Michelle Alexander, Civil rights lawyer and advocate, legal scholar and author/ BDnews24
On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr stepped up to the lectern at the Riverside Church in Manhattan. The United States had been in active combat in Vietnam for two years, and tens of thousands of people had been killed, including some 10,000 US troops. The political establishment — from left to right — backed the war, and more than 400,000 US service members were in Vietnam, their lives on the line.
Many of King’s strongest allies urged him to remain silent about the war or at least to soft-pedal any criticism. They knew that if he told the whole truth about the unjust and disastrous war he would be falsely labelled a Communist, suffer retaliation and severe backlash, alienate supporters and threaten the fragile progress of the civil rights movement.
King rejected all the well-meaning advice and said, “I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice.” Quoting a statement by the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, he said, “A time comes when silence is betrayal” and added, “that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.”
It was a lonely, moral stance. And it cost him. But it set an example of what is required of us if we are to honour our deepest values in times of crisis, even when silence would better serve our personal interests or the communities and causes we hold most dear. It’s what I think about when I go over the excuses and rationalisations that have kept me largely silent on one of the great moral challenges of our time: the crisis in Israel-Palestine.
I have not been alone. Until very recently, the entire Congress has remained mostly silent on the human rights nightmare that has unfolded in the occupied territories. Our elected representatives, who operate in a political environment where Israel’s political lobby holds well-documented power, have consistently minimised and deflected criticism of the state of Israel, even as it has grown more emboldened in its occupation of Palestinian territory and adopted some practices reminiscent of apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crow segregation in the United States.
Many civil rights activists and organisations have remained silent, as well, not because they lack concern or sympathy for the Palestinian people, but because they fear loss of funding from foundations and false charges of anti-Semitism. They worry, as I once did, that their important social justice work will be compromised or discredited by smear campaigns.
Of course, there will be those who say that we can’t know for sure what King would do or say today regarding Israel-Palestine. That is true. The evidence regarding King’s views on Israel is complicated and contradictory.
Although the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee denounced Israel’s actions against Palestinians, King found himself conflicted. Like many black leaders of the time, he recognised European Jewry as a persecuted, oppressed and homeless people striving to build a nation of their own, and he wanted to show solidarity with the Jewish community, which had been a critically important ally in the civil rights movement.
Today, we can only speculate about where King would stand. Yet I find myself in agreement with historian Robin DG Kelley, who concluded that if King had the opportunity to study the current situation in the same way he had studied Vietnam, “his unequivocal opposition to violence, colonialism, racism and militarism would have made him an incisive critic of Israel’s current policies.”Indeed, King’s views may have evolved alongside many other spiritually grounded thinkers, like Rabbi Brian Walt, who has spoken publicly about the reasons he abandoned his faith in what he viewed as political Zionism. To him, he recently explained to me, “liberal Zionism meant that I believed in the creation of a Jewish state that would be a cultural center for Jewish people, a desperately needed safe haven for Jews around the world, and a state that would reflect as well as honour the highest ideals of the Jewish tradition.” He said he grew up in South Africa in a family that shared those views and identified as a liberal Zionist.
The time he spent in the occupied territories, visiting more than 20 times, forever changed him. He told me that he watched Palestinian homes being bulldozed while people cried — children’s toys strewn over one demolished site — and saw Palestinian lands confiscated to make way for new illegal settlements subsidised by the Israeli government.