"Prior to 1976, the Israeli government had been using the Emergency Regulations, a law left over from the British Mandate, to take control of land in the Galilee and hand it over to the Israeli Land Administration (ILA), which would then redistribute it to Jewish settlers under the direction of the Jewish National Fund (JNF)."

"Britain’s colonial past has left its mark in many parts of the world. But most of the peoples it ruled gained their independence after Britain left - except for the Palestinians. Instead, Britain promised their homeland to the Zionist movement through the 1917 Balfour Declaration, even before its occupation of historic Palestine. Britain did so without consulting them, indeed, against their will."

"The Supreme Court in Israel has only been able to question the legality of this policy in a few individual cases, but not in principle. Imagine if in the United Kingdom or the United States, Jewish citizens, or Catholics for that matter, were barred by law from living in certain villages, neighborhoods, or maybe whole towns? How can such a situation be reconciled with the notion of democracy?"

"Today, we can only speculate about where King would stand. Yet I find myself in agreement with the historian Robin D.G. Kelley, who concluded that, if King had the opportunity to study the current situation in the same way he had studied Vietnam, “his unequivocal opposition to violence, colonialism, racism and militarism would have made him an incisive critic of Israel’s current policies.”

Ongoing moves by Zionist lobby groups and American legislators to define anti-Semitism as criticism of Israel is an assault on free speech everywhere, writes Professor Stuart Rees.