The Conversation King and Heschel Never Finished
Israel, Africa, apartheid and the Palestinian question our most famous alliance left unresol
SERIES I — PART II
This series asks what Black and Jewish Americans need to say to one another when shared history is real but incomplete and when each community remembers the same relationship differently.
As an African American Christian trained in seminary, I grew up with the image of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel as almost the ideal picture of interfaith moral courage. Years later, after becoming a regular participant in Jewish communal life, I came to appreciate Heschel not simply as the rabbi beside King but as a Jewish thinker speaking from a tradition and historical memory of his own.
That has made me more interested in what the famous photograph does not show.
King and Heschel’s friendship deserves its place in history. But if we are going to use it as a model for rebuilding Black–Jewish relations, we should also examine the conversation they apparently never finished.
Palestine.
King clearly understood that Israel had become politically complicated for Black Americans, Africans and the wider postcolonial world.
After the Six-Day War in 1967, King was scheduled to lead a large interfaith pilgrimage to Israel. Privately, he became increasingly concerned about the consequences. In a recorded conversation with advisers, King worried that a visit would be interpreted throughout the Arab world—and in Africa and Asia—as an endorsement of everything Israel had done. He explicitly said he had questions of doubt and worried about Israel’s annexation of Jerusalem. He ultimately canceled the pilgrimage.
That private uncertainty makes King’s appearance before Heschel and the Rabbinical Assembly on March 25, 1968, particularly revealing.
Asked about Black militants siding with Arabs against Israel, King strongly defended Israel. He affirmed its right to exist, territorial integrity and security.
Then he discussed the Arab side.
King described peace for Israel principally in political terms: national existence, territory and security.
He described peace for ‘the Arabs’ principally in economic terms: hunger, disease, illiteracy and the need for what he called a Marshall Plan for the Middle East.
The difference is striking.
Israel receives a vocabulary of political rights. The Arab side receives a vocabulary of economic development.
Palestinians as a distinct national people do not become the center of King’s analysis.
That does not mean King was hostile to Palestinians. It would be unfair to impose today’s vocabulary retrospectively upon a man murdered in 1968.
But by then the Palestinian refugee question was already two decades old. The Palestine Liberation Organization had been founded in 1964. The 1967 war had placed the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza under Israeli control.
King understood enough about the political danger to cancel his pilgrimage. Yet even beside one of his closest Jewish allies, he did not publicly develop a correspondingly explicit account of Palestinian political rights.
I find that omission more significant now than I once would have. My own writing has tried to hold Israeli security, Jewish historical vulnerability and Palestinian equality in the same frame. The more I have worked at that, the more I understand why King may have felt the political danger—and why avoiding the political rights of Palestinians left unfinished work for those who came after him.
Even extraordinary allies can become very good at discussing the injustice they agree about while avoiding the injustice that might place them on different sides.
And the disagreement became much harder after King’s death.
Israel and Africa
One reason is Israel’s relationship with Africa.
That history should not be simplified.
Israel did not begin its relationship with postcolonial Africa as an ally of apartheid.
During the late 1950s and 1960s, Israel developed significant diplomatic and development relationships with newly independent African countries. By 1963, Israel had twenty-two embassies in Africa, and at its peak it maintained relations with thirty-three Black African states.
But the relationship deteriorated. In 1973, twenty-five Black African states broke diplomatic ties with Israel. Scholarship suggests their decisions reflected African unity, international norms, the Arab-Israeli conflict and their own desire to avoid isolation—not simply Arab pressure.
Then Israel’s relationship with apartheid South Africa deepened.
In April 1975, Israeli Defense Minister Shimon Peres and South African Defense Minister P.W. Botha signed a secret security agreement. Military and technological cooperation grew through the 1970s and 1980s. Historical studies describe Israeli assistance involving drones, missiles, tank and aircraft upgrades, naval capabilities and other military technology, with cooperation continuing despite the mandatory United Nations arms embargo against South Africa.
For many Black Americans and Africans, that was not simply another episode of Cold War geopolitics.
Apartheid South Africa was one of the defining moral issues of the twentieth century.
Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress were fighting a government built explicitly around white political supremacy.
So when Israel maintained an extensive strategic and military relationship with that government, many Black people concluded that the Jewish state had ended up on the wrong side of a struggle whose moral architecture looked painfully familiar.
