The Black Church and Israel

Geoffrey Stern: So Rabbi Adam and Reverend Doumasani, welcome back. It is an absolute pleasure to have you. We, on Madlik, discuss the scriptural portion that is read by Jews in synagogues all around the world, and we also sometimes talk about current events. And tonight is going to be one of those nights that we do both. And before I introduce you or re-introduce you, because you were on the show about two years ago for the scriptural reading of Noah, I want to just provide the context of the scriptural verses that we are reading this week.

The Jews have left Egypt, and everybody seems to focus on the Exodus, on Moses and Pharaoh, and sometimes disregards the hard work of emancipation and liberation. So, Exodus is the beginning of those laws. What I said in the introduction was when the rubber hits the road. And believe it or not, and this could, believe it or not, pass over your head, it talks about laws of slavery. Indentured servants, but nonetheless slavery. And if you focus on it carefully, you see it’s not so much talking about slavery as it’s talking about emancipation.

It says that an indentured servant shall go free in the seventh year without payment. If a male slave came single, he shall leave single. If he had a wife, his wife shall leave with him. So, he takes what is his with him. And just to prove the point that we’re truly talking about the challenges of emancipation, it even talks about a slave who doesn’t want to go, who feels too comfortable with the status quo. But if the slave declares in Exodus it says, I love my master and my wife and children.

I do not wish to go free. There’s a ritual where his ear is pierced on the side of a doorpost. But the point is, these are laws of emancipation. And the real story, the real work and sweat of Exodus is literally that, becoming emancipation. I was recently in the South on a civil rights mission from my local UJA Federation, and we started studying the civil rights movement from Dred Scott and the emancipation. That’s when the struggle began. So, we are talking about the struggle of emancipation.

3:56 – And then, quickly, it makes it clear that this is a universal message. In Exodus 22: 20 it says, You shall not wrong or oppress a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. This is all a process that all of us must, or I should say, should go through. And then it goes on to this solidarity that I talked about, because the slavery that it’s talking about is as much racism as it is economic inequality. These are indentured servants who have gone into debt. So, in Exodus 22: 24 it says, if you lend money to my people, to the poor among you, do not act toward them as a creditor, exact no interest from them.” The whole idea of creating solidarity amongst the people is emphasized by et ami, my people.

4:50 – The Jewish rabbinic commentaries all comment that first you loan to a family member, then you loan to a townsman, then you loan to someone who lives in the next town. The idea is to create solidarity, pride in who you are as a people, as a family. And then finally, it talks about in Exodus 23: 1-3 you shall not carry false rumors, you shall not join hands with the guilty to act as a malicious witness, you shall neither side with the mighty nor shall you give perverse testimony in a dispute, nor shall you show deference to a poor person in a dispute.

5:35 – V’dal lo tehedar baribo. The strangest verse that you cannot give preference to the poor. And in Leviticus 19: 15 it repeats this. Do not favor the poor or show deference to the rich. Judge your kin fairly. And I am going out on a limb here, But I think, again, as a result of being a slave, it would be very easy to favor the victim, to favor the poor. And the Bible is saying don’t fall for that trap [of seeing everything through the lens of privilege and victim]. So that is the Torah scriptural reading that we have this week. But in terms of our current events, Reverend Dumasani, I shared with you an article from the Wall Street Journal that says, Why Do Black Pastors Oppose Israel?

And it had Henry Gates has answers for more than years. In today’s New York Times, there was, From Ferguson to Gaza, How African Americans Bonded with Palestinian Activists. We live in a moment when our two communities, Reverend, are being challenged. When I went down to the South, the youngest civil rights activist that I met was a wonderful person. He [Bishop Calvin Woods] was 91 years old, and he walked across the bridge on Selma. My guess is that I would not have the same reception from current African-American civil rights activists.

7:12 – So tonight, we’re going to discuss it all. By way of introduction, Reverend Dumasani Washington is the founder and board president of IBSI, the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel. And most importantly, he is the author of Zionism and the Black Church, why standing with Israel will be a defining issue for Christians of color in the 21st century. And finally, and this is all in the source sheet, there are links to all of this, He is currently raising money to create booklets that can be disseminated in black churches and at meetings of Ibsi that make the argument why standing with Israel will be a defining issue for Christians of color.

