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, was set to be published, and Ta-Nehisi Coates 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,his era-defining book on race 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” 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 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 and Palestine 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,” 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.) “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,” “My President Was Black,” “The First White President” — 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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” make the conflict worse, with its corollary argument that if only Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Jewish-supremacist government 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; and regular warnings that antisemitism 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 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, 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, “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 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), “oppressive” (Michael Powell), “threatening” (Judith Shulevitz).
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, 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. 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, Coates attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as a reporter for Vanity Fair. 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.” 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.]
