https://peterbeinart.substack.com/p/ta-nehisi-coates-on-why-he-wrote-517
The Beinart Notebook
A conversation about American foreign policy, Palestinian freedom and the Jewish people.
Our guest is the award-winning author and journalist, Ta-Nehisi Coates. His new book, The Message, chronicles his trip to Palestine and Israel (alongside trips to Senegal and South Carolina) and meditates on why some people’s stories are told and others are erased. We’ll talk about how he came to write about Israel-Palestine, about how victims become victimizers, about the backlash he’s experienced since the book came out, and about the forces that keep Black writers from shaping public debate about America’s role in the world.
The event was cosponsored by Jewish Currents and the Foundation for Middle East Peace,
The Beinart Notebook
Ta-Nehisi Coates on Why He Wrote about Palestine and Israel
October 20, 2024
AUDIO: 38:16
https://peterbeinart.substack.com/p/ta-nehisi-coates-on-why-he-wrote-517
TRANSCRIPT:
I wonder if you can take us back to the moment that you
started telling people that your next book was going to have a
big section on Palestine and Israel and what some of those
conversations were like. I'm wondering if people close to you
had real fears.
Yeah,
I mean, I think it's only appropriate that I take this back
to our conversations, which literally go back years and you
telling me, wow, you have to go, you have to go. I feel
like every time I saw you, you were like, you have to go.
And did people have fears for me taking this on?
Yes,
but I think also there was a sense that it was the right
thing to do. Oddly enough, I think maybe the fears that a
lot of people think of were not ones that were manifested
really in my life or that people really cared about, i.e.
people's perception of me.
In
certain quarters, I have had the luxury of my private life
being pretty separate from my public life. It's not that I
don't have some work friends. I do, or some people from work
that I care about very much, I do. But in my private life,
I'm actually not that important.
My
status as a writer is really kind of irrelevant. It doesn't
get me much, you know, among my friends and family. You
know, like I wasn't going to lose them. So what did it
really matter? And it's quite clear, I think the past couple
of weeks have demonstrated the reaction people have when you
just tell them what you saw or what you've read. That, yes,
there is a lot of pressure put on so that certain stories
are not heard. But, you know, I don't know what was the
point of getting this far in my career as a writer. Like if,
you know, you're going to not touch the sensitive things.
Like, what's the point? You know, why are we doing this?
One
of the things that I've always wondered about is, you know,
if you look at the American media, you look at a panel on
cable TV, you look at the op-ed page of the New York Times.
At this point in 2024, when it comes to domestic politics
and policy, if you're talking about mainstream liberal media, there
is some Black representation, right? Then when you turn to
foreign policy, when they switch to the foreign policy segment,
not just Israel-Palestine, anything, that all disappears,
right? Why do you think that is? And what is the cost of
that to America's public conversation about America's role in
the world?
Yeah.
There are a few people, Howard French has made a career
like this. I think Eugene Robinson back in the day before he
became a columnist. There are a few of us, but I think the
natural portion of this is as follows. We were all very
deeply concerned about our ability to represent ourselves and
our ability
to have a voice in the conversation around race and racism
in this country. And so that was the area that was
prioritized. But I think getting that worldliness It's just
different. Just on a basic class level, given the type of
environments that most African-Americans come from, we tend to
not be the most traveled people.
We
just haven't. We just don't know the world. And I will say,
well within my lifetime as an adult and as a working
journalist, We're shocked to discover how Central America was.
It's mind blowing, you know, like to go out in the world and
actually see it. You know, it's like really, really mind
blowing.
And
I think in our minds, we're off in our little ghettos, in
our little corners, doing our little writing. And we don't
realize how tied we are to this bigger thing. We know there's
a world out there. But the extent to which we're tied, we
don't quite understand it.
You're
a deep student of history. And I wonder when you were
thinking about this move towards writing about the world
outside the United States, but bringing your experience and
your lens that you have as a student of Black history and as
Black American, if there were precedents that you thought of.
I mean, what
I immediately thought of when I heard you were writing this
book was King's speech on Vietnam. But also there's Du Bois,
right? Or Paul Robeson, people who brought a larger critique
of the Cold War about American imperialism while connected to a
view on race. And were there precedents that you thought
about when you thought about now extending your writing more abroad and especially on Palestine and Israel?
