THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Why Ta-Nehisi Coates Hates Israel.
The conclusion he comes to is that the Jewish state is the equivalent of the Jim Crow South. “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. “‘Jim Crow’ was the first thing that came to mind, if only because ‘Jim Crow’ is a phrase that connotes an injustice, a sorting of human beings, the awarding and stripping of the rights of a population. Certainly, that was some part of what I saw in Hebron, in Jerusalem, in Lydd.”
If his luck had been different, and he were less self-involved, Coates could have come up with a better checkpoint anecdote than the lame one he offers. Something like the incident in November 2009 when a Palestinian music teacher on his way to teach a lesson was held at the Beit Iba checkpoint and forced to take out his violin and play it while Israeli soldiers laughed. There you have something more than inconvenience, a vivid and poetic illustration of the dehumanization ordinary Palestinians often face. There, too, you have a rebuttal: The 2001 Sbarro pizza shop bombing in Jerusalem, which killed 16 Israelis including a pregnant woman, was committed by a Palestinian who hid his bomb in a guitar case.
These are the kinds of complexities Coates has no time for. Since he first publicly embraced the Palestinian cause, his liberal friends have been telling him that the issue is complex. “Horseshit,” he told the New York magazine interviewer. Palestine is no more complicated than slavery or segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.” When the interviewer asked him about Hamas’s attack of Oct. 7, 2023, Coates compared it to Nat Turner’s slave rebellion: “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.”
The real reason Israel bothers Coates so much is something he waits until the very end of the book to confess:
Israel felt like an alternative history, one where all our [Marcus] Garvey dreams were made manifest. There, ‘Up Ye Mighty Race’ was the creed. There, ‘Redemption Song’ is the national anthem. There, the red, black, and green billowed over schools, embassies, and the columns of great armies. There, Martin Delaney is a hero and February 21 is a day of mourning. That was the dream—the mythic Africa . . . What I saw in the City of David was so familiar to me—the search for self in an epic, mythic past filled with kings.
There you have it. The problem with Israel is that it shames him. How can it be that the Jews carved their Israel out of the desert, and yet no place in Africa, least of all Liberia, remotely resembles Wakanda?
Coates seems determined to prove that CBS’s Tony Dokoupil was correct in his assumptions:
Related: From Ben Shapiro in 2015: Why the Left Worships Ta-Nehisi Coates.
UPDATE:
While most remember Coates for his famous Atlantic magazine cover story calling for reparations, Coates' breakout story was a 7,000-word piece in the @TheAtlantic praising Bill Cosby as a symbol of black racial independence, moral clarity, and social vision.
The piece, which… pic.twitter.com/Cda5WGmRIP
— Ashley Rindsberg (@AshleyRindsberg) October 9, 2024