Narcissist Ta-Nehisi Coates watched the planes crash into the World Trade Center on 9/11 and made it about himself, as he detailed in his best-selling book, Between The World and Me, a sacred text among progressives. I'd suggest a less reverent tone for reacting to this passage about the writer's feelings about watching the police and firefighters running into the buildings to rescue people: “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could—with no justification—shatter my body.”
Such purple prose from a writer praised for his beautiful English sentences! I can understand a black person not liking the police. A cop shot to death Coates’ classmate from Howard University, Prince Jones, which Coates blames, in In Between the World and Me, on the atrocities committed by White America as a whole. That's a stretch, given that the cop was black, but it's consistent with the author’s reductive, victim-centric worldview. But to characterize those firemen, many of whom knew they wouldn't survive, as subhuman demons who’d casually “shatter” his body for no particular reason suggests a delusional, martyr complex. Why this book’s taught in schools is beyond me. Coates fashions himself as if he's the modern-day James Baldwin, but lacks the talent to pull it off.
Coates did some traveling and wrote about it in his new book, The Message, a collection of essays. The section on his visit to the West Bank and East Jerusalem has attracted the most attention from his left- and far-left-leaning fans, as it puts his prestigious imprimatur on opinions about Israel that are already axiomatic among them. Coates, who has no experience in the region besides the 10 days he spent there last year, parachuted in and returned with the same set of familiar talking points.
The author also writes fiction and comic books, but in his non-fiction racism is the predominant theme. In his current book he opines about the Israeli occupation being a “moral crime” that the West is covering up, writing, “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel.” Does he really mean “stranger”? That quote’s all over the internet, but “stronger” would fit the metaphor, while “stranger” is… strange. There’s mutual hatred between the Israelis and the Arabs, but if the Israelis are mistreating Palestinians in the occupied territories, is it just from racism or perhaps more complicated than that? Not according to Coates, who doesn't appear to have considered the extreme racism of the Palestinians towards Jews. I wonder how he’d reply when told that any Jew going for an evening stroll in Gaza—even prior to October 7—would be putting their life in danger, although a Palestinian can safely do that in Israel.
I wonder how the author would respond to being told about how popular Hitler is in Gaza and much of the Muslim world. How would he explain why a sizable portion of the Israeli population emanates from the Mizrahi Jews who were driven out of Middle Eastern countries like Iraq, Yemen, and Egypt?
In Israel, a soldier stopped Coates on the street to ask him his religion, which reminds him of black slavery in the U.S. The Mizrahis had it much worse than that before they fled to Israel.
Coates personalizes the injustices he saw on his trip. He believes they reflect on him and they're his responsibility, writing, “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.” So everything the American government allegedly has done wrong also has the stamp of approval of every American citizen? Ask all the people who took to the streets to protest the Vietnam War if that’s the case, and that brutal conflict can be directly tied to Washington D.C.—three presidents waged it—unlike the displacement of Palestinians.
Coates writes that Palestinians' agonizing existence “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.” I don't deny the mass suffering among the Palestinians, and Israel could do more to alleviate it, but who believes we’re all tasked with nothing less than saving the world, and why do so many trust the opinions of someone afflicted with such grandiosity?
Coates, in an extensive interview with New York magazine to promote his new book, refers to Israel’s genocide and apartheid, but neglects to make the case for these assertions. Both “apartheid” and “genocide” are words used loosely by Israel detractors, but they're mostly parroting what they hear. What he leaves out is that Iran and its two proxy armies, Hamas and Hezbollah, would be delighted to commit genocide on every Jew in the world. If those forces ever get the one-state solution they yearn for (the two-state solution is just a delusion that people like Joe Biden cling to when talking about achieving a ceasefire in the current conflict), every Jew in Israel would be lucky to be alive in their new apartheid state. Most likely they'd be dead, from the river to the sea.
Any advocate claiming one side or the other is fully in the wrong in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an ideologue that can’t be trusted. The moral aspects of the situation are very complicated beyond Coates’ myopic gaze. His false claim that Israel was founded as a colonial project suggests an ignorance of the history of the region and the history of Europe. The barbarity of the October 7 atrocities that the Palestinians he writes about with such empathy don't have much of a problem with doesn't suggest to him that there’s blame on both sides. The author writes, “On the last day of my trip to Palestine, I visited Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center.” “Palestine” has never been a country, but if it were one, there would be no such museums there. Yad Vashem’s in Jerusalem, the capital of Israel. The message is clear. Ta-Nehisi Coates, like the political Left he caters to, doesn't believe Israel has the right to exist.