8:06 – I could not think of a better person to invite to meet with us. We are in anguish. We are trying to grapple with how our two peoples have drifted apart, and frankly, where we will go from here. But why don’t we start, Reverend, with a little bit about yourself, your history. How did you get to write a book like the one that you wrote?

8:34 – Dumisani Washington:  Both the book that you mentioned, Zionism and the Black Church, in my journey, they’re kind of almost one and the same. I have been an Israel supporter for many years. I was raised in a home. There wasn’t a lot of political Zion talk, but like many People who, Black Americans who came up in a traditional church background, which I discuss in my book, spiritual Zionism was pretty much a staple of who we were as Christians, right? And I mean, spiritual Zionism, I’m talking about identification with the people of the book, right?

Just that same linear history from slavery through Jim Crow and all of those things, the songs, the teachings, all of those things. There’s this deep identification with Israel, with Zion, with Jerusalem. I mentioned in my book that arguably more than any other ethnic group, black churches are named after Zionist themes, the AME Zion Church is named for the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and so on and so forth. So, for me, there was always that identification there, being a Christian from a very young age.

9:41 – It became more political for me Probably around 2011-2012, as I began to become more aware of the modern state of Israel, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and within that conflict, the way that Israel would be demonized and attacked. Almost always in racialized terms, Zionism, racism, Israel apartheid, those types of things. Knowing my history well, and even having family in South Africa who experienced South African apartheid, I knew that these things were not true.

10:18 – And I began to speak out. Like you said, I’m a very vocal person. I get that from my mother, a blessed memory. And I started talking sometime around

10:28 – Adam Mintz: By the way, that makes us just like you. We get it from our mothers, too.

10:30 – DM: There you go. Yes, sir. Absolutely. I started talking around or and I haven’t shut up and don’t intend to until my time here is up. It is very important for many different reasons. As a matter of fact, I did a couple of interviews today. One was with the newspaper. I won’t divulge the paper now, just depending on when the piece comes out. But we were talking about this issue, obviously, especially with Not just the war, obviously, what’s going on right now in Gaza, but the piece that was in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago about the thousand-plus black pastors who signed a letter demanding that the White House demand Israel ceasefire.

11:14 – And then the follow-up that you talked about, and I didn’t read this one from today about From Ferguson to Gaza and solidarity thing. What I did do and this for anyone listening, our organization, IBSI, Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel, I wrote a piece. It’s part of our substack. Now, we have, there’s a timing here in terms of, you have to subscribe to read, you don’t have to pay anything to read, but you have to subscribe to actually read the way substack works. But there are premium Pieces they’re already designated beforehand in terms of those dates this particular piece that I’m now referring to is a premium one So no,I’m not hucking but if you want to read you have to actually pay a month read or whatever So there’s a piece that the latest piece that’s on our substack is about this issue And I won’t try to unpack it all here today, but let me simply say this to you The pieces that you are referring to, both the one in the New York Times from a couple weeks ago and the one today or this week, when it is attempting to draw the connection between the general black community or even the black church community and the plight of the Palestinian people, especially with identifying Israel as the antagonist, if you will, or the plight of the Palestinian people being the fault of the Israelis, that is gaslighting.

12:45 – DM: Now, I want to be very, very clear about this. The African-American community, like the Jewish community, like any other demographic, is not a monolith. Reasonable people know that, but let’s just go ahead and put that on the table anyway. No people are a monolith. My Jewish friends always tell me, you put three Jews in a room, you get five different opinions. I always chuckle. I say, that’s the same thing with us, right? You put three black Americans in the room, and we’re going to argue about a lot of different things, even though we may be family.

13:11 – And so that’s just true. I don’t think that’s not true for any… I grew up in Stockton, California, so I had friends from across the multi-ethnic spectrum. They all have the same thing. Okay, they’re Vietnamese, Italian, Jewish, right? They’d all say the same thing. They would passionately argue about things.

