Ta-Nehisi Coates’ next book compares Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the Jim Crow South
Author Ta-Nehisi Coates is seen onstage at a conference on June 7, 2023 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Carol Lee Rose/Getty Images)
(JTA) — Ta-Nehisi Coates, the public intellectual whose writing has sparked national conversations about reparations and race in the United States, has written a book indicting Israel for its mistreatment of Palestinians and occupation of their territory.
“The Message,” which comes out Tuesday, is Coates’ first nonfiction book in nearly a decade. It is a collection of three essays, the longest of which is about a 10-day trip Coates took to Israel and the West Bank last year, prior to the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct 7.
Passages of the book that have been reprinted in reviews and articles — as well as Coates’ own reflections on the essay — have sparked praise and criticism of the analysis offered by Coates, who identifies as a “relative latecomer” to studying the conflict.
Written by a National Book Award winner frequently compared to James Baldwin, the influential Black intellectual of the Civil Rights era, the book also aims to influence the way the conflict is discussed ahead of the one-year anniversary of Oct. 7, 2023 and at a time when the Israel-Hamas war has dominated American politics and discourse.
In the essay, titled “The Gigantic Dream,” and in interviews prior to the book’s publication, Coates draws on his own identity as a Black American and likens Israel’s control over West Bank Palestinians to the Jim Crow South. He also questions the justification for Israel’s founding after the Holocaust and criticizes “the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality” in the way the conflict is covered.
“I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes in the essay, according to a recent cover story in New York Magazine. “The pushing of Palestinians out of their homes had the specific imprimatur of the United States of America. Which means that it had my imprimatur.”
Articles that praise and criticize the book both note that Coates’ survey of the conflict is limited. According to coverage, the book does not discuss Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel nor the ensuing war in Gaza, because he wanted to center it on what he saw. The essay reportedly does not include the word “Hamas.” Nor, according to the New York magazine story and others, does it discuss that Israel has faced decades of terror attacks on civilians from groups, including Hamas, that are publicly committed to the country’s destruction. (Coates’ publisher, Penguin Random House, did not respond to JTA’s request for a review copy in time for publication.)
“He refuses to countenance conversations with Jews who don’t share his opinions and don’t denounce their nation,” reads a critique of the book by Daniel Bergner in the Atlantic, Coates’ former longtime professional home. In a sign of Coates’ influence, the critique remained one of the Atlantic’s most-read articles five days after its publication.
The review adds that Coates does not acknowledge “that to a great degree, Palestinian leadership as well as many Palestinian people share this eliminationist view [of Israel], which might help explain the forbidden roads and onerous checkpoints.”
And though Coates’ essay does not touch on Oct. 7 at length, in his interview with New York magazine editor Ryu Spaeth he accuses Israel of “genocide,” a common charge of pro-Palestinian activists. He also compared Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack to Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion. After listing instances of Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians, he mused about whether he would have participated in Hamas’ cross-border attack on Israel.
“And if that wall went down and I came through that wall, who would I be?” he said. “Can I say I’d be the person that says, ‘Hey, guys, hold up. We shouldn’t be doing this’? Would that have been me?”
Coates, who has not responded to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment, has also criticized the way leading American journalists and publications cover the region, accusing them of portraying an unequal reality as an even-handed conflict. In on instance, he said pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses — whom some Jewish students across universities have accused of being hostile or antisemitic — have a better view of the conflict than some reporters.
“That kid up at Columbia, whatever dumb s— they’re saying, whatever slogan I would not say that they would use, they are more morally correct than some motherf—ers that have won Pulitzer Prizes and National Magazine Awards and are the most decorated and powerful journalists,” he told New York magazine.
Coates’ 10-day trip took place in 2023, months prior to Oct. 7, and he acknowledges that it was his first in-depth encounter with the conflict. Half of the trip was guided by writers associated with the Palestine Festival of Literature, or Palfest, and the other half was led by Israeli left-wing activists associated with the anti-occupation group Breaking the Silence.
In a blog post, he also listed well over a dozen books and articles he read to educate himself about the conflict. They include histories by Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi and Israeli scholar Benny Morris; Arthur Hertzberg’s “The Zionist Idea,” a compendium of Zionist writing; and works by Amy Kaplan, Nadia Abu El-Haj and other writers.
Coates has not appeared to lay out a detailed itinerary of the trip prior to the book’s publication but has written and said that the trip took him to hotspots of the conflict that are popular stops for those seeking an introduction to the conflict and the region. Among the places he visited were Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, which is revered by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary; the West Bank city of Hebron, where Israeli troops protect a small enclave of Jewish settlers; the Palestinian villages in the surrounding area; Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum; and cities including Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Ramallah.
Coates has spoken repeatedly about the ideas he seeks to advance in the book, including the parallel between Israel’s West Bank occupation and segregation in the United States, and his earlier perception that the conflict was too complex to understand.
“I thought I was going to another country, but in fact what amazed me was I actually felt that I was in the same country, but I was in a different time,” Coates said at a Nov. 1, 2023, event in New York City sponsored by Palfest. “I was in the time of my parents and my grandparents.”
He added that the conflict had been “made to sound as though you need a degree in Middle Eastern studies or somesuch, a PhD, to really understand what’s happening. But I understood the first day.”
“The Message” follows 2015’s “Between the World and Me,” which explored American racism and the Black experience, and his landmark 2014 article, “The Case for Reparations,” which elevated arguments for reparations for slavery to the forefront of the national conversation. In that article, Coates favorably cites reparations paid to Israel in the wake of the Holocaust, but now says that criticism of that comparison led, years later, to this book.
In interviews, Coates has questioned the justification for Israel’s establishment in the wake of the Holocaust. “Does industrialized genocide entitle one to a state? No,” he told New York magazine. At the November 2023 event, he said Israeli Jews “take the wrong lesson” from their own history of persecution.
And in the blog post that functions as a bibliography for the essay, he sketches out what he calls a “frightful” scenario: “The emancipated enslaves; the oppressed colonizes; the vanquished ethnically cleanses; a people survive a genocide only to perpetrate another.”
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