BALANCED AND GUARDED
Martin Luther King Jr. on the Arab-Israeli Tightrope
IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT on a summer night in 1967, and a dejected Martin Luther King Jr. was on the telephone speaking frankly about his depressed feelings. On the evening of July 24 King had begun a lengthy telephone conference call with several of his trusted associates. One topic dominated the discussion. At the end of the conversation, which lasted into the early hours of July 25, one of King’s advisers, Harry Wachtel, tried to encourage the dejected civil rights leader: “Martin do not despair, you are on the right track.” King responded gloomily: “There were dark days before, but this is the darkest.”1 What did he mean? He had lived through many difficult times. What were King and his associates talking about that made him so depressed that he called those days “the darkest” in his life?
The subject was the Arab-Israeli conflict, particularly how the war that had broken out in the Middle East the previous month might affect the public pilgrimage to the region that King had been planning for more than a year. He told his aides that if he went ahead with the pilgrimage after Israel’s lightning victory and occupation of the Christian holy sites in Jerusalem and the West Bank in the first week of June 1967, “I’d run into the situation where I’m damned if I say this and I’m damned if I say that no matter what I’d say, and I’ve already faced enough criticism including pro-Arab. . . . I just think that if I go, the Arab world, and of course Africa and Asia for that matter, would interpret this as endorsing everything that Israel has done, and I do have questions of doubt. . . . I don’t think I could come out unscathed.”2 Too much was at stake: his vision of how to continue the fight for civil rights, how to respond to the challenges to that vision posed by rival Black Power militants, his need to speak out against war and uphold the principle of nonviolence, and his need to maintain good ties with Jewish supporters. The Arab-Israeli conflict was a headache King did not need.
Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the most significant figures in the United States during the 1960s. He cofounded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, and his advocacy of peaceful change and nonviolent resistance, combined with his eloquent oratory and piercing sense of moral authenticity, catapulted him quickly to national and international recognition. The latter was pointedly indicated by the bestowal of the Nobel Peace Prize on him in October of 1964. Yet King did not simply champion the struggle of American blacks; he also spoke out against war, poverty, and injustice more generally. In particular, he watched events in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as anticolonial struggles broke out left and right in the 1950s and 1960s. He called for a boycott of the racist regime in South Africa, and in December of 1957 he gave a speech in which he acknowledged the interconnectedness of global struggles for independence with that being waged by blacks in America: “The determination of Negro Americans to win freedom from all forms of oppression springs from the same deep longing that motivates oppressed peoples all over the world. The rumblings of discontent in Asia and Africa are expressions of a quest for freedom and human dignity by people who have long been the victims of colonialism and imperialism.”3 Ten years later, in April of 1967, amid much controversy, he denounced the Vietnam War. By that fateful year, King had become a strong voice on the side of peace and justice throughout the world and an outspoken critic of American foreign policy.
Like other black leaders, King came face-to-face both with the intricacies of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the need to respond to the 1967 war carefully. Contrary to what generally is written about King, he was not a knee-jerk supporter of Israel to the detriment of the Palestinians and other Arabs. To be sure, King worked closely with Jews and Jewish organizations. He addressed Jewish groups early in his career, speaking, for example, at the annual convention of the American Jewish Congress in Miami Beach, Florida, in May of 1958. Prominent Jews such as American Jewish Congress president Joachim Prinz and theologian Rabbi Abraham Heschel supported King’s civil rights efforts. Heschel even awarded King the Synagogue Council of America’s Judaism and World Peace Award in December of 1965. Jews also were disproportionately well represented among those who contributed financially to the SCLC. All of this afforded him the opportunity to learn about Israel and the depth of American Jews’ feelings about it.
As a Protestant Christian clergyman, King was also intimately familiar with the Bible and its stories about how God gave the ancient Hebrews the Promised Land in ancient Canaan. It was a standard feature of black Protestant Christianity to relate black suffering to that of the ancient Hebrews. Thus, the modern Zionist saga of the Jews returning to the Promised Land was well known to King; in fact, the night before he was murdered, King eerily compared himself to Moses—whom God did not allow to enter the Promised Land along with the Hebrews according to the biblical account—when he said to a gathering of black admirers in Memphis, Tennessee, “I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”4
KING IN PALESTINE
In fact, King’s interest in the biblical Holy Land led him to make a short trip to East Jerusalem and the West Bank in March of 1959. His sojourn to the region came at the end of a trip he and his wife, Coretta, made to India in February of 1959 to study the life and teachings of the famous Indian freedom fighter and advocate of nonviolent resistance, Mohandas K. Gandhi. Coming four months before Malcolm X’s trip to the city, it marked the first time that a major figure in the black freedom struggle actually visited the Palestinians’ homeland. The trip allowed King to come face-to-face with Palestinians and hear their story, something that led him to understand the Palestinians’ plight in ways that hitherto has escaped the attention of historians.
