Ta-Nehisi Coates’ vision of an Israel without Jews

One sentence is all it takes to understand writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’ views on Israel.

“On the last day of my trip to Palestine, I visited Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center,” Coates writes as the lead to the final section of his new book, “The Message.”

Israel, Coates apparently believes, does not exist — and probably has no right to exist. How else to explain his situating a memorial to the destruction of European Jewry in some mythical place called “Palestine” — a country that has never existed, rather than in the very real state of Israel and its equally real capital, Jerusalem. 

Heralded as Coates’ grand return to letters after a decade, “The Message” arrives on the eve of the first anniversary of Hamas’ invasion of Israel and its subsequent war in Gaza. Divided into three parts — the first playing out in South Carolina, the second in Senegal, the third in Israel and Palestine — the book is an extension of Coates’ canon of reexamining racism and racial myth-making.  And it’s in this third and largest portion that Coates delivers his most trenchant — and aggrieved —  indictments of the West and whiteness. 

Back during the Obama years, Coates became wealthy and influential as the nation’s foremost chronicler of “Black doom,” as I described in a review of his 2015 book, “Between the World and Me.”

In one notorious passage, heavy with manipulative guilt-making, Coates speaks of a visit to Paris’s Luxembourg Gardens — which he brands a “public garden.” Marveling in their splendor, Coates laments that he — supposedly victimized by American disenfranchisement — had “never sat in a public garden before, had not even known it to be something that I’d want to do. And all around me there were people who did this regularly.”

Huh? We have “public gardens” in every city in America, brother Coates  — have you never been to Central Park? 

With his new book, Coates has found limitless source material in the doom that has become the Palestinians. By his own admission, Coates had never been to Israel or Palestine before his 10-day journey last year that undergirds “The Message.”

(Imagine a white writer parachuting into some African conflict to report on its past and present in the same manner; you can’t — because it would never happen).

His unfamiliarity with the region would be comical if it weren’t so dangerous — both to the Israelis imperiled by Hamas and Hezbollah along with the Gazans and Lebanese held hostage by their Islamist overlords. And yet, like so many today and before him, Coates blames the Jews.

“I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes in one of his many bursts of unoriginality.

Juiced up on arrogance and entitlement, Coates sets up a place, Palestine, and a people — the Palestinians — of whom he claims admiration, commonality and license to give voice solely because he’s black. Because they are both “conquered people.” 

Never mind Coates frames this entire section as a mea culpa for his ignorance of the Palestinian plight and, by his own admission, had zero interest in hearing “both sides” — what he described as the “defense of the occupation.”

Backed by his trauma-tourism jaunt through the Holy Land, Coates is suddenly equipped to deliver the final word on a century of Zionist egregiousness. Amateurish and self-indulgent, “The Message” is the ultimate exercise in intersectional chutzpah coming from the wrong writer on the wrong topic at very much the wrong time.

“Israel,” Coates declares after a visit to the West Bank, “had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South.”

But the West Bank is not Israel — and its increasingly militant Palestinian residents bear little in common with segregation-era African Americans, my own family included. This is just one of many examples of “The Message’s” factual frailty.

There are no winners in “The Message” beyond Coates’ own ego. Jews, for instance, are essentially erased, save for the Zionist pioneers he reduces to white supremacists — along with the wincey Kapos who accompany Coates through Jerusalem as they echo-chamber his foundational anti-Zionism. 

Despite his imprimatur of moral purity, Palestinians hardly fare better. Coates may believe his prose speaks for a people “erased from the argument and purged from the narrative,” but his fetishistic reverence for Palestine and Palestinians lacks any of the necessary nuance upon which nations (such as Israel) are actually founded.

In Coates’ hands, everything Palestine-related — their food, their architecture, their stories of exile and rebirth – is worthy simply because it’s Palestinian, even though the exact same parallels can be found among Israeli Jews. “The group spoke about politics in a manner of communal intimacy — the way my people speak when no white people are around,” writes Coates of a Palestinian-American community he visits near Chicago upon his return from the Middle East. Take it from me, Ta-Nehisi — someone who’s both black and Jewish — we Jews speak exactly the same way when we’re among our own.

Such silly setups — Coates’ cringy Pale-fabulism — confirm the hollowness of the DEI culture that gave voice to folks like Coates in the first place.

Whether in Palestine or Philly, Coates’ veracity — like those of the Palestinians he obsesses over — rests in his color and identity, not in truth or facts. How else could a book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict come to market with no serious consideration of Hamas or intifada or the Oslo Accords — only “ethnic cleansing” and Gaza “reservations” and lots and lots of “whiteness.”

Coates’ reliance upon the “Jews are White” trope is perhaps the most damning confirmation of his disdain for Jews and Judaism. As my own blackness attests, Jews — including a plurality of Israelis — aren’t exactly “white.”

Indeed, the only motivation behind Coates’ “Jews are white” charade is to edify the claims of “genocide” and “zionist-colonialism” now parading through city squares and college campuses intended to legitimize Hamas barbarism and justify Jewish death. And this, ultimately, is the real message of “The Message.”

At the end of his section on Israel, Coates finds himself in Jerusalem’s venerable King David Hotel, overwhelmed by Israeli “racism” and his manufactured parallels to its American equivalents. Horrified by the hotel guard who’d dared ask if he was a hotel guest, Coates declares, “I could only ask myself, what the f–k am I doing here” in Israel?

A better question would have been, “What the f–k is Ta-Nehisi Coates doing writing a book like ‘The Message.”  

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