[[link removed]]

THE RETURN OF TA-NEHISI COATES. A DECADE AFTER “THE CASE FOR
REPARATIONS,” HE IS READY TO TAKE ON ISRAEL, PALESTINE, AND THE
AMERICAN MEDIA.  
[[link removed]]


 

Ryu Spaeth
September 23, 2024
New York Magazine
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed].]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Ta-Nehisi Coates's writing on race fueled a reckoning in America.
Now he wants to change the way we think about Israel and Palestine. "I
realized how similar what I was seeing was to the world my parents and
grandparents were born into.” _

Ta-Nehisi Coates in the city of Lydd. “The site of a horrific
massacre,” he said, “where, among other things, grenades were
tossed into a mosque.” , Photo: Rob Stothard / New York Magazine

 

It was mid-August, roughly a month and a half before his new
book, _The Message_
[[link removed]]_, _was
set to be published, and Ta-Nehisi Coates
[[link removed]] was in my face, on my
level, his eyes wide and aflame and his hands swallowing his scalp as
he clutched it in disbelief and wonder and rage. At the Gramercy Park
restaurant where we’d met for breakfast, Coates, now 48, looked
noticeably older than the fruit-cheeked polemicist whose visage had
been everywhere nearly a decade before, when he released _Between the
World and Me_
[[link removed]]_,_ his
era-defining book on race
[[link removed]] during
the Obama presidency, and the stubble of his beard was now frosted
with white. But he was possessed still with the conviction and anxiety
of a young man: deeply certain that he is right and yet almost
desperate to be confirmed. He spoke most of the Israeli occupation of
the Palestinian territories, a central subject of his book. “I knew
it was wrong from day one,” he said. “Day one — you know what I
mean?”

_The Message_ — a return to nonfiction after years of writing
comics, screenplays, and a novel — begins with an epigraph from
Orwell: “In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely
descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my
political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort
of pamphleteer.” Our own age of strife takes Coates to three places:
Dakar, Senegal, where he makes a pilgrimage to Gorée Island and the
Door of No Return; Chapin, South Carolina, where a teacher has been
pressured to stop teaching _Between the World and Me_ because it
made some students feel “ashamed to be Caucasian”; and the West
Bank and East Jerusalem. It is in the last of these long,
interconnected essays that Coates aims for the sort of paradigm shift
that first earned him renown when he published “The Case for
Reparations
[[link removed]]”
in _The Atlantic_ in 2014, in which he staked a claim for what is
owed the American descendants of enslaved Africans. This time, he lays
forth the case that the Israeli occupation is a moral crime, one that
has been all but covered up by the West. He writes, “I don’t think
I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more
intense than in Israel.”

Coates traveled to the region on a ten-day trip in the summer of 2023.
“It was so emotional,” he told me. “I would dream about being
back there for weeks.” He had known, of course, in an abstract
sense, that Palestinians lived under occupation. But he had been told,
by journalists he trusted and respected, that Israel
[[link removed]] was a democracy — “the only
democracy in the Middle East.” He had also been told that the
conflict was “complicated,” its history tortuous and contested,
and, as he writes, “that a body of knowledge akin to computational
mathematics was needed to comprehend it.” He was astonished by the
plain truth of what he saw: the walls, checkpoints, and guns that
everywhere hemmed in the lives of Palestinians; the clear tiers of
citizenship between the first-class Jews and the second-class
Palestinians; and the undisguised contempt with which the Israeli
state treated the subjugated other. For Coates, the parallels with the
Jim Crow South were obvious and immediate: Here, he writes, was a
“world where separate and unequal was alive and well, where rule by
the ballot for some and the bullet for others was policy.” And this
world was made possible by his own country: “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.”

That it was complicated, he now understood, was “horseshit.”
“Complicated” was how people had described slavery and then
segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to
take something from somebody.”

How could he have been so wrong before? The fault lay partly with the
profession he loved. In journalism, he had found his voice, his
platform, his purpose in life. And yet, as he sees it, it was
journalistic institutions that had not only failed to tell the truth
about Israel [[link removed]] and Palestine
[[link removed]] but had worked to conceal it. As
a result, a fog had settled over the region, over its history and
present, obscuring what anyone at closer range could apprehend easily
with their own two eyes.

_The Message_ is an attempt to use the journalist’s tools to dispel
this veil. Coates was successful in such an effort before, when far
fewer Americans understood the material grip that the legacy of
slavery had on the descendants of the enslaved. In the years after
“The Case for Reparations” was published, Coates was initiated
into elite rooms in New York, Washington, and Hollywood. He testified
before Congress, won a National Book Award, was interviewed by Oprah.
This son of West Baltimore found himself, by his early 40s, an
esteemed member of the powerful whose message was welcomed. And many
are now eager for Coates to lend his considerable influence to the
deadlocked public conversation on Israel and Palestine. But _The
Message_ also unquestionably breaks with the Establishment that
championed Coates, risking his standing and possibly his career.
Journalist Peter Beinart, a vocal critic of Israel, said, “Ta-Nehisi
has a lot to lose.”

