Each MLK Day, supporters of Israel invoke the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. to draw a false parallel between the civil rights movement and Zionism. While MLK did sympathize with the state of Israel, he consistently supported nonviolence. During the Six-Day War, MLK supported a UN-mediated peace settlement that addressed the economic and security concerns of all parties. However, a letter attributed to King called ‘Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend’ has a starkly different tone. Unfortunately for the pro-Israel crowd, this letter is a forgery which reveals the willingness of some Israel supporters to use disinformation to influence public perception.
Unsurprisingly, the forgery is deeply connected to the Anti-Defamation League and ideological neoconservatives. One theory for the creation of the letter was that it was inspired by statements made by King at a Cambridge, Massachusetts dinner party. Seymour Martin Lipset, one of the first neoconservatives, recorded King’s supposed statements in a work published by the ADL. According to this account, King responded to a young black activist who criticized Israel by saying “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You are talking anti-Semitism.” However, even pro-Israel historians admit that “There’s plenty of room to debate the meaning of King’s words at the Cambridge dinner.” While Lipset’s testimony is technically possible, it is not a historical fact and should not be treated as such.
The letter was supposedly published in the Saturday Review on page 76 of the August 1967 edition and reprinted in a non-existent book titled This I Believe: Selections from the Writings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. However, the letter is nowhere to be found in any edition of the Saturday Review. While the individuals responsible for the forged letter are still at-large, its use by politicians, activists, and organizations reveals the willingness of Zionists to use false material to advance their agenda.
The most prominent example of this was when former Israeli Prime Minister, Likud Chairman, and war criminal, Ariel Sharon, referenced the forgery in a 2005 speech to the Knesset. In Sharon’s words, “…manifestations of anti-Semitism in the past years are no longer aimed only at Jews as individuals. Rather, they are aimed at the embodiment of all Jews – the State of Israel, the Jewish state. As early as 1967, in “A Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend”, Dr. Martin Luther King wrote that anti-Zionism is no less than disguised anti-Semitism.”
The letter was also referenced by the ADL during a US House of Representatives hearing concerning the 2001 World Conference Against Racism. During the conference, Zionism was linked to racism which led to the US and Israel withdrawing from the summit. In an Orwellian fashion, the ADL and the Israel lobby leveraged the forgery to withdraw from a racism conference which MLK likely would have supported.
Ultimately, the use of the forgery is not just disrespectful to the memory of MLK, but is also a malicious and deliberate attempt to distort MLK’s nuanced political opinions. Simply put, MLK was not Benjamin Netanyahu. He was a man who believed truth, justice, and nonviolence, not deception, supremacy, and militarism. Furthermore, the tendency of the pro-Israel crowd to push for censorship is antithetical to MLK’s free speech advocacy.
This MLK Day we should remember MLK for who he was: a human being. He is not infallible and it is acceptable to disagree with him. What is not acceptable is to distort what he stood for for political purposes. MLK’s commitment to justice requires that we honor facts, not fabrications, even in the name of politics.
J.D. Hester is an independent writer born and raised in Arizona. He has previously written for Antiwar.com, Asia Times, The Libertarian Institute, and other websites. You can send him an email at josephdhester@gmail.com. Follow him on X (@JDH3ster).
