There has been some conspiracy theory in the US that causes black communities hate Jews. They should educate themselves about the true alliance between Dr. Martin Luther King and the Jewish communities.

Martin Luther King Jr never treated the Jewish community as a convenient ally or Israel as a distant abstraction. His support was public, consistent, and rooted in lived relationships at a time when taking that position carried real political risk.

King’s closest moral partners in the civil rights movement included Jewish leaders, most notably Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched beside him in Selma. Their bond was not symbolic. King spoke of it as a shared covenant born from parallel histories of persecution, exile, and the refusal to surrender dignity. For King, the Black freedom struggle and Jewish survival were not competing narratives but converging ones.

That same moral clarity extended to Israel. In the years following the Holocaust and especially after the 1967 Six-Day War, King rejected attempts to separate sympathy for Jewish suffering from the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination. He described Israel as a nation fighting for its right to exist, not as a colonial project or political inconvenience. When pressured by activists who wanted him to condemn Israel to maintain alliances, King refused.

In 1968, speaking to students in Cambridge, King addressed the growing language of “anti-Zionism” on the left with unusual bluntness. He warned that denying Jews the right granted to every other people was not moral critique but a recycled prejudice. The statement cost him support among some antiwar circles, yet he did not soften it. For King, justice that collapses when Jews are involved was never justice at all.

What makes King’s stance resonate today is not that he was “pro-Israel” in a modern partisan sense. It is that he applied the same moral test everywhere: the right of a people to safety, self-definition, and survival. He refused to rank suffering or trade one community’s legitimacy for another’s applause.

King’s legacy is often edited into something safer than it was. His relationship with Jewish Americans and his defense of Israel resist that editing. They remind us that moral courage is not measured by how loudly one speaks for the fashionable cause of the moment, but by whom one refuses to abandon when the room turns cold.