There is a common refrain spoken both ironically and unironically that says “Israel is our greatest ally”. American supporters of Israel will say this earnestly, while its detractors will speak those words sarcastically to question the value and worth of Israel to the USA as an ally.

If American racial narratives are good enough to export to close allies like France and the UK, then logic dictates that Israel should import it as well. Enter Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The son of a Black Panther, Coates rapidly gained fame during his tenure at The Atlantic Monthly, where he wrote at length on issues such as racism, with a particular focus on Black slavery in the US South, and the Civil War. He quickly amassed a massive following that he christened “The Horde”, a collection of people who fawned over his writing, with White liberals happily self-flagellating to atone for the sins (whether real or not) of their ancestors. His work there culminated in his monumental essay: “The Case For Reparations”.

Coates earned universal praise for his “case”, one in which he did not bother answering specific questions as to the form in which those reparations should be made. Most everyone ignored such “quibbling”, choosing instead to compete with one another as to who could paint his writing in the most obsequious of ways. Personally, I do not find him a great stylist, and this is not because I am not aligned with him politically. I almost always fell on the opposite side of Christopher Hitchens in terms of politics, but his writing was excellent (for example, check out this book review).

Coates (TNC, for short) became the Black Intellectual Par Excellence, a role that he was quite enthusiastic in taking on. This led to his retreat from writing on serious subjects, and instead turning towards his nerdish passions, such as comic books. Unlike his father, Coates lacks the radical politics of 60s Black Nationalists, most likely a realist concession to the fact that Black Radicalism was easily subverted and extinguished. Coates went on to claim that not only was slavery America’s “original sin”, but that racism had to be constantly fought, even though it can never be defeated. The net effect of Coates’ time in the limelight was to make a mockery of the claim that the election of Barack Obama would usher in a “post-racial” America. Instead, Coates helped move the USA towards a hyper-racialism that elevated the identity politics of Critical Race Theory to the top page of American political discourse.

It’s one thing to pick on Whitey, as Whites are all too happy to whip themselves to prove that they are not “entirely bad”. The demoralization of White Americans began some time ago, and is largely self-inflicted.

It is entirely another thing to engage in moralization as a form of criticism when directed at proud people such as Jews (and specifically, Israelis). We don’t need to repeat obvious truths such as the power of the Israeli Lobby on Capitol Hill in order to find TNC’s latest crusade “rather interesting”. To take on Israel as an American political figure who has been embraced by the elite is quite the task to assign one’s self. To accuse Israel of apartheid and genocide will certainly make TNC persona non grata in some places where he was warmly welcomed while his moralizing and criticism was directed at Whites. I asked Anna Khachiyan her thoughts on TNC’s new struggle, and she replied:

I think that this is fair. TNC knows what he is getting into, which is evidenced by his words in this long piece on him and his new book (to be released this month) that delves into this incendiary conflict.

As you have already guessed, TNC views the conflict through the prism of American race relations, effectively classifying Israelis as “whites” and Palestinians as “Blacks” (at least according to his words in the above feature on him). Again, it is natural to seek parallels with one’s own experience, identity, family history, nation, etc. but as you will see, such a narrow focus can distort and result in absurd reductionism, the kind that Foreign Secretary Lammy engaged in at the UN two weeks ago.

From the profile:

But he had been told, by journalists he trusted and respected, that Israel was a democracy — “the only democracy in the Middle East.” He had also been told that the conflict was “complicated,” its history tortuous and contested, and, as he writes, “that a body of knowledge akin to computational mathematics was needed to comprehend it.” He was astonished by the plain truth of what he saw: the walls, checkpoints, and guns that everywhere hemmed in the lives of Palestinians; the clear tiers of citizenship between the first-class Jews and the second-class Palestinians; and the undisguised contempt with which the Israeli state treated the subjugated other. For Coates, the parallels with the Jim Crow South were obvious and immediate: Here, he writes, was a “world where separate and unequal was alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others was policy.” And this world was made possible by his own country: “The pushing of Palestinians out of their homes had the specific imprimatur of the United States of America. Which means that it had my imprimatur.”

That it was complicated, he now understood, was “horseshit.” “Complicated” was how people had described slavery and then segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”

Coates has dismissed any appeals to nuance in favour of a binary that is made obvious and plain.

As to Anna’s point above:

What matters to Coates is not what will happen to his career now — to the script sales, invitations from the White House, his relationships with his former colleagues at The Atlantic and elsewhere. “I’m not worried,” he told me, shrugging his shoulders. “I have to do what I have to do. I’m sad, but I was so enraged. If I went over there and saw what I saw and didn’t write it, I am fucking worthless.”