On their return trip to the United States from India, the Kings briefly visited the Middle East. After flying to Beirut, Lebanon, on March 10, 1959, and spending the night, the Kings flew the next day to Qalandiya Airport just north of East Jerusalem, in the Jordanian-controlled West Bank. Shortly after 3:00 p.m., Dr. Vicken Kalbian received a telephone call from Lucy Khuri of the Jordanian government tourist office at the airport. She told the young Armenian doctor that none other than Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife had just arrived on the daily Middle East Airlines flight from Beirut and needed to see a doctor. Taken aback, Kalbian asked, “Are you sure it’s him?” “Yes,” Khuri replied. Kalbian then took his medical satchel and traveled the short distance to where the Kings were staying at the YMCA hostel in East Jerusalem right near the cease-fire line with Israeli West Jerusalem. When Kalbian made his house call, he found himself face-to-face with America’s most famous civil rights leader.5
Dr. Kalbian was the son of a very prominent physician, Vahan Kalbian, who was born in Diyarbakir (now in Turkey) and who received his M.D. in 1914 from The American University of Beirut. Despite being an Armenian, the elder Kalbian was drafted into the Ottoman military and appointed by the military governor of Syria, Jemal Pasha, to administer all hospitals in Jerusalem during the latter years of the First World War. With the British army’s entrance into Jerusalem in late 1917, Kalbian defected from the Ottoman army, stayed in Jerusalem, and served Palestine’s new rulers for many years as the private physician to all the British high commissioners who served from 1920 to 1948. His son, Vicken, was born in the city, grew up speaking Arabic as well as Armenian, and was well-integrated into Arab life in the city.
The Arab-Israeli conflict changed all that. In early 1948 the Kalbian family fled its spacious home in West Jerusalem’s Talbiyya District following orders to evacuate that were broadcast over loudspeakers by the Hagana, the main Zionist militia in Palestine. Like virtually all other Palestinian refugees, the Kalbians—even though they were not ethnic Arabs—were barred by the Israelis from returning, lost their home, and took up permanent residence in the eastern part of Jerusalem, which was controlled by Jordan as a result of the 1948 war. Vicken thereafter followed in his father’s footsteps and became a doctor, obtaining his MD from The American University in Beirut in 1949. He soon joined his father working at Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem.6
When he entered the Kings’ room at the hostel that day in March of 1959, Kalbian found the couple in their beds. His first thought was that the famous African American looked exactly like the image of him that Kalbian had seen on the cover of Time magazine two years earlier.7 In the course of examining King, the latter showed him the scar he had from the emergency surgery he underwent the year before after he was stabbed by a would-be assassin in New York. After he was finished examining King, Kalbian called in a prescription to a local pharmacy. Before he could leave, however, King then told him, “Sit down; we’d like to talk.” King confessed to the doctor that he never had heard the Arab point of view about the Arab-Israeli conflict and wanted to hear about it. Kalbian told him about the situation; thus, the noted American civil rights leader heard about the plight of the Palestinians directly from someone whose own boyhood home was one of thousands left behind by the fleeing refugees eleven years earlier.8
Kalbian also told King that he really should meet and talk to some Palestinian officials while in Jerusalem and that he would arrange it. After he left, Kalbian informed the owner of the YMCA, Labib Nasir, about the famous guest staying in his hostel. “Why didn’t someone tell me he was here?” replied the startled Nasir. Kalbian and Nasir decided to invite some prominent Palestinians to a dinner for King that was held later at the National Restaurant. Attendees included Ruhi al-Khatib, the mayor of East Jerusalem; Musa Nasir, an academic; Anton Atallah, a judge; Raja al-Isa, a journalist; and Anwar Nusseibeh, a politician and statesman. Kalbian himself could not make the dinner, but King apparently enjoyed it, for he later thanked him for arranging it.9
The Kings were well enough to tour the sites and shrines in East Jerusalem the day after their arrival. On their third day the couple traveled to the holy sites in Bethlehem and Hebron, home, respectively, to the Church of the Nativity, where church tradition says Jesus was born, and the Ibrahimi Mosque, which reputedly contains the tombs of the biblical patriarch Abraham and some of his family. The following day, the Kings traveled to Nablus, the biblical Shechem, which contains the Tomb of Joseph and is close to Mount Gerizim, home of the Samaritan community. They attended a Samaritan religious ceremony there and later rented a car and drove to the ancient city of Jericho, near the Jordan River, before returning to the United States after a stop in Cairo.10