13:25 – That having been said… It is a misnomer then to, and I’m not saying this to you gentlemen, I’m just saying this in general with what’s going on right now in our nation, to then assume that black Americans, because of the legacy from which we descended, obviously slavery, Jim Crow segregation, fights for rights, all of those types of things, the things that we have had to contend with in our nation, and yes, often, most often with our Jewish brothers and sisters right by our side, right, that somehow that black American is quote unquote pro-Palestinian, in other words, without any type of qualification about what it means to support the poor people of Gaza or the poor people of Judea and Samaria and the West Bank, that is a misnomer and the reason why it has been affixed to the black community in the way that it has is because of a long-standing effort on the part of several bad actors, first and foremost the PLO, to conflate those issues.

14:31 – Yes, for the most part, Black Americans who are at all aware of their history, and we have had a long history of rooting for the quote unquote underdog. If we understand our history, we understand, even if indirectly passed from generation to generation, what it is to be marginalized, just like our Jewish brothers and sisters, what it is to be attacked, what it is to suffer genocide, all of those things. But just like you just said, Rabbi, as you laid out the portion, that also we also would govern ourselves by wanting to fight for what was right with an understanding, right?

15:11 – To understand what is actually going on. One of the main ways that Yasser Arafat conflated this issue is that he would always tether an Arab, average Arab Palestinian with a PLO, a Fatah fighter. In other words, he wanted the world to believe, check out the mental gymnastics, right? This is what he would do because of the nature of the PLO, which was created by the KGB. Those of you know what I’m talking about, you know, that’s not, a conspiracy. We have all the receipts, as young people say.

15:46 – We know what it is. It was always a PSYOP, right? And one of those things it would do, it would conflate the two. That somehow, if you spoke truth to power against the PLO or Fatah or Hamas, you were being, quote, Islamophobic, quote, anti-Arab, because what they wanted, they meaning the propagandists, they wanted you to not differentiate so that you would not then push back against terrorism, the quest for Jewish genocide, all of those things, right? So, this is still what’s going on now.

16:19 – Black Americans from the time of Dr. King and then later on with the other civil rights movement leaders from the 60s to the 70s clearly understood the situation. He did, Dr. King spoke of the need for the treatment, the humane and just treatment of the Arab population. He, nor the civil rights population, they just simply did not blame their mistreatment on Israel, right? And particularly during when Bayard Rustin

[Bayard Rustin argued that the African-American community was threatened by the appeal of identity politics, particularly the rise of “Black power“. He thought this position was a fantasy of middle-class black people that repeated the political and moral errors of previous black nationalists, while alienating the white allies needed by the African-American community. Nation editor and Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy noted later that, while Rustin had a general “disdain of nationalism”, he had a “very different attitude toward Jewish nationalism” and was “unflaggingly supportive of Zionism“. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayard_Rustin .]

17:06 – formed Basic Black Americans to Support Israel Committee, the black American community full-throated in support of Israel’s right to defend itself and to exist, very well aware of their connection to the Jewish people, and at the same time, like Dr. King, defending the rights of the Arab-Palestinian people. It’s just that, again, did not blame Israel. They called out the PLO. They called out the terrorism. They called out the human shield. They called out what Yasser Arafat did in using the Palestinian people as cannon fodder. He treated them like they were nothing, and the black American community called it out. That’s the biggest difference between then and now, no qualifications. When I read the article a couple of weeks ago, now in the New York Times, and no disparity, I’m not in any way attacking any of those pastors at all, this is not a personal thing at all.

17:46 – When I read the article and I read excerpts that were there, what has been very clear is what I call a deception, and I write about that in my article. The deception that somehow it is unseemly to call out the barbarism of Hamas and differentiate that from the people, meaning that to demand a ceasefire, which sounds justice-like, if you will, to use a term, right? But while there are still Israeli hostages and while Hamas is still declaring they will return to commit on October 7th again and again, that is not justice, that’s wickedness.

18:28 – In other words, for me to demand that Israel stop attempting to defend itself and eradicate Hamas without acknowledging what actually happened on October the 7th and that Hamas is still threatening to do it. That is not justice. Again, that is not really actually even dealing with reality on the ground.