There are, of course, many who believe that the moral dimensions of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are indeed complicated. The most
famous of Israel’s foundational claims — that it was a necessary
sanctuary for one of the world’s most oppressed peoples, who may not
have survived without a state of their own — is at the root of this
complication and undergirds the prevailing viewpoint of the
political-media-entertainment nexus. It is Israel’s unique logic of
existence that has provided a quantum of justice to the Israeli
project in the eyes of Americans and others around the world, and
it’s what separates Jewish Israelis from the white supremacists of
the Jim Crow South, who had no justice on their side at all. But for
Coates, one wrong cannot justify another. “All states at their core
have a reason for existing — a moral story to tell,” he told me.
“We certainly do. Does industrialized genocide entitle one to a
state? No.” Especially, he said, at the expense of people who had no
hand in the genocide.

What matters to Coates is not what will happen to his career now —
to the script sales, invitations from the White House, his
relationships with his former colleagues at _The Atlantic _and
elsewhere. “I’m not worried,” he told me, shrugging his
shoulders. “I have to do what I have to do. I’m sad, but I was so
enraged. If I went over there and saw what I saw and didn’t write
it, I am fucking worthless.”

 
At a checkpoint in the old city of Hebron. “I get sad every time I
look at this photo,” Coates said. “This was the second day of the
trip and the moment I realized how similar what I was seeing was to
the world my parents and grandparents were born into.”   (Photo:
Courtesy of Ta-Nehisi Coates / New York Magazine)
Coates is hardly the first person to attempt to elucidate the plight
of the Palestinians. Then again, he was not the first person to tackle
the subject of reparations, a staple of classroom discussions and
political debate. “I remember when he told me he was writing ‘The
Case for Reparations,’” said Chris Jackson, the editor of _The
Message_ and Coates’s other books. “I was like, ‘Ta-Nehisi, you
can’t Columbus reparations.’” Even within _The
Atlantic, _there was skepticism. “My first reaction was, _This
sounds nuts,_” said Scott Stossel, Coates’s editor at the
magazine. “_This is a nonstarter._”

Coates, however, had the enthusiastic support of _The Atlantic_’s
then–editor-in-chief, James Bennet. “He’s one of those writers
you trust when he proposes an idea,” Bennet told me recently.
“He’s really almost singular.” In one of several conversations
we had after our breakfast in Gramercy, Coates recalled, “I
couldn’t believe that I’m talking about this theoretical case for
reparations and this white dude is like, ‘Okay, so how big can we do
it?’” Coates had already won a National Magazine Award for his
2012 article “Fear of a Black President
[[link removed]],”
analyzing the racial paradoxes of Obama’s first term, which had
earned him trust and leverage. And he had a blog where he was proving
that there was an immense readership for topics that might seem off
the news, the most prominent and surprising of which was the Civil
War. “The groundwork was laid by building up the audience to
field-test his ideas,” said Stossel. “And he had a lot of smart
readers who would give him feedback. He starts out from a point of
almost radical humility, where he is open to critiques from anyone.”
Bennet told me, “He just constantly learned; he was a learning
machine.”

Coates was obsessed with the historical narratives about the Civil War
— how they’d been formed and how they overlaid the present.
“It’s kind of hard to remember, but even as late as 2014, people
were talking about the Civil War as this complicated subject,”
Jackson said. “Ta-Nehisi was going to plantations and hanging out at
Monticello and looking at all the primary documents and reading a
thousand books, and it became clear that the idea of a
‘complicated’ narrative was ridiculous.” The Civil War was,
Coates concluded, solely about the South’s desire to perpetuate
slavery, and the subsequent attempts over the next century and a half
to hide that simple fact betrayed, he believed, a bigger lie — the
lie that America was a democracy, a mass delusion that he would later
call “the Dream” in _Between the World and Me._

While Coates is known as an essayist and thinker who helped embed
concepts like “structural racism” into the collective
consciousness, “The Case for Reparations” was mostly reporting.
“He benefited from his reluctance to just opine and pontificate,”
Stossel said. The result was a nearly 16,000-word story demonstrating
an unbroken line between slavery and, in Bennet’s words, “the
systematic deprivation of the ability of Black Americans to accumulate
wealth across generations.” When Coates followed that article
with _Between the World and Me,_ which included heartbreaking
passages about his childhood in West Baltimore during the crack
epidemic in the 1980s, the impact was seismic. He was successfully
rewriting history for mainstream audiences, sparking a revisionist
renaissance that led to “The 1619 Project” and other narratives
that centered Black experience.

