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Jewish World Review
Jan. 18, 2010
/ 3 Shevat 5770
Martin Luther King, Gandhi and Zionism
By
Abraham Cooper, Harold Brackman and Yitzchok Adlerstein
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Two ironies dominate the way we remember Martin Luther King. One pertains to all white Americans, the other to Jews.
Many of us think "us and them." We respectfully acknowledge the special place that Rev. King has in the place hearts of our black fellow-citizens, because of his pivotal role in shepherding the Civil Rights movement in its most crucial years. In truth, however, all Americansblacks, but especially whites owe more to Rev. King's leadership in those turbulent years. Looking back in at the decades of inequality, we should recognize how lucky we are that America's inner voice harkened to his message and method. For any society riven by deep divisions of race is a potential tinderbox. Largely because of Rev. King's preaching of non-violence, an America that could have exploded, instead was generally kept at a slow simmer, and change came without a greater degree of violence, loss of lives and property.
In eschewing violence, Rev. King faithfully distilled and applied to the lessons of Gandhi. Regarding the Jewish people, Rev. King's record was 180 degrees opposite to the Father of modern India. Reacting in real-time to Nazi persecution of German Jews in 1938, Gandhi wrote, "If I were a Jew…I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest Gentile German might, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment…Suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy … the calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews …But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy."
Gandhi also rejected the Jewish people's continuity and legitimacy in the Holy Land, even in the midst of the Holocaust, when Jews had no other place to go but the gas chambers. "The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me….Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French….The Jews should meet the Arabs, make friends with them and not depend on British aid or American aid, They can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs…They can offer … themselves to be shot or thrown into the Dead Sea without raising a little finger against them."
Six million dead Jews later, Rev. King had an approach to Jewish survival and destiny diametrically opposed to Gandhi. He consistently spoke up in defense of the Jewish state, including this declaration soon before his death: "I see Israel, and never mind saying it, as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can almost be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security and that security must be a reality."
King, like so many other trailblazing Black leaders, was a true believing Zionist with roots in the long mutual history of Zionism in black as well as white. The story begins over a century ago with Edward Wilmot, born into a free black family on Charlotte-Amalie, capitol of St. Thomas, Danish Virgin Islands, in 1832. Proud of his African ancestry Blyden also prized his close cultural ties with Jews, beginning with members of Amelie's 400-strong Jewish community whose Yom Kippur services he watched from outside the congregation to which belonged a future rabbi, David Cardoze, who taught his young friend the rudiments of Hebrew. Unable to obtain a theological education in the racist pre-Civil War U.S., Blyden was sent by the American Colonization Society to Liberia, the American "Black to Africa" experiment that in 1847 became an independent nation. Devoting the rest of life to Africa as an educator, publicist, and diplomat, Blyden traveled widely including an 1866 trip to Jerusalem about which he wrote in From West Africa to Palestine (1873).
By the 1890s, Blyden was ready for the message of Theodore Herzl's new Zionist movement. In 1898, two years after the publication of Herzl's Der Judenstaat (1896), Blyden embraced "that wonderful movement called Zionism" as a model for the Pan African movement that today recognizes him as its godfather. By 1912, when Byden died, leadership of the Pan African movement to liberate the so-called "Dark Continent" from colonialism had shift to an African American, W. E. B. Du Bois.
Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, Du Bois was educated at Harvard and German universities where he absorbed the patina of "polite" anti-Semitism he outgrew while working with such Jewish cofounders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as Joel and Arthur Spingarn and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise. By 1919 when he journeyed to Paris to head the first Pan African Congress, Du Bois was wedded to the position that "The African movement must mean to us what the Zionist movement must mean to the Jews . . . [The] amelioration of the lot of Africa . . . [must also] ameliorate the conditions of colored peoples throughout the world." Despite Du Bois fierce disagreements with Jamaica-born Marcus J. Garvey, who headed a mass "Back to Africa" movement in Harlem in the 1920s that veered toward conflict with the NAACP's liberal Jewish supporters, Du Bois agreed with the self-styled "Black Moses" about Zionism as a paradigm for black progress. Du Bois' and Garvey's pro-Zionism also extended to many of the "Black Hebrew" congregations founded during the interwar years that continued to flourish up through Israel's creation in 1948.
After the declaration of "Black Power" in 1965, MLK's friendship toward Jews and Israel was challenged by radical Black Nationalists like Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) of the Black Panther Party who looked as a role model to the martyred Malcolm X. Conveniently forgotten, however, is what Malcolm X said in 1964, before his assassination by fanatical followers of Elijah Muhammed of the Nation of Islam: "Pan Africanism will do for the people of African descent all over the world, the same that Zionism has done for Jews all over the world."
"Black Zionism" in the three decades since didn't disappear but went underground to periodically reemerge. Repenting his own history of anti-Israel outbursts, a maturing Jesse Jackson, before the World Jewish Congress in 1990, reaffirmed MLK's acceptance of Zionism as "the liberation movement" of the Jewish people. Randall Robinson, founding president of Trans-Africa, has also repeatedly stated that African Americans and Africans can learn much from the history of the Zionist movement.
Gandhi was wrong about the destiny of the Jewish people. Rev. King got it right. May his embrace of Zionism based on a rich tradition from those who preceded him continue to speak to both Jews and black Americans, and all the peacemakers inspired by his unmatched example.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Comment by clicking here.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper is the Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angelels. Harold Brackman is the Senior Researcher there, and Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein is the Center's Director of Interfaith Affairs.
© 2010, JWR
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