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Today we remember Martin Luther King Jr.’s forgotten 1959 trip to Palestine, a chapter that has been strategically erased from mainstream history. #MLK 
In March of that year, following five months in India, King and his wife Coretta traveled to Lebanon and then to Palestine, during which time they visited East Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Al-Khalil (Hebron), Nablus and Jericho.
Upon returning to Montgomery, Alabama, King delivered a sermon on Easter Sunday reflecting on his time in Palestine. During the sermon he explained that Jersusalem “has been divided and split up and partitioned.”
“Before you can enter one side of the city, it must be clear that you will not enter the other. If on your visa it is revealed that you are going into any Arab nation, you can only go to Israel without being able to ever go back to an Arab country in the life of your passport.”
He chose not to enter israeli-occupied West Jerusalem.
Over the next 8 years, King was invited to visit 1948 Palestine by the israeli government and multiple zionist organizations a half dozen times. On every occasion he accepted the offer and then canceled. This took place in 1963, 1964, twice in 1965, in 1966 and again in 1967.
While zionists have long claimed MLK as one of their own, his travel logs tell a different story.
In Michelle Alexander’s 2019 editorial “Time To Break The Silence On Palestine” she chronicles a June 1967 call that King had with advisers in the wake of the Naksa, weighing whether or not to proceed with plans to visit ‘48 Palestine on the invitation of the israeli government.
During the call he explained, “I just think that if I go, the Arab world, and of course Africa and Asia for that matter, would interpret this as endorsing everything that Israel has done, and I do have questions of doubt.”
The call came just months after he delivered his “Beyond Vietnam” speech April 4, 1967, when he publicly declared his opposition to the war for the first time, linking the struggle for racial justice in the US to the struggle against capitalism and imperialism.
The next day 168 newspapers denounced him.
