F*ck Ta-Nehisi Coates

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

Okay, so we are contending with a tsunami of bullshit right now. In other news, it’s Monday.

The part I want to talk about today, as I touched on early in the Days of Awe, is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book, The Message. Or, as I put it in that newsletter, Fuck Ta-Nehisi Coates And His Lazy, Cynical Bid For Continuing Relevance — There, I Said It.

(Amusingly, someone unsubscribed after that newsletter, writing in a message to me: “I’m blocking you. I don’t need the profanity.”

With love, I say it’s for the best that he showed himself out, because I’m a terminally profane creature and I can’t live without the f-bomb. Very good people have tried and failed to make headway with me on this front.

Eminem has a song in which he imitates a refrain of his detractors: “Will Smith don’t gotta cuss in his raps to sell records,” he whines, echoing something he hears from them again and again, and then he answers them in his regular voice: “Well, I do. So fuck him and fuck you too.”

Now, I’m not saying fuck the guy who unsubscribed. I genuinely wish him well. I’m just saying that if profanity is a deal-breaker for him, then I’m not his writer.)

At any rate, I will freely admit that I cuss like a scurvy-stricken sailor every time I see Coates and his new book in my news feed or hear about it on my car radio.

In the work of Coates that is, in my opinion, his best — a very long feature article in The Atlantic titled The Case for Reparations — Coates compares Black America to the state of Israel. A few days ago, he told Ezra Klein, referring to this very fine essay:

That story comes out. It’s very, very well received. It’s probably the most well-received piece of journalism I’ve ever written. But there’s dissent. And the dissent was, you are using this as an example, but it actually undercuts the morality of reparations. And I thought about that for a really, really long time.

One could also spend a really, really long time wondering what he meant by that, especially since Ezra Klein failed us all by failing to ask him. It was immoral for Israel to receive reparations from Germany? Seriously?

Well, presumably Coates has now redeemed himself with his anti-Semitic detractors, by announcing to the world that the purported complexity of the I/P conflict is a lie. The fact that so many of the best and brightest political minds, who have spent a lifetime of study on the topic, have been unable to solve it for 75+ years: immaterial. Because Coates’ prophetic moral vision cuts straight through all that complexity and brings us the news that actually, it’s not complicated at all. It’s simple.

He can announce this with confidence after a one-and-a-half week grievance-porn tour in Hebron, and with an admitted refusal to talk with a single Israeli. Fam, how did we miss this chance to simplify the conundrum? If only we’d engaged solely with the other side’s account of the conflict, the whole mess would have been oh so simple to us decades ago. Why didn’t all those other brilliant analysts think of that?

Coates presents his entirely one-sided findings with a totally straight face. Whereas an elementary school kid knows that if you only heard one side in a court case, you could not make an informed decision, Coates is confident about his verdict after hearing just one side of the long, tangled story over the course of a week and three days.

Most surreally: he manages to present a picture of the conflict without a single mention of Palestinian terror.

One of the best responses to Coates’ book that I’ve seen was written by Coleman Hughes, of the Free Press. Since it’s behind a paywall, I will highlight a few especially salient paragraphs here:

If you were one such casual reader, here’s what you would learn: Some 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven out of their homes in Israel’s 1948 independence war. You would have no idea who started this war or what the Arab side wanted out of it. But you would learn that the Israelis allegedly wanted to restore their “national honor” after being humiliated by the Holocaust, so they figured “routing the savage ‘Arab’ ” would be a good way to do that. You would learn about only two massacres, both of Palestinians: at Lydda and Deir Yassin (though whether these were “massacres” or “battles” remain subjects of ongoing dispute among historians). Naturally, you would come away assuming that the massacres went in one direction only: from Jews to Arabs.

But you’d be missing the most important elements of the original conflict. 

You would know nothing about the Hebron massacre of 1929, nearly two decades before the state of Israel existed, in which about seventy Jews were slaughtered by their Arab neighbors. You would have no idea that the United Nations voted to partition mandatory Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state in 1947—with the Arab state getting 42 percent of the land. You would have no idea that the Jews accepted this proposal, but the Palestinians rejected it (along with the whole idea of partition) and launched the first strike in what became Israel’s war of independence. You’d have no idea that five Arab armies then attacked Israel with the goal of annihilation, and that Israel won this defensive war at the steep price of 1 percent of its total population. And you’d have no idea that the Jewish civilians suffered many massacres in this war, too: at Kfar Etzion and Haifa Oil Refinery, to name two. Coates discusses 1948 at length, but none of these not-so-minor details are mentioned. 

It’s hard to overstate how unfair these omissions are. The 1948 war was fought not for honor, but for survival. To suggest that it was fought for honor is to imply that Israelis had a choice whether to fight it. The truth is, had they laid down their arms, they had every reason to expect another genocide. On the other hand, had the Palestinians chosen peace, they might now be celebrating the 76th anniversary of a Palestinian state. 

But perhaps the very best response came from Yirmiyahu Danzig, who penned I’m a Jew of color. Ta-Nehisi Coates can’t apply US lessons to Israel. Again, if you don’t have a subscription to The Forward, here is an incisive excerpt:

For nearly two millennia in the land now known as Israel, Jews and Samaritans endured second-class citizenship, regular abuse and occasional massacres under imperial rule. 

