Ta-Nehisi Coates: American culture ‘complicit’ in dehumanizing Palestinians
Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the new book “The Message,” discusses his experiences visiting the Middle East, Africa and South Carolina. Each place reinforces in Coates the power of storytelling, and the responsibility of writers to plainly identify and contextualize systems of injustice wherever they appear.
As the war on Gaza enters its second year and Israel expands its attacks on Lebanon, we speak with the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. His new book The Message is based in part on his visit last year to Israel and the occupied West Bank, where he says he saw a system of segregation and oppression reminiscent of Jim Crow in the United States. "It was revelatory," says Coates. "I don't think the average American has a real sense of what we're doing over there — and I emphasize 'what we're doing' because it's not possible without American support.”
Watch Part 1 of this interview: 
• "The Message": Ta-Nehisi Coates on Po…
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We speak with Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose new book The Message features three essays tackling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, book bans and academic freedom, and the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. The Message is written as a letter to Coates's students at Howard University, where he is the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair in the English department. As part of the research for the book, Coates traveled to Senegal and visited the island of Gorée, often the last stop for captured Africans before they were shipped to the Americas as enslaved people.
Coates also visited a schoolteacher in South Carolina who faced censorship for teaching Coates's previous book, an experience he says showed him the power of organizing. "That, too, is about the power of stories. That, too, is about the power of narratives, the questions we ask and the questions we don't," Coates says of the community's response.
Watch Part 2 of this interview: • Ta-Nehisi Coates: I Was Told Palestin…
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https://ta-nehisicoates.com/blog/notes-on-the-catastrophe/
Notes On The Catastrophe
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
September 23, 2024
The Journal and The Journalist
I published “The Case for Reparations” 10 years ago, back in the lost age of blogging, when thinking publicly still felt possible. In the spirit of that era, I wrote a series of posts outlining the scholarship that informed my thesis. I believed that my argument would be subjected to a significant amount of scrutiny and that my only real defense, beyond the article itself, was truth and transparency in my sources and research. But I also constructed an ad hoc bibliography because it is in the citations of other writers that I have so often found the seed of my own work. A book is a salon of ideas. Notes and references allow the reader to branch into concepts and postulations that are significant but ultimately secondary to the host’s animating interests. If the guest happens to be a writer, the effect is often amorous. You follow a citation to its original source and in that other room find yourself in conversation with a history of the Black Death, an account of colonial plunder, or a study of pre-Code film, and just like that, an infatuation blooms.
The Message is a book for young writers, and as such, I have a matchmaker’s interest. And so in that interest—and well aware that my critique of Zionism and its effects will invite some scrutiny—I have compiled a rough account of my sources and references for the book’s final essay, “The Gigantic Dream.” It is true that the age of blogging is gone, but the need for some measure of public thinking, of romance, remains.
The spine of “The Gigantic Dream” is the 10 days I spent in Palestine. Yasmin El-Rifae and Omar Robert Hamilton, under the auspices of the Palestine Festival of Literature (Palfest), hosted the first half of my trip, paying for my travel, meals, and lodging. My hosts were activists and writers with their own ideas and politics but they exerted no undue influence, nor required that I do anything beyond a public panel in Ramallah. Nevertheless, I cannot say I left uninfluenced. On the contrary, they changed my life.
The funding for the second half of my trip was was paid for by me. My itinerary was crafted and executed in collaboration with Israeli anti-occupation activists Avner Gvaryahu and Yehuda Shaul. This portion of my trip was conducted independent of Palfest. I stress this because I am aware that there is an active conversation among activists and writers around who should work with whom and under what circumstances. I do not fully understand those politics but I want to be clear that my movements and collaborations were my own. Aside from the request that I meet with members of the group Breaking the Silence, neither Gvaryahu nor Shaul required that I do anything save bear witness. Nonetheless, I am forever indebted to them, for they too changed my life.
I came home with questions. My approach to big stories is always to first ground myself in history. Part of this grounding had already been accomplished. I’d read Benny Morris’ Righteous Victims some years earlier and there found my earliest exposure to, as Professor Morris writes, the idea of Zionism as a “colonizing and expansionist ideology and movement.” I am aware that Professor Morris has since argued that Zionism was not, in fact, a form of colonialism. I am not exactly sure what accounts for this new outlook. Certainly scholars have the right to change their minds, and I would love to read an account of Professor Morris’ own shift. I would hope that this account would also examine how, and why, Professor Morris came to advocate for colonial solutions himself, as when he approvingly invoked the establishment of America through “the annihilation of the Indians.”
Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine was the first narrative history of the region I’d read that was written by a Palestinian. Moreover, it is written by a scholar whose ancestors recorded their own interactions with Zionism’s exponents and its subsequent implementation. On my return, I sent a rather pleading note to Professor Khalidi: “It’s very hard to capture what happened to me. I feel like I walked through a door into another world, and when I looked back, I saw that the door had disappeared.”
