The British considered Gandhi an asset, seeing him as someone who stymied real efforts to change though his preaching.
It was also apparent that the British were making
use of him, or thought they were making use of him. Strictly speaking, as
a Nationalist, he was an enemy, but since in every crisis he would exert
himself to prevent violence--which, from the British point of view,
meant preventing any effective action whatever--he could be regarded as
"our man". In private this was sometimes cynically admitted. The attitude
of the Indian millionaires was similar. Gandhi called upon them to
repent, and naturally they preferred him to the Socialists and Communists
who, given the chance, would actually have taken their money away. How
reliable such calculations are in the long run is doubtful; as Gandhi
himself says, "in the end deceivers deceive only themselves"; but at any
rate the gentleness with which he was nearly always handled was due
partly to the feeling that he was useful. The British Conservatives only
became really angry with him when, as in 1942, he was in effect turning
his non-violence against a different conqueror.
- George Orwell, Reflections of Gandhi
And yes, both men had millions of angry people standing behind them with knives and clubs, whether they personally approved or not. The British could not afford to "handle" their foreign colony, so they divided it and backed off
(the division of unified British territories, and the unification of divided ones is telling - the British never intended to be away for long; they were going to get their finances together, and come back to "save" these territories from the strife the British themselves had caused. it wasn't until 1956 that the US and USSR kindly informed the British that their empire was over, did the plan get abandoned - leaving all those newly independent nations to deal with the carnage the British had left them with - including Israel and Palestine.)
Martin Luther King, on hte other hand, was an actual activist, a firebrand who would light people up and get them moving. And that movement was not under his control, once the fire was lit; most American blacks refrained from violence not because of King, but because they're like any other person in the world, and violence is usually a last resort anyway. But then you have, yes, Malcom X, and Stokely Carmichael who understood liberation will not come from asking nicely - if the oppressor were swayed by pleas for liberty, surely it would have happened.
In the end, both King and Gandhi were just figureheads on warships. Both men, whether they approved or not (one must assume they did not) were standing in front of a larger body of angry people very willing to assert their liberty by any means necessary.
The British, unable to afford such a conflict, skedaddled. The Americans, similarly unwilling (though with a different perspective, as it wasn't happening in a colony) acquiesced - by as small amount as possible.
The Israelis are no more swayed by clasped hands and pleading than Morocco, Turkey, or Russia are. Feither from the people they stand on nor the rest of the world.
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