Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message is a widely acclaimed collection of four essays, one on journalism, three on problems in African and Asian countries. The essay on journalism is a statement of Coates’s philosophy, which, as I understand it, boils down to the need for clear-eyed confrontation with the truth and its communication to serve social justice. The problem with this philosophy is the potential conflict between truth, which is always assumed to be objective truth, and social justice, which cannot be assumed to mean the same thing to all people; a commitment to social justice might distort the truth. In The Message, Coates tells the truth but not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
The last and longest essay is a treatise entitled “The Gigantic Dream” on the Middle East conflict between Israel and the Arab-Muslim population in the West Bank. The truth, as Coates presents it, is Israel’s efforts to colonize the West Bank and its brutal occupation. The social justice which Coates seeks is the end of both. But the truth is more complex, and social justice is likely chimerical. Although Coates and Progressives generally regard Israel as a colonizer, they misconceive the concept of colonization and thus misapply it, yet differently. Coates applies the concept to Israeli occupation of the West Bank; others apply it to Israel itself as well as the West Bank. Although the fact of Israel’s brutal occupation is undoubted, its link to colonization is doubtful. Most occupations are more or less brutal, but they need not precede or follow from colonization. Coates’s analysis is marred by his bias in selected historical sources, his misconception of colonization, and his misperceptions of the occupation in his ten-day visit to Israel, the West Bank, but not Gaza.
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In this ancient land, the old question—what is truth?—looms large and ominously. Apparent facts might not be real facts. Context in that place and in this time matters greatly in interpreting the “facts.” Coates is unaware that context is hard to come by on a short visit, no matter how many conversations he had with Palestinian residents. And he is less interested in the truth than his philosophy suggests. Thus, he declares that he is not interested in listening to the rationales of what he regards as Israel’s colonial existence and oppressive occupation. “I had no interest in hearing defenses of the occupation and what struck me then as segregation” (p. 148). “What struck me” might be a long way from the truth, as impressions often are. The result is not truth, but opinion, “facts” filtered through and shaped by preconceptions and biases, as suggested by his frequent references to slavery and segregation in the United States.
Coates’s comparison of the conditions of Palestinians under Israeli occupation to those of slaves under plantation regimes is more rhetorical than historical and more designed to smear Jews as if they were Simon Legrees. But there are significant differences in these conditions. Israelis control much in the lives of West Bank Palestinians but do not deprive them of all rights and property. Slaveowners controlled every aspect of the lives of blacks, who had neither rights nor property, even possession of their own or their blood relatives’ bodies.
Without context and without background in both sides of the conflict, Coates can see and report details, but he cannot see—that is, understand—them. For example, he notes the many checkpoints at which Palestinians must endure long waits and close inspections, while Israelis move through them unimpeded. (A parallel might be more voting places in white areas than in black ones.) He sees these checkpoints as instruments of occupation and segregation. Yes, but he does not acknowledge the long history of Palestinian terrorism which has plagued Israel for decades and which makes checkpoints a sensible precaution against violence against its civilians, mainly Jews and some Muslims. I doubt that there are many such instances, but I offer this one, not to exonerate Israel from the many and serious abuses of Palestinians in the West Bank, but to explain that observing something does not guarantee understanding it. Coates sees the checkpoints and the different lines, but he does not see the reason for them, only their apparent similarity to Jim Crow practices in the United States.
Given the dynamics of conquest and occupation, the ways of rationalizing them and subsequently oppressing and exploiting the conquered, Israelis differ little from other conquerors who, throughout world history, have invaded other countries and dominated their populations. Typically, they denigrate the indigenous populations and rationalize their abuses because they regard the natives as inferior. Coates lacks this broader and unbiased historical perspective. He thinks Israelis reflect a Euro-American mindset—conquest and occupation justified by white Christians suppressing savage and uplifting uncivilized natives—of the recent half millennium or so. But the dynamics are universal and eternal, and not necessarily linked to colonization. For instance, he apparently knows nothing about Japanese racist thinking prior to the end of World War II. The Japanese thought themselves a master race and those whom they conquered and controlled inferiors, if not savages, who would benefit from Japanese domination. But the Japanese established no colonies, at most enclaves to support exploitation of local resources.