Professor Khalidi proved a gracious and invaluable guide. He introduced me to the scholar Mahmood Mamdani, whose book Neither Settler nor Native quietly echoes in the background of “The Gigantic Dream.” In addition to aiding my understanding of both the colonial state and the nation-state, Professor Mamdani helped me to see “racecraft” globally and thus better understand the proclivity of the modern West to carve people into races/castes/tribes, assigning qualities and defects to each of them according to the alleged whims of God and science. (As an aside, Neither Settler nor Native was the first place I encountered the Hamitic thesis, which made for some truly wild reading.)
The work of tribe-making and racecraft helped contextualize another book Professor Khalidi recommended—Arthur Hertzberg’s anthology of primary documents, The Zionist Idea. Having derived some sense of how European colonialism worked historically, I found it a lot easier to spot its imprint in the writings of Zionism’s pioneers. This revelation was deeply gratifying. Back in my Atlantic days, I took a deep dive into the Civil War, which—much like “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”—I had been led to believe arose for “complex” reasons. What I found was that the primary documents of that era told a simple tale. Just as the pioneers of the Confederacy openly confessed their affiliation with enslavement, the early Zionists openly associated themselves with colonialism. And just as the modern defenders of the Confederacy claim slavery had no part in their cause, so too do modern Zionists declare the colonizing impulse irrelevant to their movement. But the truth was right there. Written down.
The question of how that truth became so obscured remained at the heart of my inquiry. To this point, one other book that Professor Khalidi recommended proved crucial: Our American Israel is Amy Kaplan’s cultural and intellectual history exploring how and why Zionism came to enjoy such resonance here in America. To sketch this history, Kaplan reaches back into the time of the Puritans to unearth the tropes that undergird our cultural connections to Israel:
From a diverse array of representations and cultural expressions, patterns coalesced to form a broad consensus about America’s attachment to Israel, a consensus that came to seem like common sense. The cultural alchemy that transformed the story of Israel from a particular tale about a specific ethnic state into one that resonates with the American nation as a whole has, in turn, shaped political discourse in America.
Cultural perceptions, to be sure, do not dictate policies. They do, however, create a perceptual field in interaction with those policies and political ideas from which a consensus emerges about the unbreakable bond between the two nations. Cultural artifacts—whether a novel, film, newspaper article, or museum—do not work by imposing a singular and monolithic meaning on the relationship between the two nations. But they are effective precisely because they are capacious, inviting different meanings from diverse perspectives while effectively ruling out others.
This rendering influenced not just my dispatch from Palestine but my entire book. Culture does not exist in some holy realm far removed from the politics that order our lives. In fact, culture suffuses our politics, quietly expanding and restricting our imagination. Kaplan died of brain cancer in 2020. It saddens me that I was not able to thank her. Our American Israel is masterful and deserves a larger audience.
Bearing in mind Kaplan’s insight into the power of cultural artifacts and knowing that I was writing a book about storytelling, I spent a lot of time thinking about how the Israeli narrative was rendered in the country itself. I kept returning to my visit to the City of David, which, to me, evidenced the way power sanctifies the patently ridiculous, often through science and religion. In the City of David, these tools found a union. How common was this practice of sanctifying the state through archeology, and what was its import? I owe a particular debt to Rachel Poser and her article “Common Ground: The Politics of Archaeology in Jerusalem.” Poser’s work outlined how archeology was being employed to craft an ennobling narrative and further deprive Palestinians of their homes.
I read Nadia Abu El-Haj’s book Facts on the Ground, which explores the way an ostensibly objective field of study has been employed to erase Palestinian claims and sanctify Zionism. “The archaeological project, in other words, just like other projects of making place,” writes Abu El-Haj, “emerged as fundamental to colonizing the terrain of ‘Palestine,’ remaking it into ‘Eretz Yisrael.’” I read a good deal of archaeologist Raphael Greenberg’s work—“One Hundred and Fifty Years of Archaeology and Controversy in Jerusalem,” “Pompeo in Silwan,” “Towards an Inclusive Archaeology in Jerusalem.” What became clear was that some not insignificant portion of Israeli archeology was essentially an attempt to legitimize the state by charting a glorious, uninterrupted, and carbon-dated past. If such a narrative could be forged, then Israel could be seen not as an expansionist settler project but as the redemption of an ancient state:
The stories that archaeologists of the past 150 years have told of Jerusalem’s kings and conquerors, of its dazzling prosperity and utter desolation, and their search for what has yet to be conjured out of the past, reflect their own anxieties about identity and belonging, as well as that of the communities that they serve.
