Did MLK cut blank checks for Israel? Do today's anti-Zionists claim too much?

Probably not, according to Martin Kramer, though he elsewhere, in a Jewish magazine, tries to modify himself. Actually, he expands upon his earlier writing, and does so enough that I added the second half of the header as a second rhetorical question, once I started reading.

First, from page 8 of the 15-page PDF at that first link, the famous Seymour Martin Lipset quote:

One of the young men present happened to make some remark against the Zionists. Dr. King snapped at him and said, “Don’t talk like that! When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism!”

Kramer goes on to defend that it was indeed said, and was said in 1968, not 1967.

That said, on page 5, he notes what King said approximately 9 months earlier, shortly after the end of the Six Day War:

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.

He then puts that into larger context, noting that King had a quasi-evangelistic tour of Israel previously planned, but realized he would now be a political target whatever he said. He delayed any announcement above officially cancelling, but a couple of months later, he did pull the plug.

I know that other anti-Zionists have seen the second sentence of that paragraph before. Maybe they haven't seen the first, or else have ignored it.

What King is saying, it seems to me, is NOT a moral judgment but a political one. Let us remember that he was a Baptist minister, not an AME one. I've not read anything about what thoughts he had on the "end times," but, as a Baptist and not a Methodist Episcopal, he was surely open at least to some variety of futurist millennialism, as well as politically supporting Israel's future, and supporting it for SCLC reasons, too. Many of his top supporters were Jewish. His right hand man, Stanley Levinson, was, though he was not a Zionist.

But, we're not done. Kramer then puts King's Harvard statement into context — very important context.

There is plenty of room to debate the precise meaning of King’s off-the-record words at the Cambridge dinner. Was he only referring to the clearly antisemitic meaning of “Zionists” in the rhetoric of SNCC militants? [This is discussed by Kramer, the background, on the previous couple of pages.) Or was he making a general statement? We will never know. And just how much weight should be accorded to words spoken privately and never repeated publicly? (Had Lipset not written an article more than a year after the event, King’s words would have been lost forever.) My own view is that this dinner table remark can’t always bear the oversized burden imposed on it.

Food for thought a plenty.

Then, on page 12, Kramer talks about King's "balancing act." That deserves quoting of Kramer himself in some depth:

(I)t is an offense to history, if not to King’s memory, whenever someone today summons King’s ghost to offer unqualified support to Israel or the Palestinians.

There you go.

As for the second link? It's not so much modifying himself as extending himself.

Kramer cites new background material on King's 1959 visit to Israel, including above all, West Jerusalem. Let us remember this being after the Nakba (a word not mentioned by Kramer) but long before the Six Day War and any occupations. 

Kramer's take on King's visit then, including a private dinner with top Palestinians, and his later comments are that, while not dismissing Palestinian concerns, they were on a back burner for him. Kramer notes that he had visited India, laden with poverty, just before.

Then, there's this:

Years later, in 1968, King would allude to this demand as indicative of the weakness of the Arab approach to the conflict, an approach he described as “a stubborn effort to reverse history.”

Well, that does mention, in King's words, the right of return. And, his disinterest in it AFTER the Six Day War.

Kramer then notes that while the Israel-Palestine conflict was national, and to a degree then (tho less than today) religious, it was not racial. And, Israelis calling Palestinians names aside, it really wasn't.

Finally, Kramer speculates that the thought of Reinhold Neibuhr was having an influence on King. He cites this as his top reason King wasn't more emotionally invested in the Palestinian cause. This, because it shows Niebuhr's own Zionism, deserves its own quote:

Given his influence upon King, it’s important to recall the vigor with which Niebuhr supported both the establishment of Israel and its right to defend itself. He had expressed sympathy for Zionism as early as 1929, and in 1942 he founded the Christian Council on Palestine, a pro-Zionist association that grew to include thousands of (mostly Protestant) clergymen. In 1946, he testified in favor of a Jewish state before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine. “The fact that the Arabs have a vast hinterland in the Middle East,” he said there, “and the fact that the Jews have nowhere to go, establishes the relative justice of their claims and of their cause.”

In 1948 and again during the Sinai campaign of 1956, Niebuhr defended Israel’s military actions and chastised American policymakers for not standing firmly behind “our only secure bastion in this troubled area.” The Arab refugees, he believed, would have to be resettled elsewhere than in their former homes: “The Jews cannot absorb [them] except in small numbers without imperiling the security of their nation.” In 1967, he justified Israel’s preemptive action in what would become known as the Six-Day War: “Obviously a nation that knows that it is in danger of strangulation will use its fists.” Shortly after the war, he backed Israel’s unilateral unification of Jerusalem.

Basically, if one goes on to read the next page or two of that piece? Niebuhr had swallowed whole the Jewish and British Imperialist mix of opinion about Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular, without caring to look at any background. He also viewed all of this through a Cold War lens.

That's pretty serious. Especially if you tie it with my speculation about King's millennialist theology.

As for what stance he might have taken today? He didn't even live to the First Intifada. He would have been nearly 60 when it happened, and perhaps "on the bench" of day-to-day civil rights activity by then, had he not been assassinated. Given the stresses of his life, he might have had a heart attack by then.

That said? If we're doing research, we're doing all of it. Kramer is a neocon, teaches at Tel Aviv University, is tied to neocon think tanks, specifically, the AIPAC-connected Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and likes to hate on Palestinian refugees. He is surely right about the King of 1967-68, including via his own connections to neocon nutbar and Zionist supremo Marty Peretz.

Had King lived past the First Intifada, I think he would have realized that, for his legacy if nothing else, his "balancing act" would have to shift to a different center of gravity.

Bottom line? To riff on Kramer, I won't claim that King "really" would have been pro-Palestinian today if his Zionist fellow travelers will follow his own words and stop making much more out of King's comments in Boston than is warranted.