Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. talking from the Lincoln Memorial through the March on Washington in 1963.
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In March 1968, simply weeks earlier than his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the Rabbinical Meeting in New York. What made this so particular is that it happened on this particular metropolis, a melting pot for all religions, races, and cultures, emphasizing the wonder and that means of who he was.
His phrases had been unequivocal: “Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all of our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity.” He went on to explain Israel as “one of the great outposts of democracy in the world.”
However King’s help for Israel was not political posturing. It flowed straight from his understanding of oppression and liberation. He acknowledged what it meant for a individuals to be denied sovereignty, security, and dignity. He noticed within the Jewish individuals’s return to Israel an ethical parallel to the Black wrestle and pursuit for equality.
King additionally warned towards ethical double requirements. He understood how political language can be utilized to disclaim a individuals’s legitimacy whereas claiming the mantle of justice. Simply as he confronted coded racism directed at Black People, he profoundly acknowledged the hazard of rhetoric that singled out Jews by denying their collective proper to self-determination.
“The whole world must see that Israel must exist and has a right to exist and is one of the great outposts of democracy in the world.”
These are the phrases of Dr. King, a towering voice for ethical readability and a staunch advocate for the Jewish state. At a time when many try to divide Israel from the Jewish religion, allow us to recall how this iconic Civil Rights chief championed the Jewish individuals’s proper to self-determination.
For this yr’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, it’s price commemorating not solely his dream of racial equality in America, but additionally his tackle the illness that’s antisemitism.
“When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews,” he mentioned. “You’re talking antisemitism.”
Right this moment, the orchestration from the far-left and the far-right to bifurcate Israel from the Jewish individuals can be a contradiction to Dr. King’s message of peace and love for all, which incorporates the Jewish nation.
As I just lately defined in a dialogue with our newly elected Mayor Zohran Mamdani, anti-Zionism is antisemitism. The demonization of the State of Israel, a rustic that has restored security and dignity for the Jewish individuals, results in bodily assaults on Jews the world over. In 2025 alone, the NYPD reported 330 antisemitic incidents out of 576 whole suspected hate crimes citywide, a actuality that calls for consideration and motion.
Zionism is a social justice motion that started in pursuit of a secure haven for Jews from international antisemitic pogroms and persecutions after 2,000-plus years of oppression. Israel is a manifestation of the Jewish individuals’s collective self-determination.
King profoundly believed in peace for each Israelis and Palestinians. He supported a political answer that might enable each peoples to dwell with dignity and safety. However he by no means advised that peace required the dismantling of the Jewish state. Peace, in King’s imaginative and prescient, was constructed on mutual recognition.
Calls to disclaim Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish democracy are framed as progressive. King would have acknowledged this for what it’s: an ethical contradiction.
Judaism shouldn’t be merely a physique of religion. It’s a peoplehood rooted in its ancestral land of Israel for hundreds of years. To bifurcate Israel from the Jewish faith is to disclaim the Jewish id itself.
King believed justice is indivisible. You can not struggle racism whereas tolerating antisemitism. You can’t be a champion of liberation whereas denying Jews the identical proper.
The query shouldn’t be what Martin Luther King Jr. would say at present. He already advised us. The query is whether or not we’re ready to pay attention.
Rabbi Marc Schneier is the president of the New-York based mostly Basis for Ethnic Understanding and is the Basis. He’s the creator of “Shared Dreams: Martin Luther King Jr. & the Jewish Community.”