“I remember this guy wrote this review,” Coates told me, “and
the headline was something like, ‘_Between the World and Me_ Is Not
the Classic We Hoped For.’” (The review in question actually used
the word _masterpiece_
[[link removed]]_._)
“And I was like, _Oh, that’s where the bar is?_” Bennet said,
“The degree of attention and even celebrity was like nothing I’d
witnessed.” It was also remarkable that this frontal assault on the
driving narratives of the Obama presidency — that racial progress is
real and inevitable, that we might even be living in a post-racial
society — was coming from the high citadel of respectable opinion in
D.C. “It’s really insane when you think about it,” Coates said,
“because _The Atlantic_ was at the center of power there. I mean,
it’s Washington’s magazine.”

When I asked him how he thought that had happened — how this radical
critique of the Establishment was allowed in the heart of that
Establishment — he was at a bit of a loss. “I think my politics
are radical, but my style is actually conservative,” he said. “As
a person, I don’t go in there and start yelling at people.” He
contrasted his disposition to that of his fellow _Atlantic_ blogger
Andrew Sullivan (“If he had a problem, it was going to be a huge
thing”) and Cornel West (“I’m not going to say Obama is doing
blackface or whatever”). In the editor’s note to the issue
of _The Atlantic_ that featured “Fear of a Black President,”
Bennet wrote that Coates’s writing about race was “properly
angry.”

Coates would go on to write a series of fence-swinging articles —
“The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration
[[link removed]],”
“My President Was Black
[[link removed]],”
“The First White President
[[link removed]]”
— that dissected the mixed legacy of the Obama administration and
the backlash that led to the Trump administration. Taken all together,
it constituted a legendary run of magazine writing. But it was also
during this period that his relationship with _The Atlantic_ fell
apart. In 2016, Bennet, whom Coates described as “instrumental” to
his career, left for his ill-fated role at the New
York _Times, _where he lost his job amid a debacle over an op-ed
calling for troops
[[link removed]] to
be deployed during the George Floyd protests. The same year,
Coates’s beloved blog was shut down as social media subsumed the
political conversation. At the same time, Coates had become extremely
famous for a magazine writer — too famous. “The public profile was
catching up with me,” he said. “I was perceived as a quote,
unquote, big writer or public intellectual. Man, I hated that shit. It
made my skin crawl, and I wanted as much distance from that as I
possibly could.”

_The Atlantic_ seemingly couldn’t print anything controversial
without it somehow reflecting on Coates. “He was a writer; he
didn’t have any control over other stuff that we published, plenty
of which he disagreed with,” said Stossel. “And he would be
getting harangued by his followers, who were saying, ‘How can you
abide _The Atlantic_ publishing this or that or the other?’” The
situation reached a nadir when in 2018 Bennet’s successor, Jeffrey
Goldberg, hired the conservative columnist Kevin Williamson, who was
soon revealed to have previously called for the hanging of women who
had abortions. The fiasco culminated with Goldberg and Coates fielding
questions onstage at an off-the-record town hall with _The
Atlantic_’s dismayed staff; leaked
[[link removed]] footage
of the event revealed a rueful Coates admitting that the magazine had
made a terrible mistake. He left _The Atlantic_ three months later.

With notable exceptions (he guest-edited an issue of _Vanity Fair_
[[link removed]] in
the aftermath of Floyd’s killing by police in 2020), Coates spent
the next half-dozen years away from questions of public policy. He is
obviously proud of the body of work he produced then, which includes
the _Black Panther_ graphic novels, though he struck notes of regret
when discussing various movie scripts he has in development that have
yet to see the light of day, including a _Superman_ reboot. “Like
a lot of writers, I somewhat foolishly was seduced into Hollywood,”
he told the _Longform_ podcast
[[link removed]] earlier
this year in a discussion about the interminable hoops one must jump
through to make a movie. “A lot of days, I think, _My God, what did
I do?_ I’ve had things where some part of me was praying that the
feedback would be, ‘Okay, we’re not going to do this.’”

His novel, _The Water Dancer_
[[link removed]]_, _was
a success both critically and commercially, but its reception felt
quiet in comparison to that of _Between the World and Me,_ which in
addition to transforming him into a hero of the liberal left made him
a talisman of hate on the right. “This novel was a No. 1 best seller
and sold a million copies,” said Jackson. “And it’s as if it
didn’t happen in terms of generating the kind of corrosive, just
horrible negativity that his other book summoned.”

