Martin Luther King Boycotted the Israeli State

This was originally posted in March 2013 but an update has marked it as posted today - it is of historical interest only
For many years, the Zionist movement, up to its neck in collaboration with South African Apartheid, hauled out a fabricated quote from Martin Luther King to the effect that when you criticise Zionism you mean Jews and ‘that is anti-Semitism’.  The only problem with this, as even the ultra-conservative Zionist pressure group Camera was forced to admit, was that it was false.  Meanwhile it turns out that Martin Luther King was doing his best to avoid the pariah state.

How Martin Luther King Jr. avoided visiting Israel

Documents that have come to light 45 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. show Israel's efforts to woo the civil rights leader – a campaign that never came to fruition.

The Israel Consul in Atlanta, Zeev Dover, had an interesting idea 50 years ago. In order to bring the State of Israel closer to the "black community," he made a suggestion to the Foreign Ministry: To send books on Judaism and Israel to "the libraries of every black college." Alongside this, Dover recommended inviting African-American lecturers to "black colleges" who "had visited Israel and are familiar with our history." In this way, he hoped Israel could contribute towards "introducing the sophisticated nature of the national movement for the social-cultural regeneration of the people of Israel to this group."

These ideas can be found in a memorandum under the heading "Ties with the black community," sent by the consul to the Israeli Embassy in Washington on November 9, 1962. The memo is part of a selection of documents that deal with Israel's ties with the black community in the United States, and with its failed attempts to host the black leader Martin Luther King in Israel.

These documents were recently released by the State Archives, on the 45th anniversary of King's assassination. Studying them is also relevant during the run-up to the visit of another black leader to these shores – U.S. President Barack Obama.

The internal debate within Israel regarding Martin Luther King was revealed in a classified document that the consul in Atlanta sent to the Washington embassy in August 1962. Exactly a year later, King led the huge demonstration in Washington, where he delivered his historic "I have a dream" speech.

The Israel Consul in Atlanta wrote that he "places great importance on forming connections with the black leadership," but added: "In my opinion the time is not yet ripe for his visit to Israel." He explained that this was because King represents "the militant wing of the civil rights movement," and that important organizations "are not in agreement with him and oppose his methods." He also added that alongside the global fame King had attained, he also had managed to alienate groups of moderate African Americans.

The consul raised the concern that inviting King to Israel would lead to "severe negative responses," and recommended that "in any case, we should not be the first country that gives King so-called international status." He also warned that King's visit to Israel could harm Israel's ties with Southern states in the U.S., who felt threatened by the dominant radical leader. At the end of the memo he recommended "shelving the idea until the right moment," and added "our efforts to enter into discussions with different factors in the black community must be done…without being overly conspicuous."

The next letter he sent on the subject to his superiors at the Foreign Ministry, in November 1962, presented a more complex picture: On the one hand, the black community does not have real impact or importance in the U.S. – and therefore Israel shouldn't go out of its way to woo it. On the other, he noticed the unrest that had begun, and warned that Israel should not ignore it.

"It is important that we define what our specific objectives are towards this population, and accord them the appropriate treatment," he wrote. He added the argument that African-Americans only comprise 11 percent of the population of the U.S., and said that: "despite the high birthrate [they] will remain a minority. Moreover, many more years will pass until this racial minority recovers from the economic and educational backwardness that is the result of discrimination."

When reading the consul's words, it's worth bearing in mind the spirit of the times they were written in. Today they may seem racist and arrogant: "Uniting and driving the Negros is the urge to defend themselves against discrimination and all that entails. It is unlikely that in the near future, the Negros will become a group with the political and economic influence consistent with their numbers in the total population. This is also because of their low average levels of education and affluence, and also since domestic pressures are at the top of their concerns, with the rest of the world taking second place to their struggle for recognition."

However, the consul warned that "we should not ignore this large population," and recommended "fostering contact with all its branches more than ever before." He also said that Israel's main concern should be directed towards "laying the ground for the future."

Among other things, the consul suggested emphasizing the historical similarities between Jews and blacks as persecuted minorities, but added that "our first goal must be, in my opinion, filling the gap in [their] knowledge and clarifying the eternal connection between the Jewish people and their country."

