Like college teachers around the country, I’ve found the war in the Middle East has pitted my students against each other in ways that have turned many of them into bitter antagonists. Ruling the day now on campus after campus and in much of the country is a reductive either/or question: Do you favor Israelis or Palestinians?
It’s unclear how much longer this turmoil — and the hate speech and stereotyping surrounding it — will last. College presidents, as the lawyerly congressional testimony in December of the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT on campus speech codes and antisemitism shows, don’t have an answer.
But today, as we mark Martin Luther King Jr. Day, there is a moral compass our recent history offers that gives me hope that we can find common ground to talk about the Middle East. The moral compass is King’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” written during another era of great internal division.
In explaining why he was in Birmingham, Ala., protesting the city’s Jim Crow laws and willing to be arrested for doing so, King, who in 1964 would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, knew that his greatest challenge lay in reaching beyond his supporters.
To justify his presence in Birmingham, King put forward three linked principles that are as relevant to today’s Middle East crisis as they were to the segregated South he was seeking to change:
Geography should not limit our concern with human rights. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,” King declared. King might ask today’s students why their outrage today over events in the Middle East has been so much greater than their outrage over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but he would approve of their shared belief that what is happening in Israel and Gaza is America’s and the world’s business.
Compassion must extend to anyone who suffers. There are no lesser victims. King’s specific mandate as a civil rights leader and president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was to do all in his power to end the racism corroding the lives of Black Americans. But he made clear that he did not see himself limited to caring only about the lives of those in whose name he was acting. “I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers,” King observed of the obligations he would have felt in the Nazi era.
The victims of injustice are not free from moral restraints in battling their oppressors. King was committed to what he called “nonviolent direct action.” It was part of his religious philosophy and not simply a political tactic for him. But rooted in his commitment to nonviolence was King’s belief that those like himself who were the victims of racism could not abandon their core moral values without losing their own humanity. Their suffering did not give them license to act with the viciousness of their victimizers.
Nothing would have saddened King more than a recent Harvard-Harris poll that revealed 51% of 18 to 24 year-olds in America thought Hamas’ violence against Israeli citizens was justified, nor would King have regarded as acceptable the attacks now killing so many Palestinians in Gaza.
The beliefs King expressed while in jail, it is important to remember, were not those of a minister speaking from the safety of his pulpit. King’s perspective was that of a man who would be subjected to 29 arrests over his lifetime.
In the month after King was jailed, fire hoses and police dogs were used on protesting Black students in Birmingham. There were ample grounds in the five years between his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and his own assassination in 1968 for King to become discouraged. He never did. He continued placing himself in harm’s way.
When in 1967 in a sermon he delivered at Riverside Church in New York City, King announced his opposition to the Vietnam War that America was then waging, he censured himself for not speaking out sooner, owning up to what he called “the betrayal of my own silences.” Being true to his moral compass meant acknowledging his own mistakes and starting over as many times as it took to get things right.
So must all of us as the war in the Middle East continues taking lives. There can be no throwing up our hands in despair, no thinking compromise means weakness.
Mills is professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College and author of “Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964 –The Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America.”
Martin Luther King’s teachings and the Mideast
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16.01.2024
Like college teachers around the country, I’ve found the war in the Middle East has pitted my students against each other in ways that have turned many of them into bitter antagonists. Ruling the day now on campus after campus and in much of the country is a reductive either/or question: Do you favor Israelis or Palestinians?
It’s unclear how much longer this turmoil — and the hate speech and stereotyping surrounding it — will last. College presidents, as the lawyerly congressional testimony in December of the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT on campus speech codes and antisemitism shows, don’t have an answer.
But today, as we mark Martin Luther King Jr. Day, there is a moral compass our recent history offers that gives me hope that we can find common ground to talk about the Middle East. The moral compass is King’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” written during another era of great internal division.
In explaining why he was in Birmingham, Ala., protesting the city’s Jim Crow laws and willing to be arrested for doing so, King, who in 1964 would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, knew that his greatest........
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