Visiting the Middle East and meeting with Kalbian and Palestinian dignitaries in East Jerusalem appears to have made an impact on King. Just over two weeks after landing at the East Jerusalem airport, he was back home in Atlanta delivering his Easter sermon at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church on March 29, 1959. On that particular Easter morning, King’s recent sojourn to Jerusalem and the West Bank was clearly still on his mind, as he titled his sermon “A Walk Through the Holy Land.” He may have been including the Middle East when he spoke these words about the Third World and the struggles of its people, words that also were relevant to the black Americans sitting in the pews before him: “I think we know today there is a struggle, a desperate struggle, going on in this world. Two-thirds of the people of the world are colored people. They have been dominated politically, exploited economically, trampled over, and humiliated. There is a struggle on the part of these people to gain freedom and human dignity.” That the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict were still in his thoughts was also illustrated by the fact that the next day, King wrote a letter in which me mentioned that while in Jerusalem, he had talked to “many people” about the conflict. Given that he had stayed in the Arab-side of the divided city, these “many people” could only have been Palestinians.11
THE MIDDLE EAST PILGRIMAGE IDEA
The plight of the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict remained on King’s mind as the 1950s turned into the 1960s. In October of 1964, for example, he received a letter from an American living in Israel who brought to his attention Israel’s discriminatory policies toward its Palestinian minority. Richard Krech was an American Jew who had been involved in the civil rights movement in the United States but by that point was living on the left-wing kibbutz of Sasa, in Israel’s northern Galilee region—a kibbutz built on the ruins of a destroyed Palestinian village, Sa‘sa. He wrote King a plaintive letter describing the situation faced by Israel’s Palestinian citizens, including the fact that they lived under a martial law regime and were required to carry travel passes to move around just like blacks were required to do in apartheid South Africa. Krech urged King to use his “great moral influence” to dissuade Israel from continuing these policies.12
The Middle East continued to garner King’s attention, factor into his career, and perhaps increase his ambivalence about taking sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Various Jewish quarters clamored for him to visit Israel. The Israelis no doubt believed that successfully wooing such a man of high moral standing to visit their country would be a major public relations coup. The Israeli government invited him in the summer of 1962, but Ze’ev Dover, Israeli consul in Atlanta, advised the Israeli embassy in Washington that the time was not right. He explained that Israeli officials were trying to cultivate relations with southerners, and King was too controversial among southern whites.13
The next year, King was invited by Ben-Zion Ilan of the Israeli Histadrut labor federation in Israel. King accepted the offer and was scheduled to visit Israel along with his close SCLC associate Ralph Abernathy in July of 1963 for an eight-day visit. In the end, however, King cancelled the trip at the last minute.14 In the spring of 1965 the American Jewish Committee proposed a trip to Israel, where King would be a guest of the Israeli government. He accepted this invitation in May of 1965 but never acted on it. The following year, Israeli ambassador to the United States Avraham Harmon wrote King, reminding him that the invitation was still open.15
King did not accept these invitations, but about that same time, he began developing plans to travel to the Middle East on his own. He started planning a huge pilgrimage of American Christians who would travel both to Israel and the West Bank in late 1967. King must have been affected deeply enough by his own pilgrimage to the Holy Land that he wanted to return in the company of others, although on his own terms, not as an honored guest of Israeli and Jewish groups. He and his SCLC colleagues also were going to use the pilgrimage as a fund-raiser for the SCLC.
King’s pilgrimage idea was ambitious. Its origins apparently lay in a letter he received from Sandy F. Ray, president of the Empire State Baptist Convention and an official in the SCLC. King then wrote to a black-owned tour company set up by Ray and two other clergymen, Concreta Tours, on June 24, 1966, with a proposal for the trip. The tour company envisioned a pilgrimage of at least thirty-five hundred people, at $775.00 per person, who would travel to the Middle East on one of three different itineraries. The highlight of the pilgrimage would be a sermon that King would deliver for all three groups on the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem on November 11, 1967, followed by another sermon at the Sea of Galilee (Lake Tiberias) in northern Israel on November 16. The trip would also take pilgrims to Paris, Rome, and Athens.16
In November of 1966 King dispatched a trusted confidant to the Middle East to assess the possibilities of undertaking such a trip. Andrew Young had become the SCLC’s executive director in 1964 at the tender age of thirty-two. Young did not travel using SCLC funds, however; earlier that June, he had been invited to participate in a twelve-day “study mission” in Israel by Irving M. Engel, the American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) honorary president. Engel explained that the AJC was inviting twelve black leaders from the United States to participate in one of three groups that would undertake a twelve-day study mission in Israel. Young ended up accepting the invitation and planned to go with the second group, which traveled to the Middle East from November 17 to November 28, 1966. The trip took Young and his wife, Jean, to a number of locales in Israel, including Rehovoth, Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Caesaria, Haifa, Acre, Nazareth, Tiberias, Jerusalem, and Beersheba, as well as some Druze Arab villages and Kibbutz Lavi. While there, Young swam in the Jordan River and even met the legendary Israeli politician David Ben-Gurion.17 In addition to the study tour’s itinerary, Young spent some time looking into some preliminary details of King’s proposed pilgrimage.