Coates said that with fiction, readers had to actually read the book
to have something to say; he’d had a break from the knee-jerk
responses to headlines that can dominate conversations on social
media. “It didn’t show up in the discourse, you know what I mean?
But that was the point,” he said. “It was a relief, man. To be
honest with you, I was like, _Why am I even doing nonfiction? Why
would I come back to this shit?_ ”

 
A moment of respite in the West Bank. “Up until this point, we’d
seen all of this pain and suffering. And on the last day, we were in
this moment, which was quite beautiful,” Coates said.  (Photo: Rob
Stothard / New York Magazine)
The first inkling that Coates might want to write about Israel came
around the time he was leaving _The Atlantic._ He was partly spurred
by criticism he’d received over a passage in “The Case for
Reparations” in which he cited reparations paid by the German
government to the State of Israel after the Holocaust as a potential
model. “We did an event when ‘Case for Reparations’ came out, at
a synagogue in D.C., and I remember there was a woman who got on the
mic and yelled about the role of Palestinians in that article,” he
told me. “And I couldn’t quite understand what she was saying. I
mean, I heard her, but I literally could not understand it. She got
shouted down. And I’ve thought about that a lot, man. I’ve thought
about that a lot.” It hadn’t occurred to him that Israel might
itself be in the debt of a population that it had oppressed, a blind
spot that remains a source of regret to this day. “I should have
asked more questions,” he told me. “I should have done more. I
should have looked around and said, ‘Do we have anybody Palestinian
who’s going to read this before we print it?’”

Stossel said that this regret struck him as an “overreaction” to a
mere example of real reparations, but Abdallah Fayyad, a former
staffer at _The Atlantic_ who grew up in Jerusalem, told me that
when he first read the article, he found the inclusion of Israel
discordant with its principal message. As he noted, the vast majority
of German reparations paid to Israel were not given to individual
victims of the Holocaust but used to build up the fledgling state.
“I love that piece,” Fayyad said. “But the people who bore the
costs of those reparations were the Palestinians.”

Coates felt the need to fix this wrong, but to write something
substantial about the issue would have been difficult at _The
Atlantic._ “I probably did not want to go through whatever it
would’ve taken,” he said. Though the magazine had supported his
bold positions before, he felt that Israel was a protected subject
under both Bennet and Goldberg, the latter of whom ardently defended
Israeli interests as a staff writer and blogger alongside Coates.

In part because of the pandemic, it would be years before he could
finally visit East Jerusalem and the West Bank, both of which, along
with Gaza, were seized by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967 and have
been occupied ever since. Days before the trip in May 2023, Coates
told one of his traveling companions, the writer and professor Eve L.
Ewing, that he was gripped by fear of what he might witness. “I
really didn’t want to go,” he said. He had learned enough, in the
years since publishing “The Case for Reparations,” to know that it
would be painful. But his idols, people like Frederick Douglass and
Ida B. Wells, had told their stories at the risk of capture and
enslavement and worse. “We’re supposed to be Black writers, and
we’re afraid now?” he said. “What are we then? And so it was
really clear to me what I had to do.”

On the ground in the occupied territories, he saw the segregated
roads, the soldiers with their American-made weapons, the surveillance
cameras, and the whole archipelago of impoverished ghettos. “I felt
a mix of astonishment, betrayal, and anger,” he writes. “The
astonishment was for me — for my own ignorance, for my own
incuriosity … The betrayal was for my colleagues in journalism —
betrayal for the way they reported, for the way they’d laundered
ethnic cleansing, for the voices they’d erased. And the anger was
for my own past — for Black Bottom, for Rosewood, for Tulsa —
which I could not help but feel being evoked here.”

One of his first encounters with the Israeli state is a soldier
stopping him on the street to ask him his religion, a confusing
question for an atheist. It becomes clear that if he does not give the
correct answer — “Jew,” “Christian,” anything but
“Muslim” — he will not be allowed to pass. “On that street so
far from home,” he writes, “I suddenly felt that I had traveled
through time as much as through space. For as sure as my ancestors
were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white
man, Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian
is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere.”

In Coates’s eyes, the ghost of Jim Crow is everywhere in the
territories. In the soldiers who “stand there and steal our time,
the sun glinting off their shades like Georgia sheriffs.” In the
water sequestered for Israeli use — evidence that the state had
“advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the
pools and fountains but the water itself.” In monuments on sites of
displacement and informal shrines to mass murder, such as the tomb of
Baruch Goldstein, who gunned down 29 Muslims in a mosque in 1994,
which recall “monuments to the enslavers” in South Carolina. And
in the baleful glare of the omnipresent authority. “The point is to
make Palestinians feel the hand of occupation constantly,” he
writes. And later: “The message was: ‘You’d really be better off
somewhere else.’”

