I felt tremendous shame,” Ta-Nehisi Coates confessed in November at a pro-Palestinian event called “But We Must Speak.” His shame, he told a rapt crowd near Columbia University, had arisen during a recent trip to Israel, his first. Long deceived by “all of the articles I’ve read,” he had assumed that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was exceedingly complex, that “you need a degree in Middle Eastern studies or some such, a Ph.D., to really understand what’s happening.” But when he was guided from Jerusalem to Hebron on a tour organized by the Palestine Festival of Literature, he found that the situation was far from complicated.
He had confronted, he said, Israel’s “Jim Crow regime,” its “segregationist order,” enforced by the “biggest guns I’d ever seen in my life.” And given that he had been “reared on the fight against Jim Crow, against white supremacy,” he felt mortified by his years of blindness to the brutal simplicity of the Palestinian plight. “How,” he asked, “could I not know?”
A year later, he is publishing The Message, a book of four essays; the first, serving as an introduction, is presented as an imaginary lecture to his writing students at Howard University. Addressing them as “comrades,” he pronounces that his mandate and theirs, as writers, is “doing their part to save the world.” Then come three essays built around racially or ethnically charged travel. The last and by far the longest piece is devoted to his single transformative visit to Israel. It is the book’s main reason for being, and it is a condemnation of the “elevation of complexity over justice,” which is “parcel of the effort to forge a story of Palestine told solely by the colonizer.” Coates’s dismissal of complication amplifies the certainty of the book’s title, which, given the biblical landscape of the book’s second half, appears to allude to the fierce truth-telling of the prophets. Coates seems almost to put himself on that plane.
Yet an undercurrent of shame, in multiple forms, lies beneath his conviction: shame, partly, over having internalized the worldview of oppressors. Though quieter than other themes, it is a propulsive force—and it helps to explain, in the Israel essay, a stunning omission, a moral abdication.
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Just goes to show that there are some "voices" on the left that can say anything they want about Israel and even Jews and hardly anyone will give a damn.
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