Young also crossed from Israeli-controlled West Jerusalem into East Jerusalem and met with Dr. Vicken Kalbian. Young had heard about Kalbian from King and wanted to discuss with him some of the medical details about that part of the pilgrimage that would take place in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Kalbian was quite impressed with Young. He described the young SCLC official as “a most impressive guy: polished and cultured,” and he found Young’s wife, Jean, “beautiful” and “statuesque.” Young explained to the doctor that King wanted to bring as many as two thousand pilgrims with him on the pilgrimage. Because many of them would be elderly, Young said that the organizers would need to prepare for possible medical emergencies, including providing ambulances to drive people with medical conditions down into the Jordan Valley for that part of the pilgrimage.18 Young and his wife also attended a reception hosted by Hanna Nazzal, the Palestinian owner of Terra Santa Tours.
Young wrote to Kalbian after his return to the United States, thanking him for the conversation, which had included talk about the Arab-Israeli conflict. “Your view of the Palestine situation was most helpful,” he wrote. At the same time, Young confided to his colleagues that he was not sure whether the 1948 Palestinian refugees really still wanted to go back home or if that was just being stated for propaganda purposes.19
Starting in November of 1966, King began wondering whether he should cancel the pilgrimage because of the increasingly worrisome political situation in the Middle East. On November 13, 1966, several thousand Israeli forces crossed into the West Bank and raided the Palestinian village of Sammu‘ in response to the killing of three Israeli border patrolmen by a mine two days earlier (for which Israeli blamed al-Fateh guerrillas entering from the West Bank). The Israeli forces destroyed dozens of homes in the village and engaged in fighting with Jordanian troops before withdrawing. Israel’s actions drew widespread international condemnation and planted seeds of doubt in King’s mind about the advisability of the pilgrimage idea. In a November 23, 1966, conversation that King had in Atlanta with his close aide Stanley Levison, he mentioned that he was reconsidering traveling to the Middle East.20 Young returned from the region the next day and later spoke with King about the situation, the trip, and the political delicacies King might face in stepping into the Arab-Israeli conflict now that violence in the region was resuming.
The FBI was tapping Levison’s telephone and monitored a conversation he had with Young on December 1, 1966. Young told Levison that while he was in the Middle East the previous month, he had told both Israeli and Jordanian officials—who were anxious for the high-profile American to visit—that King’s primary purpose in traveling there would not be political but that he could not guarantee that King would remain silent on the issue. Young reported that they did not seem concerned with that and that, overall, he did not foresee any problems with the pilgrimage unless the region exploded into an actual war. Levison and Young also discussed other potential problems, including how ordinary blacks would interpret the pilgrimage idea and the money and attention that would be focused on it.21
News of King’s hesitancy began to spread. Hearing of his concern, the American ambassador to Jordan, Findley Burns Jr., wrote to him in January of 1967 urging him not to cancel the trip. He admonished King: “Cancellation at this time, giving as the reason conditions in the Middle East, could lead to misunderstandings which, in my opinion, would be disadvantageous to all concerned.”22
The June war six months later, combined with Israel’s resultant occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, obviously posed even more serious challenges for King’s plan to lead a peaceful pilgrimage into an area at least part of which was now under Israeli military rule. Within three weeks of the war’s conclusion, Emily Fortson of the company handling the pilgrimage details, Concreta Tours, traveled to Israel and the West Bank to assess the situation and determine how the war had affected planning for the event. The local tour organizers and others were upbeat about the prospects (no doubt desperate for tourism in the war-torn region), but King remained hesitant.23
Another reason for King’s reluctance to proceed with the pilgrimage was that the Middle East put him in a difficult position politically. King was a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who had come out against the Vietnam War publicly in April of 1967 and needed to maintain his reputation as a peacemaker. Would the pilgrimage be interpreted as a backhanded endorsement of Israel’s preemptive attack on the Arabs in the June war and subsequent military occupation of Arab territory? Furthering his dilemma was the fact that King also had long enjoyed good relations with American Jews and Jewish organizations, and he wanted to retain their support. He knew that Jews had been deeply concerned about Israel’s fate as the crisis grew in May of 1967 and had been virtually unanimous in hailing Israel’s subsequent victory as a momentous deliverance from what they had feared was the country’s imminent destruction.
