The pro-Israel media forces are panicking at the stunning success of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, The Message. Coates is rising on the best-seller lists, and appearing on major television and radio programs which until now have been largely closed to pro-Palestinian views. Israel’s defenders are flailing about, looking for ways to discredit him.
Let’s examine just one element of their critical onslaught. Coates explains that he spent 10 days in Israel/Palestine (in the summer of 2023, before October 7), and the critics are sneering that he could not possibly understand a complex situation after such a short stay.
On closer inspection, this argument vanishes. First, you don’t necessarily have to visit a place to understand enough about it to pass judgment. Most of us alive today spent zero days in the legally segregated American South before the civil rights movement brought a measure of justice, but that doesn’t prevent us from having strong — and accurate — opinions about it.
Next, Coates did not rely exclusively on his own visit. His book ends with “Notes on Sources,” a hyperlink to a range of books and articles which he pored over both before and after his stay.
What’s more, he is a superb reporter. He did preliminary research to locate and contact a broad range of people, both Palestinians and Israelis, who guided him during his visit. He explains how he was shown around during his first five days by the hosts of the Palestinian literary festival that he had been invited to, but he spent the second half of his trip almost entirely with Israelis. In this second half of his trip he was accompanied by Avner Gvaryahu, who heads Breaking the Silence, the group of former Israeli soldiers who now oppose the occupation. Gvaryahu gave him a searing long description of how Israeli soldiers routinely commandeer Palestinian homes and terrorize their residents. Coates toured the West Bank city of Ramallah with “the great journalist Amira Hass,” the Israeli daughter of Holocaust survivors, who has covered both occupied Gaza and the West Bank for decades.
Coates didn’t learn about these two in the New York Times. The Times Opinion section has run a single article by Gvaryahu, but its news reporters have never, not once, interviewed him or any other dissident Israeli ex-soldiers. Nor has the Times been able to find Amira Hass’s telephone number to talk to her, much less write the profile that she merits.
Contrast Coates’s thorough approach with, say, your typical tourist. Few overseas visitors will cross the green line and travel beyond Israel’s pre-1967 borders, so they won’t see the Israeli military checkpoints, or other signs of the occupation. Instead, they’ll spend much of their time in cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, or in tourist and religious sites.
Still, a first-hand look can help clarify reality, even for someone who has researched in advance. When Coates actually saw the “settlements” in the occupied West Bank, he noted that he had previously taken the word “to refer to rugged camps staked out in the desert, but in fact the settlements are more akin to American subdivisions. . .” (I had the exact same reaction two decades earlier, when my Palestinian guide showed me the “settlement” of Har Homa near Jerusalem, which was then under construction, and which now has 25,000 Jewish-only residents in a complex of multi-story buildings.)
Coates closes his remarkable book with a strong — and accurate — indictment of U.S. media coverage of Israel/Palestine. He says he feels “betrayed” by his “colleagues in journalism.” Here is part of his conclusion:
An inhuman system demands inhumans, and so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television. Editors and writers like to think that they are not part of such subsystems, that they are independent, objective and arrive at their conclusions solely by dint of their reporting and research. But the Palestine I saw bore so little likeness to the stories I read, and so much resemblance to the systems I’ve known, that I am left believing that at least here, this objectivity is self-delusion. . . [The result is] an effort to forge a story told solely by the colonizer, an effort that extends to the proscribing of boycotts by American states, the revocation of articles by journals, the dismissal of news anchors by skittish networks, the shooting of journalists by army snipers. . .”
