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.
“Race was the [South African] Boers’ answer to the overwhelming monstrosity of Africa – a whole continent populated and overpopulated by savages.”
She writes of the “dark continent,” a “world of native savages was a perfect setting for men who had escaped the reality of civilization…human beings who, living without the future of a purpose and the past of an accomplishment, were as incomprehensible as the inmates of a madhouse.”
Arendt praised colonialism, calling it a “form of achievement” carried out in “exotic countries.” Exterminating native peoples was fine because it was “quite in keeping with the traditions of these tribes themselves. Extermination of hostile tribes had been the rule in all African native wars.”
Describing Israel, Arendt noted that the country had at its top German judges of whom she approved as the “best of German Jewry.” Below them were prosecuting attorneys, one of whom, a Galician Jew, was “still European,” she noted. “Everything is organized by the Israeli police force which gives me the creeps. It speaks only Hebrew and looks Arabic. Some downright brutes among them. They obey any order. Outside the courthouse doors the oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country.”
People who looked Arab were seen as disgusting by Arendt. “Orientals” were part of a “mob,” similar to the “savages” she had described in her previous writing.
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.
Hannah Ardent
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/hannah-arendt-white-supremacist-456007
So we’re now quoting opinion pieces by the jerusalem post?