Why Do Black Pastors Oppose Israel? Henry Louis Gates had an answer more than 30 years ago. By Alan Dershowitz and Andrew Stein
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-do-black-pastors-oppose-israel-7d131f24?mod=opinion_lead_pos11
More than 1,000 black pastors are pressing President Biden to restrain Israel in its war with Hamas and threatening that if he doesn’t do so, it will cost him black support in November. “We see them as a part of us,” the Rev. Cynthia Hale of Decatur, Ga., told the
, referring to Palestinians. “They are oppressed people. We are oppressed people.” Barbara Williams-Skinner of the National African American Clergy Network said: “Black clergy have seen war, militarism, poverty and racism all connected.”
Yet their focus on the Middle East is perplexing. “The Israel-Gaza war, unlike Iran and Afghanistan, has evoked the kind of deep-seated angst among black people that I have not seen since the civil-rights movement,” Ms. Williams-Skinner said. Why? The world is filled with victims of oppression—the Uyghurs of China, the Kurds of Iraq, the Ukrainians. The black citizens of Sudan have been subjected to mass killing and enslavement at the hands of Arabs. What makes the Palestinians more worthy of sympathy—especially since, unlike these other groups, they have turned down numerous offers of statehood and have made terrorism their tactic of choice?
Perhaps it is that their antagonists are Jews. In a 1992 article, the historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. pondered the causes of rising antisemitism in the black community. He considered the influence of “Christian anti-Semitism, given the historic importance of Christianity in the black community.” But he laid the primary blame on black demagogues who were vying for leadership in the new “Afrocentric” movement.
Mr. Gates noted that many Jews were surprised by the “recrudescence of black anti-Semitism, in view of the historic alliance between the two groups.” He cited the “brutal truth” that the “new anti-Semitism arises not in spite of the black-Jewish alliance, but because of it.” The alliance had been formed by a previous generation of black ministers, led by Martin Luther King Jr., who sought integration. The new generation of Afrocentric leaders, including pastors, needed to keep blacks isolated to establish their own power.
Mr. Gates noted that “it is among the younger and more educated blacks that anti-Semitism is most pronounced” and that this bigotry “belongs as much to the repertory of campus lecturers as community activists.” More than 30 years later, these words seem prophetic.
Mr. Dershowitz is a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School and author of “War Against the Jews: How to End Hamas Barbarism.” Mr. Stein, a Democrat, served as New York City Council president, 1986-94.
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