Mandela, Arafat and Historical Memory
This history matters when Jews ask why Mandela embraced Yasser Arafat.
Mandela himself explained the complexity remarkably well.
Speaking to the South African Jewish Board of Deputies in 1993, he rejected antisemitism, recognized the legitimacy of Zionism as Jewish nationalism, affirmed Israel’s right to exist within secure borders and supported Palestinian national self-determination.
In the same speech, he said the ANC had been extremely unhappy about Israel’s military cooperation with the apartheid government and that Israel’s refusal for years to isolate apartheid had influenced the ANC’s attitude toward Israel.
Mandela did not reason: Israel cooperated with apartheid, therefore Israel has no right to exist.
Nor did he reason: Israel has a right to exist, therefore Africans should forget its relationship with apartheid.
He held both truths.
Some Black Americans have difficulty understanding why Jews cannot simply separate criticism of Israel from the Jewish experience.
Some Jews have difficulty understanding why Black Americans cannot simply separate Israel from apartheid South Africa, Mandela and African liberation.
Historical memory explains part of the gap.
For many Jews, 1948 is first of all the restoration of political sovereignty after centuries of statelessness and persecution; 1967 is remembered through the fear of another war that could threaten Jewish survival. A Black audience shaped primarily by apartheid, colonialism and liberation movements may know those dates but not feel them that way. Jewish participants are right to ask that those memories be understood before Israel is reduced to a simple story of white power.
Black Christians, White Evangelicals and Israel
Religion explains another part.
White evangelical Christians and Black Christians may read the same Bible, revere many of the same Hebrew Scriptures and speak passionately about Israel, yet they often arrive at very different political conclusions.
In a 2022 Pew survey, 70 percent of white evangelical Protestants said God gave the land that is now Israel to the Jewish people. Only 36 percent of Black Protestants said the same. White evangelicals were also far more likely to favor a single state governed by Israel.
This is important because Black Americans sometimes assume that America’s intense support for Israel is primarily an expression of Jewish political power.
That leaves out one of the largest forces in American pro-Israel politics: Christian Zionism.
Vice President Mike Pence repeatedly grounded his support for Israel explicitly in his Christian faith and addressed Christians United for Israel. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an evangelical Christian, similarly described Christian support for a Jewish homeland as a longstanding religious commitment. Mike Huckabee has long publicly identified as a Zionist and has taken positions on Palestinian statehood and the West Bank rooted partly in his biblical understanding of the land.
Some of these white Christian supporters of Israel are politically aligned with the same MAGA movement that many Black Americans experience as hostile to DEI, critical race theory, affirmative action and other racial-justice initiatives.
That produces another paradox.
A Black Christian can read Exodus and identify with the Hebrew slaves struggling for liberation.
A white Christian Zionist can read Genesis and see God’s covenant as requiring strong political support for modern Israel.
Both may believe they are taking the Bible seriously. They are reading through different histories.
This is why the Palestine question could not remain indefinitely outside Black–Jewish dialogue.
King sensed the problem.
His relationship with Heschel was deep enough to change American history, but we do not possess a comparably developed public conversation between them about Palestinian national claims.
Then the issue grew larger. Israel’s relationship with Africa changed. Its cooperation with apartheid South Africa deepened. Mandela emerged from prison remembering who had supported the ANC and who had worked with Pretoria. Black-Palestinian solidarity developed. Israel became not simply a foreign-policy question but a test of how Black and Jewish Americans understood oppression itself.
We should celebrate King and Heschel.
But the next generation of Black–Jewish dialogue should do more than reproduce their photograph.
We should finish the conversation they never had.
Selected sources and research notes
- Rabbinical Assembly, King conversation transcript — https://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/sites/default/files/assets/public/resources-ideas/cj/classics/1-4-12-civil-rights/conversation-with-martin-luther-king.pdf
- Jewish Virtual Library, Martin Luther King and Israel — https://jewishvirtuallibrary.org/martin-luther-king-and-israel
- University of Haifa, Israel in Africa — https://cris.haifa.ac.il/en/publications/israel-in-africa-1956-1976/
- South African History Online, Mandela 1993 address — https://sahistory.org.za/archive/address-anc-president-nelson-rolihlahla-mandela-opening-37th-congress-south-african-jewish
- Pew, Israel and Palestinians views 2022 — https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/05/26/modest-warming-in-u-s-views-on-israel-and-palestinians/