The Message is Clear: On The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates

My Gut Response

Ta-Neishi Coates has a new book about to launch. It’s called “The Message,” and according to today’s article about it in NY Magazine, I’m bracing for even more demonization of Israel.

Read the article linked above. And then consider my question:

Who will have the bravery to send Coates back to where he belongs?

(Where does he belong? I’ll get to that.)

In the meanwhile, I’m not pinning hope on any help from the literary establishment. Because incident after incident indicates that the Jews are doomed. A recent example includes the cancellation of a panel at the Albany Book Festival because two writers refused to share the stage with Jewish author, Elisa Albert.

I am constantly sounding the alarms when it comes to antisemitism in the writing community. It terrifies me. One friend tried to console me by suggesting that writers have reduced power nowadays. That people don’t read books as much as they used to.

I’ve got a plethora of arguments against this position. I could start back before the printing press was invented and argue that the written word had global impact even before it was accessible to the masses.

Here in 2024, if anyone thinks that the literary elite lack power, they are mistaken. Ideas go through a pipeline that land in our culture, especially in academia. We are experiencing a stunning rise in antisemitism, where ideas about Israel translate into hate crimes against actual Jewish persons.

Ryu Spaeth, author of today’s piece in NY Magazine today, works hard to straddle a fair line. He does not promote the book as some ground breaking solution to Israel-Palestine; in fact, he points out that Coates himself has no idea how to solve the problem of Israel-Palestine. As we all know, nobody has been able to solve it. This inability should not preclude criticism, but Coates’s words strike me as cavalier. He embodies the attitude of a person with no skin in the game. From Spaeth:

“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.”

Sounds to me like Coates got to fill himself up with some moral superiority during his recent interest in the region. He admits he has no lived experience. Also, can NY Magazine please note that some of the so-called journalists in Gaza were Hamas militants? One even kept hostages!

Coates is ambitious. I’ll give him that.

He seems intent on doing for the Palestinians what he’s done for the Black community here. Coates drew a direct line from American slavery to the current manifestation of systemic racism in America, but the same technique does not apply in the Middle East. Jewish bigotry is thousands of years long and globally wide. The Arab world was the colonizer long before the Holocaust and long before the British.

It seems Coates, who is uncomfortable with the Palestinian plight (as if many Israelis themselves are not?), wants to reduce the field. When faced with complexity, he tries to overcome it with a metaphor. The irony of his chosen metaphor—computational mathematics—is that it’s an optimistic one. As if the Middle East could be solved so easily.

Spaeth writes: “[Coates] had also been told that the conflict was “complicated,” its history tortuous and contested, and, as [Coates] writes, “‘that a body of knowledge akin to computational mathematics was needed to comprehend it.’”

If only it were so simple.

Let’s pretend we could reduce the complexity down to that of computational mathematics. We’d need to input all the details, fully and comprehensively. We’d need to quantify thousands of years across the globe, from more “benign bigotry” to pogroms and slaughters.

Coates doesn’t even come close to an approximation of such an attempt because his perspective is the very opposite of input. His narrative relies on omission. There is no mention of Hamas, Iran, or the Intifadas! What about all the times Israel tried for a two-state solution?

Based on the NY Magazine article, it seems like what Coates has achieved is a snapshot taken through a personal lens that is blurred by the thickened cataracts of his own experience as a Black man in America. His words resemble the hubris of the white liberal savior. Except his motivation is rooted in the Black struggle, and in it, his desire for it to mean more than the Black struggle itself:

Coates is quoted as having a deep fear “‘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.’”

It’s easy to get caught up in his good intention. I hope Coates is NOT trying to deliberately harm the Jews, but in his false equivalency of the Black struggle with that of the Palestinians, he reveals his ignorance of the Middle East. That is my optimistic take. Because if he constructed a book with an awareness of all he’s left out, then what does it mean? What is its purpose? What is his goal?

From the article:

“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.”

Coates admits he’s driven by indignation, but his indignation is limited. His indignation is limited because his empathy is limited. Instead of expanding his lens to see how the entire region is oppressed by forces such as Iran and its proxies, he demonizes Israel. Even his so-called empathy for the Jews runs dry while speaking about Yad Vashem itself, as demonstrated by this quote:

“In a place like this,” [Coates] 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?’”

Spaeth unpacks this:

“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.”

If Coates believes Yad Vashem is being used as a tool, then he is absolutely demonizing Israel. Moreover, the fact that the Jews have survived life in the desert thus far doesn’t negate the fact that they are still struggling to survive on a daily basis. The Holocaust is not a one and done affair. There were and are pre and post Holocaust threats to Jewish survival. No other country has to do so much to merely survive.

