Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book draws on Jim Crow-era US to weigh in on Israel-Palestine

Altercation with CBS host while promoting book sparks controversy at the network; the author rejects claims of bias, saying ‘no shortage’ of pro-Israel voices in US

Author Ta-Nehisi Coates is seen onstage at a conference on June 7, 2023, in Atlanta, Georgia. (Carol Lee Rose/Getty Images/via JTA)
Author Ta-Nehisi Coates is seen onstage at a conference on June 7, 2023, in Atlanta, Georgia. (Carol Lee Rose/Getty Images/via 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 came out on October 1, is stirring controversy among readers, journalists and activists in the US.

It is Coates’s first work of nonfiction in nearly a decade and is composed of three essays. The longest – and most talked-about — is about a 10-day trip he took to Israel and the West Bank last year, prior to the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7, when the terror group raided Israel’s southern communities, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting 251.

Written by a National Book Award winner frequently compared to James Baldwin, the influential Black intellectual of the Civil Rights era, the book aims to influence the way the conflict is discussed as the one-year anniversary of the October 7 terror onslaught is marked, 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 surrounding 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.”

Criticism of adopting a narrow perspective of the conflict

Articles that praise and criticize the book both note that Coates’s survey of the conflict is limited. According to coverage, it does not discuss Hamas’s October 7 terror attack on Israel nor the ensuing war in Gaza, because Coates wanted to center it on what he saw. The essay on Israel, the longest of the book’s three, reportedly does not include the word “Hamas.”

Nor, according to the New York magazine story and others, does it mention that Israel has faced decades of terror attacks on civilians from groups, including Hamas, that are publicly committed to the country’s destruction. (Coates’s 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’s former longtime professional home. In a sign of Coates’s 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” — measures imposed by Israel on the Palestinians of the West Bank.

CBS interview turns fiery

A heated “CBS Mornings” interview with host Tony Dokoupil on September 30 was the latest controversy surrounding the book.

The veteran journalist zeroed in right away on a section about Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank in an exchange the Washington Post last week called “unusually tense and substantive.”

For all of Coates’s honors as a writer, Dokoupil said, the essay “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.” He wondered why Coates’s writing did not include references to Israel being surrounded by enemies that want to eliminate the country.

“Is it because you just don’t believe that Israel in any condition has a right to exist?” he asked.

Coates said there was no shortage of places where Israel’s viewpoint is represented, and that he wanted to speak for those who don’t have a voice.

“I wrote a 260-page book,” Coates said. “It is not a treatise on the entirety of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.”

Dokoupil later asked Coates about what offended him about the existence of a Jewish state, and said that Palestinians “exist in your narrative merely as victims of Israel,” as if they had not been offered peace at any juncture.

Coates said that he was offended when any people — including the Palestinians who talked to him for his book — are treated as second-class citizens in the country where they live, comparing it to the Jim Crow-era US in which his ancestors grew up.

CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil. (Courtesy)

Network reportedly censures host on October 7 anniversary

The altercation between the two sparked an internal debate in the network, resulting in the apparent censuring of David Dokoupil — a move that drew further criticism as it came on the anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 terror onslaught.

In a staff call on Monday, CBS News chief Wendy McMahon and her deputy, Adrienne Roark, said several journalists in the company had reached out to them about the interview.

“There are times we have not met our editorial standards,” Roark said, citing Dokoupil’s interviews and other comments made by CBS personnel that she did not identify.

CBS News is built on a “foundation of neutrality,” she said. “Our job is to serve our audience without bias or perceived bias.”

She said that the problems had been addressed, but neither she nor CBS expounded further.

However, the host will not face further disciplinary action, reported the LA Times Tuesday, amid other reports saying he had expressed regret to his colleagues during Monday’s conversation.

CBS News chief Wendy McMahon. (Courtesy/CBS)

In response to the network’s unusual move, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt contacted CBS News chief Wendy McMahon on Monday, defending the host’s handling of Coates’s “one-sided views,” according to the New York Post.

Siding with the Palestinians back home post-October 7

And though Coates’s essay does not touch on October 7 at length, in his interview with New York magazine editor Ryu Spaeth he accuses Israel of “genocide,” a common charge of anti-Israel activists that the Jewish state vigorously denies. He also compared Hamas’s October 7 massacre 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’s cross-border terror onslaught 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 evenly matched conflict. In one instance, he said anti-Israel 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’s 10-day trip took place in 2023, months prior to October 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.

Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt at the Never is Now conference in New York, March 5, 2024. (courtesy)

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 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 guard a small enclave of Jewish settlers and restrict Palestinian movement; 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 US, 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 November 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 some such, 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 Palfest 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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