‘I don’t have much hope for a Harris presidency’: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Israeli apartheid and what the media gets wrong about Palestine
I spoke with the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates about his new book The Message for The Guardian. He has a lot of important things to say.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book The Message could just as easily have been called Between the World and Me had that title not been taken by his own 2015 bestseller. In The Message, Coates travels to Senegal, South Carolina and Palestine, offering reflections along the way on the African diaspora, US book bans and Israeli apartheid. The result is a work that both digs into the ways that the powerful seek to monopolize storytelling to preserve their privileges and charges writers with the duty to fight back by writing back.
With the enormous success of his previous books; his many awards, including a MacArthur fellowship and a National Book award; and his celebrated career in journalism, Coates is known as perhaps the most perceptive critic of American racism and an eloquent chronicler of Black life in the United States today. The Message contains the same moral authority that we are accustomed to from him, but the vision and geography of this book are wider than his past work.
At more than half the book’s length, the chapter on Palestine is clearly the beating heart of The Message. In the summer of 2023, Coates spent 10 days in the West Bank and Israel, five days with the Palestinian Festival of Literature and much of the rest of the time with Breaking the Silence, a group composed of former Israeli soldiers who now oppose the occupation. He witnessed first-hand the daily humiliations Palestinians endure traveling on segregated roads or walking through checkpoints. In Hebron, an Israeli soldier stopped him on the street, repeatedly pressing Coates to state his religion, only allowing him to proceed when he told the soldier his grandparents were Christian. He saw how Israel controls the distribution of resources: “Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and the fountains, but the water itself.”
“The Palestine I saw bore so little likeness to the stories I read, and so much resemblance to the systems I’ve known,” he writes. The intensity of his critique extends almost as much to American journalism as it does to Israel’s system of control.
Predictably, some American critics have pounced on Coates, faulting him for not speaking with more Israelis or, more bizarrely, questioning the value of a “celebrity writer” taking a moral stand on the question of Palestine. Recently, on CBS Mornings, he faced a particularly hostile interview in a segment that went viral and prompted the network to admonish the interviewer. The fallback position of Coates’s critics is that he doesn’t have the foreign policy expertise to weigh in on the question of Palestine, but what they fail to see is that he has enormous expertise on identifying racism.
“I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. After returning from the trip, Coates contacted the renowned Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi for a reading list, sought out Palestinian communities in the United States, and underwent an intense reckoning with the question: what can happen when victims become oppressors?
I caught up with Coates on a recent Friday afternoon to discuss his book, its reception and more.
MB: I’d like to ask you about that CBS Mornings interview, when Tony Dokoupil monopolized the segment and asked you hostile questions, and then the subsequent fallout at CBS. But I want to take the question in a slightly different direction.
One of the ways that white supremacy works in the United States is by keeping Black people out of global affairs as soon as they say anything internationalist in tone and critical of the USA. Paul Robeson had his passport revoked. WEB Du Bois’s anti-colonial politics resulted in his self-imposed exile to Ghana. Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted during the Vietnam war and lost his title. Do you think the system feels especially threatened when Black people seek and speak the truth about the world outside the United States and this country’s role in that world?
TNC: It’s possible. I don’t know whether it’s “especially”. It’s probably true. The thing that I’ve thought a lot more about is the fact that you have a class of low-information journalists, certainly when it comes to Palestine and Israel, and perhaps the world. And I say that as somebody who was among them. These people are not low-information because they’re bad people or even necessarily incurious people. But there is tremendous pressure not to have this conversation. And the pressure doesn’t even come in threats but by turning the terrain into a minefield and then telling people that they really aren’t qualified. And not only are you really not qualified; you shouldn’t bother to get qualified, whatever that would mean.
I think there’s appropriate sensitivity around the Holocaust. I think there is appropriate sensitivity around the lethal force and weight of antisemitism in western history. But that doesn’t give journalists a pass to not know [what is happening to the Palestinians]. And to the extent that I’ve been bothered by this conversation, it’s because it has gone into a kind of meta-conversation about CBS News, ethics, who is woke and who is not, and tough interviews. And that’s bullshit.
The topic is apartheid. Apartheid is the topic. And people who don’t want to talk about apartheid, because it’s uncomfortable, much like they did with the protests last year at colleges, try to turn this into a conversation about manners.
It is amazing to me that the debate is not: “Ta-Nehisi said Israel is perpetrating apartheid, and that is not true and here’s why.” Or “Ta-Nehisi said Israel is not a democracy. It is a democracy and here’s why.” Or “Ta-Nehisi said half the population that Israel rules are second-class citizens or worse. That is not true. Here’s why.” I didn’t even get challenged in that interview. And the reason why I’m not challenged is that these are facts. There is a mountain of citations to back up those conclusions.
People don’t want to straightforwardly say: “I am defending apartheid because … ” Or “I think the apartheid is appropriate because … ” Or “I think a dictatorship over a group of people that began, conservatively, more than 50 years ago is appropriate because … ” Instead, you get this conversation about manners, man.
Read the rest of the interview here.