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In the current of present-day Progressive thought, Coates sees Israelis as colonizers in the tradition of European colonization. He is not alone in this opinion; many demonstrating against Israel’s excessive reaction to the Hamas attack see Israel in the same way. The point of the accusation is to discredit and reverse the Jewish project realized by the state of Israel—thus, the campus protesters’ rallying cry, “From the river [Jordan] to the sea [Mediterranean], Palestine will be free.”
To see Jews as colonizers implies that they are alien invaders, with no legitimate claim to the land. The implication depends on the fact of the influx of European Zionists and Holocaust refugees into Palestine. But these Jews supplemented the Jews living in Palestine as they always have. Jews cannot be colonizers because they have held claim to the land by virtue of long residency. There are two truths here. One, since prehistoric times and long before Islam arose as a faith, Jews have lived in the “Holy Land,” which includes Judea and Samaria in the West Bank as part of “Greater Israel,” and have claims to it. Two, non-Jews have always lived in this land, too, so their Arab-Muslim descendants have a solid claim to the land as well. This situation in the “Holy Land” might be unique because of the multi-millennial coexistence, cohabitation, and contention of two peoples in the same land. In short, Jews are not invaders and colonizers; they are developers.
In some sense, the land of Palestine belongs to no one and to everyone. From time immemorial, invaders have conquered the land only to be evicted by other invaders or revolts by the residents. From a historical perspective, the cycle seems never-ending and establishes a context which should qualify anyone’s claims to legitimate exclusive possession of the land and writers’—Coates’s—views of those claims to it.
In that cycle, Coates sees Israel’s emergence as a state, and its conquest and occupation of the West Bank as evidence of its imperialist/colonialist intentions from the beginning of the twentieth century. He selects the writings of notorious but minority Zionists like Ze'ev Jabotinsky and incidental quotations from mainstream Jewish leaders to support his case. But facts argue that Israel’s intentions were neither imperialist nor colonialist, at least not before 1967. Although Israel routed larger Arab armies in its War for Independence in 1947-48, it retained only modest parcels of land beyond the boundaries of the UN Partition Plan for the division of the British Mandate. For twenty years, it did nothing to extend its holdings into the West Bank or Gaza. The tragedy of the Six-Day War in 1967 was that Israeli military power, justified by Egypt’s acts of war, succeeded in defending the country but corrupted it thereafter. As they say, nothing fails like success. As I have argued in a recent blog, Israel’s conduct in its occupation of the West Bank (Gaza held, then released) has betrayed the country’s and the Jewish religion’s principles and values. Only slowly did Israel’s occupation of the West Bank evolve into incremental development. Again, the concept of colonization does not apply, for Jews have always lived in this land and thus have a historical claim to the lands of Greater Israel. Coates, in the myopia of a brief visit and little background, sees the present moment as typical. What he does not see—he did not want to see—is that Israel, despite today’s grave flaws, still struggles to improve, as protests, legislation, judicial decisions, and law enforcement opposing the government’s conduct suggest. Progress is not smooth, swift, or assured, but he nowhere recognizes the resistance to Israeli oppression and the efforts to alleviate or eliminate it. Whether Israel of its own initiative will abandon the illegal settlements remains to be seen.
Coates offers no suggestion for going forward. Instead, he offers finger-pointing and anger—“rage” is a word commonly used throughout—as if targeting one group or another can solve any problem or, according to his writer’s philosophy, reflect truth and promote social justice. Is rage the message? If so, he is one of many angry writers, especially self-righteous minorities and women, who justify themselves by expressing their anger and accusing someone else of exclusive responsibility for the world’s ills. Even as an old, white man, I accept radical critiques of American society; even as a Jew, I accept radical critiques of Israel. But I reject and resent anger- and hate-based ideological, especially Progressive, analyses which impede understanding, antagonize the parties to the conflict, and hinder them from negotiating their differences. To put it bluntly, I think that writers like Coates, with pretensions to truth and social justice, should shut up or shape up, for right now they are in the way.
Otherwise, Coates might have suggested that the international community, which established the state of Israel and defined its borders, should enforce them and its other resolutions curtailing Israeli expansion by its illegal settlements. Although the lands of the West Bank include the previous Jewish lands of Judea and Samaria, Israel must be enjoined to accept the loss of those lands to which it has some historical claim, not as colonists, but as residents, in order to restore peace in the “Holy Land.” If a consortium of states can effect the return of Israel to the confines of the UN boundaries only by boycott, divestment, and sanctions, so be it. The enforced end of Israeli occupation of the West Bank would be a small price to pay for that peace.
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