On March 25th, 1968, just ten days before he was assassinated, Dr. King was the honored guest at the 68th annual convention of the Rabbinical Assembly. Rabbi Everett Gendler interviewed him in front of the audience as they discussed many topics, including the Arab-Israeli conflict. During the interview, Dr. King was posed this question:
What would you say if you were talking to a Negro intellectual, an editor of a national magazine, and were told, as I have been, that he supported the Arabs against Israel because color is all important in this world? In the editor’s opinion, the Arabs are colored Asians and the Israelis are white Europeans. Would you point out that more than half of the Israelis are Asian Jews with the same pigmentation as Arabs, or would you suggest that an American Negro should not form judgments on the basis of color? What seems to you an appropriate or an effective response?
This question, 55 years later, is still very relevant. Not only has the skin color sentiment grown since 1968, but it has become the very foundation for modern-day Jew-hatred and Israel-hatred in America. Anti-Israel activists claim today exactly what anti-Israel propagandists claimed back then; that Israel is full of White settlers who pushed out the Brown Arabs and are currently oppressing them. Some Israel advocates have decided to respond to this by explaining that over 50% of Israelis are what some would call “Jews of Color.” This is an incomplete and potentially dangerous reply.
So what if more than half of Israel is non-White looking? Does that make their “settler colonialism” okay? Does skin color absolve Israel of the false accusation of “stealing Palestinian land”? Using the progressive left’s logic against them never really works, including in this instance. It just tacitly admits that Israel is as evil as they’re saying it is.
The “there are many Jews of Color” response to attacks against Israel is also dangerous because it gives approval to the demonization of Ashkenazi (European), White-looking Jews. If an accuser states that Israel is a White colonial power oppressing Brown people, and one's response is simply “Well there are Black and Brown Jews in Israel too!” It gives permission to the accuser to continue hating lighter-skinned Jews. It perpetuates a very corrosive ideology. Dr. King tells us what that is in his response to Rabbi Gendler:
On the Middle East crisis, we have had various responses. The response of some of the so-called young militants again does not represent the position of the vast majority of Negroes. There are some who are color-consumed and they see a kind of mystique in being colored, and anything non-colored is condemned. We do not follow that course in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and certainly most of the organizations in the civil rights movement do not follow that course.
Dr. King continued to talk about what peace for Israel, and peace for the Arabs meant. (Neither Dr. King nor Rabbi Gendler said Palestinians because, until Yasser Arafat later weaponized the term against Israel, Palestinians referred to the Jews of the region). Dr. King answered Rabbi Gendler’s question about how Israelis’ pigmentation is perceived by dispelling the notion that somehow a different skin color changes a standard of morality.
This brings us to the point of this piece, something that plagues the United States so deeply: Being color consumed.
As I write this article, Hamas still has some 230 Israeli hostages; babies as young as 7 months old all the way up to survivors of the Holocaust. October 7th, 2023 has again shown us how monstrous Hamas is. They’ve raped women, dragged their dead bodies all over the streets, decapitated people, burned babies and children alive, and much, much more. Now they have hundreds of Israeli captives and, according to Israeli officials, we do not know what their condition is.
In the midst of all of this, representatives in the US are calling for a ceasefire because now it suddenly cares for civilians when Israel tries to take out Hamas in Gaza. Many are asking, how can they call for a ceasefire when Hamas still has hostages? How can there be a ceasefire when Hamas never actually honors one? What are the Israel families’ missing loved ones supposed to do?
The answer no one seems to want to acknowledge is that those questions are the point. People who are calling for a ceasefire are not at all interested in bringing back the kidnapped men, women, and children. They don’t care at all about the currently suffering Israelis, and it’s because they are a product of academic and cultural brainwashing. They have been thoroughly convinced that White is bad and Colored is good. They’ve been taught the color-consumed doctrine that Dr. King denounced, and they did it with the approval of too many trying to advocate for Israel today. Instead of challenging the entire doctrine, we challenged the notion that Israel is White, leaving the doctrine perfectly in place like a buoy to keep them on track.
Sadly, that has become one of the weakest points of our advocacy. No one seems to care about the Israelis, so we resort to appealing to their obsession with skin color. We say, “You know, some of the hostages are Black Jews, don’t you?” We show them pictures of Mizrahi Jews whom Hamas has in their clutches and say “See? Hamas has Brown Jews too.” If someone has to be shown darker-skinned victims in order for them to feel sympathy, that someone is already lost. It shouldn’t matter whether or not the Israelis kidnapped are White-looking. But to far too many people, it does.
Yes. For years, IBSI has taught others about the multiethnic Jewish people and shown their different hues. Our purpose was always to inform as so many non-Jews are unaware of who, in fact, is Jewish. This was part of the impetus of our Founder’s 2016 PragerU video, Why Are There Still Palestinian Refugees, and his creation of The Mizrahi Project. But the purpose of these efforts was (is) always to educate, never to imply that certain Jews are more important than others.
Dr. King’s response to Rabbi Gendler was addressing what I believe to be the single biggest psychological operation our society has seen. Yes, White = bad / Colored = good is a psyop at the highest level. From White Privilege conferences to calls to “abolish Whiteness” at some of the most well-known Universities in the country, to a general hatred of White people being normalized in our culture. We have been conditioned to see anything White as subhuman. Once that was firmly established, all that needed to be done in any situation was to depict Bad Guys as White and Good Guys as colored.
The psyop was so successful, this depiction of Good Guys and Bad Guys can be done no matter the skin color. Thus, none of the color consumed care that Hamas has colored Israeli hostages. They are Israeli, and Israel is White, therefore, they are perpetuating Whiteness by living in Israel. This is how the color consumed has been trained to think.
It is incredibly sad that this has to be said, but in reality, even if Israel was 100% White, our hearts should be in pieces over the fact that 1500 of them were slaughtered, and over 200 are still in captivity. Even if all of Israel was filled with White Jews what Hamas has done and continues to do is beyond reprehensible, and Israel has every right to eliminate Hamas and get their people back. We shouldn’t have to ask what the people look like in order to determine who we support and who we oppose. We shouldn't decide that we stand with the Arab Palestinians because we saw a picture of one of the Arab kids and saw she has nappy hair like ours. Our only side needs to be the truth, and the truth will set us free.
We need to stop playing games with the color consumed. If you know your child’s school is teaching these doctrines, unenroll them. If you see that it is being taught from the pulpit at your church, leave that church. If you hear your rabbi twisting scripture to fit that narrative, leave that synagogue. Our collective humanity needs to be restored, and in order to do that, we must first unlearn the poison we have learned.
Excellent article.