In fact, to shore up his credentials with Jewish allies, King had lent his signature to a pro-Israeli advertisement placed in the New York Times on June 4, the day before hostilities broke out. The group responsible for the advertisement was a new one called Americans for Democracy in the Middle East, headed by journalist and editor at Forbes magazine Charles E. Silberman.24 The advertisement was titled “The Moral Responsibility in the Middle East” and stated that “men of good faith must recognize their moral responsibility to maintain freedom of passage at the Straits of Tiran.”25 King did not actually read the text of the advertisement, but two days after it appeared, the savvy civil rights leader conceded to Levison that his signature probably would help his standing in the Jewish community. Levison, who was Jewish, disagreed, telling King that only 10 percent of SCLC’s donations came from Jews.26
At the same time, King worried about appearing too supportive of Israel. He obviously knew about the Palestinian perspective on the conflict from his 1959 trip to the West Bank and East Jerusalem. King was also aware of the growing Black Power movement and the degree to which its militancy had eaten into his civil rights constituency, especially among young people. Sensitive to the intersection of racial politics and the Arab-Israeli conflict, he therefore was not eager to compromise his standing among black radicals further. King admitted to Levison on June 6, 1967, that he had not seen the advertisement’s text before agreeing to support it and, after actually reading it in the newspaper, thought that it was unbalanced and tilted too much toward Israel. He believed it made him and the other signatories seem like hawks on the Middle East and doves on Vietnam. King’s ambivalence also came out in a June 8, 1967, conference telephone call he had with his aides when he confessed to being aware that SNCC had criticized him and the advertisement. His sensitivity about being attacked by SNCC may have been a factor in his refusal to condemn SNCC when the newsletter controversy erupted later that August.27
King was clearly conflicted about the Middle East and concerned about his image as an internationally known peacemaker. During that same June 8, 1967, conference call, King sought out advice from Young, Levison, and Harry Wachtel about what to say regarding the Middle East. He believed that if pressed to speak out, he could just emphasize his overall philosophy that war does not solve social and political problems. The fact that the apostle of nonviolence had come out strongly against the American war in Vietnam in his famous “A Time to Break Silence” speech at the Riverside Church in New York in April of 1967 was another reason why it was becoming increasingly difficult for King to be associated with Israel’s preemptive strike and subsequent military occupation of Arab territory, territory that included the holiest shrines in Christianity. King was also worried about Israel becoming “smug and unyielding” after its massive victory.28
With the short war over and King still worried about both the pilgrimage and what to say publicly about Israel, he decided on a course of action that he hoped would satisfy all sides whenever he was asked about his thoughts on the recent hostilities. It was developed in conversations with his aides. As far back as December of 1966, Young had mentioned to Levison that while he was in the Middle East, he held a conversation with a man from the Middle East Council of Churches who mentioned that Arab-Israeli peace would only come when the Arab world became more developed.29 Six months later Young repeated this idea during the June 8, 1967, conference call, noting that this idea of peace through development also was expressed in the February 1965 “Pacem in Terris” conference in New York, which had discussed Pope John XXIII’s 1963 “Pacem in terris” encyclical.30 Wachtel then wrote a draft telegram to President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet premier Alexei Kosygyn ten days later on June 18—presumably it was written on behalf of King—in which he used this approach to explain how to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict peacefully: “For Israel peace requires firm and unequivocal insurance of their territorial integrity so that their people may continue with security to build their nation without diverting their resources towards armament and war. For the Arab world peace requires the elimination of poverty, illiteracy and disease which has prevented these Third World nations from developing stable, viable lives for their many millions of people.”31
King seems to have been pleased, for his public comments thereafter reflected what his aides had suggested. King decided to emphasize his solid support for Israel’s right to exist, if not for Israeli actions during the war or thereafter. Whatever he may have thought about the intricacies of the Arab-Israeli conflict, King clearly believed that Israel had a right to exist as a state, and he had no qualms about affirming this point. But he also he understood enough about the Palestinians from firsthand experience to know that unless their plight somehow was addressed, the conflict would continue.
