After a bumpy ride with Israel during his first term, President Barack on his first official visit to the Jewish state appears to have made a stabilizing mid-course correction. Though most attention has been paid to his Jerusalem speech, Obama’s remarks on landing at Tel Aviv may have the greater historical importance. In Cairo in 2009, Obama appealed to Arab and Muslim empathy for “the Jewish people [who] were persecuted for centuries, . . . [by] anti-Semitism in Europe [that] culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust.” Suffering from historical amnesia, he failed to mention any historical bond between Jews and the Holy land predating the Shoah. In 2013 landing in Israel, he corrected this grave oversight: “More than 3,000 years ago, the Jewish people lived here, tended the land here, prayed to God here. And after centuries of exile and persecution, unparalleled in the history of man, the founding of the Jewish State of Israel was a rebirth, a redemption unlike any in history.” Debate now rages about whether Obama reinvented himself into being a new Bill Clinton—whose sympathy for Israel shined through even after many arguable blunders—from being a recycled Jimmy Carter whose dislike for the Jewish state casts a dark shadow despite his accomplishment at the Camp David Summit. I want to focus instead on Obama in relation to the historic African American bond with the Zionist idea and reality. Given the decades-long deterioration in African American relations with Jews, it is not surprising that, in the twentieth-first century, a certain cynicism has begun to color interpretations of even the historical affirmation of Israel by the Reverend Martin King, Jr. In 1956, the young King said: “There is something in the very nature of the universe which is on the side of Israel in its struggle with every Egypt.” His last speech before his assassination in 1968 recalled his 1959 trip on the Jericho Road when Jericho was still in Arab hands. The cynical view that King was merely appealing for Jewish support—and dollars—belies African American history. In slavery times, it was the liberator Moses and his lieutenant Joshua—not Jesus and his apostles who dominated the spirituals. The ideological godfather of modern Pan-Africanism—Edward Wilmot Blyden—was also an ardent friend of Jewish Zionism. Born into a free black family on Charlotte-Amalie, capitol he Danish Virgin Islands, Blyden prized his close ties with Jews, beginning with the 400-strong Jewish community including David Cardoze, later a rabbi, who taught Blyden the rudiments of Hebrew which he subsequently mastered. Sent as an agent of the American Colonization Society to Liberia, the American “Black to Africa” experiment that in 1847 became an independent nation, Blyden in 1866 visited Jerusalem, declaring “Jews are to be restored to the land of their fathers” once “the misrule of the Turks” was overcome. In 1898, Blyden was fascinated when he saw Herzl’s rise as Zionism’s new Moses. Blyden’s pamphlet, The Jewish Question, begins with Blyden’s announcement of his: deepest possible interest in the current history of the Jews—especially in that marvelous movement called Zionism. The question, in some respects, is similar that that which at this moments agitates thousands of descendants of Africa in America, anxious to return to the land of their fathers. Apparently without any knowledge of Blyden, Theodor Herzl in his 1902 novel, Altneuland, has Zionist Professor Steineck remark: “Now, that I have lived to see the return of the Jews, I wish I could help to prepare the return of the Negroes. . . . All men should have a homeland.” Next in this pro-Zionist succession came NAACP founder W. E. B. Du Bois. Overcoming an early disdain for allegedly exploitative Jewish merchant class, Du Bois studied the Zionist movement carefully, especially after the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917. He declared when in Paris to organize the Pan African Congress of 1919 that: “The African movement must mean to us what the Zionist movement must mean to the Jews, the centralization of race effort and the recognition of a racial front.” In 1921, Du Bois commented favorably on the completion of blueprints for a Hebrew University on the Mount of Olives “in the new Palestine.” In 1929, he blamed “the murder of Jews in Palestine” by “ruthless and bloodthirsty evil-doers” primarily on British maladministration. The Holocaust —which he called “a calamity almost beyond comprehension”—solidified Du Bois’ pro-Zionism. Citing Saudi Arabia’s continuation of the slave trade, Du Bois was singularly unsympathetic with the Arabs whom he faulted for “widespread ignorance and poverty and disease and a fanatic belief in the Mohammedan religion”—in contrast to Palestine’s “young and forward looking Jews, bring a new civilization to an old land.” After Israel’s Declaration in May, 1948, and the appointment of African American Ralph Bunche to succeed assassinated Count Folke Bernadette, Du Bois concentrated his fire not on the Stern Gang but on “the apparent apostasy” of Bunche—“the grandson of slaves”—for not being pro-Zionist. It is true that there is a counter-tradition—vociferous but circumscribed—in African American thought, running from Marcus J. Garvey’s followers in the 1920’s to Louis Farrakhan’s today, which is hostile to Zionism and Israel. Here we have an ambivalence different but parallel to “the double consciousness” struggling in African-American breasts that Du Bois identified in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Those inclined to try to dissect innermost motives—a dangerous business—might start with the possibility that Barack Obama is no stranger to these clashing traditions toward the Zionist project. Reverend King’s better angels seem, for the moment, to have the upper hand.