18:48 – GS: You know, one of the things when I was down South, I went to a museum of lynching [The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and The Legacy Museum built by Bryan Stevenson and his Equal Justice Initiative] and one of the [light]bulbs that went off is when they referred to the Ku Klux Klan as terrorists. And it just showed me that to be a terrorist doesn’t mean you have to be part of a minority. You use terrorism to terrorize people. And what happened on October 7th was terrorism pure and simple. It was exactly like the Klan saying, you don’t belong here. Get out. I don’t care who we burn, who we kill. And the other thing that kept on coming over my mind was this whole kind of lens of DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, where the world is divided by color.

19:37 – You know, it reminded me of what King said, which is, don’t judge by the color of your and if you’re judging by the color of your skin, you’re basically engaged in racism. You’ll see most people are of color. Most Jews, half the population, the growing half, came from Morocco, Iraq, Yemen, Tunisia, and all that. So, it’s not only not true, but even if it were true, you can’t put a lens on everything and say white bad, black good.

20:19 – DM: Yes. Well, one of the reasons why, and I referenced it probably just one last time, in the article that I’m referring to on our sub stack, IBSI.org, and it’s Africa Israel Weekly for those who want to take a look at it, you’re more than welcome to. Again, you’d have to, you can see the preview, but you have to sign up to do the rest of it. I address this issue and what you’re addressing there, unfortunately, Rabbi, not you, unfortunately, but the unfortunate reality is politics. So, you referred to demographics.

20:46 – DM: You were saying that you met a 91-year-old gentleman who was part of the civil rights movement, and you might be received differently, and that’s likely true only because there is that generational divide. Now that goes beyond the black community. They did a poll. I can’t remember if it was Gallup or whoever it was. Maybe by November, about a month after October the 7th. And by and large, America continues to stand with Israel against what’s happening to Israel. But that breaks down both in terms of age, certain age group.

21:17 – DM: The older ones, of course, consider themselves more for Israel, the younger ones, not so much. But then also in terms of politics, right? Now, I say politics not for the purpose of being partisan, but for the purpose of being real. One of the things black folks also have, we have a history of speaking truth to power. In our tradition, we believe that you have to say what’s true even though it’s uncomfortable, even though it’s inconvenient, right? And so, the unfortunate reality here, particularly probably over the last seven, eight years or so in the United States, is that when it comes to sympathies lying with Israel, that’s become more and more of a divisive issue.

21:55 – DM: Now, some of that is by design, unfortunately. Politicians on both sides of the aisle play games with the Israel issue like they do with other types of things for their own purposes, and of course that’s heinous. Unfortunately, however, where we are is that there is a reality that in this whole ecosystem of DEI, this whole ecosystem of white privilege and white demonization and everything Western is bad at, this is unfortunately the hard left, which is replete within our college system, which we just saw with the Ivy League presidents and everything who couldn’t sit, who could not disavow calls for Jewish genocide, right?

22:31 – DM: This is actually happening again, for those who are listening, don’t get your dander up. There is Jew hatred on the left and the right, and we see it just rising up. It’s extremely unfortunate. I’m talking about what we see playing out in this specific context. Here, when it comes to white, bad, color, good, which you’re right, absolutely, Dr. King did address that. He addressed that in the 1960s, right? But that has only continued to grow in our institutions, on social media, all of these things, so that Israel, by default, is demonized in the conflict by people who could not find Gaza on a map.

23:09 – DM: Why? Because they believe that Israelis are quote-unquote white and the Palestinians are quote-unquote people of color. That was the strategy of the PLO starting in the 60s. And if for nothing else, they are consistent because they kept hammering that thing to where we are now. People who know nothing about the conflict. They don’t know who Fatah is, don’t know who Hamas is, couldn’t pick Mahmoud Abbas out of a line-up. They have no idea, but they know in their bones that in this conflict, Israel is bad, Israel is evil, Israel is white, Israel is the oppressor.

23:43 – DM: Done. That is how many people, including folks who consider themselves educated, with degrees, teaching other people in universities, is how they’re listed down in this really ridiculous binary thing, this is where we are. People, in other words, much of what you’re seeing playing out in the streets of the United States of America is not just anti-Semitism, it’s rank ignorance of life. I’m not trying to be mean, but I’m just trying to be really real. What you have is people who’ve drunk that entire concoction, if you will, that somehow color Pigmentation equals value, equals value judgment, and this is much of what we are suffering from now.

