TA-NEHISI COATES DESCRIBES ISRAELI “APARTHEID”
Allan C. Brownfeld, Editor
Special Interest Report
December 2024
The respected Black author Ta-Nehisi Coates, a former national correspondent for
The Atlantic and a faculty member at Howard University, has written a book, “The
Message,” that takes him to a number of countries, including Israel. It is the
report about his visit to Israel that has stirred much discussion.
While in Israel, Coates witnessed the country’s “two-tier” legal system in
action. He met with displaced residents of the West Bank and wandered into a
park named for Meir Kahane, a “Jewish supremacist” who “promoted the permanent
annexation of the West Bank and Gaza and the enslavement of Palestinians.”
Reviewing the book in the Washington Post (Oct. 13, 2024), Becca Rothfeld notes
that writing about the plight of the Palestinian people “requires a great deal
of bravery in a climate in which critics of Israel are routinely denounced as
antisemitic (and in which Coates himself has been lambasted for venturing to
suggest that Netanyahu’s ethnocracy is inconsistent with the basic tenets of
liberal democracy)…There are any number of books that brush aside the
displacement and mass murder of Palestinians as an afterthought.”
In an interview with Sean Illing on Vox (Oct.15, 2024), Coates described his
first reaction to observing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians: “The word I used
at the time when I saw it was Jim Crow, because it was so obviously Jim Crow.
You’ve got one set of roads for one group of people, and the roads you have for
the other group of people are impossibly longer, and those roads have
checkpoints, and the checkpoints sometimes materialize out of nowhere.”
Coates said that, “Personally, I hate the idea of a state based entirely on
religious or ethnic identity. I am of the mind that discrimination on the basis
of race, ethnicity or religion is never acceptable. There is nothing in this
world that will make separate and unequal okay, and there’s nothing—-and I’ll
use this word—-that makes apartheid okay.”
In a heated interview on CBS, Coates was asked by host Tony Dakoupil, “What is
it that particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state?” Coates
replied: “There’s nothing that offends me about a Jewish state. I am offended
by the idea of states built on ethnocracy no matter where they are.” Coates
went on to discuss the treatment by Israel of Palestinians and compared this
with segregation in the American South. He said, “I walk down a street in
Hebron and a guy says to me: ‘I can’t walk down the street unless I profess my
religion.’”
Coates said he was walking with a Palestinian whose father and grandfather were
born in Hebron, “And I have more freedom to walk than he does. He can’t ride on
certain roads. He can’t get water in the same way that Israeli citizens who
live less than a mile away from him can. Why is that okay? Either apartheid is
right or it’s wrong…Either what I saw is right or it’s wrong.” *
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