- cross-posted to:
- history@lemmy.world
- history@hexbear.net
- cross-posted to:
- history@lemmy.world
- history@hexbear.net
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Malcolm X: based
MLK: not based.
This understanding is critical for the liberal to leftist pipeline.
Also based: Huey Newton, Fred Hampton.
JVL is a terrible source
Jacobin has a much more in-depth article: What MLK Actually Thought About Israel and Palestine
When you look at the breadth of MLK’s works, it’s certainly true he had an incorrect understanding of Israel and the Zionist project. I’m not going to excuse that, even at the time there were notable figures such as Malcolm X, Einstein, Hannah Ardent, ect, that correctly identified early Israel as a fascist settler-colonial project. It’s an important blind spot of his at acknowledge and address.
Nevertheless, MLK’s thoughts on colonialism and segregation from South Africa and America, can correctly be applied to Israel, and make it obvious how critical International opposition such as Boycott Divestment and Sanctions are to collapse the fascist regime, as it was for Apartheid South Africa.
MLK 😔
You’d think he would have recognized settler colonialism, which is disappointing. It’s a mix of scary and reassuring when people more intelligent and educated than you are flat out wrong.
OK? Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t see or predict Israel operating an open air prison in the Gaza Strip, or an apartheid-like system in the West Bank. There wasn’t that much to criticize about Israel during his lifetime.
Even if he didn’t predict it, from the getgo Israel had been a settler colonialist project that’s similar to the one that he was born in and which led to the oppressive predicament of African Americans. To not recognize this fact shows hypocrisy.
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Perceptions of Zionism in the 20th century weren’t as different as you might believe. Anti-colonial literature has been around since before the middle of the 20th century, and had accurately delineated what colonialism is and what it’s not; see in this regard the works of Aimé Césaire and Franz Fanon, both prominent black authors. Malcolm X also correctly linked Zionism to European colonialism. Hell, even the Zionists saw themselves as colonialists.
I doubt he saw Israel as the western MIC blacksite it became, and more saw it akin to something like Liberia, which he also supported. Which, yes, Liberia is also a colonial project.
Hence, proving further my point.
Does that make him a hypocrite?
More so incoherent, ignorant. I am not dismissing MLK as a prominent figure of the civil rights movement in the US, but to defend his views on Israel is deeply unserious given that other black figures and intellectuals, his contemporaries, were aware of what zionism stood for.
No they weren’t.
So why was Malcolm X, a contemporary of MLK, an anti-zionist and saw Israel for what it was?
Cause Malcolm X is based as fuck.
Fr though: No one is totally immune to their own biases and limited worldviews. I could be he thought of Jewish peoples as fellow victims of oppression (which is true) and failed to see the forest for the trees. He was also very outspoken about his Faith driving him to fight inequality, it could be that his views, like a lot of other people, were influenced by it.
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I don’t know, you tell me, you seem to know a lot more about it?!
I didn’t say or mean to imply that there was nothing to criticize about Israel at the time, just not quite as much as later including today.
There wasn’t that much to criticize about Israel during his lifetime.
That shows an almost childlike ignorance about Israel and that it was known even before its existence that it was an apartheid settler colonial project.
Unfortunately, you have to come to terms with the fact that %99 of people in the west had a “childlike ignorance” before October 7th.
This is probably one of the most ignorant things MLK has ever said, but his fight was against racial oppression inside America, and he got killed for it, by America.
You think that just started? Israel was easily around 50k+ dead Palestinians and at least 50% of the way to stealing the land they have now when MLK was in his 20’s. So yeah… That 50k is a generously low number. This shit started in the 1800’s and the murders and land theft began in the early 1900’s. ALL before the Holocaust. The Holocaust and antisemitism as the reasons for starting Israel are a lie when you carbon date the operations.
Israel didn’t control the West Bank or Gaza Strip until 1967, less than a year before MLK’s death.
I’m opposed to what Israel has been doing with those two territories. I’m not opposed to Israel’s existence, I don’t consider it any less legitimate than any other country; many countries were founded on violence or other horrible things that I don’t condone.
No, Israel didn’t officially occupy it then. Bit they were already there in mass killing Palestinians and agitating a war JUST like today in the West Bank. Sorry, your stance is wrong. He was a Zionist.
From Nur Masalha Ch 1 Pg 15-16
At the time the Balfour Declaration was issued, Jews constituted about 10 percent of the population of Palestine, and owned about 2 percent of the land. While Zionist land purchases remained relatively limited during the Mandate period (6 percent until 1948), Jewish immigration into Palestine began eroding the immense numerical superiority of the Palestinians.32 Growing Arab awareness of Zionist aims in Palestine, reinforced by Zionist calls for unrestricted Jewish immigration and unhindered transfer of Arab lands to exclusive Jewish control, triggered escalating protests and resistance that were eventually to culminate in the peasant- based great Arab Rebellion of 1936-39.
Already at the time of the Balfour Declaration, apprehen sions concerning the fate of the “non-Jewish communities’ had been voiced in British establishment circles. Edward Montagu, a Jewish cabinet minister at the India Office, had expressed in 1917 his belief that the Zionist drive to create a Jewish state in Palestine would end by “driving out the present inhabitants.”33 Even the enthusiastically pro-Zionist Winston Churchill had written in his review of Palestinian affairs dated 25 October 1919 that “there are the Jews, whom we are pledged to introduce into Palestine, and who take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience."
A History of Modern Palestine Ch 3
By February 1947, Britain had had enough. It had more soldiers in Palestine than on the Indian subcontinent, and had been constantly involved in direct clashes with both political leaderships. The number of British casualties had also risen, mainly due to a terror campaign waged by Zionist extremists, the most notorious being the Stern Gang. This terror campaign peaked with the blowing up of British headquarters in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946. But it was not terror that forced the British out. A particularly bad winter in 1946–47, and a harsh American attitude towards Britain’s debt to the United States, created an economic crisis in Britain that served as an incentive for a limited process of decolonization, mainly in India and Palestine
Partition was planned expulsion
The mass ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948:
After the Nakba the Palestinians within now Israel that survived the ethnic cleansing were under the draconic Israel Martial Law and Defence (Emergency) Regulations, which we’re then practiced in the occupied territories instead after 1967. Even then, Arab Israelis continued to be second class citizens for many reasons including Education, continued.
He did have quite a lot of those takes sadly. Amazing human to have happened to us regardless.
Amerikkkans never cease to surprise me with unexpected shitty takes.
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