In his new book, The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates visits three places: Dakar in Senegal, West Africa, which has become a place of pilgrimage for African-Americans tracing slave ancestry; to Columbia, South Carolina, where a previous book of his has been banned, and where a woman born in the South rises to teach and defend her teaching of the book; and to Palestine.
Coates, a MacArthur Fellow and the author of a famous Atlantic Magazine piece arguing for financial reparations for descendants of American slaves, is bamboozled by Palestine. In the Arab Palestinians, he sees parallels to the Black experience in America, but the deeper he gets, the more Arabs and Israelis he interviews, the more the Israeli experience resembles European colonialism in America. The Israelis did not import slaves from another continent, but settled in settled lands as the European colonials of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had done in Africa and the Americas.
The parallels are legion: Palestine, like North America, was seen as an “empty” land waiting to be wisely settled and used. The present inhabitants, Arabs—and here Coates does not go into the great religious and social diversity of the indigenous population—were seen as the “other,” as lesser than, uncivilized, awaiting the transformation of modern civilizers. Remember how Indigenous Americans were accused of underusing the land, and, of course, of barbarism, heathenism, and a string of adjectives saying “less than.”
Ironically, the leading civilizers in Israel have been European in training and education, and the indigenous Jews of the Middle East are overwhelmed. Think of the Israeli Jews you see on TV screens. How many dark-skinned Sephardic Jews do you see? The European Jews brought Western European customs and politics to “heathen” lands. And Israeli Jews, especially those of prominence, are increasingly whiter. Like Italian and Greek immigrants to America who have grown lighter with intermarriage and adoption of more Anglo and Northern European culture.
Here the comparisons slip back and forth between Black and Indigenous experiences in America. Like the Indigenous Americans, Indigenous Arabs have been and continue to be gradually and irrevocably forced from their lands, replaced by Jewish settlers intent on a civilized Jewish state. Like Black Americans, Arabs are subject to an expanding corpus of laws—which Coates calls their “Jim Crow.” In fact, he uses “apartheid’ to describe today’s Israel, and describes the cozy relationship between Apartheid South Africa and Israel before its revolution and Mandela.
Coates travels with fellow journalists (this all before the war), but sometimes goes off on his own to travel with both Arab and dissident Jewish writers, activists, and archeologists. With the archeologists he learns that the field has been used to remove indigenous Arabs from their lands in the name of recovering a Jewish past. A Moroccan settlement of almost a thousand years is bulldozed and over 600 ancient Holy Land settlers driven from their homes. A Jewish antiquities tourism—often aimed at American Christians—is developed around sites in Jerusalem and other Biblical places. Sometimes the Abrahamic descriptions are accurate; other times messianic projections.
Which sends me to the recent books and revelations about Marcus Whitman and a fabricated story that adds divine, “providential” direction to the story of Manifest Destiny. A Manifest Destiny we learned as political and historical, rather than religious and Protestant. The point the same: Indigenous people should not stand in the way of an expanding Protestant Christian nation or an expanding Jewish state.
Coates spent only ten days in Palestine, but it has obviously shaken him. Home, in the United States, he arranges a meeting with a survivor of an Israeli slaughter of an Arab village in 1948. There he meets descendants, one a teacher who had majored in journalism. She was an academic star, but American journalism, even the highly regarded newspapers and magazines (that Coates the MacArthur Fellow is welcome in) does not want Palestinian journalists writing about Palestine. The stories and articles BY Palestinians in the leading newspapers over fifty years are fewer than 2 percent of the articles ABOUT Palestine. In the Washington Post, less than 1 percent. Even “pro” Palestinian pieces must be written by others.
This sends me to the daily television news briefs, the deaths of scores of Palestinian journalists trying to get the true stories of Gaza and the West Bank to the world, and to Israel’s blockade of Western journalists seeking to get into Gaza to cover the war. In and about Israel, it appears, partisanship, self-censorship, and outright censorship are the rules of the day.
Today’s New York Times’ stories tell us that pro-Palestinian protest on college campuses is muted. Nothing like the protests at the beginning of Israel’s retributive war on Hamas in Gaza. A few professors let go, a few students dismissed.
I would that college presidents and politicians step back and read The Message before embracing Israel quite so tightly.
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Image from Portland’s Literary Arts