-American, Wally Yazbak, saying that Lewis’s record wasn’t as pro-Israel as these groups make it out to be.
Yazbak noted during the interview the occasions on which Lewis voted favorably towards Arabs, one being the Congressman’s vote against the Iraq war. He was one of few elected officials in the House or the Senate to cast a negative vote against a war whose negative repercussions are still present. On another issue, the status of Jerusalem, Lewis told Yazbak that all peoples should share this holy city.
When asked why he thought Lewis was slow to come to the support of Palestinians, contrasted with his steadfast backing of Israel, Yazbak responded, “Lewis was misled” by the numerous American pro-Israel lobbies and other political forces that proclaim Israel can do no wrong and that Palestinians are simply a drag on Israel’s efforts to expand the Israeli state. Lewis also showed signs of increasing support for Palestinians in his vote to release hundreds of West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem minors arbitrarily arrested, confined and abused in Israeli prisons.
Yazbak told a story of having met Lewis at the Jimmy Carter Center in Atlanta in 2018, when Lewis said, “Jerusalem belongs to all religions and no one can just give it away to one religion.”
Lewis’s support of Ilhan Omar’s pro-boycott bill was a welcome surprise, Ariel Gold wrote in the Forward last summer. She reviewed Lewis’s long record as a “staunch supporter” of Israel– even signing a letter supportive of Israel at a time of expanding settlements.
In 2015, less than a year since the Israeli assault on Gaza that killed over 2,000 people, Lewis said, “In this Congress, I take a backseat to no one in my commitment and support of Israel and the American Jewish community.”…
[H]e has been eerily silent about Israel’s attacks on Palestinians. In March 2018, when Senator Bernie Sanders and Reps. Betty McCollum, Barbara Lee, Keith Ellison, and others condemned Israel’s murder of unarmed Palestinian protestors in Gaza — murders that the UN said likely amounted to war crimes — Lewis said nothing.
In a 2002 op-ed Lewis said that he was “shocked” by the UN resolution equating Zionism with racism and averred that Martin Luther King Jr. was a vigorous supporter of Israel.
[King] consistently reiterated his stand on the Israel- Arab conflict, stating “Israel’s right to exist as a state in security is uncontestable.” It was no accident that King emphasized “security” in his statements on the Middle East.
Lewis made an identification of Jews and blacks in that article, as particularly victimized groups.
[King] knew that both peoples were uprooted involuntarily from their homelands. He knew that both peoples were shaped by the tragic experience of slavery. He knew that both peoples were forced to live in ghettoes, victims of segregation….He knew that both peoples have been subjected to oppression and genocide on a level unprecedented in history.
The AJC expressed concern yesterday about how it could carry John Lewis’s regard for Israel over to the next generation of black politicians. Apparently, this concern does not extend to Nikema Williams, chair of Georgia’s Democratic Party and a state senator, who has been selected to run for Lewis’s seat. Melissa Weiss of Jewish Insider tweeted a photo of Williams in Israel “on a 2018 trip to Israel with the American Israel Education Foundation,” which is an arm of the Israel lobby group AIPAC.
“[King] knew that both peoples were uprooted involuntarily from their homelands. He knew that both peoples were shaped by the tragic experience of slavery. He knew that both peoples were forced to live in ghettoes, victims of segregation….He knew that both peoples have been subjected to oppression and genocide on a level unprecedented in history.” John Lewis
____________
“Both peoples were uprooted involuntarily from their homelands”
Surely Lewis meant to include the Palestinian Nakba, right?
“Forced to live in ghettoes, victims of segregation”
Surely Lewis meant to include the Palestinian history of refugee camps, exile and displacement, right?
“Subjected to oppression and genocide”
Surely Lewis meant to include the reality of the Israeli-imposed state of oppression the Palestinians are subject to, right?
Any well-trained Hasbarist will immediately go high dudgeon and challenge the validity of comparing the Palestinian Nakba and long-running Israeli Occupation on the one hand with the Triangle Trade or the Holocaust on the other. For sure, there are differences of scale, intent, duration and outcomes between all three of these historical tragedies. However, ask any Palestinian if they think Israel’s Occupation, checkpoints, arbitrary imprisonment, militarization of the West Bank, documented torture, school closures and as well as routine killing of Palestinian civilians and a host of other oppressive measures feels more like freedom and democracy or … slavery.
Political Zionism’s desperate recitations/distortions of MLK’s words and deeds are a reflection of the fact that it has no similarly placed living public figure of color to speak convincingly on its behalf. Nelson Mandela was, to my mind, the model of moral courage we should reference when discussing which side of history Zionism falls on. He said:
“We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
It is no surprise that John Lewis, once in the sinecure office of Congress person, would support “Israel” and ignore Palestinians and their rights. Nor is any great surprise that despite his very strong civil rights activism in the 1960s, that he would not recognize, indeed would ignore the right of Palestinians to live on their own lands and not have been/be removed (violently/brutally) no matter who the people doing the removal were/are/claim to be – I don’t recall his being at the forefront for Native American rights to their lands or his being deeply concerned about how the land that is now the USA came to be so. That might simply be my ignorance, and if so my apologies, but his focus was on African Americans and segregation and its dreadful effects.