By the time Coates returned to New York, Palestine was his obsession.
Right away, he began sending work and research to group chats of
various friends. “You wake up and Ta-Nehisi has overnight written
four different walls of text and posted three different e-book
screenshots and highlighted things,” Ewing told me. “We have
probably talked about Palestine pretty much every day since
returning.”

Later that summer, just after he returned to the U.S., Coates
introduced himself to the Palestinian American historian Rashid
Khalidi at Columbia, who invited Coates and his wife to dinner to
discuss his trip. “I think he felt that he had been conned,”
Khalidi told me. “And I think he felt he had to — I don’t
think _atone_ is the right word, but make up for what he had
mistakenly believed.” So Coates began his education in earnest with
Khalidi guiding him through the literature in a running dialogue that
lasted months. It was a process not dissimilar to his preparation for
“The Case for Reparations”: Coates leaned on friends, family, and
experts, Jews and Arabs and others, to stress-test and expand his
ideas. “He’s a very public learner,” Ewing said.

Coates’s friends, I noticed, were eager to attest to the
extraordinary amount of research that went into _The
Message, _undoubtedly anticipating that Coates’s relatively recent
interest in the subject may become a point of criticism. “It’s not
a book that reads like someone who just parachuted in, read one or two
things, and started making a lot of sweeping statements,” Beinart
told me. But, of course, Coates did parachute in, and one could argue
that this provides the book’s greatest asset — its sense of
revelation, its portrait of the new in all its shameful splendor. The
point he is trying to make is that anybody can see the moral injustice
of the occupation. “What is the experience that justifies total rule
over a group of people since 1967?” he asked me. “My mother knows
that’s wrong.”

Coates is interested in patterns of domination, in how oppression
replicates itself in different contexts, and in the “related traumas
of colonialism and enslavement,” as he writes in his essay on Dakar,
a beautiful, searching examination of how his racial consciousness has
evolved over time and across space. “I knew slavery and Jim Crow,
and they knew conquest and colonialism,” he writes of the
Senegalese. The kinship he feels with the Palestinians has similar
origins: “I felt the warmth of solidarity of ‘conquered
peoples,’ as one of my comrades put it, finding each other across
the chasm of oceans and experience,” he writes.

His affinity for conquered peoples very much extends to the Jews, and
he begins the book’s essay on Palestine at Yad Vashem, Israel’s
memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. “In a place like this,”
he writes, “your mind expands as the dark end of your imagination
blooms, and you wonder if human depravity has any bottom at all, and
if it does not, what hope is there for any of us?” But what Coates
is concerned with foremost is what happened when Jewish people went
from being the conquered to the conquerors, when “the Jewish people
had taken its place among The Strong,” and he believes Yad Vashem
itself has been used as a tool for justifying the occupation. “We
have a hard time wrapping our heads around people who are obvious
historical victims being part and parcel of another crime,” he told
me. In the book, he writes of the pain he observed in two of his
Israeli companions: “They were raised under the story that the
Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had been
confronted with an incredible truth — that there was no ultimate
victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing.”

There is undeniable power in the time-collapsing, globe-spanning
pattern Coates establishes. When he goes back to the founding of the
State of Israel in 1948, however, _The Message_ ventures onto
shakier ground, becoming entangled in complex academic battles that
his first-person reporting elides. In an attempt to establish that
Israel was started as a colonial project, Coates marshals substantial
primary documentation showing the colonial motivations of the early
Zionists, from Theodor Herzl, the father of the movement, to militant
extremists such as Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who called for an “Iron
Wall” between Jews and Palestinians. But attempting to squeeze
Israel into a classic colonial mold invites some convincing
objections. As Adam Kirsch, a literary critic and frequent contributor
to _The Atlantic, _points out in his new book, _On Settler
Colonialism_
[[link removed]]_,_ the
original Zionist settlers, including those who fled the pogroms in
Europe before the Holocaust, did not have a mother country in whose
name they could extract resources or claim sovereignty, nor a country
to which they could ultimately return. And as people expelled from the
region long ago, they had claims to indigeneity themselves. Even
Khalidi, who is firm that Israel was a settler-colonial project, said
that such analogies can go only so far: “Usually, settler-colonial
projects are extensions of the people and of the sovereignty of the
mother country,” he said. “Zionism is an independent national
movement. So it’s different to everything that ever came before.”

