The Message
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
One World, 256 pages, $19.59
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s fundamental problem is that he is a narcissist. Other people interest him only insofar as they reflect his own thoughts and feelings. That is what makes him such a bad reporter, a shortcoming he freely admits to. “Part of me would have done anything to go home,” he writes in his new book The Message, about his 10-day trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories in the summer of 2023. “The part that always grouses about the rigors of reporting, the awkwardness of asking strangers intimate questions, the discipline of listening intently.” Readers, if listening to other people is a chore, then journalism might not be the career for you.
It could also be that Coates hates reporting because he is bad at it. Every reporter knows the a-ha moment of living through the anecdote that will make the perfect lead or kicker. No such perfect anecdotes have ever happened to Coates or, if they did, he was oblivious to them. His previous book, Between the World and Me, was an indictment of America as a racist hellscape, yet the worst act of racism he recounted from his own life—not something he read about in a newspaper or a history book—was a white lady on an escalator who shouted at his dawdling son, who was blocking her way, “Come on!”
The pivotal firsthand anecdote in this new book is equally underwhelming. At a checkpoint outside the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, Israeli soldiers made his party of a dozen or so people wait for 45 minutes. That’s it. “Was it that we had cameras? Was it that our guide was Jordanian? No justifications were given, no questions asked, no instructions offered,” he writes. “Watching those soldiers stand there and steal our time, the sun glinting off their shades like Georgia sheriffs, I could feel the lens of my mind curving to refract the blur of new and strange events.”
Let us grant that checkpoints of all kinds are a pain. Even going through customs at a First World airport can be a tedious and capricious process, where inconveniences turn easily into humiliations; security checkpoints in dangerous parts of the world are commensurately worse. Nevertheless, it is a fragile hook on which to hang condemnation of an entire nation.
Those brief minutes of indignity set Coates off on another one of his autodidactic adventures. At the blog for The Atlantic where Coates made his name, his most popular posts were those about making his way, chapter by chapter, through books like Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson or Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder. Readers loved joining in his self-education. It made the subjects of Civil War history or 20th-century Eastern Europe feel fresh.
Now the subject Coates has undertaken to learn about is Israel and Palestine. When he returned from his trip, he had dinner with Columbia University historian Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian-American, who drew up a syllabus for him. “We have probably talked about Palestine pretty much every day since returning,” sociology professor Eve Ewing, who was on the trip, told New York magazine. “You wake up, and Ta-Nehisi has overnight written four different walls of text and posted three different e-book screenshots and highlighted things.”
“The conclusion he comes to is that the Jewish state is the equivalent of the Jim Crow South.”
The conclusion he comes to is that the Jewish state is the equivalent of the Jim Crow South. “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. “‘Jim Crow’ was the first thing that came to mind, if only because ‘Jim Crow’ is a phrase that connotes an injustice, a sorting of human beings, the awarding and stripping of the rights of a population. Certainly, that was some part of what I saw in Hebron, in Jerusalem, in Lydd.”
If his luck had been different, and he were less self-involved, Coates could have come up with a better checkpoint anecdote than the lame one he offers. Something like the incident in November 2009 when a Palestinian music teacher on his way to teach a lesson was held at the Beit Iba checkpoint and forced to take out his violin and play it while Israeli soldiers laughed. There you have something more than inconvenience, a vivid and poetic illustration of the dehumanization ordinary Palestinians often face. There, too, you have a rebuttal: The 2001 Sbarro pizza shop bombing in Jerusalem, which killed 16 Israelis including a pregnant woman, was committed by a Palestinian who hid his bomb in a guitar case.
These are the kinds of complexities Coates has no time for. Since he first publicly embraced the Palestinian cause, his liberal friends have been telling him that the issue is complex. “Horseshit,” he told the New York magazine interviewer. Palestine is no more complicated than slavery or segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.” When the interviewer asked him about Hamas’s attack of Oct. 7, 2023, Coates compared it to Nat Turner’s slave rebellion: “I would’ve been one of those people that would’ve been like, ‘I’m not cool with this.’ But Nat Turner happens in a context.”
The real reason Israel bothers Coates so much is something he waits until the very end of the book to confess:
Israel felt like an alternative history, one where all our [Marcus] Garvey dreams were made manifest. There, ‘Up Ye Mighty Race’ was the creed. There, ‘Redemption Song’ is the national anthem. There, the red, black, and green billowed over schools, embassies, and the columns of great armies. There, Martin Delaney is a hero and February 21 is a day of mourning. That was the dream—the mythic Africa . . . What I saw in the City of David was so familiar to me—the search for self in an epic, mythic past filled with kings.