He attached to the letter a list of dozens of American colleges that had black students. "In the southern U.S., blacks are concentrated in their own special colleges, which allows us special access to this sector without the fear of 'discrimination' on our part that could occur after making a special and separate request to students on mixed campuses" he wrote.

While the Israeli government had not yet formulated its final position regarding King, there were other organizations in Israel that hurried to invite him to visit. The Histadrut labor federation received King's confirmation – but for some unknown reason he cancelled his visit. This pattern repeated itself several times over the next few years: Authorities in Israel invited him, he responded in the affirmative, but the visits never took place. In 1964, following the announcement that King was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Israeli representatives met with him.

Deputy Prime Minister Abba Eban met with King in Washington and invited him to visit Israel. King accepted, but a date was not set. Five months later, in March 1965, the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Avraham Harman, invited King as an official guest of the Israeli government to visit "on any date at his convenience." This invitation was another that went unfulfilled.

In December that same year, King met with Shimon Yallon, the consul general of Israel in Atlanta. At the start of the meeting King said he had held an "open invitation" to visit Israel for four years, but that his visit had, unfortunately, yet to take place.

Half a year later, King wrote to the Israeli ambassador in Washington. In his letter, he said that he was "very embarrassed" he didn't respond to his request over the course of several months. He justified this as follows: "Just the other day one of my secretaries discovered a large number of letters that had been placed in a folder of 'letters to be filed.'…Your letter was, unfortunately, one of those in that particular folder...I can assure you that it was not due to sheer carelessness but to the pressures of an understaffed and overworked office."

But despite the apology, King ended the letter with a reservation: "At this writing, it is not possible for me to give you a date when I can go there, but I do hope that my schedule will soon ease up so that I can accept an invitation to go to Israel," he wrote to the ambassador.

The trend started to change in 1967. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol wrote to King that he was happy to hear about his coming visit to Israel, and offered government sponsorship for the trip. In May 1967 King responded, saying that he would accept the invitation and that he would be happy to meet the prime minister personally: "Take this means to express my deep appreciation to you for the invitation you extended me to come to your wonderful country," he wrote. The outbreak of the Six-Day War gave him an excuse to cancel the visit again. Less than a year later, in April 1968, he was assassinated.

One can understand why Israel made such efforts to bring about a visit from King – as a visit from a Nobel laureate could have improved Israel's standing in the U.S. and Africa, where he was revered. As to the question of why King did not accept the invitations, there is no clear-cut answer.

"King was sympathetic to Israel and declared support for its right to exist in peace. But given all the delays and evasions, it seems he did not want to identify himself with Israel to this extent during the struggle for equal rights for blacks in the United States," write Shlomo Mark and Hagai Zoref at the State Archives. "It is possible that the fact that during the 1960s his status began to decline in the African-American community, with the rise of more radical groups that were identified with anti-Israel positions, such as Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, also contributed to this," they added.

Israeli Labour’s Genocidal Racism - Time to Exclude their British cousins - the Jewish Labour Movement

Levi Eshkol

A myth has grown up that the Israeli Labour Party provides a real political alternative to Netanyahu and Likud.  In part this is wishful thinking.  The belief that nothing can be as bad as the present far-Right coalition government.   But it is also ahistorical.  There is nothing that Likud have done that the Israeli Labour Party hasn’t done before it.

As its new leader Avi Gabbay is quickly demonstrating, historically the Israeli Labour Party was as racist as its Revisionist opponents. The following article, which is taken from Ha’aretz, shows that Israeli leaders were contemplating genocide in 1967.  Levi Eshkol, who was always considered a liberal Zionist, suggested stopping water supplies to the Gazans in order to ‘encourage’ them to leave.

That is why it is so outrageous that the Jewish Labour Movement, the British branch of the Israeli Labour Party, is an affiliated ‘socialist’ society of the British Labour Party.  The Labour Party was every bit as much a party of Empire as the Tories, even if they dressed it up in the language of trusteeship and benevolence.  The alliance with the Zionist settlers was an integral part of Labour’s support for Empire. 

