For the past several years, Martin Luther King Day has provided an opportunity for supporters of Israel to invoke the great civil-rights leader’s statements of sympathy for Zionism, and for its enemies to try to argue that, were he alive today, he would feel differently. This year, members of the latter group could turn to a November article ostensibly reporting on what King had to say about “Israel’s relationship with the Palestinian people.” Martin Kramer observes that in the 1967 interview the article cites, King never mentioned the Palestinians at all:
That’s because in 1967, the Palestinians weren’t an independent party to the war. The territories occupied by Israel in 1967 belonged to Egypt (Sinai and Egyptian-administered Gaza), Syria (the Golan Heights), and Jordan (the West Bank and east Jerusalem). At the time, all proposals for Israeli return of territories meant giving them back to these states. King specifically emphasized the conditions for Israel’s return of the Sinai to Nasser’s Egypt, Egypt being the leading Arab state and Israel’s primary enemy.
Palestinians, however, had a different demand. For nearly twenty years, they had insisted on their return to Israel proper, from which they’d departed as refugees in 1948. King avoided saying anything that could be construed as endorsing that “right.” . . . Later, in September, he alluded to the Palestinian demand as “a stubborn effort to reverse history.”
So it’s rather misleading to state that the . . . interview reveals “what King thought about Israel’s relationship with the Palestinian people,” or that “King said that Israel should return Palestinian lands.” Neither then nor at any time did he speak of “the Palestinian people,” but only of “refugees.” Nor did he ever use the term “Palestinian lands.”
Read more on Sandbox: https://martinkramer.org/2024/01/15/mlk-the-six-day-war-interview/