Coates didn’t like the situation in the West Bank when he visited there. Is he suggesting that Israelis are just playing domination games? Why no mention of the other forces in the big picture? Say, the terrorism? And the stated goal to kill all the Jews in Israel and around the globe?

Quite an oversight.

My hunch is that they’re omitted so that Coates can draw a straight line. Otherwise, how else could he resolve his own angst? He’s a writer. He needs a through-line. He fails to capture the gestalt, and I don’t know whether that failure is accidental or by design. Either way, its dangerous for Jews in both Israel and the diaspora.

An interesting reveal in the piece happens regarding Coates’s return from his visit overseas:

“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.’”

According to this tidbit of insider information, one can easily imagine how so many writers got taken into the anti-Israel narrative even before October 7th. A literary superstar comes home with an obsession. He’s got literary friends. And so it went.

When the article gets into what such a book will do to Coates’s career, I wanted to vomit:

“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.’”

I wanted to vomit because he has no real skin in the game. He doesn’t have family or friends held hostage in Gaza. He doesn’t have family or friends under constant missile and drone attack from Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran.

What are his stakes—his literary career? If anyone is paying attention, the literary establishment is not on the side of Israel. His veneer is only going to sparkle more given the unbridled antisemitism in the world of letters.

Let’s return to Coates’s motivation again. Apparently, he felt tricked through the years by American journalism with regard to Israel:

“In journalism, [Coates] 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.”

According to this, at least some of Coates’s anger toward Israel stems from his observation that American media didn’t give enough coverage to the Palestinian plight. He seems to assume that Israelis were living under the same rock. Israelis, Coates ought to learn, never had the privilege or luxury of living under the same rock. And a large percentage of Israelis are leftist, trying to sustain their own survival while working toward peace.

Suddenly, Coates is woke and disillusioned? No one living in the Middle East was ever asleep.

There’s a quote about Coates imagining having a child in need of a better hospital, but having no access to it:

“‘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?’”

Right here is a great opportunity to introduce the concrete efforts of Israelis who make access to such healthcare possible for Gazans. People like the writer, Joanna Chen, who risks her own life while continuing to transport children from Gaza to Israel even since October 7th.

Coates is a literary superstar, and we know that human beings are apt to conform and follow the superstar. We’re going to need chutzpah to push back against Coates’s very limited perspective.

When he speaks of displaced Palestinians in 1948, does he talk about how the entire Arab world tried to kill the Jews on Israel’s first day of existence? That while some Palestinians were tragically displaced, some chose to leave and others remained and now make up 20 percent of Israel proper as full citizens with all the respective rights and privileges? That some Muslims are fighting with the IDF?

Nope.

When he speaks about Jews as colonizers, does he identify their mother country?

Nope.

Even NY Magazine makes a false reference to the occupation of Gaza since ‘67—The Israelis freaking left two decades ago! Please correct this mistake.

I urge people to not only pay attention but to speak up.

Let’s now take a look at what recently happened over in Toronto. Here’s the headline:

“Students attending protest told to 'wear blue' to mark them as 'colonizers.’ Students from several Toronto middle schools were forced to participate in a political protest disguised as a 'field trip“

Jewish kids were forced to dress in blue. If that doesn’t chill you, you are mightier than fire itself.

Before I sign off, I’ll now circle back to the beginning. I wrote that I want Coates to return to where he belongs. Where might that be?

I want him to return back to his initial curiosity. And then I want him to stay there. To sit with it. To keep looking. I want him to zoom far out, and then I want him to zoom close in on all the things he left out. I don’t want to condemn him—not yet. I want to challenge him.

Because I think he really did and does feel bad for the Palestinian plight—as do so many of us Jews living in Israel and the diaspora.

Coates, if I’m sensing his personality correctly based on the piece, is unable to tolerate the uncertainty. He cannot handle the complexity, the gray zones, the cost of survival. He needed to close the book on things, so to speak, so he penned a book that he could then close.

By writing a book, I bet he relieved himself. Israelis don’t have that luxury. And for those watching the misery Olympics unfold, Jews are currently facing more hate crimes than Blacks over here in the Americas.

What is The Message going to be?

If I could wager a bet, I’d put my money on this:

Coates wrote The Message to make himself feel better about a humanitarian crisis. He didn’t do the work. He did some work. He concocted a reduction that didn’t need to simmer long.

His message would maybe be okay if it landed in an audience open to complex conversation. The problem is that the audience is not willing to take in the big picture either.

Coates may have written the incoming bomb, but its ability to blow us up is because the collective community is allowing and promoting the demonization of Israel.

The only way to handle the incoming bomb is to call it what it is.

Get your chutzpah ready. We’re going to need it.