Why Ta-Nehisi Coates Hates Israel

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s fundamental problem is that he is a narcissist. Other people interest him only insofar as they reflect his own thoughts and feelings. That is what makes him such a bad reporter, a shortcoming he freely admits to. {snip}

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Now the subject Coates has undertaken to learn about is Israel and Palestine. {snip}

The conclusion he comes to is that the Jewish state is the equivalent of the Jim Crow South. “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. “‘Jim Crow’ was the first thing that came to mind, if only because ‘Jim Crow’ is a phrase that connotes an injustice, a sorting of human beings, the awarding and stripping of the rights of a population. Certainly, that was some part of what I saw in Hebron, in Jerusalem, in Lydd.”

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The real reason Israel bothers Coates so much is something he waits until the very end of the book to confess:

Israel felt like an alternative history, one where all our [Marcus] Garvey dreams were made manifest. There, ‘Up Ye Mighty Race’ was the creed. There, ‘Redemption Song’ is the national anthem. There, the red, black, and green billowed over schools, embassies, and the columns of great armies. There, Martin Delaney is a hero and February 21 is a day of mourning. That was the dream—the mythic Africa . . . What I saw in the City of David was so familiar to me—the search for self in an epic, mythic past filled with kings.

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Earlier in the book, Coates talks about his 2014 Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations,” which cemented his status as America’s most prominent public intellectual. “In the months before the article was published, I felt that I had at last discovered the answer to the haunting question of why my people so reliably settled at the bottom of nearly every socioeconomic indicator,” he writes. “The answer was simple: The persistence of our want was matched exactly to the persistence of our plunder. {snip}”

What he loved most about that article, in other words, was the feeling of finally being able to blame all the problems of black America on other people. Israel took that away from him. All the excuses for why his father’s black paradise remained a fantasy applied equally to the Jews, but they overcame the hostility of the world to succeed where Garvey & Co. failed. That, and not any resemblance to Jim Crow, is the reason Coates hates Israel so bitterly.

Coates’s embrace of the Palestinian cause has been condemned by his liberal friends with a vehemence that recalls the last time anti-Semitism caused a permanent rift in the left. In the 1970s, the alliance between college-educated Jewish liberals and black radicals fell apart over the latter’s embrace of the Arab cause as part of a growing Third World consciousness. In 1979, black civil-rights hero Andrew Young was forced to resign as ambassador to the United Nations after he was revealed to have met secretly with a representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which no US official was supposed to meet with until the PLO agreed to recognize Israel. That scandal, plus differences of opinion over racial quotas and similar issues, alienated Jewish liberals and launched many on the path to neoconservatism.

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There is little reason to expect a replay of history, however. The demographics have changed too much. In 1970, the American electorate and Harvard’s undergraduate student body were both close to 90 percent white. Today. the situation is very different. Last year, people of color made up a majority of children under 18 and a majority of every Ivy League freshman class, except at Dartmouth. At the same time, Jewish enrollment at Harvard is lower than it was during the bad old days of quotas in the 1920s. Demographics don’t perfectly predict political opinions, on this issue or any other, but defectors from the left may be surprised to discover that wokeness, the ideology of valorizing all people of color, has quite enough inertia to carry on without their help.

The future we face is encapsulated in an anecdote that occurred when Coates stopped pontificating to himself and listened to other people for a change. Avner, who leads a group of former Israeli Defense Force soldiers who now favor a more liberal policy toward the Palestinians, is showing Coates around the West Bank with their driver Guy. Coates asks these two Israelis what they would do differently if they were in charge. Avner says he favors self-determination for both peoples. “The question is, can there be a way to have the right to self-determination for Israelis and to Palestinians? I think the answer is yes, there has to be. I mean, there’s no other way.”

Guy doesn’t have time for Avner’s waffle. “I see the establishment of Israel as a sin. I don’t think it should have happened,” he says. “It’s something I can’t live with. And I think in order to have some kind of sustainable, reasonable life here, there should be a real change.”

Coates was instrumental in bringing American elites from having Avner’s view to Guy’s, in respect of their own country. Before, America was flawed but redeemable; now, it was sinful from Day One, founded on slavery and plunder. This line sounded good to many American liberals when its implications weren’t entirely clear. It is much easier to see what abolishing the occupier state means in the context of Israel. {snip}