This passage is key:

On the ground in the occupied territories, he saw the segregated roads, the soldiers with their American-made weapons, the surveillance cameras, and the whole archipelago of impoverished ghettos. “I felt a mix of astonishment, betrayal, and anger,” he writes. “The astonishment was for me — for my own ignorance, for my own incuriosity … The betrayal was for my colleagues in journalism — betrayal for the way they reported, for the way they’d laundered ethnic cleansing, for the voices they’d erased. And the anger was for my own past — for Black Bottom, for Rosewood, for Tulsa — which I could not help but feel being evoked here.”

TNC makes a clean break with much of establishment journalism, and in harsh language to boot. At the same time, he inserts himself and his people into a conflict in which they have not been participants, nor even spectators, yet merges his side with one of the two conflicting peoples. I think that it’s a fair criticism to argue that he is making it about himself in a way. Some will say that his anger here is directed at the USA, because it is Israel’s patron. I can understand that, but it’s quite a leap from slavery and Jim Crow to support for a foreign state far, far away from America.

Case in point:

In Coates’s eyes, the ghost of Jim Crow is everywhere in the territories. In the soldiers who “stand there and steal our time, the sun glinting off their shades like Georgia sheriffs.” In the water sequestered for Israeli use — evidence that the state had “advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself.”

Israel = The Confederate States of America in this equation.

Here is an interesting excerpt:

His affinity for conquered peoples very much extends to the Jews, and he begins the book’s essay on Palestine at Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. “In a place like this,” he writes, “your mind expands as the dark end of your imagination blooms, and you wonder if human depravity has any bottom at all, and if it does not, what hope is there for any of us?” But what Coates is concerned with foremost is what happened when Jewish people went from being the conquered to the conquerors, when “the Jewish people had taken its place among The Strong,” and he believes Yad Vashem itself has been used as a tool for justifying the occupation. “We have a hard time wrapping our heads around people who are obvious historical victims being part and parcel of another crime,” he told me. In the book, he writes of the pain he observed in two of his Israeli companions: “They were raised under the story that the Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had been confronted with an incredible truth — that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing.”

I am not going to argue as to who is right and who is wrong in this conflict as this has been discussed ad naseum, but TNC does raise a fair point, a point that is going to get him into trouble with powerful interests at home.

More on his identification with Palestinians:

“If this was the 1830s and I was enslaved and Nat Turner’s rebellion had happened,” Coates told me that day in Gramercy, “I would’ve been one of those people that would’ve been like, ‘I’m not cool with this.’ But Nat Turner happens in a context. So the other part of me is like, What would I do if I had grown up in Gaza, under the blockade and in an open-air prison, and I had a little sister who had leukemia and needed treatment but couldn’t get it because my dad or my mom couldn’t get the right pass out? You know what I mean? What would I do if my brother had been shot for getting too close to the barrier? What would I do if my uncle had been shot because he’s a fisherman and he went too far out? And if that wall went down and I came through that wall, who would I be? Can I say I’d be the person that says, ‘Hey, guys, hold up. We shouldn’t be doing this’? Would that have been me?”

Based on this lengthy profile of TNC, the message should be clear: Israelis are Whites (oppressors), and Palestnians are Blacks (victims). He has therefore aligned himself with Lammy and Diallo, not on Israel per se, but in a worldview that is racialized, and that is a product of American historical narratives that are spreading far and wide globally, without regard to local contexts and peculiarities.

David Polansky told me that “how TNC will be treated will tell us where the American Jewish establishment median is right now”, and I think that he is right. There are many American Jews who are not supportive of Israel at the moment, with quite a few who are outspoken in their harsh criticisms of the treatment of the Palestinians. This leads me to believe that there are notable Jewish figures like Peter Beinart who are more than publicly supporting TNC in his new crusade. Beinart has for years now being a harsh critic of Israel, and specifically Bibi Netanyahu, with his focus being on how Palestinians are being mistreated by the Israeli state.

It was Beinart who alerted me to the growing divide between Israelis and their Amerian cousins with respect to Israel via this excellent long essay from 2010. Beinart is a great example of this growing divide, as he cannot square Israel’s nationalist turn with Jewish America’s inherent (although not unanimous) liberalism.

TNC is not going to win this fight, as the pro-Israeli side in US politics still holds sway. His entry into this conflict is significant, because it does indicate that some American elites are growing increasingly uncomfortable with Israel’s actions and behaviour, and especially because of his role as a “moral” figure speaking from the experience of racial relations. Diallo, Lammy, and TNC might seem to be operating in different worlds, but they have a lot more in common than meets the eye. Racial identity politics is just another weapon in the hands of US foreign policy. If every conflict can be framed in racialized “Black vs. White”, an America engaged in public atonement for the sins of slavery is well-positioned to act as arbiter/rescuer every single time.

And yes, Ta-Nehisi, I will read your book.