{Reposted from the Elder of Ziyon website}
Historian and scholar Martin Kramer writes:
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.
Kramer goes on to show how King was an unabashed Zionist even though today the anti-Israel crowd tries to steal his legacy.
The Edward Said quote is fascinating, though. It seems to indicate that all of the good King did – all of the progress he made towards equal rights for all people – is worthless to Said because of this one position. Never mind that King’s position of support for Israel is entirely in line with his support for equal rights for all; after all, King saw the justice of having a Jewish state which in fact allowed Jews to be considered equals with other peoples in the world. But to Said, all of MLK’s legacy seems to be worthless because of his Zionism.
Further reading into Said’s writings show that this is in fact consistent. He addresses King briefly again in his memoirs, where he says:
Eleanor Roosevelt revolted me in her avid support for the Jewish state; despite her much-vaunted, even advertised, humanity I could never forgive her for her inability to spare the tiniest bit of it for our refugees. The same was true later for Martin Luther King, whom I had genuinely admired but was also unable to fathom (or forgive) for the warmth of his passion for Israel’s victory during the 1967 war. (141)
Said’s representation of the United States also remains strangely silent on racism, the country’s original and enduring sin rooted in the ravages of European settler colonialism that led to the genocide of the native peoples followed by the enslavement of Africans. …
He only mentions in passing that at the Princeton of the 1950s “there wasn’t a single black” (274), offering no comment as if this were an inconsequential fact for a country then in the throes of the civil rights struggle, which he does not even address.
Support for Israel’s aggression against the dispossessed and oppressed Palestinians does indeed deserve censure, but reciprocity is required, in this case in terms of support for African American civil rights struggles, which is noticeably absent in this memoir.