While white Christians were engaged in acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing in their expanding colonies — like the British colonies that predated the creation of the U.S. – Arab Muslims were conquering, colonizing and marginalizing Jews and Samaritans in the land now known as Israel; Copts and Nubians in Egypt; and Assyrians and Mandeans in Iraq; replacing them with Arabic-speaking Islamic majorities. 

What this means: Coates’ American model — in which a non-native group conquered and oppressed native peoples of color, as well as enslaved persons of color — cannot be accurately applied to Israel. Jews and Arabs alike have long called the land of Israel home; the history of conquest and oppression there is infinitely more complicated than in North America.

My great-grandfather was born in Jerusalem in the final years of the Ottoman Caliphate. His life was scarred by the dehumanization to which he was subjected simply for the crime of being a Jew in Judea; arbitrary arrests, being forced to dismount his donkey when he passed a Muslim, constant verbal and physical harassment with the looming threat of death if he stepped out of line. 

It was this humiliation that inspired him, and the vast majority of native-born Palestinian Jews, to embrace Jewish refugees and their dream of national liberation — Zionism…

The trouble is that for anyone who has spent a substantial amount of time in Israel or studying the history of the Middle East, the notion that Israel is either colonial or European is farcical. 

The Middle East isn’t just the geographic location of the Jewish state; it’s a core part of its culture and identity. A majority of Israeli Jews’ recent ancestors lived in and were driven out of Arab and Muslim majority countries before coming to Israel as refugees. Their cultural and political identity, which plays a determining role in Israeli policy, is informed by their experiences as an ethno-religious minority under Arab rule.

Finally, to offer one more perspective, there is the excellent Newsweek article by John Aziz, a British-Palestinian peace activist and political analyst.

Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and the blockade Israel imposed started after Hamas used Gaza as a base for attacks on Israel, Aziz writes. The West Bank barrier was built during the Second Intifada as a consequence of the Israelis' desire to prevent suicide bombings. Constant rocket fire from Gaza and Lebanon has been a reality for Israelis since Hamas and Hezbollah took control of those areas.

This is not a civil rights struggle akin to 1960s America or apartheid South Africa. It's a full-blown military conflict between two separate nationhoods. At some point, war became inevitable when Hamas continued to use Gaza as a launching pad for attacks. Ignoring this won't help anyone. Hamas and Hezbollah do not want to coexist with Israel; they want to destroy it.

Unlike Coates' hypothetical Palestinian version of himself, millions of actual Palestinians living in Palestine are certain that Hamas went too far. In the most recent polls of Palestinians, like this one by AWRAD published in September, support for Hamas has fallen dramatically—to just 6 percent of the population. Indeed, the same poll shows that 62 percent of Gazans now favor a two-state solution.

Gazans understand that Hamas and October 7 have totally failed them. It's something of a tragedy that the Palestinians most impacted by Israel's war have more intolerance for violence than Coates.

There’s so much more to deplore about this book and the fallout, which includes the trouble CBS journalist Tony Dokoupil got into for challenging Coates on his stance, reasonably asking him why he is mortally offended by the idea of a Jewish state.

“There’s nothing that offends me about a Jewish state,” Coates said. “I am offended by the idea of states built on ethnocracy, no matter where they are.”

Where to even start with such a disingenuous smear? Israel is not built on "ethnocracy." Most Israelis are people of color. Jews come in every color under the sun. The convert is considered by Jewish law to be as Jewish as a Jew from birth. 2 million Arabs live in Israel with exactly the same rights as Jews. Israel airlifted tens of thousands of Ethiopians out of famine and brought them to Israel and bestowed full citizenship on them -- the only nation on earth to bring Black people into their country not to enslave them but to save them from starvation.

Meanwhile Gaza is JUDENREIN, entirely JUDENREIN, and this doesn't bother Coates, or anyone else, in the slightest. Meanwhile Gaza is governed by a terror group whose charter calls for the genocide of Jews worldwide and seeks to re-establish an Islamic caliphate wherein all minority groups are terrorized by the most repressive form of Islamic rule, and again, this doesn't even get a passing mention by Coates. Coates manages to write a whole screed on the I/P conflict without once even touching on the Arab terrorism that long preceded Israel's statehood. If anyone suffered the equivalent of "Jim Crow" laws in the Middle East before the inception of Israel, it was Jews, who were forced by Arab colonizers to submit to the separate set of laws that came with their inferior dhimmi status for more than 1300 years.

Meanwhile, CBS apologized to their entire staff for Dokoupil’s supposed breach of conduct during this interview, saying it failed to meet the network’s “editorial standards.” You can read more about that in this article or this one or this one.

Fam, the fact that Coates came out with this arrogant garbage is not Good For The Jews, but on Wednesday, I’ll say more about why it’s also more than likely not quite as bad as so many of us think, and I’ll also tackle the infuriating New York Times opinion piece about Israeli snipers supposedly and systemically shooting children in the head every day.

Until then, as usual, I send you all the love and strength.

I promise you, we will outlive them.

Am Yisrael Chai.