In a landmark opinion piece in the New York Times, Michelle Alexander recently wrote that it is “time to break the silence” on Palestine, in particular the debates over the position Martin Luther King Jr would have taken had he lived to see Israel’s 1967 war develop into the further dispossession of Palestinians from their land.

As King was assassinated just a year later, many have looked to his pronouncements for some clue. Some have attempted to paint King as an unswerving supporter of Israel. Their most substantial evidence is a letter that King supposedly wrote to an “anti-Zionist friend.”

You declare, my friend; that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely ‘anti-Zionist’. . . .  And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God’s green earth: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews. . . .  Anti-Semitism, the hatred of the Jewish people, has been and remains a blot on the soul of mankind. In this we are in full agreement. So know also this: anti-Zionist is inherently anti-Semitic, and ever will be so.