King therefore chose to balance his public assertion of Israel’s right to exist with an indirect acknowledgment of the Arab point of view—but in economic, not political, terms. He chose to speak out about how poverty and the lack of economic development in the Arab world kept the pot of violence and war boiling, and he eschewed any overt discussion of the political bases of Arab grievances, such as Palestinian dispossession, the fate of the 1948 refugees, compensation for their property losses, and so forth. This was about as close to expressing overt sympathy for Arab perspectives as King was willing to go in public while still maintaining his identity and his vision of political allies and action.
This two-track approach was made clear a week after the war ended, when on June 18, 1967, journalists from the ABC television program Issues and Answers interviewed King and asked him about the recent fighting. King stated that prewar Arab talk of driving Israel into the sea was “terribly immoral” and that the Jewish state offered a good example of what people can do together to transform “almost a desert land into an oasis.” Peace required security for Israel. Yet King also acknowledged that so long as people are poor, as many Arabs were, they are going to make “intemperate remarks. They are going to keep the war psychosis alive”—which was a tacit comparison with the socioeconomic bases of American black anger and violence. Peace therefore required a type of “Marshall Plan for the Middle East” to spur economic development for all.
When pressed to comment about whether Israel should return the Arab territories it occupied during the war, King was forced to get off message and go beyond palatable platitudes to answer that specific political question. Still, he chose his words carefully and used qualifying language: “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.”32 These were prescient words indeed.
King was also worried that the recent war would derail the peace movement that was trying to organize additional large, national protests against the Vietnam War. Even before war broke out, his aides believed that the peace movement was “suffering badly” because Jews, who were highly represented within antiwar ranks, had all become hawks when it came to events in the Middle East. Levison complained on June 6, 1967, that the war had become a “real monkey wrench” in the peace movement and that King’s hopes for a major peace march in August were now pointless. King agreed, but he remained anxious to keep public attention focused on Vietnam, even though war in the Middle East had “confused it a great deal.”33
In the end the 1967 war and the political concerns surrounding a trip to the Middle East led King to cancel his planned pilgrimage. By mid-June of 1967 Levison claimed that only about two hundred people had made reservations for the trip instead of the several thousand that King had hoped for.34 King called his close aides on July 24 to determine what to do. King feared that his presence in Jerusalem in particular would be problematic inasmuch as “they [the Israelis] have annexed Jerusalem, and any way you say it they don’t plan to give it up.”35
After a lengthy discussion, King finally opined that his instincts had usually proven to be sound and that his instincts in this instance told him that “I don’t think I could come out unscathed” from the trip. His image as a peacemaker would be tarnished, and his mind seemed to be made up.
King wrote to the head of Concreta Tours on September 6, 1967, expressing his desire to cancel. The SCLC leader cited a flare-up of Egyptian-Israeli shelling across the new front lines along the Suez Canal as a reason. King also stated that it would “compromise” his beliefs in nonviolence and democracy to take a trip to Greece and risk appearing to support the Greek Colonels—the leaders of the military coup that had overthrown the Greek government in April of 1967—given that the pilgrimage’s itinerary included Athens. He followed that up with a letter to El Al Israel Airlines, the Israeli national carrier, officially cancelling the pilgrimage. His letter cited four reasons for doing so. First, he claimed that he could not conduct a trip that was “free from political over tones [sic]”—a direct reference to his desire to avoid embroiling himself in the political questions raised by the war and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Second, while he agreed that it was safe for Americans to travel to Israel and the West Bank, ordinary American citizens who read about the ongoing violence along the new Arab-Israeli cease-fire lines might feel that the situation was too dangerous. Third, he did not want to do something that might connote support for the Greek junta. Finally, King claimed that the Newark, Detroit, and other inner-city black rebellions that summer were placing great demands on his time and energy.36 King’s 1959 trip remained the only time he ever visited the Middle East.
KING ON THE TIGHTROPE
Public perceptions about King’s stance toward the Arab-Israeli conflict continued to trouble him thereafter. Just six days after writing to El Al Israel Airlines, King felt compelled to write another letter dealing with Israel. In mid-August the SNCC newsletter controversy erupted. King had been traveling and when pressed by the media for comment deftly demurred by stating that he had not read that particular issue of the SNCC Newsletter. Two weeks later, the National Conference for New Politics in Chicago adopted the statement condemning Israel and Zionism for starting the June war. This time it was harder for King to sidestep the issue, given that he had opened the conference with the keynote speech. Several major American Jewish organizations—among them the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, the United Synagogues of America, and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith—sent King a telegram shortly after the conference ended asking that he publicly distance himself from the gathering because of the statement on Israel. The telegram argued that because King had opened the conference with a speech, he might be perceived as endorsing its subsequent resolutions.