Yes
and no. Yes, from an inspiration level. You know what I
mean? Like, weirdly enough, what I thought back to is the
long history of Black journalists in this country and how it
was never a safe occupation. You know, the Ida B. Wells was
never safe.
Walter
White is going into the South, passing as a white man to
investigate lynchings. He could have been killed at any moment.
You know, I thought about that a lot. But the no part of
it is, I think, what makes it difficult. Like you, I am a
product of what you might call, I don't know, literary
journalism, new
journalism or whatever. Like that particular craft that, you
know, is practiced at the New Republic, New York, Atlantic. I
come out of that world. And on a craft level, I love the
thing. You know what I mean? I love long form as a thing
because that is a way of thinking too.
That's
a way of analyzing the world. You know what I mean? Where
you pull a little bit from the world of literature. You pull
a little bit from the world of books. You pull a little bit
from the world of reporting to create this thing. And I
love that as a method. But the politics of that world...are
so bad on this. And part of this is in that essay. There
are precious few Black people who have had the space to
pursue that, and even fewer who've had the space to pursue it
internationally. And so that part was very lonely and very,
very isolating. There are people who I learned from, people
who I admire as craftspeople, who are so distant from my
politics on this. And a lot of that essay is me working
through that.
Yeah.
One of the things that I wonder if you've thought about is
there's a whole class of people, including many of the people
of those kind of magazines that you mentioned that you and I
worked at, that are willing to hear you say that America is
a racist country, but
they're not willing to hear you say Israel is a racist
country. And America is our country. How do you explain the
fact that, at least in those circles, you can say harsher
things about the United States and oppression in terms of the
United States than you can about a country where people
aren't even living?
So
I would say two things. There's this great book called Our
American Israel by this woman, Amy Kaplan, who regrettably
passed away from brain cancer. But it looks at the cultural, I
guess, similarities between the two countries, how culture
influenced it. And she points out that the story that America
tells itself is a story that rhymes with
the story Israel tells itself. This gets very dark in
certain places, by the way, which we can talk about later.
But As to your question, I think it's a couple of things. I
think the fact that what you cite, the ability to say that,
that was a fight. That was not always true.
You
know what I mean? That is not a natural development. That
was a fight that was every bit as vicious as the fight
that's happening right now on behalf of Palestinians, empowering
them to tell their own story and opening up the
perspectives. It was like this.
I
mean, I was watching a documentary on the Kerner Report a
couple of nights ago. They had news footage and every single
television journalist that they put, they were all white, all
of them. And so what I stand on is the shoulders of a very, very
long fight to get to this position where you could be on
the cover of The Atlantic and make the case for reparations,
right? It was not true 10 years before that. That was not
true 20 years. And so I think we are just at the beginning
of what I hope will be a successful struggle
and a successful fight to change that and open some things
up. I think that's the first thing. But Peter, I think
there's something deeper to that. It is immensely troubling.
And I wanted to sit in this tension and in this trouble to
accept that a group of people can suffer from existential
collective punishment, that
can suffer from industrialized genocide. which itself is the
climax of centuries of oppression, of pogroms, ethnic cleansing,
mass murder, other genocidal violence, et cetera. And say
that that legacy is now attached to a state that is pursuing
similar violence against another group of people. That's not
just dark because the state is Jewish.
It
forces us to face some things about ourselves and maybe even
some of the underlying linchpins and pillars of progressivism
and the left. Like this idea that somehow like the oppressed
are ennobled or oppression is ennobling, that there can be
this broad alliance of oppressed people.
There's something dark here that is beyond Israel itself that I think is really, really hard to face.
Yes.
And one of the things that I found most intriguing about
the book and that some of the statements I've heard you made
is that you seem particularly interested in what Black
Americans should learn from this, from the way that the
dominant political story that Jews ended up taking collectively
from the Holocaust was, we
need our own state, a state based on supremacy. And I was
thinking, what is the danger that Ta-Nehisi is thinking about?
