"If Israel decides to give full rights to only one ethnic group and fewer rights to others, it loses its democratic soul and with it its Jewish one."
— Jeremy Ben-Ami, The Forward (Jan. 3, 2025)
"What began as a terrible trauma and a justified war of defense turned into a campaign of killing and revenge that has no end."
— Uri Misgav, Haaretz (Jan. 9, 2025)
On Jan. 26, 2005, the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon thought he was quoting Martin Luther King Jr.: “You declare, my friend, that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely anti-Zionist. And 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.” You may think that this sounds like King, but it is a forgery.
King praised the Jews for support in the civil rights movement, and he did support Israel’s right to defend itself in the 1967 Six Day War. He was also right to criticize the vicious antisemitism found in the speeches of Stokely Carmichael, Malcom X and others.
I am confident that he would have agreed with me, and many others, that those who criticize Israel’s various governments are not antisemitic. I also believe, if he lived long enough to see the decades of suffering of the Palestinian people, he would have joined us in calling for justice for the Palestinians in their own land.
King spoke out strongly, as early as 1948, against the apartheid (“separateness” of the races) regime in South Africa. He understood why after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre that took the lives of 70 nonviolent protesters, the African National Congress established an armed wing that participated in destruction of infrastructure across the country.
King’s advisers had long exhorted him to speak against the Vietnam War. Finally, in an address at the Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, King declared that “I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted.” I suggest substituting Palestine for Vietnam.
When Carter met with Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat in September 1978, he wanted to include the Palestinians. As former Carter adviser Stuart Eizenstat explained: “Carter told me he saw Palestinians as akin to the Black population of the South, whose discrimination he had witnessed firsthand.” The Camp David Accords ended with no agreement on any Palestinian demands.
In 1977, before the Camp David talks, Begin and Sadat had a preliminary meeting at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel. On July 22, 1946, Begin, leading the Jewish Irgun militia, led a terrorist attack on this hotel and 91 were killed and 47 were injured.
Chaim Weizmann, soon to be the first president of Israel, declared: “I can’t help feeling proud of our boys.” The hypocrisy of condemning Palestinian violence in view of the history of Zionist terrorism is contemptible. This was just one of many Israeli attacks and targeted assassinations over the next 78 years.
There was much controversy about Carter’s book "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid." The book’s use of the term apartheid was the most contentious claim. But even three former Israeli leaders agree that Israel is, or would become, an apartheid state. In 2002, the former Israeli attorney general declared: “We established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories.”
In 2010, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak stated: “If millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.” In the same year former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert asserted: “If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, we then have a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights.”
The sad fact is that the current government does not support a two-state solution; indeed, some of Netanyahu’s colleagues want to annex Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank, leaving nothing for the Palestinians.
I agree with those scholars who claim that Israel has been acting like a colonial power. With very few exceptions colonial administrations have never given up their power, and those colonized, after decades of oppression and patient waiting, have resorted to violence to gain their independence.
Martin Luther King sums up this truth: “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
Gier is a long-time member of the Latah County Human Rights Task Force. Read other articles on this issue at nfgier.com/?s=israel+palestinians. Email him at ngier006@gmail.com.
