Ta-Nehisi Coates comes up short after his visit to Israel
In 1596, Shakespeare caught the antisemitic spirit of the age with “The Merchant of Venice.” His Shylock lends money to a Christian, Antonio, on the condition that the moneylender can slice off a pound of Antonio’s flesh if he defaults. When Antonio fails to pay, he’s spared the knife only because another character argues that the security was about flesh, not blood, and thus Shylock couldn’t collect.
Still, Shylock comes up even shorter. He is charged with conspiring against a Venetian citizen and his fortune is seized. He gets to keep half his estate by converting to Christianity – something his daughter separately does when she runs off with a Christian man.
The Nazis loved the play. More than 50 productions were mounted in Germany between 1933 and 1939, Smithsonian Magazine reported.
Today, we see a similar phenomenon with a celebrated modern author, Ta-Nehisi Coates. Though his work is nowhere near as distinguished as The Bard’s, Coates reflects today’s widespread antisemitic sensibility with his latest offering, “The Message.” And, like Shakespeare, his work is generating a lot of heat. The book “is a masterpiece of warped arguments and moral confusion,” argues one critical writer, Coleman Hughes. Others differ, of course.
Coates offers a central chapter in the book about his visit in the summer of 2023 to the West Bank. There, he writes, he saw cisterns on the roofs of Palestinian homes that collected rainwater that the householders depend on. He contrasted the primitive plumbing with Israeli settlements on the West Bank where “you can find country clubs furnished with large swimming pools.”
To Coates, the different systems smacked of the segregated South. “On seeing these cisterns, it occurred to me that Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself,” he wrote. “And more, it occurred to me that there was still one place on the planet—under American patronage—that resembled the world that my parents were born into.”
His writing offers what a reviewer in The New Yorker called Coates’s version of moral clarity. It seeks to join the struggles of brown Palestinians with Black Americans, echoing views that have long been interlaced with antisemitism.
“Palestinians and Black Americans share a profound connection, and it is the duty of people of conscience who would oppose Jim Crow to oppose the oppression of Palestinians,” reviewer Jay Caspian Kang writes. “The struggles cannot be disentangled and written off as foreign or complicated.”
Indeed, Coates seeks to simplify the long pained Middle Eastern conflict. And he gives the century-old tensions an odd – and strained — racial cast. Coates “is casting off what he sees as the white standards of writing and its addiction to ‘complexity’ and stating, instead, his version of moral clarity,” Kang writes.
Really now — “white standards of writing”? Where might one find such things?
For his part, Coates describes his book as an effort to debunk the complexities he claims that journalists invoke to obscure Israel’s occupation, as The Free Press reports. The writer complained in an interview with New York magazine that the argument that the conflict was “complicated” was “horseshit.” That was just how defenders of slavery and segregation described these plagues a century ago. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”
Never mind how much Palestinian terrorists have sought – over decades and by the bloodiest means possible – to obliterate an entire state. Never mind that just a year ago, such terrorists raped, murdered and pillaged, demonstrating a savagery far exceeding the treatments West Bank residents get, even in the admittedly lopsided Israeli military courts.
In fairness, Coates visited months before the ghoulish violence of Oct. 7th last year, and before the Gaza and Lebanese wars. His 10-day trip was his first in-depth encounter with the conflict. As The Jerusalem Post reports, half of the trip was guided by writers associated with the Palestine Festival of Literature, or Palfest, and the other half was led by Israeli left-wing activists associated with the anti-occupation group Breaking the Silence.
Clearly, he was not deeply immersed in the area and that showed. But, even given his shallow — and perhaps heavily propagandized — acquaintance with the issues, one has to wonder how he could be so blind to the reasons Israelis fenced off the Palestinian territories. Was he that ignorant of the Intifadas of 1987 and 2000, when thousands on both sides died?
Was he that unaware of the infamous Passover Massacre of 2002, when terrorists killed 30 people in the Israeli city of Netanya. Did he not know that this spurred the reoccupation of the West Bank and spawned the fences? Was he blind to the very many peace deals that Palestinians walked away from?
Simplicity and simple-mindedness are two different things. A journalist – and Coates is foremost a reporter – needs to bring a basic understanding of history to his work. Just looking around doesn’t cut it. But Coates seems to prefer simple-mindedness.
Since his book came out, the press has been filled with a good bit of argument over sharp questions that a CBS journalist, Tony Dokoupil, posed to Coates on Sept. 30 on the usually light-fare CBS Mornings show. The reporter challenged Coates’s one-sided view, mainly for its gaps:
“Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it?,” Dokoupil asked. “Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the First and the Second Intifada, the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits? And is it because you just don’t believe that Israel in any condition has a right to exist?”