Is he talking about Liberia? Could it connect to Black
Panther? And Wakanda as a visual. And then I heard you say
this thing in the Ben Rhodes interview, which was very
powerful, where
you basically said about Kamala Harris and the Democrats, you
said it was a very black convention. And so in some sense,
these are black bombs. Talk to me about this universal
warning, but particularly the one that you're relating to black
Americans here.
Yeah,
so in the case of Israel, I would say, and this is, I
have never said this out loud, really, but it's something that
I've been marinating on, so I don't quite have this down.
But I really think it's important to understand that this idea
of a state as safety was rooted in a European, very, in
fact, German,
romantic idea, right? that states somehow verified peoples,
that this was tied to land, that this was tied to language,
that this was tied to culture. And those were particular
things for particular people. Again, that's not a Zionist idea.
The age of nationalism.
Yes,
yes, yes, yes. I mean, in fact, Nazism is very tied to
that idea, for instance. And so what I saw the thinkers of
that age doing was saying, OK, we are oppressed, not
necessarily questioning the premises or the frame of the era,
but actually accepting them and saying, you know, we need to
go and do X, Y
and Z and that will be our liberation. You know, again, I'm
at pains to say this. That is not a Jewish era. You
actually see it across African-American history also. Sometimes
we question the frame, but sometimes we accept it and say, we
just need to do X, Y, and Z.
And
we don't ask deep questions about the models that we're
actually doing. And so to fast forward that into today, you
know, I'm out at the DNC. And again, it's a very Black
convention. Blackest convention I've ever seen. I was in this
group chat and a guy made the joke and he said, you know, this
convention is so Black that the first white person to talk
was Steve Kerr, basketball coach. You know? And you're seeing
all this. And the models are Jesse Jackson's running 84 and
88. And the models are, you know, Fannie Lou Hamer and
Shirley Chisholm. And they're Native Americans there, you know,
who are making their cars.
And,
you know, Latinos are there. That was very inclusive, which
has always been at the core of the best of the black
struggle. That this is not just us. This is all of us.
Except it's not all of us. except it's not all of us.
And
I look outside and I see a group of people who can't even
speak on the floor, can't even make a speech, can't even be
allowed to talk. And this is at a convention to nominate a
Black woman who bears all of that legacy. That's dangerous.
It's
dangerous because it means that did we really learn the
lesson of Fannie Lou Hamer? Or was the lesson just that
slavery is not wrong? Being the slave is what's wrong. And
that is a dark prospect. That's a dark prospect. And when I
was in Israel, on the West Bank, the
saddest thing for me was that the Israeli state project does
not question the frame, that it accepts the frame. And I
guess for us to just accept The frame that Joe Biden has
presented to us, that the Democratic Party has presented us,
that the last, I don't know, umpteenth
years and decades of politics have presented to us on Israel
and towards Palestinians would be a grievous mistake and, in
fact, a hijacking and a betrayal of the legacy that brought
us here in the first place.
I'm
curious whether you have had pushback from Black Americans on
this question, because I would say, you know, I, like many
Jews, have spent my entire life having this argument. I had
it with my grandmother. I had it my whole life. And people
like to kind of critify this story about Israel being a
liberal democracy.
But
as you rightly intuited, at the end of the day, the hard
kernel of the argument is man is a wolf to man. And we are
not going to be the people to take the risk of On a
fundamentally different world, you know, Arthur Hertzberg, before
he died, once
said to me that he had been in a debate with Edward Said,
and Said said, why would Jews want a state after all the
brutality of states? Jews were so creative in diaspora. And
Sir said, yes, these states, they're terrible, they're brutal.
We'll give ours up fifth. You know, so
when you make this argument and someone says to you, wait a
second, you want Kamala Harris to endanger her chance of
being the first black woman president on a basis of principle
for Palestinians, given how precarious the situation for black
and with Donald Trump there, you get that pushback.
Weirdly,
no. But I think the difference is that the imaginative
impulse has always been there, right? This idea that it was
always supposed to be bigger than you is intrinsic in the
struggle. Look, we started the tour at the Apollo Theater
right in the heart of Harlem with Amen Mohedin.
You
know, you can't get any more in the center of the Black
community than right there. And people were very, very happy
to have that conversation. I mean, I also think there is a
sense that we already did the symbolic thing. We did that. We
gave Obama all of the room and et cetera.
