The Message

Content Warning: This section discusses racism, racist violence, colonialism, the Holocaust, and the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict; views expressed are Coates’s alone.

Coates describes his visit to Palestine and Israel after an invitation from the Palestine Festival of Literature. Early in his visit, Coates visited Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center; the Book of Names held there contains close to five million names of people who died in the Holocaust. Coates felt despair and horror at Yad Vashem, relieved only by a few moments of hope when he saw stories of people who worked to save Jewish people during the Holocaust. There was one off note in the visit there—namely, a line of very young Israeli soldiers casually chatting. They were there to protect the museum from attacks, but their heavily armed presence was such a display of state power that it unsettled Coates and reminded him that when Western powers carved out Israel in the Middle East, the Jewish people who immigrated there became a nation with power.

As Coates navigated holy sites in Jerusalem with the group, he was struck by the widespread nature of Israeli control over the movements of Palestinians and Muslims. He recounts being made to wait outside a site as a soldier quizzed him about his religion (none), his parents’ (none), and his grandparents’ (Christian), with the latter answer gaining him admittance. The thought that people from an oppressed minority would exercise power over others scrambled Coates’s beliefs about the racial order. Then again, there was something familiar here, namely that “race is a species of power and nothing else” (125), whether it is in the Jim Crow South or Israel, regardless of the races involved.

These revelations led Coates to question his past representations of Israel. In his landmark essay “The Case for Reparations“ (published in The Atlantic and later collected in We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy [2017]), Coates uses Germany’s reparations to Israel for the Holocaust as a case study in how the United States could make reparations to the descendants of enslaved people and people who lived under Jim Crow laws. Even when he wrote the essay, he had a vague notion that there was something untoward in Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people. Despite his usual skepticism, he forgot that “[empires are founded by travelers” (133)—outsiders who decide to stay—and that, far from a “world beyond plunder” (133), Israel is a case study in the plunder that occurs when the oppressed gain a state with the backing of powerful empires. 

Coates’s guide took him to a site where Israelis massacred Palestinians in 1948, a damning fact that “r[uns] counter to Israel’s own noble creation myth” (139). A man whom Coates assumed to be an Israeli scowled at them, and Coates surmised that the man was angry because he recognized “the threat of the storyteller, who can, through words, erode the claims of the powerful” (140). Coates quotes Palestinian American philosopher and post-colonialist writer Edward Said to back up his assertion that imperialists always try to present their conquest as a civilizing mission for the benefit of colonized peoples. Coates realizes that despite having invoked his racial and literary ancestors before writing “The Case for Reparations,” he failed to be a good steward of that tradition when he ignored what was happening to the Palestinians.

That error became painfully clear to him as he heard speakers at the Palestine Festival of Literature include him among a tradition of writers as truth tellers, including James Baldwin. The longer Coates stayed in Palestine, the more he struggled to articulate what kind of state Israel is with a captive population of Palestinians existing within and alongside it. He first compared Israel to the Jim Crow South, but he dismissed this comparison as “the language of analogy, of translation, not the thing itself” (145). He decided then that his “mission in Palestine was to grow new roots, describe this new world, not as a satellite of [his] old world but as a world in and of itself” (145). He would no longer be complicit in the erasure of the Palestinian people, whose presence in contemporary journalism is almost nil: The editors and writers who have the power to inscribe the limits of humanity have counted the Palestinians out. Coates sees it as his job—as a journalist and storyteller—to break this silence around the Palestinian people.

Coates shifted gears by focusing on sites in Israel. He stayed at a fancy hotel to shake off the difficult scenes that he has witnessed, but then he castigated himself for staying at a place that Palestinians likely could not enter. He began to wonder just what he was doing in this part of the world and what business any American has being in Israel, but he stayed the course. His guides at this point were members of the anti-occupation group Breaking the Silence, made up of former Israel Defense Forces soldiers who had rejected their mission to control Palestinians. One of his guides told him the story of soldiers commandeering the homes of Palestinians and blindfolding anyone who opposed them; these stories sounded like “something out of a horror movie” (151). Coates admits to the reader that he has only now, through writing, put together how systemic the abuse and domination are. Riding along with his guides, Coates learned more about the geography of what is putatively Palestinian territory—Gaza, the West Bank, and parts of Jerusalem—and realized that the idea of a two-state solution is a farce in practice.

