Last week I wrote admiringly about Ta Hanesi Coates’ new book, The Message. I chronicled his comparisons of Israeli’s state treatment of Arabs to the historical system of chattel slavery in America, and to European dispossession of Indigenous Americans in settler colonialism.
I did NOT absolve Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel a year and months ago. In fact, Coates does not bring up that event and Israel’s retributive attacks in Gaza and the West Bank. I don’t know the year of his travels, but assume it was all pre-War. As the book was published in 2024, he had time to comment on both, but chose not to. Hehose to hone in on his time in Palestine and his observations of the relations between Jews and Arabs, and, especially Israeli state-sponsored treatment of Arabs.
Coates does address antisemitism in America, and reminds us of its role in the growth of US-Israeli state relations. I have always assumed that President Biden’s support of Israel from the day of Hamas’s attack and through Israel’s return attacks and ferreting out of Hamas fighters in Gaza rested, in great part, on old guilt feelings about our nations failure to acknowledge Nazi death camps and to come to European Jews’ aid in the 1930s.
What Coates adds to that story is the perseverance of American antisemitism through and after the War. In a 1945 post-War poll, only 5 percent of Americans believed that immigrations should be increased. “Displaced persons”—the millions of Europeans left stateless and homeless after the War, which of course included hundreds of thousands of Jews, were not welcomed by Americans. When President Truman tried to increase immigration numbers and quotas, he was rebuffed by Congress, some of whose members spouted vitriol at “displaced persons.” The nation-state of Israel was spoke to President Truman’s support for Jewish War victims and accommodated American antisemitism.
Background. The Palestinian Mandate resulting from the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles was held by the British. Zionism, and a gradual immigration of Russian and European Jews to Palestine had begun decades earlier, and Arab resistance to Jewish immigration and settlement had been countered by the paramilitary Jewish Haganah. When the British refused to allow unlimited immigration into Palestine after the War, Haganah, and their more militant offspring, Irgun, made war on the British and on Arab Palestinians. The British retreated, Jews proclaimed the nation of Israel, and on May 14, 1948, just 11 minutes after Israel was founded, Truman and our US government were the first to recognize Israeli nationhood.
From that point, American scholars and writers like Leon Uris and Barbara Tuchman echoed earlier Zionists’ contention that Israel would be a civilizing force on a land that until its collapse had been part of the Ottoman Empire. It was a land that was not vacant, but not a nation either, and in Zionist settler talk, a land that was inhabited by lesser people. The Palestinian Arabs became the American Indians in the narrative of settlement and civilization. And, for Americans, it was being conveniently carried out half way across the world. It was one way of dealing with the problem of the Jewish refugees left in the wake of Europe’s war.
And yes, there were Jews in Palestine before WW II and before the Zionist sponsored emigration from Europe in the early 20th century, as there were Jewish enclaves in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey. This fact became part of the new Zionist narrative and reason to “reclaim” the Holyland. (One early Zionist proposal advocated Jewish settlement in Argentina.) This thread, according to Coates, has sparked the search for old Jewish presence. Current Arab residents can be removed from their homes to accommodate current archeological searches, and there is a growing industry of tourism focused on ancient Jewish roots.
It is this narrative that Coates works from. And I believe we can condemn Israel’s, and especially Prime Minister Netenyahu and Israel’s current leadership’s long-time treatment of Palestinians in the state of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, and not condone Hamas’s brutality on October 7. We can follow Coates’ comparisons to his own post-slavery Black American experience, and to his knowledge of European colonialism in Africa—and to our growing knowledge of colonialism’s effects on Indigenous Americans.
But. Is it fair now to raise 100-year-old Zionist talk of an uncivilized, sometimes “vacant,” land, and to criticize their avowed mission to civilize “lesser” people? Or, for that matter, can we raise Hitler’s admiration for United States’ treatment of our Native population, and his comparing it to his treatment of European Jewry?
I think we can. We can learn from true history, and I applaud Ta Hanesi Coates and news outlets like Haaretz for pursuing it. I think there are many Israeli Jews who agree. I follow the progressive Jewish online Haaretz—which the current Israeli government is censuring. I find news of Jews and Christian and Muslim Arabs working together towards peace within Israel. There was, recently, during the fighting, an orchestra of mixed high school students touring the US.
In the end, I believe that we must stop Israel from further settlements and annexations in Gaza and the West Bank. We must stop the fighting. We must find a way for Jews and Arabs—Muslims, Christians, and Druze—to live together and side by side in what people still call the Holyland. Jews have no place to go back to. Nor to Palestinian Arabs. And the huge problem of displacement across the Middle East can only begin to be resolved when this conflict at the heart of it is resolved.
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Image: Truman Library