Today Israel is an integral part of the alliance with America.  Israel is the United State’s racist rottweiler in the Middle East.  Israel is a symbol of support for the American alliance, something that the Labour Right hold very dear. Pampering master’s dog is a way of paying homage to the NATO alliance.  That is why the Labour Right is so enthusiastic about Israel.  It is the lynchpin of the US presence in the Middle East and our role as very much a junior supporting one.

Those who are not serious about breaking with support for US imperialism will not be serious about breaking with Labour Zionism and disaffiliating the Jewish Labour Movement.  That is why the detestable racist, Emily Thornberry has said that those who don't support Israel's right to exist (as a racist state) should be expelled.

There are some people, the latest being Socialist Fight, who believe that American foreign policy on Israel owes something to a Jewish lobby.  For them and others I remind them of what Alexander Haig, Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan said:

'Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security.'

Tony Greenstein

Isaac Herzog and Avi Gabbay - past and present leaders of the Israeli Labour Party - both vehemently anti-Arab

Liberal Israeli leaders were contemplating genocide in Gaza already in 1967

Jonathan Ofir on November 17, 2017

Levi Eshkol, prime minister of Israel in the 1960s.

 “Perhaps if we don’t give them enough water they won’t have a choice, because the orchards will yellow and wither.”

That is what Israeli Prime Minster Levi Eshkol said in 1967 about Gaza, as revealed in newly declassified documents from the time. Ofer Aderet of Haaretz reported about this today.   

Avi Gabbay - Israeli Labour's new leader served in Netanyahu's cabinet

As I have already written, Eshkol, the leftist ‘liberal Zionist,’ was very willing to send Palestinians to the moon:

“I want them all to go, even if they go to the moon”, he said. 

As is widely known, the standard UN definition of Genocide includes “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.

These newly declassified documents reveal that the genocidal policy was indeed there already in 1967. This is important, because it sheds light on later policies, such as Israel’s siege of Gaza, which is part of an ‘incremental genocide,’ as historian Ilan Pappe has been calling it since 2006, and it puts the notion of a “huge concentration camp”, the term Haaretz journalist Amira Hass has used for Gaza, in historical perspective.  

Indeed, Eshkol was aware in the months after the 1967 war of the “suffocation and imprisonment” in Gaza in 1967, as the declassified documents reveal. And he was quite clear about this being an instrument to effect Israeli strategy:

“precisely because of the suffocation and imprisonment there, maybe the Arabs will move from the Gaza Strip”, he said.

Eshkol was also paraphrasing Herzl, when Eshkol told the cabinet he was “working on the establishment of a unit or office that will engage in encouraging Arab emigration.” He noted that

“We should deal with this issue quietly, calmly and covertly, and we should work on finding a way from them to emigrate to other countries and not just over the Jordan [River].”

This is a near quote of Herzl’s 1895 diary entry:

“We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly”, Herzl wrote.

Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was approving of Eshkol’s (and Herzl’s) ideas. He said, 

“By allowing these Arabs to seek and find work in foreign countries, there’s a greater chance that they’ll want to migrate to those countries later.”

Dayan raised the idea of giving the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza permits to work abroad, in the hope that some would prefer to stay there.

Eshkol was rather obsessed with the ethnic cleansing of Gaza as a prime issue:

“We are interested in emptying out Gaza first”, he said.

This shows that the notion of the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza is not limited to right-wing politicians such as Moshe Feiglin, who as Likud Knesset co-speaker in July 2014, provided a 7-point plan to Netanyahu, to do just that.

Eshkol also provides for other more apocalyptic options:

“Perhaps we can expect another war and then this problem will be solved. But that’s a type of ‘luxury,’ an unexpected solution.”

This ‘luxury’ (for Zionists, that is), is quite precisely what the ‘leftist’ Israeli historian Benny Morris was speaking about when he told Ari Shavit in 2004:

“But I am ready to tell you that in other circumstances, apocalyptic ones, which are liable to be realized in five or ten years, I can see expulsions”.  

Dayan, by the way, was a bit more ‘generous’ than Eshkol, and suggested that out of the 400,000 Gazans, the 100,000 whom he considered ‘not refugees’ would be allowed to stay. 

