One sentence is enough to understand author Ta-Nehisi Coates' view of Israel.
“On the last day of my trip to Palestine, I visited Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center,” Coates writes at the beginning of the final section of his new book, The Message.
Mr. Coates appears to believe that Israel does not exist, and perhaps has no right to exist. How else to explain that he erected a monument to the destruction of European Jewry in a mythical place called “Palestine” – a historic country? never It did not exist in the very real state of Israel and its equally real capital, Jerusalem.
foretold As a grand return to Mr. Coates' letters Ten years later, on the eve of the first anniversary of Hamas's invasion of Israel and the ensuing Gaza war, a “message” arrives. The book is divided into three parts: Part 1 takes place in South Carolina, Part 2 takes place in Senegal, and Part 3 takes place in Israel and Palestine. This book is an extension of Coates' canon of reexamining racism and the formation of racial myths. And in this third and greatest part, Mr. Coates is at his harshest, and most painful. — An indictment against the West and white people.
As I noted in my review of his 2015 book Between the World and Me, Mr. Coates became a wealthy and influential figure during the Obama years.
In one infamous passage, Mr. Coates, burdened with manipulative guilt and clearly worshiped by his more privileged audience, speaks of a visit to the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris – which he calls “the public garden.” amazing thing Coates, an alleged victim of American disenfranchisement, laments: “I've never sat in a public garden before, and I didn't even know that was what I wanted to do.” . And I had people around me who did this on a regular basis. ”
Huh? Every American city has a “public garden,” Brother Coates, have you ever been to Central Park?
In his new book, Coates has found an endless source of information about the fate of Palestinians. By his own admission, Coates had never been to Israel or Palestine until last year, when he took a 10-day trip in support of The Message.
(Imagine a white writer parachuting into a conflict in Africa and covering its past and present in the same way. You can't, because that would never happen).
His commitment to the region is no less dangerous, both for Israelis endangered by Hamas and Hezbollah, and for Gazans and Lebanese held hostage by their Islamist monarchs. Familiarity can be funny. Nevertheless, like many people today and before him, Coates condemns the Jews.
“I don't think I've ever felt the glare of racism so strange and so intense as in Israel in all my life,” he said in one of his many outbursts of unoriginality. I'm writing.
Angered by arrogance and entitlement, Coates establishes a place called Palestine and a people who claim a right to praise, commonality, and a voice simply because they are black: the Palestinians. Because they are both “conquered peoples.”
Never mind that Mr. Coates branded this entire section a cardinal sin due to his ignorance of the Palestinian plight, which, by Mr. Coates' own admission, he described as a “defense of occupation.” I had no interest in hearing the opinions of both sides.
Encouraging tourism around traumatized holy sites, Coates was suddenly ready to say the last word on a century of Zionist inhumanity. Amateur and self-indulgent, “The Message'' is the ultimate exercise in intersectional nonsense, by the wrong author, on the wrong subject, at the very wrong time.
In one of the book's many examples of factual fragility, Coates, who visited the West Bank, declares that “Israel was moving beyond the Jim Crow South.”
but, The West Bank is not Israel And the increasingly militant Palestinian population, including those in my own family, has little in common with African Americans from the era of segregation.
There is no winner in “The Message” beyond Coates’ own ego. Jews, for example, have been essentially wiped out, with the exception of the Zionist vanguards, whom Coates reduces to white supremacists – a perversity who accompanies him throughout Jerusalem, echoing Coates' underlying anti-Zionism. Capos are also an exception.
Despite his flaws in moral purity, the Palestinian is unlikely to fare any better. Coates may believe that his prose speaks for people who have been “erased from discussion and excluded from narrative,” but his fetishistic veneration of Palestine and Palestinians is It completely lacks the nuance necessary for a nation (such as Israel) to actually be created.
In Coates's hands, everything associated with Palestine – the food, the architecture, the stories of exile and rebirth – is simply valuable. Because I'm PalestinianEven though the exact same similarities can be found among Israeli Jews. “This group talked about politics in a kind of communal intimacy, the way my people talk when white people aren't around,” said a member of the Palestinian American community who visited the Chicago neighborhood after returning from the Middle East. Coates writes. Take it from me, Ta-Nehisi — a person who is both black and Jewish — We Jews speak exactly the same way when we are among our own people.
Such a ridiculous setup — Coates' disgusting Pale fabrication. — See the emptiness of the DEI culture that gave people like him a voice in the first place.
Whether in Palestine or Philadelphia, Coates' authenticity, like the authenticity of the Palestinians he is obsessed with, lies not in truth or fact, but in the color and identity of his skin. How else can a book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict be published that only talks about “ethnic cleansing” and the Gaza “reservation” and a lot of “whiteness” without seriously considering Hamas, the Intifada, the Oslo Accords, etc.? I wonder if it will?
Coates' reliance on the “Jews are white” metaphor is perhaps the most damning confirmation of his disdain for Jews and Judaism. Jews, including multiple Israelis, are not exactly “white,” as my own blackness attests.
In fact, the only motive behind Coates' “Jews are white” pretense was to enlighten the claims of “genocide” and “Zionist colonialism” currently paraded through city squares and college campuses. Its purpose is to justify the barbarism of Hamas and the death of the Jewish people. And ultimately, this is the real message of “The Message.”
At the end of the section on Israel, Coates finds himself in Jerusalem's historic King David Hotel, overwhelmed by Israel's “racism” and its fabricated parallels to its American counterpart. Intimidated by a hotel security guard who dared to ask if he was a hotel guest, Coates declared, “All I could do was ask myself what the hell I was doing in Israel.”
A better question would have been, “What the hell is Ta-Nehisi Coates doing writing a book like The Message?”
dkaufman@nypost.com
