Ta-Nehisi Coates begins the Israeli-Palestinian section of his new book, The Message, with a visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. The excursion, taken on the last day of his 10-day junket to the Palestine Festival of Literature, isn’t meant to elicit sympathy for the Jewish people or offer context about the founding of Israel. Rather, it is a literary device used to accuse the Israelis of becoming the thing they most revile. You see the irony, of course. It’s like unfurling one of those Israeli flags with a swastika painted on it — but in swirling prose.
Indeed, The Message may well be the most beautifully crafted blood libel ever published. Each turn of phrase oozes with a loathing of the Jewish state. As with his previous work, history is a poetic truth in which white people are innately and inexorably evil — the Jew perhaps most of all.
Coates, in fact, severs the Holocaust from Jewish history, as if this is within his power, noting that he sees “Yad Vashem at a distance from Israel itself” because of “echoes to white supremacy, colonial roots, its apartheid policies.” Even a casual student of history knows this rendering of Zionism is absurdly juvenile. But it is his telling of the Palestinian plight that is criminally misleading.
The Palestinians of The Message are uncannily peaceful, yearning to write poetry and plow the “sacred land” beneath their feet. Nowhere in his book, not once, does Coates bother mentioning “Hamas” despite writing it right after one of the largest massacres of Jews in history. Nowhere in his polemic about the Palestinian struggle does Coates type the words “Palestinian Liberation Organization” or “PLO” or “Fatah,” much less “Hezbollah” or “Iran.” “Yasser Arafat” wasn’t important enough to make an appearance.
Because Coates distances himself from the Holocaust, his readers will be blissfully unaware of the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, who personally implored Adolf Hitler to “burn” the Jews of Europe years before Israel ever existed. It would, no doubt, be a heavy lift for Coates to explain why Arab pogroms occurred with regularity before the “occupied territories” or “Nakba.”
The word “terrorist” makes one appearance in the entirety of The Message, and it is preceded by the word “Zionist.” Coates spends his time lamenting the myths of 1948. Though Coates is unconcerned about the thousands of Palestinian murders of Jews, we learn about the fanatic Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Palestinians at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in 1994. The Goldstein story is unintentionally useful. Anyone with a functioning moral compass immediately recognizes that Goldstein isn’t a martyr of Israel, his actions denounced by virtually every Jewish organization in the world. To this day, on the other hand, the Palestinian Authority allocates monthly stipends to the families of hundreds of Baruch Goldsteins, reportedly to the tune of hundreds of millions.
There is no Baruch Goldstein Boulevard in Jerusalem, but one wonders if Coates found time to visit Dalal Mughrabi Square in Ramallah, named after a Palestinian woman who, in 1978, participated in the murder of 38 civilian men, women, and children (13 of them). Judging from the tone of Coates’s book, he would have been impressed.
Another glaring problem with The Message, other than the author’s risible grasp of the subject matter, is that Coates processes everything through his racialist dogma. The reader is inundated with navel-gazing analogies about the Antebellum and Jim Crow South. Coates is less a one-note thinker than a toddler banging on a snare drum with a mallet.
Coates admits to harboring a vague awareness of the “long history of alliances between Palestinian freedom fighters and the radical Black activists to whom I traced my own roots.” Still, he is “shocked” when a Palestinian writer quotes one of his books during a literary event. “I felt the warmth of solidarity, of ‘conquered peoples,’” intones the wealthy celebrity author.
Coates is buoyed that an international group of poets are “invoking” the tradition of “James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, or Angela Davis.” It is, I will admit, quite serendipitous that the attendees at the Palestine Festival of Literature share Coates’s radical influences. Take, for instance, the late poet Baraka, who once accused Jews of having pre-knowledge of the 9/11 attack.
Here is a taste of his prose:
Smile, jew. Dance, jew.
Tell me you love me, jew…
I got the extermination blues, jew-boys,
So come for the rent, jewboys.
Admittedly not as talented a stylist, Baraka’s influence on Coates is obvious. But it’s Angela Davis who mirrors his career best. Unlike our author, Davis never won a Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation ($800,000!). She was, however, a recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize. On her junkets to the Soviet Union and East Germany, Davis not only praised her hosts but whitewashed the evils of the totalitarian system that stripped its citizens of agency and tortured political prisoners or sent them to gulags.