Coates responded that there is “no shortage in American media” of reporting about such matters. He is most concerned, he argued, with “those who don’t have voice.” Further, he said he is offended by states built on the idea of “ethnocracy.” He claimed there are two tiers of citizenship in Israel, one for Jews and one for Palestinians.
Never mind that coverage on CNN and other outlets overwhelmingly deals with the sufferings of Gazans and West Bank residents, paying relatively little mind to the displacement and deaths among Israelis. Never mind that those allegedly lacking a voice have found plenty on American campuses. Never mind, too, that Israeli Jews include people of a crazyquilt of ethnicities and that the single largest group, in fact, are brown peoples of Sephardi backgrounds. Never mind that Palestinian Israelis vote and have had elected representatives in the Knesset since the founding of the state.
Really, Coates, how can you omit so much?
For Dokoupil’s probing questions in a fairly short exchange, he was criticized by a top executive at CBS, Adrienne Roark, who was reportedly seconded by network chief Wendy McMahon. In a staff meeting on Oct. 7, of all dates, Roark argued the interview was not in line with the network’s commitment to neutrality and did not uphold the network’s standards. Without elaborating on the punishment for Dokoupil, if there was one, she said the matter had been addressed internally.
To be sure, Dokoupil, who has written about his conversion to Judaism, did bring some passion to his questions. That’s perhaps not surprising because his ex-wife lives in Israel along with their two children. Indeed, he said that the book “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” given its characterization of Israel. He said the book “delegitimizes the pillars of Israel.”
Still, the journalist didn’t raise his voice. And he did what a good journalist does – he elicited answers from Coates that shed light on the author’s views.
And Dokoupil’s questions were defended by the network’s chief legal correspondent, Jan Crawford. “I thought our commitment was to truth,” Crawford said, according to an audio recording of the meeting published by the Free Press. “And when someone comes on our air with a one-sided account of a very complex situation, as Coates himself acknowledges that he has, it’s my understanding that as journalists we are obligated to challenge that worldview so that our viewers can have that access to the truth or a fuller account, a more balanced account. And, to me, that is what Tony did.”
At least one other journalist touched on the same ground days before the network host did.
In a piece for The Atlantic, author Daniel Bergner wrote: “The more relentless Coates becomes in his prosecution of Israel, the more he loses his way. His habitual unwillingness just to recognize conflicting perspectives and evidence, even if only to subject them to counterarguments, undermines his case. Might it have been worth noting that Israel is surrounded by Arab states and populations committed to its annihilation? That to a great degree, Palestinian leadership as well as many Palestinian people share this eliminationist view, which might help explain the forbidden roads and onerous checkpoints? That Baruch Goldstein’s unforgivable mass murder came on the heels of others, by Muslims of Jews, near the same sacred tomb? That, some would argue, the Palestinians have rejected two-state proposals running back to the late 1930s, when the British put forth a plan that would have granted the Jewish people only about 20 percent of the land that is now controlled by Israel?”
Regrettably, Coates’s views are not out of line with those of many in the progressive ranks. One Black writer on X said Dokoupil’s approach reflected “his Jewishness, his feelings, his knee-jerk Zionist defense mechanisms – but what’s also present is a very white, very American thing: his white supremacy.” The Palestinian-Italian comedian Dean Obeidallah claimed the journalist “repeatedly attacks and smears Ta-Nehisi Coates for daring to discuss Palestinian humanity in his new book.”
There’s no doubt that Coates is remarkably talented. His candor about his tortures at the hands of an abusive father and his fear of other Black people in Baltimore, described in Between the World and Me, is exceptional (he ultimately sees his mishandling as a product of white racism). And his imaginative flights in The Water Dancer are entrancing and powerful.
But his lack of a basic understanding about the Middle East reveals a huge gap in his knowledge. He lacks the substance of a Thomas Friedman, who has written eloquently and fairly about the region, for instance, or any number of other journalistic observers who’ve spent a lot longer than 10 days in the area.
Do his generalizations and simplifications add up to antisemitism? If not, they come awfully close. They echo much of what Americans have heard in coarser form from such figures as Louis Farrakhan and even the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Certainly, the pathology can be surprisingly subtle. Even today, scholars debate whether Shakespeare was indulging in antisemitism or merely exploring it. After all, the playwright gives Shylock one of the more moving monologues in the play:
“Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”
Shakespeare appeared to offer some human fellowship and even sympathy for Jews in that monologue, at least. Coates, for his part, showed little understanding even in a visit to Yad Vashem, where he saw a row of soldiers there “safeguarding nothing less than the evil of the Jewish state,” Bergner wrote. Coates saw an evil barely obscured by the “moral badge of the Holocaust.”
It’s extraordinary how a person who can see so many other things so clearly can be so blinded.