There you have it. The problem with Israel is that it shames him. How can it be that the Jews carved their Israel out of the desert, and yet no place in Africa, least of all Liberia, remotely resembles Wakanda?
Earlier in the book, Coates talks about his 2014 Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations,” which cemented his status as America’s most prominent public intellectual. “In the months before the article was published, I felt that I had at last discovered the answer to the haunting question of why my people so reliably settled at the bottom of nearly every socioeconomic indicator,” he writes. “The answer was simple: The persistence of our want was matched exactly to the persistence of our plunder. I was blessed with a gift, and the gift was not simply the knowledge that ‘they’ were lying (about us, about this country, and about themselves), but the proof.”
What he loved most about that article, in other words, was the feeling of finally being able to blame all the problems of black America on other people. Israel took that away from him. All the excuses for why his father’s black paradise remained a fantasy applied equally to the Jews, but they overcame the hostility of the world to succeed where Garvey & Co. failed. That, and not any resemblance to Jim Crow, is the reason Coates hates Israel so bitterly.
Coates’s embrace of the Palestinian cause has been condemned by his liberal friends with a vehemence that recalls the last time anti-Semitism caused a permanent rift in the left. In the 1970s, the alliance between college-educated Jewish liberals and black radicals fell apart over the latter’s embrace of the Arab cause as part of a growing Third World consciousness. In 1979, black civil-rights hero Andrew Young was forced to resign as ambassador to the United Nations after he was revealed to have met secretly with a representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which no US official was supposed to meet with until the PLO agreed to recognize Israel. That scandal, plus differences of opinion over racial quotas and similar issues, alienated Jewish liberals and launched many on the path to neoconservatism.
For a while, it looked as though a similar divorce might happen again in our day. Many liberals were genuinely shocked by the support for Palestine on college campuses in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack. It caused many to rethink their support for “wokeness” and its crude division of the world into oppressors and oppressed, evil whites and blameless people of color. Wealthy liberals like Bill Ackman defected. Suspicions of anti-Semitism among Black Lives Matter activists, which The New York Times had covered as far back as 2018, gained new credence as campus protesters chanted “From the River to the Sea” and some embraced paraglider iconography. The tensions threatened to bring about a split in the left as far-reaching as that of the 1970s.
There is little reason to expect a replay of history, however. The demographics have changed too much. In 1970, the American electorate and Harvard’s undergraduate student body were both close to 90 percent white. Today. the situation is very different. Last year, people of color made up a majority of children under 18 and a majority of every Ivy League freshman class, except at Dartmouth. At the same time, Jewish enrollment at Harvard is lower than it was during the bad old days of quotas in the 1920s. Demographics don’t perfectly predict political opinions, on this issue or any other, but defectors from the left may be surprised to discover that wokeness, the ideology of valorizing all people of color, has quite enough inertia to carry on without their help.
The future we face is encapsulated in an anecdote that occurred when Coates stopped pontificating to himself and listened to other people for a change. Avner, who leads a group of former Israeli Defense Force soldiers who now favor a more liberal policy toward the Palestinians, is showing Coates around the West Bank with their driver Guy. Coates asks these two Israelis what they would do differently if they were in charge. Avner says he favors self-determination for both peoples. “The question is, can there be a way to have the right to self-determination for Israelis and to Palestinians? I think the answer is yes, there has to be. I mean, there’s no other way.”
Guy doesn’t have time for Avner’s waffle. “I see the establishment of Israel as a sin. I don’t think it should have happened,” he says. “It’s something I can’t live with. And I think in order to have some kind of sustainable, reasonable life here, there should be a real change.”
Coates was instrumental in bringing American elites from having Avner’s view to Guy’s, in respect of their own country. Before, America was flawed but redeemable; now, it was sinful from Day One, founded on slavery and plunder. This line sounded good to many American liberals when its implications weren’t entirely clear. It is much easier to see what abolishing the occupier state means in the context of Israel. The idea shocks many Americans. Whether the future belongs to the liberalism of yesterday or the wokeness of tomorrow will depend on their ability to apply the lessons of that shock to their own case.