24:31 – DM: People who believe that Israel is quote-unquote committing genocide against the Palestinians lie. Why do they believe that? Because Israelis are white and Palestinians are brown. Gaza is an open-air prison and Israel counts the calories of the Gazans. They believe it. Because they believe that quote-unquote white people are evil. And again, you already said Israelis are not quote-unquote white. They’re the colors of the rainbow, right? Black, white, and brown, you have that in Israel.

24:57 – DM: But people generally don’t know any of that. They wouldn’t know a Mizrahi Jew if he walked up and shook them by the hand. They don’t know those things because of the propaganda that they have been fed. And so, they see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through that kindergarten lens.

25:14 – GS: Reverend, I’m going to interrupt because we just have a few more minutes and I want to end on a positive note. Could you please tell us what IBSI, the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel, is doing to make the world a better place?

25:28 – DM: Our first and foremost objective is education. We teach just history, authentic black history, black Jewish history. We talk about the Israel-Africa alliance, and this is what we’ve been doing since Now, again, I was gone in CUFI [Christians United for Israel] for about seven years, so I returned, and we resumed that work in June of 2021. We speak with pastors, black pastors, black community leaders, and members across the country. We do live events. We do virtual events. And we share this information and galvanizing that type of support.

26:03 – DM: That what you have here is a situation, we don’t have demographics in that sense because we’re gonna do that type of measuring, it hasn’t been done yet. But what we believe anecdotally for the past over a decade, that the majority of African Americans are not anti-Semites, right? They actually want to see a just peace in the Middle East like any other reasonable person. And have deep affinity where Israel is concerned and concerned where the Arab Palestinians are. What we do is bring the information about this conflict, about why it’s important to the Black community, why it always has been, and those connections, and we give them the opportunity to then show not just their solidarity, but to teach others about what’s going on so they’re not misled.

26:49 – DM And as a matter of fact, those of you in the Atlanta area will be in Atlanta, in Hampton, right outside of Atlanta, this weekend, Saturday and Sunday, doing a conference there at Agape International Ministries.

27:00 – GS: So talk to me about the program where you actually send, because so much about this is demographics and age, and you send young African Americans on missions. Talk to me about that, and then talk about the pamphlets.

27:12 – DM: So, the PEACE initiative is our, our broadest advocacy tool if you will. Peace is an acronym which stands for plan for education, advocacy and community engagement, we launched the pilot. In we recruited Black American men and women from across the country, a small group so that we could actually apply about of them, put together what we had been planning for a while. They went through a nine-month intensive. Each month, they came together for nine months on Zoom, and we unpacked all kinds of different topics.

27:47 – DM: Ancient Israel, Africa’s relationship, Black and Jewish synergy, United Nations, you name it, right? And we also took two trips. In December of 2022 we went to South Africa, and June 2023 of we went to Israel. December 2022 was the motherland; June 2023 was the holy land. And they learned and walked there on the ground, learning culturally, historically, all these things. We learned about what real apartheid was from the people who both experienced it, went to Robin Island, learned about many other things, gentlemen, The Jewish communities key and crucial role in helping the black South Africans dismantle apartheid the same way they did here in the United States against the Jim Crow system right we actually walk through all of those things and same thing and we go to Israel we talk about black Jewish synergy Africa Israel where we went to innovation Africa save a child’s heart.

28:41 – DM: All over the land. These young people’s lives will never be the same. They’re doing advocacy right where they are there. And it is our goal to continue it on possibly this year. Of course, you know, October 7th kind of paused everything. So, by God’s grace, we’ll be able to resume that and take no fewer than each time, twice a year. So it’s our goal to take young people every year to go through that same type of intensive.

29:05 – Multiple Speakers And you asked me another question right back here, which one it was.

GS: The pamphlets.

29:09 – DM So what we are doing now, one of our initiatives is to take, from my book, to take, our team is working on putting small booklets together of some information from each of those chapters so that we can have those physical things to pass out to churches and other black organizations. As a matter of fact, if we had them right now, we’d be taking them down to Atlanta, but we don’t have them produced yet. They won’t be ready probably until March. But that is what we’re doing now. We are in a fundraiser.