Much of The Message is concerned with the want of such a past; how I felt that want in my youth, saw it in my own community, in Columbia, South Carolina, and then again in Jerusalem. But my trip confirmed the danger in serving that want and how easily a noble past comes to justify an ignoble present. That was the lesson of the Moroccan Quarter, and having taken the lesson, I sought the history. I found it at the website Jerusalem Story, through the work of Nadim Bawalsa and Kate Rouhana. Their article “The Destruction of Jerusalem’s Moroccan Quarter” is a sobering read and, along with Abu El-Haj’s work, formed the basis of my writing on a world that stood for nearly a millennium and was erased in matter of days. I could have kept reading about archaeology and power for another five years. But I have arrived at an age where I must concede that the number of my questions will outrun my time on this earth. More prosaically, my publisher would have lost it if I’d taken another day to turn in this manuscript.
“The Gigantic Dream” ultimately made up half of the book that contains it. That is because The Nakba, and the stories that animate it, is still in motion. Thus while my aim was to confront the stories, it also was to clarify the catastrophe. I’d heard the label apartheid affixed to Israel long before my trip. But I can’t say I truly understood what that charge really meant beyond a vague claim of racism. Even after I returned, I didn’t quite get the import. In researching apartheid, I was aided by Nancy L. Clark and William H. Worger’s book South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid. And in looking at Israel’s historical ties to South Africa, I found something truly revealing: Sasha Polakow-Suransky’s The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid tells the story of how “a Janus-faced Israel denied its ties with South Africa, claiming that it opposed apartheid on moral and religious grounds even as it secretly strengthened the arsenal of a white supremacist government.” I learned so much from Polakow-Suransky’s work: Israeli’s complicity with apartheid, its arming of South Africa, and its willingness to honor that country’s leader at the sacred site of Yad Vashem.
Having understood what apartheid was, as well as its relationship to Israel, I moved to understand the specific charge of Israeli apartheid. I found extensive evidence of that charge. There was the fact that so many Israeli leaders themselves had—at the very least—understood that their country was on the edge of apartheid. There were the words of writers and historians such as Thomas Friedman, Nicholas Kristof, and even Benny Morris, none of whom are anti-Zionist, invoking the concept of apartheid to describe the Occupied Territories. But most convincingly there were the reports coming out of the human rights community—Amnesty International, Al Haq, B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch—that documented the charge at length. These reports helped me understand how Israel discriminates at a fundamental level, even against its nominal Palestinian citizens.
To better understand how this particular apartheid was legislated in Israel, I turned to Noura Erakat’s book Justice for Some. On a very basic level, Justice for Some was my reference for understanding the successive wars in Palestine, the carving up of Palestinians into separate groups, and the awarding of different rights to each group, all while making no one in those groups the equal of any Jewish citizen. But there was something more in her work that stuck with me—a critique of the American habit of making a fetish out of the law:
Think of the law as like the sail of a boat. The sail, or the law, guarantees motion but not direction. Legal work together with political mobilization, by individuals, organizations, and states, is the wind that determines direction. The law is not loyal to any outcome or player, despite its bias towards the most powerful states. The only promise it makes is to change and serve the interests of the most effective actors. In some cases, the sail is set in such a way that it cannot possibly produce a beneficial direction, and the conditions demand either an entirely new sail, or no sail at all. It is this indeterminacy in law and its utility as a means to dominate as well as to fight that makes it at once a site of oppression and of resistance; at once a source of legitimacy and a legitimating veneer for bare violence; and at once the target of protest and a tool for protest.
I found this passage particularly helpful as a descriptor of the law as a tool, not just in the Palestinian struggle or Zionist statecraft, but in all of our politics.
It was probably at this point in my research that the deeper conflict between nationalism and humanism truly began to clarify for me. I thought a lot about the stories Polakow-Suransky told—from Vorster’s visit to Yad Vashem, to the Anti-Defamation League spying on anti-apartheid activists, to the Israeli weapons industry profiting off the repression of Black South Africans. And then I wondered what I would do on behalf of my own people’s welfare. What was my relationship to the nationalism that made me? Was it merely power? I tried to approach this question wary of false parallels and equivalences—that is to say, from the perspective of someone who has never faced a campaign of industrialized extermination. I quickly found myself forced to revisit the limits of the phrase “my people.” Did I believe that the worth of “my people”—Black people—was in our bloodlines? Did my politics ultimately amount to the preservation of DNA?
They did not. “My people” is unavoidably a term of genes. But the thread of the Black struggle in this country that I now feel most tied to seeks to destroy the structures of racism, and thus destroy the concept of races—including our own. Frankly, I look forward to that day. The value of Black people, to me, is in our collective experience: the stories, the songs, the philosophies, the corpus. I think that the lessons of that corpus are for all humanity, and I fear them being eradicated in the same way I fear any body of human knowledge being eradicated.