The book is strongest when its aperture is narrow. There is no mention
of the fact that Israel is bombarded by terrorist groups set on the
state’s annihilation. There is no discussion of the intifadas and
the failed negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders going
back decades. There is even no mention of Gaza because Coates was
unable to visit the region after the October 7 attack and he did not
want to report on a place he hadn’t seen for himself. (“People
were like, ‘Gaza is so much worse,’” he told me. “‘So much
worse.’”) What there is, instead, is a picture of the intolerable
cruelty and utter desperation that could lead to an October 7.

“If this was the 1830s and I was enslaved and Nat Turner’s
rebellion had happened,” Coates told me that day in Gramercy, “I
would’ve been one of those people that would’ve been like,
‘I’m not cool with this.’ But Nat Turner happens in a context.
So the other part of me is like, What would I do if I had grown up in
Gaza, under the blockade and in an open-air prison, and I had a little
sister who had leukemia and needed treatment but couldn’t get it
because my dad or my mom couldn’t get the right pass out? You know
what I mean? What would I do if my brother had been shot for getting
too close to the barrier? What would I do if my uncle had been shot
because he’s a fisherman and he went too far out? And if that wall
went down and I came through that wall, who would I be? Can I say
I’d be the person that says, ‘Hey, guys, hold up. We shouldn’t
be doing this’? Would that have been me?”

Jackson told me that Coates’s obsession with Palestine, like his
obsession with the Civil War, “is in large part driven by the
feeling of having been lied to.” When I met Coates in Gramercy Park,
he was still clearly in the throes of that obsession, his eyes boring
into me, demanding affirmation for his feelings of shock and outrage,
almost as if he were accusing me of something, which in a way he was
— of complicity, of ignorance. His disillusionment with the press,
in other words, can feel personal. When I asked him about the role
of _The Atlantic, _which I told him struck me as the mainstream
magazine most supportive of the Israeli state and most scornful of the
campus protests that erupted in response to the siege of Gaza, he
replied, “A lot of people there who I love, who I really, really
love. But I can’t avoid the fact that they’re part of it.
They’re part of it.” He added, “I wish they did better.”

What they are a part of, in Coates’s view, is the American media’s
tendency to occlude or ignore what is actually happening in the
occupied territories. “The coverage of the place is so dissimilar
from the situation of at least half the people who are on the
ground,” he said. In interviewing journalists about Coates and his
work, I got the sense that taking the Palestinian side, or even
talking about the issue at all, invited significant risk to one’s
credibility and career, part of a constant policing of the parameters
of acceptable discourse on the subject. “There’s a reason that so
many people — high-profile, progressive people — avoid this
issue,” Beinart said. “Because they know there’s a cost.” The
media thus limits the picture of the conflict in at least two
important ways, both of which are visible in the coverage of the issue
by _The Atlantic._

The hallmarks of _The Atlantic_’s coverage include variations of
Israel’s seemingly limitless “right to defend itself”; an
assertion that extremists on “both sides
[[link removed]]”
make the conflict worse, with its corollary argument that if
only Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Jewish-supremacist
government
[[link removed]] were
ousted, then progress could be made; abundant sympathy for the
suffering of Israelis and a comparatively muted response to the
suffering of Palestinians; a fixation on the way the issue is debated
in America, particularly on college campuses
[[link removed]];
and regular warnings that antisemitism
[[link removed]] is
on the rise both in America and around the world.

While _The Atlantic_ has certainly published some dissenting views
in these areas, the central pillars of its perspective are unshakable.
In November 2023, as Israeli forces were beginning their decimation of
Gaza, Yair Rosenberg predicted
[[link removed]] that
a new moral authority in Israel would rise from the rubble of
Netanyahu’s failures. Amid news of Israel bombarding schools and
hospitals, the magazine’s April cover story
[[link removed]],
by Franklin Foer, claimed that the left’s sympathetic response to
the October 7 attack had augured the end of “a golden age” for
Jews in America. In May, in an article quibbling with the U.N.’s
estimate of the death toll in Gaza, Graeme Wood wrote
[[link removed]],
“It is possible to kill children legally, if for example one is
being attacked by an enemy who hides behind them.” When Hamas
murdered six Israeli hostages in late August, Foer wrote a
wrenching obituary
[[link removed]] for
one of the victims, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, treatment that is rarely
afforded to Palestinians who have been killed in the conflict. And as
student protests against the ongoing assault on Palestinian civilians
took hold across the U.S., _The Atlantic _applied a full-court
press: The demonstrations were “heartless” (David Frum
[[link removed]]),
“oppressive” (Michael Powell
[[link removed]]),
“threatening” (Judith Shulevitz
[[link removed]]).

