opinion

Intersectionalism undermines legacy of MLK

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The alliance between African-Americans and Jews during the struggle for civil rights has often been invoked when tensions between the two have arisen in the years since the 1960s.

Yet the memory of blacks and Jews working together is important not so much for what a few heroes did a half-century ago, but because it sets an example for subsequent generations. Since then, Jews and blacks have sometimes fallen out over issues like affirmative action, but have still generally found themselves on the same side of many, if not most, of the great issues of the day.

However, intersectional ideology may succeed where others who sought to sow strife failed. That theory declares that the struggle for civil rights in this country is linked to the Palestinian war on Israel. Championed by leaders of the anti-Trump resistance, it has gained notoriety in the last few years.

The attempt to tie civil rights, as well as the cause of equality for women, to anti-Zionism and the BDS movement received an airing at demonstrations organized by the Women’s March and related groups last weekend. Speeches and statements by leaders Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour illustrated how hate for the Jewish state has become integrated into the agenda of the left.

Indeed, those themes were sounded even at events that sought to disassociate themselves with the national group after it became tainted by anti-Semitism, as Nicole Guzik of Sinai Temple noted in an open letter explaining why she walked out of the Los Angeles March.

But even more disappointing is the attempt to use Martin Luther King Jr. Day to twist the great civil rights leader’s legacy and put him on the side of BDS and the war on Israel.

In a New York Times op-ed, columnist Michelle Alexander on Sunday claimed that King would have joined the attack on Israel if he were alive today. King was inexorably drawn to fight injustice. But the idea that he could have been convinced that the Jews — alone of all people in the world — should be denied a state and rights denied to no one else requires not merely a suspension of disbelief, but a deliberate attempt to deny things he actually said and believed.

Speaking of those who were early champions of what we now call intersectionalism, King said: “Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all our might to protect her right to exist, its territorial integrity … Israel is one of the great outposts of democracy in the world … Peace for Israel means security and that security must be a reality.”

He also famously responded to a questioner who attacked Zionism by saying, “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism.”

But as Alexander’s article illustrates, those who seek to reimagine King as an enemy of Zionism, rather than as its friend and advocate, are not deterred by the facts.

Alexander’s depiction of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a compendium of half-truths and outright lies. The struggle is a complex one in which both sides of suffered, but in Alexander’s cartoonish version, only Palestinians have rights. That they have repeatedly refused offers of peace, including statehood, is never mentioned. Nor does she (or her editors) think it necessary to detail that the Israeli security measures she laments were rendered essential by terrorism.

But her column is not about ending the Israeli “occupation” of the West Bank or Jewish settlements. Her beef is with Israel’s existence as a Jewish state in the pre-1967 borders. Her support for BDS is rooted in the same conviction that motivates its other supporters: a false vision of Israel as a colonial state and the imperative to eliminate it, rather than merely to place a Palestinian state alongside it.

In Alexander’s reading, Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, is illegitimate. So while she pays lip service to concerns about anti-Semitism, she ignores the fact that a movement dedicated to destroying the sole Jewish state is an expression of Jew-hatred.

Interestingly, Alexander cites the controversy over rescinding an honor to Angela Davis, a member of the Communist Party USA and a supporter of the Black Panthers, a violent group that preyed upon blacks and whites in the 1960s as King advocated non-violence. Davis, who was personally involved in terrorist activity, was going to be honored by the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum, but the plans were canceled when members of the Jewish community protested. They rightly considered her backing of BDS, as well as her support for the Soviet regime’s repression of Jews and other dissidents, to render her ineligible for such an honor. That has provoked a backlash from the pro-BDS left.

We don’t have to engage in counter-factual theorizing about what King would have done had he not been assassinated to understand that his faith in nonviolence and support for the rights of the Jewish people would have always placed him opposite Davis and BDS supporters who wish to wipe Israel off the map.

A lot has changed since King was murdered in 1968 — a point in time when it would have been unimaginable for the Times to publish a screed calling for Israel’s destruction. That it thinks it appropriate to attack Jewish rights on a day dedicated to commemorating the struggle for civil rights for all people is a bitter irony that Martin Luther King Jr. would have viewed as a betrayal of the legacy of brotherhood for which he gave his life.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.