And
so I don't think I am the only one who thinks this one
has to mean something more than symbols if it's going to be
real. It does not mean that you don't vote for Kamala. And I
think people are clear on that.
Black
people come up to me in the street and thank me for
talking about this. I have not had the Black person come up
to me yet to say, you're endangering this. Maybe if I was
more resentful, like personally, of Kamala, which I'm not.
You
know, I watched the debate like everybody else and was very
happy to see her take apart Donald Trump. I was gratified
like everybody else. And you can feel that, you know what I
mean? And at the same time, this has to stand for something.
I feel like I'm pulling from a very real tradition.
So it's not just really me talking when I say this.
Yeah.
Just because you mentioned Obama, I can't help but ask it.
You were obviously known for having conversations with him. Do
you think if he was reading your book, the Palestinians will
say, yeah, I knew all that, but he just couldn't do anything
about it?
I
know people who were close to him at a different point in
his life. They say he knows. They say it's impossible for him
to be at the University of Chicago and not know. To have
gone to Columbia and not known. Given what those environments
are. Like, Chicago is home to the largest Palestinian diaspora
in the country.
It's
actually hard to not know. I haven't talked to him. I wish
I had known more at the time that I was in conversation and
had done those interviews. I certainly would have pressed
more. Looking back on his presidency, he kind of acted like
somebody who knew.
But
maybe, and now I'm getting into speculation, also felt that
there was little he could actually do. Someone once told me,
who, as I said, knew him at a different point in life. Not
only did he know, but Bibi knew that he knew.
Yes.
Bibi hated him for it.
I
think that's exactly right. And I think there were a lot of
people in the organized American Jewish community and the
Israeli government who suspected he knew or thought because
he's Black, he's likely to know. And that makes him dangerous.
Is that your sense of him?
My
sense of him was that the story he told was about his
connection to progressive and liberal Jews. He said he read
David Grossman's book, Yellow Wind. He talked about his
relationship with Arnold Jacob Wolf, who was progressive. And
he talked about himself being a liberal Jew and all this
thing.
And
I'm sure there's some truth to that. But I also wonder
whether that was an easier thing for him to say politically
than to say, I actually also feel sometimes like a Palestinian
or identify with like that would have been impossible. And
so he could say this thing, which is to say, I'm with these
group of Jews,
not
with these group of Jews. But he couldn't say, I really
identify with the Palestinians. And Kamala, do you have any
sense of whether she knows anything?
I
have heard from several people that they have had private
conversations with her that indicates some sympathy, that
indicates a position that is different than Biden. Now, look,
what that will mean and how that will be manifested, I don't
know. I will be honest with you.
I
mean, this is probably the closest I've ever been to any
sort of activism. in the sense that I feel that I have a
certain position in American life and can yell things. What
effect that has, I don't know, but I have a responsibility to
yell and to point out the grievous problem and the great
damage of being the first Black woman president and having
2,000-pound bombs with your name on them dropping on Gaza.
That's a nightmare. Like we think about voting and politics in
a very, just get past this one kind of way, like a very
practical, tangible way.
But
I do think should Kamala win this year and 2028 comes
around, I think the moral problem will become a practical
problem if nothing changes. Like at that point, like say we're
in 2028, right? Okay, so this is 20 years of this election
is the most important election in our lifetime.
Okay,
so now I have to look at the content of those elections.
And effectively what you are telling me is the price of
protecting a woman's right to choose is support for apartheid
and genocide. Like that is the rough math of what you are
saying to me. There are women in Palestine too.
It's like the cost of the New Deal was sustaining Jim Crow.
That's
right. That's right. That's what it'll be. So now like we're
not questioning systems anymore. We just need power. That's
all we're saying. The systems are no longer the problem. And
that's at that point, I wonder where I will be and who I
will be as a political person, because that would be deeply
problematic for me.
So
because the book is so interested in this question of why
victimization doesn't necessarily ennoble, it requires you to
tell a story and that there are various stories. And some of
those stories are very, very dark. I was wondering whether
you thought about that vis-a-vis Palestinians who are in the
midst of it now, of this unimaginable slaughter.