This is not to say that these writers don’t sometimes make good
points. But the overall pattern reveals a distorting worldview that
pervades the industry and, as Coates writes in _The
Message, _results in “the elevation of factual complexity over
self-evident morality.” “The view of mainstream American
commentators is a false equivalence between subjugator and
subjugated,” said Nathan Thrall, the Jerusalem-based author of the
Pulitzer Prize–winning _A Day in the Life of Abed Salama_
[[link removed]]_,_ as
if the Israelis and the Palestinians were equal parties in an ancient
tug-of-war.

It is widely speculated among journalists that _The Atlantic_’s
editor-in-chief, Goldberg, is driving the magazine’s coverage in
this area. Goldberg and _The Atlantic_ declined to comment, and
Coates was wary of laying the blame on one person. “I don’t
think _The Atlantic_ was ever a home for a critique of Zionism,”
he said. “I’m a little hesitant to put that on Jeff. And I
probably would broaden that out and say that some of these magazines
that are now making a home for it, there’s not a long history of
it.”

For Coates, the problem for the industry at large partly stems from
the perennial problem of inadequate representation. “It is extremely
rare to see Palestinians and Arabs writing the coverage or doing the
book reviews,” he said. “I would be interested if you took the New
York _Times_ and the Washington _Post_ and _The Wall Street
Journal_ and looked at how many of those correspondents are
Palestinian, I wonder what you would find.” (It’s a testament to
just how polarizing the issue is that many Jewish Americans believe
the bias in news media works the other way around, against Israel.)
There is, too, the problem of reporting on a subject on which American
officials have remained almost entirely uniform, steadfastly
supporting Israel. And American mainstream journalism, Coates says,
defers to American authority. “It’s very similar,” he told me,
“to how American journalism has been deferential to the cops. We
privilege the cops, we privilege the military, we privilege the
politicians. The default setting is toward power.”

“It’s not like Arthur Sulzberger is rubbing his hands together”
and dictating pro-Israeli coverage, Coates continued, noting that
the _Times_ had recently published a mammoth investigation into
how Jewish extremists had taken over the Israeli state
[[link removed]].
It’s that in the total coverage, in all of the talk of experts and
the sound bites of politicians and the dispatches of credentialed
reporters, a sense of ambiguity is allowed to prevail. “The fact of
the matter is,” he said, “that kid up at Columbia, whatever dumb
shit they’re saying, whatever slogan I would not say that they would
use, they are more morally correct than some motherfuckers that have
won Pulitzer Prizes and National Magazine Awards and are the most
decorated and powerful journalists.”

“What I suspect,” he told me, “is that American media in general
thinks of itself as separate from the ends and goals of American
power. And I don’t think that’s true.” Indeed, it sometimes
seems like the unstated project of _The Message_ is to recalibrate
Coates’s position toward power and the people who wield it —
people who, at one time, were ready to welcome him as one of their
own.

His job now, as it has always been, is to speak truth to power, not
figure out what one might actually do with it. When I asked Coates
what he wanted to see happen in Israel and Palestine, he avoided the
geopolitical scale and tended toward the more specific — for
example, to have journalists not be “shot by army snipers.” He
said that the greater question was not properly for him; it belonged
to those with lived experience and those who had been studying the
problem for years. Pragmatism, at any rate, has never been his
concern. As Stossel told me about working on “The Case for
Reparations,” “I was trying to push him in the direction of
‘Well, how would this actually work in practice?’ And he,
shrewdly, was like, ‘Well, I’m not going to get into that.’”

When I told Ewing that Coates struck me as “a very intense guy”
and asked her whether he was like that at Howard, where he and Ewing
taught a writing workshop together in the summer of 2022, she laughed
and said, “Oh my gosh, not at all. If anything, the students were a
lot more deferential to me and treated him like the uncle that you
relentlessly make fun of for being old and dorky.” The students I
spoke to confirmed that Coates cut a more relaxed and contented figure
on campus, which Coates famously depicted in _Between the World and
Me_ as drawing together from all corners of the country the whole
parade of Black life. Howard remains his spiritual home; one of his
students, Selam Getu, told me he introduced their class to his
parents, his wife, his son. “He saw us as part of the family a
little bit,” she said.

“I would have days,” Coates told me, “where something would be
going wrong with something I was writing, and I would get to the yard
at nine o’clock, and I would sit there and watch all these young
Black people on their way to do something positive with their lives,
to make their lives better. It was just so inspiring. I just felt so
good. I loved it.”

Coates’s vision of history’s oppressive forces can feel
overwhelming, as if the enemy he has identified were timeless,
invincible, ingrained in the very weft of the world. If he sometimes
has the fervor of a preacher, he belongs to a religion of no
redemption — a position that was noted in criticism of _Between the
World and Me _and that some, including Barack Obama, worried was akin
to despair. But Coates is also deeply invested in the future. _The
Message,_ like _Between the World and Me, _is an epistolary work,
this time addressed to his students at Howard: “I confess that I am
thinking of young writers everywhere whose task is nothing less than
doing their part to save the world.”