King felt forced to act. He had in fact been suspicious of the direction the conference seemed to be taking even before it began, and the storm of controversy that emerged no doubt confirmed his concerns. His aides had been told in advance that issues relating to Israel were hindering the work of conference planning. Levison had held a phone conversation on August 24, 1967, shortly before the conference began, with Richard A. Russell, a Jewish businessman, activist, and part owner of Ramparts magazine. Russell was close to King and occupied a seat on the executive board of the National Conference for New Politics. He indicated that he was resigning from the committee because he had tried and failed to have fellow board member Stokely Carmichael removed. Russell could no longer work with Carmichael given his “pro-Arab, pro-Nasser point of view,” and inasmuch as he had encouraged King to become involved with the conference, he told Levison to let King know of his action.37
Second, King must have believed that he could not ignore a communication directed to him by such high-profile Jewish allies. Much therefore rode on how he responded, and King chose his words carefully when he responded to the telegram. As far back as June 6, Levison had advised King that if he must make a statement on the Middle East that he include something to the effect that Israel’s existence and territorial integrity were “incontestable.”38 King adopted this suggestion almost verbatim. “Israel’s right to exist as a state in security,” King diplomatically wrote to the Jewish organizations on September 28, 1967, “is incontestable”—a statement that Levison seems to have written and that, while not repudiating the conference or its condemnation of Israel, nonetheless served to assure the Jewish groups about his support of Israel’s right to exist. The American Jewish Committee seemed pleased and thereafter issued a press release that quoted from King’s letter.39
King and SCLC leaders continued to deal with the Arab-Israeli conflict and its domestic ramifications for blacks and Jews. They believed that beyond the question of Israel, they had to say something about the delicate question of whether SNCC and the National Conference for New Politics went beyond being anti-Israeli and were in fact being anti-Semitic in their statements, as Jewish groups and even certain black leaders were claiming. The SCLC issued a statement titled “Anti-Semitism, Israel, and SCLC: A Statement on Press Distortions” soon after King wrote back to the Jewish organizations about his position on the New Politics conference, Israel, and anti-Semitism.
The statement essentially repeated for public consumption what King had written in his response to the Jewish organizations. It upheld Israel’s right to exist but took care to follow King’s two-pronged approach, balancing support for Israel with recognition that the roots of the problem lay in the region’s economic underdevelopment. It noted, inter alia: “SCLC and Dr. King have repeatedly stated that the Middle East peace embodies the related problems of security and development. Israel’s right to exist as a state in security is incontestable. At the same time, the great powers have the obligation to recognize that the Arab world is in a state of imposed poverty and backwardness that must threaten peace and harmony. Until a concerted and democratic program of assistance is effected, tensions cannot be relieved. Neither Israel nor its neighbors can live in peace without an underlying basis of social and economic development.” It also was careful to note that ultimate peace required action and vision on both sides: “The solution will have to be found in statesmanship by Israel and progressive Arab forces who in concert with the great powers recognize that fair and peaceful solutions are the concern of all humanity and must be found. . . . Neither military measures nor a stubborn effort to reverse history can provide a permanent solution for peoples who need and deserve both development and security.” Rather than simply blaming each side, especially the Arabs, for intransigence or fanaticism, the statement instead offered a left wing–sounding economic analysis by noting that “at the heart of the problem are oil interests.” Finally, the SCLC statement condemned anti-Semitism firmly and clearly: “SCLC will continue tirelessly to condemn racism whether its form is white supremacy or anti-semitism.”40 King was being measured, cautious, and nuanced.
King continued to be cognizant of the conflict and the fine line he was forced to walk in his approach to it. He had a vision of working carefully within the system to uphold. Some of his advisers pushed him to come out more forcefully for Israel, despite the apparent contradictions inherent in an advocate of nonviolence championing a country that was now subjecting the West Bank, Gaza, Golan, and Sinai to a military occupation. SCLC board member Wyatt Tee Walker wrote him in late August of 1967 to ask him to sign another pro-Israeli statement. “Israel deserves a chance to survive,” Walker wrote. “I remain a pacifist; but the information I have seems to justify Israel’s response to the Arab threat—fight or die!”41 Despite such advice, King knew that the Palestinian question was only going to grow in intensity unless it was resolved; merely having Israel use its military power to subdue the Arabs was no solution, as he noted in “Anti-Semitism, Israel, and SCLC: A Statement on Press Distortions.” Years later his aide Jesse Jackson recalled King mentioning that the Palestinian question was going to grow into a major problem. “I remember Martin telling me before he died,” Jackson noted, “that was gonna be the next big new tension in the world, about the Palestinians.”42
As 1967 turned into 1968, King remained obliged to dance among the raindrops of racial and ethnic politics and to keep in mind how they intersected with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Publicly, he stuck with his two-pronged strategy about how to respond to questions concerning Israel and the Middle East. King continued to speak out in support of Israel’s right to exist, if not its policies, and took pains in this regard to set himself apart from Black Power advocates’ position on the Middle East. This helped him burnish his insider credentials. All the while, however, he balanced this with his call for improving Arab standards of living in hopes that this would lessen Arab rejection of Israel, which helped his image as an outsider prophet of peace and justice.