Is
it fair to have that question about Palestinians now, about
how Palestinians narrate their own excruciating ongoing
dismemberment? Because one could say that Hamas, which has
something of an Islamist supremacist vision, is its own dark
version of that story. Right. And that it's not really within
an equality framework, the
story that it's telling about what's happened to Palestinians.
Right. Or is it not fair to ask that of people while
they're going through it? And you ask that question after it's
stopped.
You
know what? Not only do I think it's fair, I think if
Palestinians weren't pushed out of the frame, you would see
that conversation. I think they would have it because I've had
it privately with many of the people that influenced this
book. I mean, they are not unthinking people.
I
take them to be human beings like any other thinking group
of intelligent human beings with differences and thoughts and
visions and ideas. But there's no room. Like you can't name a
Palestinian bureau chief. There's just no room. You know what
I mean?
Part
of sucking the oxygen out and keeping them out is like that
kind of nuance that you just got at. There's just no room
for it. You know what I mean? Because then you're lucky if
you get like one Palestinian in discussion and then they have
to speak to the whole of it. Right.
Which
is an impossible position to be in. You know, like entry
is, will you denounce Hamas? You know what I mean? Like maybe
if you had three or four up there, the conversation would
be different and you would get something a little bit more
textured and nuanced.
Some
of your writing that I have found most powerful has been
involved in dissecting arguments made to defend power. I'm
thinking of particularly like the first white president. You go
through George Packer, Nick Kristof, Bernie Sanders, right?
And you basically dismantle the claims that they're making
about Trump's ascendancy not being about racism and white
supremacy.
You
have done a lot of that, but you decided not to do that
same project when it came to the kind of exoneration of
Israel, of Israeli Jews. A lot of people have come at you a
little bit on this question of why you didn't engage with
the pro-Israel arguments.
So
I would say two things. I would say it actually is there. I
would say, like, that's the point of Jabotinsky. That's the
point of Herzl. That's the point of Benny Morris. That's the
point of Moses Hess. You know what I mean? It is there. But
I'm dealing with a group of people who don't have the
microphone.
It's
very different. I'm living in a world where the Black
Panther is a movie. You know what I mean? You can't imagine
an analog for Palestinians at all. And so I guess in some
ways, my work was kind of a corrective because I probably
centered their frame a little more than maybe I felt like I
had to.
But
I think if I took that critique at its highest, what it
says is I did not go and interview settlers, for instance.
which I didn't do. Maybe I would have done if that was the
entirety of the book. Maybe I would have done that.
But
the urgent thing for me felt that I wrote the case for
reparations. And in using reparations from West Germany to the
state of Israel, I felt that I had erased the people. That
essay is about correcting that. And I guess I would just say
over and over again, the Zionist argument is not hard to
access.
It's
everywhere. You know, it is the air around us. And I guess
the last thing I'll say about that is how often do we ask
the question of authors who are sympathetic to Israel? How
often do we say, hey, how many Palestinians have you
interviewed? How often do we interrogate the very structures?
Who
is looking at our magazines and our newspapers to say, how
many Palestinian authors are you publishing? Like, where are
Palestinians in this narrative? So I find it interesting that I
am being subject to a level of critique, which I will
happily answer for, but a critique that is not actually made of the structures that actually have the most power.
Right.
I've heard a lot of people say, you know, Ta-Nehisi Coates
only spent 10 days in the West Bank. And my response to
people has been, OK, I know you've been to Israel 25 times
and I know which hotels you've stayed at in Tel Aviv.
I
bet those 10 days he spent in the West Bank is
significantly more than the number of days that you spent with
Palestinians in the West Bank. You've been going there since
you were 13. So it's all about what you see when you're
there, as opposed to the number of days that you're there.
Yeah.
You
are known for not being an optimist about the course of
history. And the book, in some ways, is about the way in
which violence begets violence. Victimization begets
victimization. You're a student of the Civil War, which was
not a nonviolent end to slavery.
I
know you've thought a lot about the Haitian Revolution, which
was not a nonviolent end to oppression. We do have the
example of the Civil Rights Movement or South Africa. Help me
think about how you think about potentially different models.
