Column: Here’s what Ta-Nehisi Coates got right about Israel and Palestinians
The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has gotten far more attention than he deserves for his new book, “The Message,” which contains a blistering condemnation of Israel. The response from Israel’s defenders has been equally and deservedly blistering.
The heart of their criticism is pretty simple: Coates doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He visited Israel for 10 days on a literary junket run by critics of Israel and returned to write, by his own account, a one-sided, wholly impressionistic indictment of the country.
When I say by his own account, I mean it. Coates insists that he wants to tell the story of the victims — the oppressed Palestinians — not of their Israeli oppressors. That’s why he doesn’t mention the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks or really discus terrorism or history at all.
There’s something deeply troubling about the discussion over Israel’s failure to prevent the attacks. It assumes the terrorists have no agency in choosing not to engage in barbarity.
Indeed, he has declared that complexity itself is to be rejected in favor of black-and-white morality, Israel being the bad guys and the Palestinians the good guys. According to Coates, the very idea that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “complicated” is a way of shielding Israel from the condemnation it deserves. He says the idea that the situation is complicated is “horsesh—.”
And here is where I largely agree with him: The problem Israel faces isn’t morally complicated at all. It might have been on Oct. 6, 2023. But after Oct. 7, things got simple.
The terrorist organizations that Coates whitewashes or ignores openly and proudly insist that they want Israel destroyed. I’m not even referring to those insipid chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” Their leaders and founding documents plainly state that their goal is to eradicate Jews and their country.
It’s a mistake to regard youth demonstrations such as those over Israel’s war in Gaza through a lens of ‘60s nostalgia. Crowds can be a force for ill as well as good.
Hezbollah has never been subtle or ambiguous: It wants Israel gone and the Jews living there dead or exiled. The Houthis’ official slogan is “God is the greatest, death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews, victory to Islam.” Coates could find this out by spending five minutes on Wikipedia.
When someone clearly expresses an intent to kill you and your family, it’s not complicated.
Keep in mind that these aren’t just words. A year ago, Hamas launched a brutal attack in which they killed men, women and children; raped women; and kidnapped more than 200 people. This wasn’t the rhetorical cosplay we’ve seen on American college campuses. This was a deliberate and wanton slaughter of civilians. And in the wake of the attacks, Hamas’ leaders vowed to repeat them again and again.
Except for the issue of retrieving the hostages, the complications for Israelis melted away in the face of such an enemy.
And that’s why Coates’ cartoonish understanding of Israel and the Palestinians is so pernicious.
You know what’s complicated? A two-state solution. That requires hard work, bargains and sacrifices. If you are a friend of the Palestinians, the last thing you should promote is sophomoric simplicity.
If you tell the Israelis that compromise is pointless because their country should not exist or be able to defend itself, they will simply ignore you, and rightly so. And if you tell Americans they must choose between terrorist organizations that rape and kill civilians and a democratic ally that doesn’t promise death to America, the odds are good that they’re going to pick the latter.
If Palestinians had eschewed violence in favor of peaceful resistance and moral suasion, they probably would have had a viable state long ago. But Palestinian leaders and Arab governments rejected that approach for decades. Indeed, the Oct. 7 attack was intended to prevent such an approach. The normalization of relations between Israel and Arab governments was a major motivation for it.
Coates and his defenders insist that they want “moral clarity” on the conflict. I believe moral clarity is on Israel’s side. It’s a democracy whose Muslim and Arab citizens have rights that they wouldn’t enjoy in most Arab and Muslim countries.
But even if you reject such facts as irrelevant, Hamas has forced Israelis to either defend themselves or die. Such a choice makes everything clear and simple very quickly. Israel’s flaws vanish before that existential test. That’s why complexity is the only hope the Palestinians have.
A cure for the common opinion
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