Representative Jamaal Bowman started his political career as a progressive supporter of Israel. He was one of several Black candidates who rode the protest-friendly fervor of the George Floyd summer to political triumph in 2020, defeating three-decade incumbent Eliot Engel, one of the staunchest Israel supporters in the House, in New York’s 16th Congressional District by drawing voters from whiter and more affluent parts of Westchester County and Blacker, more Latino and working-class sections of Yonkers and the Bronx.

His position on Israel began to change in 2021, when as a freshman congressman he visited Israel and returned with a dim view of the government’s willingness to pursue a two-state solution, according to HuffPost. His winning coalition began to splinter as his denunciations of Israel became more acute and fell apart in the aftermath of October 7, when he characterized the Israeli assault on Gaza as a genocide. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee recruited George Latimer, an Israel hawk, to primary Bowman with a campaign that painted him as out of touch with his constituents. On Tuesday, Bowman was easily defeated.

Bowman’s reelection campaign revealed a deep degree of naïveté about how to win elections; there was no way he could galvanize enough antiwar votes to overcome Latimer’s appeal to Israel’s supporters. But Bowman’s brief tenure in Congress also revealed the predicament that Black Democrats find themselves in because of the war in Gaza, which has forced them to compromise the very moral bona fides that gave them political clout to begin with.

When considering Bowman’s downfall, it is worth comparing his trajectory to that of Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, a former pastor for Martin Luther King Jr.’s parish in Georgia who won his 2020 race in part because........

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