Author Ta-Nehisi Coates is seen onstage at a conference on June 7, 2023 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Carol Lee Rose\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cThe Message,\u201d which comes out Tuesday, is Coates\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
Passages of the book that have been reprinted in reviews and articles \u2014 as well as Coates\u2019 own reflections on the essay \u2014 have sparked praise and criticism of the analysis offered by Coates, who identifies as a \u201crelative latecomer\u201d to studying the conflict.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In the essay, titled \u201cThe Gigantic Dream,\u201d and in interviews prior to the book\u2019s publication, Coates draws on his own identity as a Black American and likens Israel\u2019s control over West Bank Palestinians to the Jim Crow South. He also questions the justification for Israel\u2019s founding after the Holocaust and criticizes \u201cthe elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality\u201d in the way the conflict is covered.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,\u201d he writes in the essay, according to a recent cover story in New York Magazine. \u201cThe pushing of Palestinians out of their homes had the specific imprimatur of the United States of America. Which means that it had my imprimatur.\u201d<\/p>\n
Articles that praise and criticize the book both note that Coates\u2019 survey of the conflict is limited. According to coverage, the book does not discuss Hamas\u2019 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 \u201cHamas.\u201d 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\u2019s destruction. (Coates\u2019 publisher, Penguin Random House, did not respond to JTA\u2019s request for a review copy in time for publication.)<\/p>\n
\u201cHe refuses to countenance conversations with Jews who don\u2019t share his opinions and don\u2019t denounce their nation,\u201d reads a critique of the book by Daniel Bergner in the Atlantic, Coates\u2019 former longtime professional home. In a sign of Coates\u2019 influence, the critique remained one of the Atlantic\u2019s most-read articles five days after its publication.<\/p>\n
The review adds that Coates does not acknowledge \u201cthat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked on Monday why he did not write about attacks on Israel in the book, Coates said that views sympathetic to Israel are already represented in major U.S. outlets.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is no shortage of that perspective in American media. I am most concerned always with those who don\u2019t have a voice,\u201d he said in an interview on CBS. \u201cI wrote a 260-page book. It is not a treatise on the entirety of the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis.\u201d<\/p>\n
And though Coates\u2019 essay does not touch on Oct. 7 at length, in his interview with New York magazine editor Ryu Spaeth he accuses Israel of \u201cgenocide,\u201d a common charge of pro-Palestinian activists that Israel vigorously denies. He also compared Hamas\u2019 Oct. 7 attack to Nat Turner\u2019s 1831 slave rebellion. After listing instances of Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians, he mused about whether he would have participated in Hamas\u2019 cross-border attack on Israel.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd if that wall went down and I came through that wall, who would I be?\u201d he said. \u201cCan I say I\u2019d be the person that says, \u2018Hey, guys, hold up. We shouldn\u2019t be doing this\u2019? Would that have been me?\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 whom some Jewish students across universities have accused of being hostile or antisemitic \u2014 have a better view of the conflict than some reporters.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat kid up at Columbia, whatever dumb s\u2014 they\u2019re saying, whatever slogan I would not say that they would use, they are more morally correct than some motherf\u2014ers that have won Pulitzer Prizes and National Magazine Awards and are the most decorated and powerful journalists,\u201d he told New York magazine.<\/p>\n
Coates\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s \u201cThe Zionist Idea,\u201d a compendium of Zionist writing; and works by Amy Kaplan, Nadia Abu El-Haj and other writers.<\/p>\n
Coates has not appeared to lay out a detailed itinerary of the trip prior to the book\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s Holocaust museum; and cities including Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Ramallah.<\/p>\n
Coates has spoken repeatedly about the ideas he seeks to advance in the book, including the parallel between Israel\u2019s West Bank occupation and segregation in the United States, and his earlier perception that the conflict was too complex to understand.<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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,\u201d Coates said at a Nov. 1, 2023, event in New York City sponsored by Palfest. \u201cI was in the time of my parents and my grandparents.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added that the conflict had been \u201cmade to sound as though you need a degree in Middle Eastern studies or somesuch, a PhD, to really understand what\u2019s happening. But I understood the first day.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Message\u201d follows 2015\u2019s \u201cBetween the World and Me,\u201d which explored American racism and the Black experience, and his landmark 2014 article, \u201cThe Case for Reparations,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
In interviews, Coates has questioned the justification for Israel\u2019s establishment in the wake of the Holocaust. \u201c\u200b\u200bDoes industrialized genocide entitle one to a state? No,\u201d he told New York magazine. At the November 2023 event, he said Israeli Jews \u201ctake the wrong lesson\u201d from their own history of persecution.<\/p>\n
And in the blog post that functions as a bibliography for the essay, he sketches out what he calls a \u201cfrightful\u201d scenario: \u201cThe emancipated enslaves; the oppressed colonizes; the vanquished ethnically cleanses; a people survive a genocide only to perpetrate another.\u201d<\/p>\n
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