Shalom.
It was in my George Orwell class in college many years ago that my favorite professor, Howard Ziff, challenged the class with this quote about journalism, whose source is not known to me: “The role of the journalist is to broadcast the truth, and at the same time, destroy the ability to perceive.” That quote stuck in my brain for some reason, and it was brought back to me recently by the latest kerfuffle surrounding Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book tour promoting his latest “woke” book offering, The Message.
I have not read this book, nor have I read any of his books. For those of you new to Coates, he is a former senior editor and national correspondent for The Atlantic, considered one of the fathers of the “woke” movement, a MacArthur Genius Fellowship award winner and author of several books. The Message, reflects on his visits to Dakar, Senegal; Chapin, South Carolina; and the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The latter trip left a deep impression on Coates. In a 2024 profile for New York, he said, “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel”. According to the profile, The Message “lays forth the case that the Israeli occupation is a moral crime, one that has been all but covered up by the West”.
I have never visited the West Bank, but I have read enough to know life there, in a word, sucks, and Palestinians who live there are treated with a different set of rights and rules than Jews that live there. There are countless horror stories documenting the pernicious nature of checkpoints and their impact on Palestinian daily life. Stories of pregnant women being stopped at checkpoints, clearly in distress, and not being able to get to a hospital in time. The horror of a busload of children injured in a crash on a road that was on the wrong side of the fence, and hence, difficult for ambulances to tend to. And I could go on and on.
There is of course, a long and nuanced history of the land, which many think is illegally occupied, while Israelis will, rightfully, claim it is disputed territory. Not so nuanced is the terrorism unleashed in the Second Intifada starting in 2000 after Yasser Arafat turned down a peace offer that essentially gave Palestinians everything they had been asking for. In the initial weeks of the Second Intifada, there was a popular element to the violence, but within a short time, grassroots participation in the violence ebbed, and the Palestinians turned to directly attacking Israeli civilian centers, military installations, vehicles, and civilians through suicide bombings, drive-by shootings, and rocket launchings, which killed over 1,000 Israelis, and left thousands severely injured.
Israel attempted to counter Palestinian violence in a variety of ways. Most directly, it engaged in military operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to destroy the terrorist infrastructure. A major incursion was launched in March-April 2002, following the March 22 Hamas suicide bombing of a Passover seder at a Netanya hotel in which 30 were killed and 140 were wounded. As a proactive measure, in 2003, the Government of Israel approved the building of a security fence or barrier, intended to prevent Palestinian terrorists from reaching their civilian targets inside Israel. And ever since, the bombings, shootings and massacres of innocent people have subsided and for the most part, terrorism has been contained.
Coates admits that his essay on the West Bank was not meant to be a treatise on the nuanced history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. To give him even a slim benefit of the doubt, I think he tried to cut through the nuance and present it simply as human tragedy and a moral crime. But the real crime here is one of gross negligence by the author, who claims to be a reporter but presents a totally one-sided anti-Israel polemic, and who is now making the circuit with the liberal media, who as usual, are fawning over him and by default, his book. I have heard some pretty lame interviews this last week, by Chris Hayes on MSNBC and by Ben Rhodes on Pod Save the World, both examples where supposed “journalists” have not pushed back one bit on the one sided and irresponsible view portrayed by Coates. That is, until he ran into a real journalist on CBS Mornings show, Tony Dokoupil, who had the temerity to ask him a few legitimate questions, which led to a major kerfuffle at CBS. And this is where things get interesting. I’m used to the lame stream media’s biased and double standard reporting about Israel, but when the execs at CBS started shaming Dokoupil for doing his job, and then apologizing for not admonishing him sooner, you know the woke shit is out of control and seeping into traditional main stream media outlets. At the end of the post, I have provided links to the original CBS Mornings interview as well as a panel discussion following it with Bari Weiss and a few others from The Free Press, to which I subscribe. You be the judge.
Mr. Coates seems like a nice man. And I understand from reviews that his prose is exceptional. But, his essay on the West Bank was grossly one sided and irresponsible. His complete lack of anything remotely connected to the reality facing Israel is analogous to writing an essay on the civil war without mentioning slavery. It’s like broadcasting a truth, or part of a truth, in order to destroy the ability to perceive.
If you want to go deeper on this story, I suggest a critical essay written by Coleman Hughes, also of The Free Press, entitled “The Fantasy World of Ta-Nehisi Coates”.
Brad out.
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