What that salvation might look like is unclear. Also unclear, as we
approach the first anniversary of October 7, and as war grinds on
without an end in sight, is whether the media will change its approach
to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — whether Coates has in fact
made his grand intervention at the right moment once again, when
people are ready to look at the world in a new light.

It often doesn’t seem like it. In August, at the exuberant apex
of Kamala Harris’s campaign for the presidency
[[link removed]],
Coates attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago
[[link removed]] as a reporter
for _Vanity Fair_
[[link removed]]_._ He
was impressed by the diversity of the speakers. “We’re dying,
having a ball,” he said of his friends on the group chat. “And
Steve Kerr comes up and somebody’s like, ‘Oh, this convention is
so Black they had to get a basketball coach to be the white
dude!’” He went on, “Everybody’s getting a chance,”
referring to the Native Americans and Latino Americans and Jewish
Americans and gay Americans who stood up to speak. “I mean,
everybody’s there, right?” But by the end of the first day, he
learned that the Uncommitted movement, named after people who voted
“uncommitted” in the Democratic primary in protest of the Biden
administration’s support of the war in Gaza and the Israeli regime,
couldn’t get a Palestinian American added to the program. DNC
organizers had rejected a substantial list of names of potential
speakers. “I saw people invoke Fannie Lou Hamer, and I saw people
invoke Shirley Chisholm, and I saw a tribute to Jesse Jackson,” he
said. “And then I would be outside, with these Palestinian Americans
and sympathizers to Palestinian Americans, and I would see that they
had no place.”

In his dispatch for _Vanity Fair,_ Coates drew attention to this
failing, referring for the first time in writing to the current
military assault in Gaza as a “genocide
[[link removed]].”
Among the hundreds of journalists in attendance, he was virtually
alone in urging people to remember that there was a war going on, and
for a moment his words changed the tenor of what had been a raucous
party. (“He has a habit of doing that,” Stossel said.) But it was
not enough for the Democratic Party to agree to bring a Palestinian
American onstage. For Coates, the issue was not just where a Harris
administration would stand on Palestinian rights. It was what a
President Harris, who would be the first graduate of Howard to occupy
the Oval Office, would mean for people like Coates, who were raised to
believe that their struggle for freedom lies on the side of the
powerless.

“I have a deep-seated fear,” he told me, “that the Black
struggle will ultimately, at its root, really just be about narrow
Black interest. And I don’t think that is in the tradition of what
our most celebrated thinkers have told the world. I don’t think
that’s how Martin Luther King thought about the Black struggle. I
know that’s not how Du Bois thought about the Black struggle. I know
that’s not how Baldwin thought about the Black struggle. Should it
turn out that we have our first Black woman president, and our first
South Asian president, and we continue to export 2,000-pound bombs to
perpetrate a genocide, in defense of a state that is practicing
apartheid, I won’t be able to just sit here and shake my head and
say, ‘Well, that is unfortunate.’ I’m going to do what I can in
the time that remains, and the writing that I have, to not allow that
to be, because that is existential death for the Black struggle, and
for Black people, as far as I’m concerned.”

In retrospect, one can see this fear laced throughout all of
Coates’s work about the first Black president. And in his hands, the
story of Israel is a cautionary tale of the corrupting influence of
power, a warning to the oppressed who might dream of one day exerting
their will over an otherwise unkind world. As he explains in _The
Message,_ his name, “Ta-Nehisi,” can be translated as “Land of
the Blacks,” in reference to an ancient Nubian kingdom that Black
nationalists of his parents’ generation spoke of with longing. “We
were born not to be slaves but to be royalty,” he writes. “That
explains our veneration of Black pharaohs and African kingdoms. The
point was to craft a different story than the one imposed on us — an
understandable response, but one that I’ve never made peace with.”

_[RYU SPAETH is a features editor at New York. His writing has
appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, The New Republic, and
elsewhere.]_

* Ta-Nehisi Coates
[[link removed]]
* Israel
[[link removed]]
* Palestine
[[link removed]]
* Gaza
[[link removed]]
* West Bank
[[link removed]]
* Occupied Territories
[[link removed]]
* media
[[link removed]]
* Journalism
[[link removed]]
* Israel-Gaza War
[[link removed]]
* Ceasefire
[[link removed]]
* Hostages
[[link removed]]
* Hamas
[[link removed]]
* U.S.-Israel military aid
[[link removed]]
* Racism
[[link removed]]
* segregation
[[link removed]]
* jim crow
[[link removed]]
* apartheid
[[link removed]]
* war crimes
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed].]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]