Ta-Nehisi Coates Describes Israeli “Apartheid”

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.” *