Chutzpah

Tablet Magazine recently published a speech by Israeli Ambassador Ronald Dermer to the Ebenenzer Baptist Church in Atlanta asserting that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would be a full-throated supporter of the policies of the current Israeli government.

Chutzpah.

Ambassador Dermer writes: "Perhaps Dr. King saw in Israel a kindred spirit—a land of noble ends and just means. After all, Dr. King’s goal was to ensure that African-Americans, like all Americans, could exercise their individual right of self-determination in the country they called home. And Israel’s goal has always been to ensure that the Jewish people, like all people, can exercise our collective right of self-determination in the land we have always called home. And like Dr. King, Israel has pursued its noble goal through just means."

Dr. King did, in fact, say very positive things about Israel.  But he was assassinated in April 1968, less than a year after the Six Day War, when Israel, in what was a defensive war, conquered the West Bank.  Massive Israeli occupation of the West Bank did not begin until the Likud election victory in 1977 – nine years after Dr. King’s death.  So Dr. King never saw the Israeli occupation.  He likely would not have sided with the Settler Movement, particularly given his anti-colonialist sentiments.  Dr. King did not believe that blacks should seize land in the South from whites; he recognized that both groups had lived on the land for centuries and needed to live on the land together.  He most certainly would not have seen a parallel to the American South in the Likud/Settler seizures of Palestinian land on the West Bank.  Calling the land home does not establish a right to that land – particularly when someone else has lived on it for centuries.

Ambassador Dermer implies that if a Palestinian MLK had arisen during the years following the Six Day War that all now would be well. But Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin had no intention of leaving the land once the Palestinians proved that they would protest the occupation peacefully.  Rather, he unambiguously asserted that he would “create facts” on the West Bank that would make return of the land impossible.  If a Palestinian MLK now arose and led an effective non-violent movement, would Ambassador Dermer advocate returning the seized land on the West Bank to the Palestinians?  Absent such a statement from Ambassador Dermer, his speech in Atlanta, seeking to wrap the current Israeli government in the mantel of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is chutzpah in the extreme.