A close look at the tools that Israel uses to control the Palestinians—the intelligence apparatus, checkpoints, and arrests—convinced Coates that Israel is set on dominating Palestinians, not in sharing land. He felt “horror” as he looked at the system of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. He also notes that the segregation of Palestinians in narrower and narrower bits of land echoes the practice of redlining back in the United States.

The literature of early Zionism either represents Palestinians as “barbarians” in need of civilizing by the nascent state of Israel or erases them entirely from the story of Israel’s founding. The founder of modern Zionist thought, Theodore Herzl, calls the idea of a Jewish liberal democracy a “‘gigantic Dream’” (157), but even during his lifetime, the discourse around that dream slipped into the old grooves of colonialism. Coates believes that the parallels between the dehumanizing language deployed against the Arab population in Zionist works parallels the language deployed against African people and people of the African diaspora in the works of writers like Josiah Nott. Ironically, British supporters of Zionism deploy this same dehumanizing language in the representation of Jews. Coates carefully traces how that representation slowly transformed to the point that one writer claimed that the Jews were becoming a light-skinned, blue-eyed people the longer they stayed in Israel.

Coates examines the literature of Zionism directly to figure out why the erasure of the Palestinian people has gone so unnoted (including by Coates himself, up until this point) and why countries like the US have been so entranced with the stories that Israel tells about itself and the land that it was founded on, especially after the Six-Day War. In Coates’s view, it comes down to novels like Leon Uris’s Exodus, which mythologizes the founding of Israel. During the Six-Day War of 1967, Americans thought that they were looking at a war that was less morally complex than the Vietnam War, which the US was busy losing at the same time. Americans believed in the myth of “Purity of Arms” (180), in which righteous Israeli warriors exercise restraint as they fight honorably against their enemies. Later, when Israel did lucrative business with the apartheid state of South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, the West said nothing, even when the parallels between South Africa’s treatment of its Black population and Israel’s conduct toward the Palestinians were obvious. There were some protests by Israelis when a South African prime minister came to lay a wreath at a Holocaust memorial, so not everyone was blind to the parallel.

Coates believes that what he saw in Israel is nothing less than a “slow but constant ethnic cleanse” happening in plain sight (199). Tourist attractions like the City of David National Park, where visitors can see a sanitized version of Israeli history, communicate to Palestinians that it would be better if they left their land entirely. Palestinians are a plundered people. Coates feels that this plunder has been committed in his name as an American, and he wonders if this domination of others would have been the fate of Black Americans had they ever achieved nationhood. In fact, the troubled history of Liberia—a West African nation founded in the early 19th century as a homeland for formerly enslaved Black people from the US and the Caribbean—showed the disastrous reality of Black colonization of Africa.

Seeking an unmediated experience in Israel, Coates returned to Vad Yashem alone. By this point, he had learned that the memorial is down the road from the site where a massacre of Palestinians took place during the consolidation of the Israeli state. He now saw Vad Yashem as a part of the state story that Israel tells about itself, one that elides the suffering of Palestinians. Coates left the Middle East knowing that he is a mere translator for the Palestinian experience. Nevertheless, this essay is a small act of reparation that he can make for the injustice he feels he did to the Palestinian people through his willful ignorance in “The Case for Reparations.”

In the year after his trip, Coates spent time in the US with people like Deanna Othman, a young Palestinian journalist who wanted to tell stories about the Palestinian people, to expand the space of storytelling so that it represents the humanity of Palestinians, but couldn’t find an outlet willing to publish such stories. He visited with the patriarch of a Palestinian American family; the man told Coates firsthand accounts of the violence committed against his village and family at the start of the occupation and why he had to leave Palestine.

Coates can tell some of that story, but it is ultimately voices like Othman’s that are needed to bring clarity to the story of Israel and the Palestinians and to haunt readers much like Coates himself has sought to do in telling stories about Black Americans. At present, journalists and writers are choosing to let “factual complexity” trump “self-evident morality” when it comes to Palestinians (231).