And is it possible to avoid that tragedy in which all of
this violence that is heaped
upon Palestinians just ends in a bloodbath for everybody? I
mean, we're in the midst of it now, but in which it just
basically engulfs all the people between the river and the
sea.
So
I'll say the dark part of this first. Even our nonviolent
revolutions have the specter of violence behind them. I don't
know that you can divorce the civil rights movement from World
War II. I don't know that you can divorce South Africa and
apartheid from the end of the Cold War. Absolutely. I think
that, you know, even
if the revolutionaries themselves are not violent, the specter
of it is really always there. Having said that, there is
something that is very, very powerful in this struggle that is
at hand. And that is that the truth is blatantly obvious
and the lie is critically important to the project.
You
know, a lot of people who say, well, Americans don't want
to know. I'm not sure that's true because there's a ton of
energy put into the project of them not knowing. Like there
was a lot of effort. You know what I mean? And so I always
have to ask, well, if that were true, why
is so much effort put into crafting a narrative? I actually
am of the mind that it is very hard for human beings to
perpetrate horrific violence on other human beings with their
eyes wide open. You know, and that's one of the theories in
the book. I actually think that's actually hard to do.
So
I think knowing does matter. And the telling of what it is
is not hard. Like what is happening on the West Bank. The
fact that Israel is not a democracy. You can explain this in
about two sentences. And that was like the biggest surprise.
People said it was complex. And that's what I thought.
I
thought I was going to go over and see some really morally
complex. But I didn't. I mean, it was so obviously immoral.
It is blatantly immoral. And I think the argument that it's
not is extremely hard to make.
And
the shadow of that to me is that when you make it, people
don't say this is not happening. They say, yes, but what did
they do to deserve it? That is effectively the counter
argument.
Yes, that Israel had no choice.
Right. Israel had no choice but to perpetrate apartheid.
Right.
So this most famously came up in that CBS interview where
it's basically like, why aren't you acknowledging all the ways
in which the Palestinians brought this on themselves or in
which Israel had no choice but to do all of that?
Why
leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want
to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror
groups that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of
the first and the second intifada, the cafe bombings, the bus
bombings, the little kids blown to bits?
And is it because you just don't believe that Israel in any condition has a right to exist? And I'm curious, you
have made a very conscious decision in these interviews to
basically say, I'm not going to engage with that set of
questions. I'm not going to talk about why there were suicide
bombings or what Iran wants to do. I'm basically going to
say none of it justifies this from my perspective.
Help me understand the decision to respond in that way.
There's
always good reasons to perpetrate a system of apartheid, of
segregation, of plunder, or whatever. There are always good
arguments. Always. Always. I suspect that if you read the
documents justifying apartheid, the argument was not, we are
evil and we want to perpetrate apartheid.
I
know a lot of them were very similar to the arguments we
hear now. Yes. You know, Africa is a tough neighborhood. How
many times? Right, right, right. And hey, it was they do hate
you.
And
it's true for black Americans, too. There were arguments in
favor. Like I was telling somebody this the other day. They
said, well, we think the slavery, anti-slavery debate was not
complex. It was. And from their perspective, it was. It was
an entire cast of what they call pro-slavery intellectuals who
made the case for
why you needed slavery, why it was, as Calhoun called, a
positive good. They believed that an underpinning of democracy
in a free country required a kind of elevation to which
people of African descent had not attained. Right. John Calhoun
was not a dumb guy. No, no, no. These are not dumb people.
You know what I mean?
Like,
so this was a very real argument. Segregation, you know what
I mean? Within the lifetime of my parents, the argument was
integration is dangerous. Look at the crime rates in these
black neighborhoods. And the crime rates were high. They were.
And I think what most people will say is none of that
justified the upholding of an immoral
system, period. And so if that is the argument, then why am
I talking about suicide bombers? Why am I talking about the
violence of Palestinians? Either this is right or wrong,
period. If you want to make the argument, I need to inflict
apartheid and a violent system of segregation on this group of people
because I am endangered, you should honestly and forthrightly
make that argument. I disagree with it because my moral
underpinnings are different.
Yeah.
