Black Zionists Sidebar

Forging a New Alliance...

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Building on its success with white evangelical Christians, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews hopes to “rekindle an old friendship” from the civil rights era and persuade more African Americans to become Zionists. That’s why the media-savvy, Chicago-based organization has launched the Fellowship of Israel and Black America.

“We never had a targeted marketing campaign and program aimed at African Americans,” Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, the head of IFCJ explains. Just so that no one is confused about which African Americans the IFCJ is courting, Eckstein adds: “We are not dealing with the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons. We are strictly working through the religious, evangelical black community.” 
Eckstein will co-chair the new initiative with Glenn Plummer, an African American pastor from Detroit. Among its first goals is to work with the Israeli government to build a monument in to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Israel. The group will also sponsor tours to Israel for African American religious leaders and encourage them to return with their congregations.

African Americans, who tend to vote Democratic, have more in common with the overwhelmingly Republican white evangelicals than one might suspect. According to a study by The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 51 percent of African Americans believe that that “the state of Israel is a fulfillment of the biblical prophecy about the second coming of Jesus.” African Americans also tend to be conservative on social issues such as gay marriage, and Republicans hope to make inroads in the African American vote based on these commonalities. According to Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page, it is no accident that the rise of black evangelicals as a political force is timed with the Bush presidency. “In the Karl Rove era, we’ve seen a widespread political polarization of churches, especially with the president’s faith-based initiatives,” Page says.

In 2005, the Knesset Christian Allies Caucus—a two-year old body of the Israeli parliament that seeks to build a direct cooperation between the Jewish state and Christian leaders around the world—invited Plummer to address the Knesset. In his speech, Plummer called on the assembled MKs “to get in our face and remind us that we stood together in the sixties. Say ‘we need friends now,’ and you’ll be met with the open arms of embrace from black Americans.”

The United States’ estimated 20 million Christian Zionists dwarf its six million Jews. Israel first began seriously courting evangelical Christians in the late 1970s, and they are now among its staunchest supporters. Most of IFCJ’s 400,000 donors have contributed more than a quarter of a billion dollars to Israeli and Jewish causes over the last eight years.

Robert Mawire, the pastor of Good News Ministries in Fort Worth, Texas, is thrilled about the new initiative. His church spearheads the Christian Aliyah Project, which provides funding for the immigration of Jews from Argentina, Uruguay, Ethiopia, France and Eastern Europe to Israel. Mawire works closely with the Absorption Ministry in Israel and the Jewish Agency in New York. “Our part is to pay,” he bluntly informs me. “The government tells us where the airlift is going to come from… and then we wire the money to the Jewish Agency.” In the past few years Mawire has raised more than $250,000 in donations for the project. For every dollar the Christian Aliyah Project raises it receives a matching dollar from the Jewish Agency and a matching dollar from the Absorption Ministry.  

“I think the best would be if the leadership of Israel would come and address black audiences across this nation,” explains Mawire. “It would tell the blacks that you recognize us, you receive us, you respect us, we mean something to you.”—Evan R. Goldstein