What does astound me and I cannot fathom is his belief (told him?) that Jews were slaves? When exactly? If this refers to ancient Egyptian history – highly unlikely, but even if were true, Jews would not have been “selected” for slavery because of being Jewish (even were they of that religious persuasion at the time). Slavery was common across the ancient world and encompassed all sorts of people (other than the elites), all melanin types, religious affiliations (had they any), ethnicities… If it refers to during the Nazi period and really the 1940-45 period – not only Jews were used as slave labor, indeed most were Slavs. There were Roma among them as well.
And how is it that a person of supposed conscience, moral virtue can support as Lewis clearly did the murderous ethnic cleansing that the Zionists have inflicted upon Palestinians since 1947? HOW? That one group of people’s needs, rights are presumed of greater significance, importance than those of another people?
For the record:
“Fraud fit for a King: Israel, Zionism, and the misuse of MLK” By Tim Wise, Zmag.org, 25 January 2003
EXCERPTS:
“In the item, entitled Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend,’ King proclaims that criticism of Zionism is tantamount to anti-Semitism, and likens those who criticize Jewish nationalism as manifested in Israel, to those who would seek to trample the rights of blacks. Heady stuff indeed, and 100% bullshit, as any amateur fact checker could ascertain were they so inclined. But of course, the kinds of folks who push an ideology that required the expulsion of three-quarters-of-a-million Palestinians from their lands, and then lied about it, claiming there had been no such persons to begin with (as with Golda Meir’s infamous quip), can’t be expected to place a very high premium on truth. I learned this the hard way recently, when the Des Moines Jewish Federation succeeded in getting me yanked from the city’s MLK day events: two speeches I had been scheduled to give on behalf of the National Conference of Community and Justice (NCCJ).
“Because of my criticisms of Israel–and because I as a Jew am on record opposing Zionism philosophically–the Des Moines shtetl decided I was unfit to speak at an MLK event. After sending the supposed King quote around, and threatening to pull out all monies from the Jewish community for future NCCJ events, I was dropped. The attack of course was based on a distortion of my own beliefs as well. Federation principal Mark Finkelstein claimed I had shown a disregard for the well-being of Jews, despite the fact that my argument has long been that Zionism in practice has made world Jewry less safe than ever. But it was his duplicity on King’s views that was most disturbing. (cont’d)
(cont’d)
Though Finkelstein only recited one line from King’s supposed ‘letter’ on Zionism, he lifted it from the larger letter, which appears to have originated with Rabbi Marc Schneier, who quotes from it in his 1999 book, “Shared Dreams: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Jewish Community.” Therein, one finds such over-the-top rhetoric as this:
“‘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–this is God’s own truth.’ The letter also was filled with grammatical errors that any halfway literate reader of King’s work should have known disqualified him from being its author, to wit: ‘Anti-Zionist is inherently anti Semitic, and ever will be so.’
“The treatise, it is claimed, was published on page 76 of the August, 1967 edition of Saturday Review, and supposedly can also be read in the collection of King’s work entitled, This I Believe: Selections from the Writings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. That the claimants never mention the publisher of this collection should have been a clear tip-off that it might not be genuine, and indeed it isn’t. The book doesn’t exist. As for Saturday Review, there were four issues in August of 1967. Two of the four editions contained a page 76. One of the pages 76 contains classified ads and the other contained a review of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s album. No King letter anywhere.
“Yet its lack of authenticity hasn’t prevented it from having a long shelf-life. Not only does it pop up in the Schneier book, but sections of it were read by the Anti-Defamation League’s Michael Salberg in testimony before a House Subcommittee in July of 2001, and all manner of pro-Israel groups (from traditional Zionists to right-wing Likudites, to Christians who support ingathering Jews to Israel so as to prompt Jesus’ return), have used the piece on their websites.”
This article is little more than thinly-veiled apologetics for Lewis.
As Jeff Blankfort noted (on his Facebook page), “Phil should have known better than to attempt even a minimum whitewash of John Lewis’s record on Israel and Palestine by interviewing a Palestinian-American who provides the whitewash.”
When asked why he thought Lewis was slow to come to the support of Palestinians, contrasted with his steadfast backing of Israel, Yazbak responded, “Lewis was misled” by the numerous American pro-Israel lobbies and other political forces that proclaim Israel can do no wrong and that Palestinians are simply a drag on Israel’s efforts to expand the Israeli state.
As Blankfort noted, this “is an easily traceable lie. Lewis never came to support the Palestinians and if he was mis-led, it was willingly, since Lewis was obviously aware that everyone else in the SNCC leadership (think Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown) strongly supported the Palestinians and condemned Zionism. Contrary to Yazbak, Lewis never showed signs of any support for Palestinian minors either. Yazbak was apparently referring to Rep. Betty McCullum’s bill, HR 2407 which has never come to a vote and Lewis was not a co-sponsor although more than a dozen other members of the Black Caucus have put their names on the bill.”