BECAUSE THEY’RE BETTER THAN HIM? Why Ta-Nehisi Coates Hates Israel. “It could also be that Coates hates reporting because he is bad at it.”

Every reporter knows the a-ha moment of living through the anecdote that will make the perfect lead or kicker. No such perfect anecdotes have ever happened to Coates or, if they did, he was oblivious to them. His previous book, Between the World and Me, was an indictment of America as a racist hellscape, yet the worst act of racism he recounted from his own life—not something he read about in a newspaper or a history book—was a white lady on an escalator who shouted at his dawdling son, who was blocking her way, “Come on!”

The pivotal firsthand anecdote in this new book is equally underwhelming. At a checkpoint outside the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, Israeli soldiers made his party of a dozen or so people wait for 45 minutes. That’s it. “Was it that we had cameras? Was it that our guide was Jordanian? No justifications were given, no questions asked, no instructions offered,” he writes. “Watching those soldiers stand there and steal our time, the sun glinting off their shades like Georgia sheriffs, I could feel the lens of my mind curving to refract the blur of new and strange events.”

Let us grant that checkpoints of all kinds are a pain. Even going through customs at a First World airport can be a tedious and capricious process, where inconveniences turn easily into humiliations; security checkpoints in dangerous parts of the world are commensurately worse. Nevertheless, it is a fragile hook on which to hang condemnation of an entire nation.

I’m sure it was infuriating. The essence of all upscale lefties’ fury: Don’t you know who I am?