29:36 – DM: We do a fundraiser every Black History Month, 100K in 28 days, and some of those funds are going to be used to produce those pamphlets, to produce those small booklets. We have an amazing, amazing graphics arts team and everything, and so it’s going to be absolutely beautiful. So, it’s going to be miniature versions of Zionism and the Black Church. Something, as a matter of fact, one of the meetings that I heard them have today, I wasn’t in it because I’m not that organized, so they kicked me out of those meetings.

30:01 – DM: But one of the meetings they had today was about, there’s a section in chapter six, the last chapter of the book, about where we go from here, or what do we do now. And in that, I talk about the value of education. And we unpack Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington, for those who know about the Rosenwald schools. So, one of those booklets will focus on that particular part of the book. That history so that people can have that in their hands, pass it out there at their churches, and again, because obviously the greatest deterrent to the ignorance that’s happening, the lack of information, is knowledge, and we’re trying to get

30:35 – GS: So besides supporting you, what else can you recommend to the Jewish community besides having confidence and faith? [laughs]

30:46 – DM: Well, yeah, and we welcome everyone to support again, IBSI.org. You can find out more about us. Whenever I get a question like that, Rabbi, I respond the same way. This is over the years, even long before October 7th, oftentimes our Jewish friends will ask, so what can we do? How can we help? We tell them about our organization, but we also tell them to continue to support those efforts in your community. They may have nothing to do with Israel, that you know are genuine. What we do in our organization, for example, is we promote other black community leaders to our audiences, whether they’re black audiences, Jewish, or whatever, so that they can be aware of them, like Pastor Cory Brooks in Chicago, Illinois.

31:31 – DM: On the south side who’s building the community center and everything. I’ve met him through our Jewish friends that are there, because Cory Brooks’ work is there in what’s one of the roughest, if not the roughest part of Chicago, and he’s been doing amazing work changing lives. Oh, and by the way, has a close relationship with the Jewish people, the Jewish community there, stands with Israel. So, we highlight those types of things. So, I encourage people, if they want to contact us, they can.

31:56 – DM: We make ourselves aware of those types of Black leaders across the country. What they may be doing in their ministries or in their vocations may have nothing directly to do with Israel or even nothing directly to do with fighting anti-Semitism, but they, in their stance, do stand with Israel, they do stand against anti-Semitism and hatred, and they’re doing great work in their community. We connect them to them, or making them aware of them, whether it’s for contributions or however they want to help.

32:22 – DM: So that’s what they can do. If they’re aware of those people in their community, help them, support them, and let other people know about them.

32:29 – AM: Yeah, I just want to say that Reverend, what you’re talking about, both your identification of the issue, but also the amazing work that you’re doing really, you know, puts a, you know, puts a whole different spin on some of the negativity that we’ve been reading about recently. And I just want to give you a tremendous amount of credit and we look forward to having you join us again in the future and working together with you because the work that you’re doing is God’s work and it’s such important work.

32:59 – DM: Well, I thank you for that. I appreciate it. I do. And we appreciate you all support. And yeah, anything, anything we can do to help or anytime you want us on, you let us know. We’ll do our best to be there.

33:08 – AM: Thank you so much. And you know how we, you know, Reverend, the way we, we conclude each week, we wish each other a Shabbat Shalom. So, we want to wish you a Shabbat Shalom.

33:17 – DW: Shabbat Shalom to you gentlemen. We really appreciate that again. Thank you so much for everything that you are doing as well. Looking forward to connecting again. Thank you so much. Shabbat Shalom. Thank you for having me.

GS: Thank you and please click on the Defaria Source sheet and there you will find links to IBSA and the Reverend’s book. It’s just a must-have, amazing book. I want to thank you again, Reverend, for everything that you do. Normally we do what we call disruptive Torah, but madlik means a light, and tonight we have shared a light because the Jewish community needs to know that there are people such as you that our two communities can, must, and will fight together for emancipation, freedom, and a better world. So, thank you so much. I hope to see you again soon. Shabbat Shalom.