But there are many ways to accomplish such an eradication, the most frightful of which would be by the very hand that authored the corpus. The emancipated enslaves; the oppressed colonizes; the vanquished ethnically cleanses; a people survive a genocide only to perpetrate another. Perhaps this kind of destruction is more normal than not. Nonetheless, what my trip taught me was that one way to ensure that destruction is by marrying the imaginative, the idealistic, to the amoral ambitions of a state. “A Jew who accepts apartheid ceases to be a Jew,” said Shimon Peres. There’s a lot in that statement to think about. I don’t feel myself qualified to assess the souls of the Jewish people but I can assess my own. A world where our essence is expressed in state power above all is a world in which I am a stranger to my own people.
I’d rather not say too much more about the souls of other communities. But I do want to mention the early chapters of Ronen Bergman‘s Rise And Kill First. What Bergman shows is how a particular story of the Holocaust, one which held that Hitler’s victims had gone like “lambs to the slaughter,” helped birth Israel (relatively) historic embrace of assassination. It goes without saying that any sketch of oppression and its discontents will invariably show people refusing to calmly submit to their own plunder, to say nothing of their annihilation. But those of us who’ve grimaced at the site of all the “We Are Not Our Ancestors” sloganeering well understand how such a story can take root. (I’ve always found Eddie Murphy to be instructive here.)
“The Gigantic Dream” begins with the Holocaust. I made that choice because I felt very strongly that without some grounding in the history of antisemitism and its annihilating weight, I would not understand Zionism at all. I owe a debt to the Ken Burns film The U.S. and the Holocaust, which I watched shortly after my return. This is the only documentary I’ve seen that situates both the Holocaust and America’s ambivalent response to that tragedy in a context of white supremacy. American racism—the Chinese Exclusion Act, the era of eugenics, the legal work of Jim Crow—proved to be one of the predominant inspirations for the great Race War that spanned the years 1939 to 1945. What must be understood is that we are not just a country with a history of racism but home to one of the three great “overtly racist regimes,” as George M. Fredrickson writes in his book Racism: A Short History: South Africa, Nazi Germany, and the Jim Crow South. In other words, we are a primary source not just for the idea of racial bias but for legal and systematized racist regimes. James Q. Whitman’s short history Hitler’s American Model expands on this point by detailing the ways in which Jim Crow’s legal structure was studied by Hitler’s agents and ultimately influenced the Nazi’s infamous Nuremberg Laws. Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth extends this study into Nazi colonial policy in Africa and the fallacy of assuming that racism somehow requires an immutable concept of race:
…Hitler’s racism was not that of a European looking down at Africans. He saw the entire world as an “Africa,” and everyone, including Europeans, in racial terms. Here, as so often, he was more consistent than others. Racism, after all, was a claim to judge who was fully human. As such, ideas of racial superiority and inferiority could be applied according to desire and convenience. Even neighboring societies, which might seem not so different from the German, might be defined as racially different.
In understanding America’s response to the Holocaust, I owe a debt to Felice Batalan and her paper “The Displaced Persons Act of 1948 and Home-Grown Antisemitism.” I was under the impression that the carnage of the Holocaust had served as a lesson to America and done much to cure the country of its antisemitism. This proved to be untrue.
And then there was the role of my own profession–journalism–which I have come to believe played no small role in the distorted view we have of Israel, Palestine and its peoples. On this point, obviously Edward Said‘s classic essay “Permission To Narrate” was key. In terms of more recent scholarship, Maha Nasser‘s research gave empirical structure to what I felt to be true–that is the near total absence of Palestinian narrators in major newspapers and magazines.
Finally, in the years after I published “The Case For Reparations,” I would, from time to time, see the writer Peter Beinart in random social situations–on the street, at a function, in between takes of a cable news show. Almost every time I saw Peter, he had different versions of the same question–Have you visited Palestine yet? He was insistent, in all of these conversations, that I would not be the same after. He was right. I owe him a public note of thanks for his encouragement–as well as his writing which I devoured on my return.
I want to emphasize that this is all a work in progress—one stretching back some 10 years. I now find myself questioning my presumptions, even ones based on work I’ve recently cited, such as Fredrickson’s construction of overtly racist regimes. I also find myself reading more in the world of Indigenous history, sparked by its constant citation by Palestinians and Israelis. At the time of this writing, I am halfway through Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz’s book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of America. I wish I’d read it before my trip because I don’t think Americans quite understand the extent to which the genocide we perpetrated here became a model for the world. I wish I’d had more time to incorporate all this into my thinking. I simply ran out of time. More questions than days, I guess.
–Ta-Nehisi