No, this is one of the things that gets me about the
Jewish community in some ways the most deeply is I encounter
and listen to so many brilliant, brilliant people. I listen to
them talk about Talmud, Jewish texts, and I think There is
so much brilliance and talent, and I'm so awed and dazzled.
And
then they switched to this issue. And it reminds me, all of
their brilliance is not getting us anywhere. Because when it
comes to this, as you say, it's a simple moral question. We
have a couple of questions from the audience, one of which
is about, you know, Black nationalism really well.
I
know it was even part of your upbringing. And I wonder if
you can talk about the ways in which Black nationalism and
Zionism are similar and the ways in which they're different.
Well,
in fact, there's a long history of many Black nationalists
actually being Zionists themselves, you know, and having great
admiration for Zionism. And I think what the impulse is, is
you have a group of people suffering from, as I said,
centuries of horrific oppression. And you see them go and
build a nation of their own. I mean, this
is what it looks like, a nation of their own, where they
can feel safe and they can feel good about themselves and
they can feel worthwhile. And certainly from the outside,
There's a kind of affinity, but actually the impulse is older.
It goes back to where we started this conversation and that
root in romantic nationalism, because
there's a whole series of 19th century black nationalists who
look to Africa in much the same way, who very much believe
that a state should be crafted in Africa. You know, Liberia
obviously being the example of a state that comes out of
that.
But
the dialogue about Africans from those black American black
nationalists was very, very similar. to the dialogue that
Zionists had about Palestinians to the extent that they saw
them, which is to say that we will go there and we will be
a kind of fortress of civilization in darkest Africa. Very
similar. Very, very similar. The treatment, the
degradation of Black people in Africa, of Native Africans themselves, by Black Americans, very, very similar. And so...
That's the first thing. I don't want to overly simplify this
because weirdly enough, there also is a strain of black
nationalism that is obviously very critical of Israel. Malcolm
X, for instance, you know, towards the end of his life, when
he takes his travel and he actually goes to Gaza. And I
haven't explored this enough to really know about this, but a
lot of people point to Nasser. as an influential figure and
his attempt to craft a kind of pan-African, pan-Arab, you
know, however you want to put it, and the appeal that had to
Black Americans.
The
thing is, the oldest Muslim communities in this country are
Black communities. There were enslaved people who were literate
in the Quran who were brought over here. So Islam has a
particular root and influence in the black community that goes
all the way back to Africa.
And
so I think that's part of it, too, you know, in terms of
the complexity. But for me, what I saw and the thing that I
really wanted to think about is this temptation to not
question systems, to just accept the priors of even of the
people that oppress you.
This
question of Black nationalism, it's different variations. You
created a Black country in Africa. I mean, you adapted it,
right? Wakanda in Black Panther.
You
think at all about Israel and Zionism? I was more thinking
about nationalism. But yeah, you can see it as a critique of
the idea of nation states and the idea of ethnostates. Yes,
that is in that work. But I probably was more gaming out
what a real nationalism would be. I mean, in the fictive
space,
I
mean, one of the things that you then have the ability to
do is say, OK, so now I'm going to take all these questions
of race off the table and like look at you as actual people
who are perpetrating a system. So, yes, questions of
nationalism were there. I did not know enough about Zionism at that point to kind of go that far.
You
think it's possible that you might go back to fiction or
comics or movies and take this subject into a different
medium?
Probably.
I hope so. I still enjoy that world. I mean, I had to
obviously come back and do this, but yeah, I could see that.
Yes.
Since
the book came out, is there one particular interaction about
it with somebody in public or in private or message or
something that has really stuck with you?
Yes.
The messages I have gotten from my Muslim friends, from my
Arab friends and my Palestinian friends. And what I have been
told is they are very, very happy to see this perspective
out in the world. And the second part of that message has
always been because we can't do it. And that makes me really,
really sad. And so, yes, that very much sticks with me.
You
have this very powerful part of the book where you talk
about being in the Chicago area in a group of Palestinian
Americans, just Palestinian Americans, and the way they're
talking to one another when there's nobody else around. You
compare it to the way Black Americans may talk when it's just
them.
And
I'm just wondering if you can talk a little bit about what
that's like to witness and what we should learn from that
kind of intimate grammar that people have when they have the
comfort to not feel like they're worried about the external
glare.