King exemplified this approach when he spoke at the Rabbinical Assembly’s convention at Kiamesha Lake, New York, on March 25, 1968, telling his Jewish audience that the 1967 war engendered “various responses” in the United States, stressing that “the response of some of the so-called young militants again does not represent the position of the vast majority of Negroes.” He took a swipe at black nationalists and their vision of racial solidarity with the Third World by stating that such people were “color-consumed” and “see a kind of mystique in being colored” that prompts them to condemn anything that is not. King then assured the conference that he considered Israel to be “one of the great outposts of democracy in the world,” an “oasis of brotherhood and democracy.”
True to form, King did not ignore the Arab world in his address, taking pains once again to state that while peace for Israel meant physical security, peace for the Arab world meant “economic security.” Dismissing the Arabs’ hostility to Israel as a “quest to find scapegoats” to blame for their economic insecurity—and thus continuing to ignore public discussion of what he clearly knew by that point were the political bases for Arab grievances—King argued that alleviating Arab economic insecurity could lead to peace: “Peace for Israel means security. . . . On the other hand, we must see what peace for the Arabs means in a real sense of security on another level. Peace for the Arabs means the kind of economic security that they so desperately need. These nations, as you know, are part of that third world of hunger, of disease, of illiteracy. I think that as long as these conditions exist there will be tensions, there will be the endless quest to find scapegoats.”43
Ten days later King was dead, killed by an assassin’s bullet in Memphis, Tennessee. As is the case with Malcolm X, we can only speculate about how King’s stance toward the Arab-Israeli conflict might have evolved had he lived. He knew the realities faced by all sides in the conflict, yet he took his role as peacemaker seriously enough not to champion either side’s behavior in a consistent manner. King also knew that the issue was not going away and that as a peacemaker he no doubt would continue to have to face it. Like other mainstream civil rights leaders and Black Power activists, King’s vision of black identity and place within America undergirded his stance on the Arab-Israeli conflict.
What is clear after King’s death, however, is the way that certain partisans of the conflict strove to paint him and his legacy as being supportive of their side of the issue. Such a powerful moral voice belonging to a man who epitomized much of what Americans considered good about the 1960s was considered a prize catch, and activists of various stripes long have tried to claim him as an advocate for the justice of their cause. In the years since his death, pro-Israeli commentators in particular have claimed that King lined up solidly behind the Jewish state. Suspicion about the veracity of some of his alleged expressions of support for Israel and Zionism emerged when a book appeared in 1999 that contained a letter supposedly written by King in 1967 claiming that anti-Zionism was really just a form of anti-Semitism. But “Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend” turned out to be a hoax. A number of persons have tried to track down where the counterfeit letter first appeared, or who created it, to no avail.44 Regardless of what really happened, it shows the degree to which being able to lay claim to King’s prestige and legacy continues to be seen as valuable political currency vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict in the twenty-first century.
Despite whatever proponents of Israel or the Palestinians claim that King thought or would have thought about the Arab-Israeli conflict, King clearly understood the pain and suffering of both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs alike from his travels and contacts, and he tried to remain balanced and guarded in his public pronouncements about the conflict. In this way his approach to the Middle East was markedly different both from Black Power militants like those in SNCC and from fellow civil rights leaders like Roy Wilkins and Bayard Rustin. Beyond his own ambivalence about being a pacifist taking sides in an armed conflict, King’s caution also emanated from his fear of alienating Jewish supporters, on the one hand, and further antagonizing Black Power detractors, on the other. His views on racial identity and his mission as an advocate of wider nonviolent socioeconomic change in the United States found him straddling the divide between Jewish solidarity and Black Power concepts of revolutionary Third World identity. He surely spoke positively about Israel as a country and its right to exist, but these attitudes did not extend to condoning Israeli conduct.
Black Power pro-Palestinian criticisms of Israel quickly began to spread starting in 1967. King and other mainstream black leaders soon found themselves contending with the intellectual and cultural power of militant black attitudes about global issues such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, notably voices emerging from the Black Arts Movement.