Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of the pioneers of the lucrative racial grievance industrial complex, has shifted his attention to the Middle East.
In a feature published by New York magazine, Coates announced that he will publish a new book explaining why he believes Israel is a brutal apartheid regime victimizing the indigenous Palestinian population. The book, titled The Message, condemns American media figures, academics, and politicians who insist the Israel-Palestinian conflict is “complex” and cannot be simplified into a neat narrative devoid of moral ambiguities.
Coates’s confident assertions about Israel stem from a singular 10-day trip to the Jewish state in the summer of 2023. The writer describes being “astonished” by the widespread presence of checkpoints, guns, and walls within the country — a blaring indicator that Palestinians must exist as a subordinate class to “white” Israeli Jews.
This trip, Coates contends, imbued him with a sense of moral clarity regarding the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. After confidently dismissing any arguments in favor of the Israeli narrative as “horses—,” Coates urges Americans to offer unconditional support to the Palestinian people, arguing that their plight in Gaza and the West Bank shares striking similarities to that of black people during the brutal regime of the Jim Crow south.
Coates apparently did not learn any of the region’s history explaining how and why Palestinians got to this point.
“There is no mention of the fact that Israel is bombarded by terrorist groups set on the state’s annihilation,” features editor Ryu Spaeth notes for New York magazine. “There is no discussion of the intifadas and the failed negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders going back decades. There is even no mention of Gaza because Coates was unable to visit the region after the October 7 attack and he did not want to report on a place he hadn’t seen for himself.”
Anyone familiar with Coates’s writings can easily predict his analysis of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Coates depicts Palestinians as a sort of Middle Eastern version of American black people, a miserably oppressed lower caste with little hope of overcoming their circumstances. To Coates, Palestinians, much like black Americans, have virtually no agency and, therefore, should not be blamed for their own actions. By stripping Palestinians of their agency, Coates is able to rationalize and whitewash the horrific Oct. 7 slaughter of roughly 1,200 people in Israel.
Coates’s comparison of Palestinians to slaves is both intellectually dishonest and unmoored from any serious historical rigor. Unlike Palestinians, victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade never had the opportunity to negotiate for their freedom. If Hamas cared at all about the freedom and dignity of the citizens of Gaza, the group could have immediately tossed aside its weapons and surrendered to Israel. Moreover, Hamas routinely murders Palestinian civilians that speak against its rule, actions not becoming of any legitimate “freedom movement.” The blockade in Gaza, while deeply regrettable, only exists because of the presence of the terrorist group and only filters out military arms.
Coates similarly excused any antisocial behavior from black Americans in his 2015 bestseller Between the World and Me, insisting that they are products of malevolent forces outside of their control.
“You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels,” Coates wrote.
Unsurprisingly, Coates suggests that he views the stories of all so-called “oppressed” people as virtually indistinguishable from each other, lending moral credibility to groups that perceive themselves to be history’s losers.
“I felt the warmth of solidarity of ‘conquered peoples,’ as one of my comrades put it, finding each other across the chasm of oceans and experience,” Coates said.
The celebrated writer then contends that the so-called “Black struggle” must now be exported abroad. Those with a strong sense of morality must observe the Palestinian experience through the lens of black Americans during the Jim Crow era, tossing aside any of the conflict’s unique history or geopolitical realities.
Coates’s attempt to Americanize the Israel-Palestinian conflict is not new. Left-wing activists have long attempted to portray Palestinians as part of a legacy of “oppressed” peoples, while whitewashing their own role in their conflict with Israel. Very few leftist commentators are willing to acknowledge that most Palestinians, unlike black Americans, largely do not want to live peacefully alongside their neighbors. Rather, large swaths of Palestinian society aspire to remove Jews from the land altogether and implement an Islamic state.
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Moreover, Coates does not mention that there are literally tens of thousands of multi-generational Palestinians living in neighboring countries of Jordan and Lebanon without citizenship rights. He does not mention the expulsion of Palestinians from Kuwait or Lebanon. He doesn’t mention that even Egypt does not want to accept Palestinian refugees because it is terrified of Hamas combining forces with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Israel-Palestinian conflict is certainly simple when you can, as Coates does, dispose of “complexity” in favor of sweeping moralistic sentiments and social justice word scramble. However, unlike Coates, Israel does not have the luxury of looking at existential geopolitical issues with the naivety of a 23-year-old ethnic studies graduate student.
Corey Walker is a Washington, D.C.-based reporter who focuses on institutional capture, education, and public safety.