Let’s get specific on some of his observations:
Probably the best example I can think of is the second day, when we went to Hebron, and the reality of the occupation became clear. We were driving out of East Jerusalem. I was with PalFest, and we were driving out of East Jerusalem into the West Bank. And, you know, you could see the settlements, and they would point out the settlements. And it suddenly dawned on me that I was in a region of the world where some people could vote and some people could not. And that was obviously very, very familiar to me. I got to Hebron, and we got out as a group of writers, and we were given a tour by our Palestinian guide. And we got to a certain street, and he said to us, “I can’t walk down this street. If you want to continue, you have to continue without me.” And that was shocking to me…..[ there are ] Checkpoints all through the city, checkpoints obviously all through the West Bank. Your mobility is completely inhibited, and the mobility of the Palestinians is totally inhibited….And I was walking to the checkpoint, and an Israeli guard stepped out, probably about the age of my son. And he said to me, “What’s your religion, bro?” And I said, “Well, you know, I’m not really religious.” And he said, “Come on. Stop messing around. What is your religion?” I said, “I’m not playing. I’m not really religious.” And it became clear to me that unless I professed my religion, and the right religion, I wasn’t going to be allowed to walk forward. So, he said, “Well, OK, so what was your parents’ religion?” I said, “Well, they weren’t that religious, either.” He says, “What were your grandparents’ religion?” And I said, “My grandmother was a Christian.” And then he allowed me to pass…., I was in a territory where your mobility is inhibited, where your voting rights are inhibited, where your right to the water is inhibited, where your right to housing is inhibited. And it’s all inhibited based on ethnicity. And that sounded extremely, extremely familiar to me.
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/2/ta_nehisi_coates
The Gvaryahu and Haas assessment is a chef’s kiss.
The pro-Israel mafia are losing their minds over Coates only spending 10 days in Israel/Palestine. Yet are happy to have their insights on the region amplified by the likes of Brent Stephens who spent all of two years at the Jerusalem Post, more than 20 years ago and yet still gets a weekly Opinion Column in the NY Times to spew his unapologetic Zionist propaganda.
The total absence of insight in the western media from the likes of Haas, Gvaryahu, Levy, Klein, Landsmann, Efrati, Pinkas, Novack, or virtually anyone else in the Israeli media and human rights establishment, shows exactly how biased, warped, one-sided, asymmetrical, and downright Orwellian the coverage is of our so-called greatest ally in the Middle East.
You’d think given that we pour so much money, weapons, cover, military resources, intelligence, political and geo-political capital into one tiny little spit of land, that our media would put more effort and gravitas into reporting on it more accurately and with voices from the ACTUAL region itself. They don’t. They instead platform brazen ideologues, apologists, propagandists, and political representatives of the nation itself to brainwash the people with their Hasbara, while ignoring, black-balling, and de-platforming everyone else.
It’s little wonder that Coates himself felt “lied too” and now that he has been red-pilled firsthand and is sharing his outrage, the rest of the people are also reacting with near total surprise and feelings of betrayal.
I can tell you from firsthand experience, that the feeling of betrayal from those you used to admire or trust the most, is an insanely powerful motivating force! Having grown up in Apartheid South Africa, I still remember the day I realized that I had been lied to and deceived about the situation my entire young life! I also remember the day, roughly ten years later, that I realized that every single one of my Jewish friends and acquaintances had been actively lying, deceiving, and misleading me about the situation in Apartheid Israel, either out of shame, ignorance, groupthink, allegiance, propaganda, gaslighting, peer pressure, supremacy, or any reason for that matter.
The result was the same. Their deceit was unforgivable and I can assure you that Coates is feeling the exact same thing right now, and that he will spend the rest of his life on this planet advocating for the Palestinian cause and speaking out against Israeli Apartheid. The Zionists had better pray that he doesn’t decide to make another 10-day trip to the region and write an entire book dedicated to the issue.
When you’ve been a victim of systemic oppression or witnessed it firsthand in any from or in any country, you sure as shit don’t need more than 10 days to identity it, diagnose it, and call that shit out.
Of course the zionists are panicking. Considering the history of African Americans on this country the opinion of Ta-Nehisi Coates holds much gravitas.
Havev to wonder how minutes, let alone days, that pro-Israel propagandists such as Tom Friedman have spent in the west bank. Or Gaza.
In any case, most Americans have never spent a day in Vietnam. But we knew the truth about the US war against it.
I haven’t read Coates’s book (yet, I have it on hold at the library). But I doubt that he says anything that other people, other writers, haven’t said. But people who ignore them are paying attention to Coates. High bloody time.