My Message, On The Message
Why Coates's Palestine Message Hit a Nerve, and Is it time to deploy my Defense Against the Dark Arts?
When readers got ahold of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay on Palestine in his 2024 book The Message, the response was swift—praise from some, unease to anger from others. Why did it hit so hard?
This was the writer’s first political/social commentary book of the post-Trump I/Covid era, and it landed October 1, 2024, almost the one-year anniversary of the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas that started the Gaza War. Maybe time really is everything?
Coates recounted what he saw on his visit to the West Bank and East Jerusalem during the summer of 2023, before the war; it was his first trip. (I went to Israel as a college student in December 2005 and spent New Year’s on the shore of Galilee and travelled as far South as Masada). He drew parallels between Palestinian life under military occupation and the Southern racial order of Jim Crow America. He described checkpoints, restricted movement, and separate systems that reminded him of the American South he had studied so closely. He did not propose policies or offer diplomatic solutions or rather he had the “diagnosis not the cure.”1 He wrote as a witness. His claim was simple: naming oppression is itself an act of justice. As his official website states:
Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language,” but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities…Finally, in the book’s longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.2
So, he wrote The Message about the messages, the narratives shaping and grounding particular political assumptions and systems. Fair enough.
For admirers, the essay mattered precisely because it refused neutrality. Coates spoke plainly about what he observed as he saw it. Coates is undeniably a great writer. His echoing of the Black American freedom struggle gave his words added weight. And curiously of his three essays, which include the topics of Africa and the American South —situations where readers can see Coates has a connection— his longest essay was on the West Bank and the eastern portion of Jerusalem? That alone raised eyebrows and told us that something there, in the east, struck Coates. Critics said the piece left too much unsaid. They charged that by centering only Palestinian suffering, it ignored Jewish trauma, Israeli fears, and the security concerns of a nation with a history of relatively recent wars with their neighbors and the memory of serial terrorist campaigns. They claimed Coates risked flattening a history thick with competing claims. Maybe so, maybe not. But again, Coates as a writer is so good he cannot be ignored. Coates woke up many Americans about racial injustice and those who were most affected by his writing in 2014, are often those most afflicted by feelings of angst over the two presidencies of Donald John Trump, and the continuities of Biden’s support with Israel’s war —even after he was a lame duck— with his predecessor/successor.
This clash was also about what audiences expect from public writing in moments of conflict. Was Coates’s witness enough? If it was not enough why should those who do not like it be so agitated, would it not be easy to dismiss the musing of someone who does not know the issue? Was the disquiet because of Coates’s stature or because people who say they are not guilty felt indicted? It was all of the above and that is a disorienting mix. Disorientation is perhaps the dominant political feeling among Americans today.
Most of us know this tension intimately. One voice says, "We must name the wrong when we see it." Another says, "But it's more complicated than that." Both voices can have wisdom. Both also carry risks. That is why the essay became a flashpoint.
But I think more needs to be said with clarity and specificity, so I am going to write my own message about the issue of the Holy Land for a bit and see where it takes me. I’ll start on next Message Monday with the question of nationalism, which is also the subject of my first curated reading list on under the Outside the Academy Bookshelf tab. Hopefully you will stick with me on Mondays as I answer questions about Israel and Palestine, without the need for a seminar. (Maybe I should do one through my soon to launch podcast?) Though, given I have read and thought about this topic more than any other non-American-centric issue over the last twenty years, I probably have more to say than even I realize.
It will be my indirect reply to The Message.
https://www.vox.com/culture/376202/ta-nehisi-coates-the-message-review
https://ta-nehisicoates.com/books/the-message/