Dayan also seems to suggest the ‘Bantustan’ blueprint, which is the idea that has informed Israeli policy in the West Bank, even within the ‘peace-process’ of the last few decades, even when Israel was supposedly being ‘generous’:  

“No soldier will have any interest in interfering in the lives of the inhabitants. I have no interest in the army sitting precisely in Nablus. It can sit on a hill outside Nablus”, Dayan said.

In the same way, Israel does not need to be IN Gaza, or only occasionally. It’s much easier to just control the prison from outside, from a nearby hill…

In 1967, Israel was experiencing the duality of exhilarated joy at the ‘liberation’ of the new territories (as even ‘leftist hero’ Ehud Barak puts it), and the ‘trouble’ of the Palestinian presence. This is embodied in Eshkol’s words:

“I suggest that we don’t come to a vote or a decision today; there’s time to deal with this joy, or better put, there’s time to deal with this trouble”.

The ‘trouble’ was of course the Palestinian ‘demographic problem’, which has been looming upon Israel from its very beginning.

“I cannot imagine it — how we will organize life in this country when we have 1.4 million Arabs and we are 2.4 million, with 400,000 Arabs already in the country?”, Eshkol said.

These words are very interesting to scrutinize. When Eshkol says “we are 2.4 million”, he is actually not including the Palestinian citizens of Israel (known in Israel as ‘Israeli Arabs’). This is clear, because in 1967, the total population of Israel was nearly 2.8 million. The last time the population was 2.4 million was early 1963. The prime minister couldn’t possibly be making a numerical error of that magnitude. No; Eshkol is clearly excluding the Palestinian population from the count, and treating it as a population to be regarded as a fifth column, an alien population, of ‘Arabs already in the country’ – just like the 1.4 million Arabs who have just come under Israel’s control. Let it be noted, that in late 1966, Israel relinquished its 19-year military regime over Palestinian citizens in Israel. Eshkol’s words demonstrate that whilst the relinquishing of this regime happened technically, and for ‘moral’ reasons, the establishment’s overall perception of Palestinian citizens was still as ‘others’.

The concern with the ‘demographic problem’ in the minutes is all-consuming. Education Minister Zalman Aranne was emphatic about the ‘demographic threat’:

“The way I know the Jewish people in Israel and the Diaspora, after all the heroism, miracles and wonders, a Jewish state in which there are 40 percent Arabs, is not a Jewish state. It is a fifth column that will destroy the Jewish state. It will be the kiss of death after a generation or a generation and a half”.

Adding vitriolic spices of ‘Arab hatred’ and the ‘high birth rate’ of Arabs, Aranne continued:

“I see the two million Jews before me differently when there will be 1.3 million Arabs — 1.3 million Arabs, with their high birth rate and their permanent pent-up hatred. … We can overcome 60,000 Arabs, but not 600,000 and not a million”.

Finally, there is an interesting part about Jewish settlement in Al-Khalil (Hebron). Eshkol showed the ministers a letter he received in November 1967 from associates of the dean of Hebron Yeshiva — which had relocated to Jerusalem after the 1929 Hebron Massacre — asking the government to “make appropriate arrangements to let dozens of the yeshiva’s students, teachers and supervisors return and set up a branch in Hebron.” Labour Minister Yigal Allon (author of the famous Allon Plan to annex large swaths of the West Bank) was all for it: “There is a benefit in finding the first nucleus of people willing to settle there. The desire of these yeshiva students is a great thing. There aren’t always candidates willing to go to such a difficult place”, he said.

So much for rogue religious rightwing settlers twisting Israel’s arm.  

Those who have followed the Zionist historical trace may not be surprised by these statements, nor that they are uttered by ‘liberal-Zionists’, by ‘leftists’.

The logic here is, after all, Zionism 101. Nonetheless, they can still be shocking to read, and they should be. These are statements that convey clear intention of ethnic cleansing, and even Genocide. Emptying out, suffocation, deprivation of water till orchards wither. These words are not uttered by rightist Zionist leaders, but by leftist ones. No wonder Israel keeps these archives hidden for 50 years and more. 

H/T Ian Berman for bringing the recent Haaretz article to my attention.