“Dr. King to Lead Fall Pilgrimage to the Holy Land,” the New York Times reported on May 15, 1967. (When will the Times stop calling Israel the Holy Land?) Martin Luther King, Jr. had announced the previous day his intention to have the pilgrimage in the fall, with two main stops, one, to be held on Nov 14 on the Mount of Olives in the Jordanian sector of Jerusalem, the other, two days later, in a gathering on the Galilee. Of course, by May 15, 1967, it was very late in the day to be speaking of the Jordanian sector of Jerusalem. In less than three weeks, conquered by Israel, it would be no more. The Six Day War ended King’s thoughts of a Middle East pilgrimage.

This was not a throwaway idea. Although King promoted the pilgrimage as non-political and having no relation to his civil rights campaigns, he had been thinking about this for months, and had planned his trip in consultation with the Israeli and Jordanian governments. The previous fall, King had sent his closest advisor, Andrew Young to the Middle East to plan for the pilgrimage, which was to be a group of 5000 persons, going first to Jordanian Jerusalem, passing through the Mandelbaum Gate then separating Israeli West Jerusalem from Jordanian East Jerusalem, and then up to the Galilee, in a specially constructed amphitheater that make it look as it King was preaching from, and standing, on the water.

Why was King interested in peace in the Middle East? Perhaps one reason was that his campaigns for civil rights in the United States had stalled. King was having more of a challenge than ever in corralling the clashing egos that made up the Southern Christian Leadership Conference into some semblance of order. King was dealing with long hot summers of riots at home, a challenge to his left by black power advocates who thought he and his advocacy for non-violence, and a mounting white backlash at home.

Only a month before he made public his plans about his Middle East pilgrimage, on 4 April 1967, King, in a famous address at Riverside Church in New York City, broke with the Johnson administration, and called for an end to the War in Vietnam. His involvement in seeking Middle East peace was part of an extension of his ministry to questions of peace and war worldwide. On 4 June, 1967, the day the Six Day War began, King was one of 14 Christian religious leaders (Reinhold Niebuhr was his most famous co-signatory) calling on Egypt to end its blockade of the Straits of Tiran, and the Johnson administration to honor its commitment to the freedom of international waterways. It was a strongly pro-Israeli statement: “Let us recall that Israel is a new nation whose people are still recovering from the horror and decimation of the European holocaust” and that “the people of Israel have the right to live and develop in tranquility.”

King later tried to play down the significance of his signing the statement, complaining privately that the New York Times treated it as a blanket endorsement of Israeli policies, which felt it was not. Still, it was one of the few times in his career that the staunchly pacifist King seemed to endorse military action. And the statement said nothing about the Palestinians or any Arab grievances against Israel. I have no doubt that he was sincere in everything he said about Israel in the last year of his life, and I hope it’s not too cynical to suggest that one reason for his support for Israel was to staunch the flow of Jewish support from the SCLC and the civil rights cause, which had reached high tide by 1967. King’s support for Israel did not stay long in the headlines. His position was not particularly popular among African Americans. When black residents of Chicago were asked about it, most responded along the lines, to give some quotes, that “Israel seems to have what it takes to win on its own,” the United States should stay out it, and that “the Negroes here seem to be in worse shape than the people in Israel” and that King should stick to the issues, and the people, he knew best. That fall, at the New Politics convention in Chicago, King gave the opening address. The conference in its final statement condemned the Six Day War as an “imperialistic Zionist war.” King condemned the statement, saying “I will never be anti-Semitic, and I will never engage in anything that signifies anything other than concern for the humanity of the Jewish people.”

That was just about the last thing King had to say about Jews and Israel in the few months remaining in his life. It is not clear what King hoped to accomplish by his pilgrimage to Israel and Jordan. The statements issued indicated that he hoped that if Israel and Jordan could work together on accommodating him and his 5000 followers to their countries, it could have been the start of a real healing process. And he thought that peace and calm would improve the economic climate, and make cooperation more likely. But he surely believed that on some level, bearing personal witness would be able to change hearts and minds, melt old grievances, and like all non-violence campaigns, force old conflicts into new contexts.

On the evening of 4 April, 1968 I was in my room, listening to a rock station, reading Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, when my father, I think, called out the horrible news that King had been assassinated. I went to my junior high school the next day, a predominantly African American school, and the white students were assaulted, and we eventually gathered, cowering in the cafeteria, to be rescued by the police. It’s not that I liked being thrown down the stairs or jabbed with sharp objects, and I sympathized with the horror stories of my classmates, but I kept my true feelings to myself, that we whites and we Jews (almost all of us were Jewish) on some level probably deserved it. Not many would have agreed with me. More would have agreed with a local rabbi in my Queens neighborhood who was developing a reputation as a rabble rouser, Meir Kahane (I attended Bar Mitzvahs of some of my friends at his synagogue at which he presided) that the riots after King’s murder showed that Jews needed to defend themselves against blacks, against Arabs, against all the enemies of the Jewish people, by any means necessary. New battle lines were drawn in the wake of King’s assassination, from which we continue to fight our wars.

It is a half century since Martin Luther King was assassinated, long enough ago to place the event very much in the past, but still recent enough to be in the living memory of many, such as myself. One thing is abundantly clear that as we examine the past half century from the perspective of King’s career. We have come a long away, and we have not moved at all, we move forward and backward at the same time. We have much to be proud of, and much to be ashamed of.

King’s interest in Middle east peace is one of the least remembered aspects of his amazing career. It is easy to dismiss his plans for a Middle East pilgrimage as quixotic and ill-thought out, not rooted in the history of bitter histories of Israelis and Palestinians. But King grew up in a land of bitter histories, and knew that the only way to break with the past was to give the voiceless a voice, and those deaf to their suffering new ears to hear them. King left much business unfinished, and much of his unfinished business is familiar; the Poor People’s Campaign to address economic inequality, various organizations to fight for true citizenship for black Americans, and the struggle against the War in Vietnam to end unnecessary and evil overseas American military adventurism. With them, his planed pilgrimage to Israel and Palestine needs to be remembered as one more arena to which he brought his unequalled moral witness, and one more arena in which his hopes for a better world have gone largely unfulfilled.