One suspects Coates is unaware of how strongly Soviet-era “anti-Zionist” propaganda embraced by many Western intellectuals of the 1970s influences his thinking. Like them, he hides his contempt under a patina of compassion. Like them, he exhibits not the slightest curiosity about the corrupt rulers who keep Palestinians in destitution and a perpetual state of war.
Coates is too busy uncovering racism under every yarmulke. Jerusalem, contemptuously referred to as “The City of David,” reminds Coates of his earlier trip to “Columbia, South Carolina, and all 127 the monuments to the enslavers and advocates of Jim Crow.” (King David, to be fair, would have had a difficult time enslaving Arabs, who colonized the area some 1,600 years after his rule. But the reader gets the point.) “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” Coates contends. And, really, who needs to speak the language or learn the history or even spend more than a couple of days in a country when you can simply bore into the souls of strangers and accuse them of bigotry?
Consider this scene, in which a solipsistic Coates finds himself waiting at a border crossing:
If this had happened in America, I would have told you that the soldier who stopped me was Black, and I guess he was here too. In fact, there were “Black” soldiers everywhere lording their power over the Palestinians, many of whom would, in America, have been seen as “white.” Again I felt the mental lens curving against the light and was reminded of something I have long known, something I’ve written and spoken about, but still was stunned to see here in such stark detail: that race is a species of power and nothing else.
Race is no longer merely an immutable biological characteristic but a state of being. We get it. This vapid pseudo-intellectualism will impress the guilt-ridden, well-heeled white progressive who typically buys Ta-Nehisi Coates books. But there is no racial difference between most Palestinians and most Jews. Even with his telepathic abilities, Coates would be unable to detect any racial distinction between the progeny of the 750,000 or so Jews who were expelled from their ancient homes across the Middle East after 1948 and a Palestinian whose family first came from Egypt or Saudi Arabia in the early 1900s, as most did.
But this deceitful sleight of hand allows Coates to frame the “occupation” as the modern iteration of “chattel slavery.” Quoting Egyptian fabulist Edward Said, Coates contends Jews embrace mission civilisatrice, which is to say, an ideology that centers on the subordination and domination of “lesser” cultures.
The proof comes in Israel’s militarized society. A “row of twenty-odd soldiers in brown fatigues, carrying guns the size of small children,” he noted, “they were almost children themselves — barely out of high school, by their appearance.” At Yad Vashem, Coates saw “guns being so flagrantly wielded in such a solemn place.” When a “phalanx of soldiers” examined his passport, he said they made him wait “for no discernible reason.”
Surely Coates isn’t stupid enough to believe there’s absolutely no discernible reason whatsoever for Israelis to give young people guns or to take precautions at border crossings. There are thousands of reasons, spread out over nearly 80 years of history. Some of these reasons combust in pizzerias and others stab women and children.
The evidence that Jews are compelled to be vigilant, but rather that they are chauvinistic oppressors.
“For all my talk of being fooled by the language of ‘Jewish democracy,’” Coates explained, conflating the West Bank and Gaza with Israel proper as often as possible, “it had been right there the whole time. The phrase means what it says — a democracy for the Jewish people and the Jewish people alone.” Around a third of Israel’s population, by far the most ethnically diverse in the Middle East, if not the world, aren’t Jewish. The 13 children murdered by a Hezbollah rocket a few months ago in Israel weren’t Jews. Many Arab Israeli citizens oppose Zionism itself, yet they are free to participate in the nation’s democracy.
Never mind that the West Bank, where Coates spends most of his 10 days, hasn’t had an election in 18 years. Never mind that criticizing the Palestinian Authority can land you in prison or dead. Never mind that Palestinian leaders have spent 70 years rejecting offers of a state, as they enrich themselves on foreign aid and condemn their people to poverty and hopelessness. Coates doesn’t mind.
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Instead, Coates cobbles together a smattering of objectionable quotes, many of them out of context, from Israeli politicians and early Zionists as proof that bigotry is inherent in the project. In truth, all he does is prove that a person is free to say whatever he or she likes in the Jewish state — an imperfect place with imperfect people, like any other Western nation.
To its credit, The Message never shrouds its contempt for the Jewish state by hiding behind the assertion that it is merely “criticizing Israel” or opposing Netanyahu, as so many others do. In his telling of the tale, the Jew is a nefarious colonizer, no better than a slave owner. I just wish he had titled his book From the River to the Sea for clarity.
David Harsanyi is a senior writer for the Washington Examiner.