Yeah.
I'm
hesitating because I feel like I don't want to betray them.
I mean this in the sense that these are people that don't
really have a public voice. So I feel a little awkward about
rendering their private conversation public because they don't
have an opportunity to be public.
I
will say that getting to see them think through October 7th,
which they did, these are people who in their hearts are
deeply committed to nonviolence. These are not Hamas is great,
you know what I mean, sort of people. There was a woman
whose husband was born and raised in Gaza. She had been to
Gaza.
They
were having a kind of conversation that you simply cannot
have in public. You know, thoughts about this, thoughts about
that. And it's sad that there just is not room. We lose
because they can't talk in public.
Absolutely.
Yeah, no. And I would just call out for people who don't
follow it, the Makdisi podcast. Every time I listen to that
Congress, I think I don't necessarily agree with every single
thing that people say in that package. I think if more of
this showed up in the mainstream media, we
would be having such a more sophisticated, smarter, more
valuable conversation. And so then our policies are affected by
that, by the way. Absolutely. Absolutely. So just because you
mentioned October 7th, you have mentioned the parallel with
Nat Turner. And I'd just like to hear you think about what
is the right way and the wrong way for
people to think about an analogy like that, or for that
matter, analogies with Native Americans who slaughtered
indiscriminately white settlers in the United States in the
19th century. What is the value of that analogy and what are
the dangers of that analogy?
Absolutely.
So
I think like from my basic politics, I am not built in
such a way that I can look at something like October 7th and
not be horrified. I just can't. You know what I mean?
Political arguments aside, I am telling you in my soul, in my
bones, I don't have the constitution for that. I just don't.
Nat
Turner, who took as his cause and his ideology that
everyone, all white people involved in the system of
enslavement were guilty. Women, children, whatever. The children
had to be killed because they were going to grow up to be
enslaved. His analysis was not wrong. The logic of it is not
incorrect. In fact, the
logic of sin war, there's an argument that the logic is not
wrong, but the morality of it, again, I always struggled
with that term. I didn't have the vocabulary to explain why,
but I always struggled with that idea. I think two things.
First, if you take as your belief, which for instance,
animates my anti-death penalty stance, that
human life really is sacred. I heard this, I was on
Democracy Now!, and they were interviewing this young lady
who's a student leader, and she had this motto, which she
said, every life a universe.
Yes, yes. And I really believe that. Tradition, yeah.
I
thought that was a wonderful way of saying it. So I would
say that the minute you start looking coldly upon the lives
of people who are entrenched in systems, I wonder what the
vision of your liberation is. And I think it's really
important to think like five steps ahead. Like, should you
win?
Who
are you going to be? Yes. Do I really want to live in a
state run by you? Do I want to live like I want to be part
of a society in which you have power? I'm not sure I do.
So like, where are we going here?
You
know, and I understand it's very, very difficult work for
oppressed people to do. But I think it's important. I think
how you fight actually is important. I'm uncomfortable making
those kinds of declarations because, again, I really think the
people that need to be hashing this out in public are not
me. You know what I mean?
The
people that can speak to this in a direct kind of way are
not me. But if you ask me, Ta-Nehisi Coates, that's how I
feel. Those are my politics.
Yeah.
Well, Ta-Nehisi, the reason that I kept badgering you all
those years was because I just had this sense that even
though Palestinians were working heroically against incredible
odds to change this conversation and that there were a few of
us lunatic, self-hating Jews who were trying to do something
that we wouldn't be able to do it and that we needed the cavalry and that you are a big part of that cavalry.
Did you think I would actually go or did you think I'd never go?
You
know, I didn't know you well enough to know. And I just
have to say to me, what's so beautiful about it is I really
believe that as much as being Jewish is at the center of my
being and I care about people, this is not a struggle of
tribe against tribe.
It
has to be the opposite of that. Right. And it has to be a
movement like the great movements that bring together people
from every possible background. bringing their own traditions of
humanity to bear and their own experience. And that's what
you did in the book. And I'm super, super grateful for it.
And for this hour, we got to talk.
Thanks so much, Peter. Thank you.
Thank you. Thanks to everyone for being here. Thanks, everybody.
