Ta-Nehesi Coate: the Message

Coates argues that the story of Jewish reclamation of Eretz Israel is also imbued with myths of what British Occupied Palestine looked like before 1948. There are many stories of Zionist leaders coming to a land without a people, of a savage desert needing to be tamed, of a barbaric, aimless people who needed civilizing.

And these myths persist in the present where Israel is portrayed as a land of Birthright parties, Jewish harmony, and democracy for all.

The truth behind these myths is inevitably more complicated. The innocent martyrs of Masada were actually fanatic Sicarii, hunted by the Romans not for being Jewish, but for being assassins who killed Romans and Jews alike. Viewed through another lens, Bar Kochba was less of a brave military leader, and more of a reckless narcissist who almost caused Jews to be wiped off the map. The land without a people or civilization was actually very much populated with communities with their own, developed ways of life. And the nation full of parties, harmony, and democracy has been grappling with injustice and internal divides for years.

While critics like journalist Jonathan S. Tobin have accused Coates of writing “woke propaganda” and making a one-to-one comparison between the Israeli-Palestinian situation and the American Black-White paradigm, Coates explicitly says this is not the case, and acknowledges that the story of Jews in Israel is much more complex. He relates to Jews both in his own experience of a Black American in Africa, as a people yearning for their homeland and a nation where they can truly feel like they belong. But he also shows the similarities between Jews who refuse to acknowledge anything but a picture-perfect history of Zionism and Israel and the white Americans who see any acknowledgment of the country’s prejudiced past as an attack on their identity.

While reading The Message, I kept being reminded of a meditation from the Kol Haneshama prayer book I studied this Yom Kippur. Attributed to the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, it asserts that neither a person nor a people can “be redeemed until it sees the flaws in its soul and tries to efface them. But whether a person or a people, whoever shuts out the realization of her/his flaws is shutting out redemption.”

Coates provides a number of statistics and laws that exemplify the injustice in our mythologized utopia: Jewish citizens of Israel who marry non-Jews from other countries can pass on their citizenship to their spouse; Palestinian citizens cannot. In the city of Hebron, Jewish settlers and Palestinian citizens are under the jurisdiction of different courts even when they commit identical offenses. Water consumption for Israelis is nearly four times that of Palestinians living in the West Bank.

Coates is persuasive when he warns of the dangers of buying into fabricated histories. When people in the Jewish community rush to defend a fictionalized perfect Jewish state instead of responding with calls to do better, it is a disservice not only to the Palestinians who have been displaced and killed by Israeli policy, but to ourselves. As the Kol Haneshamasays: “There is a sense in which you can destroy yourself by not saying yes to the reality that actually exists.”

In his first essay, Coates argues the social function of great writing is to “make people feel all that is now at stake.” In one of the most tumultuous times in Jewish history, that is certainly necessary, even if the message comes from a writer with whom readers may disagree.