Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Latest Assault on Israel

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s latest book, The Message, is dominated by his essay on the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank, based on a short trip he took there in the summer of 2023. A number of reviews and comments have questioned his credibility and there is no evidence that he did any nuanced reading on the history of the conflict. Indeed, The Atlantic reviewer noted that Coates refused to talk to anyone who was in any way sympathetic to Zionism.

His essay has no nuance; Hamas is never even mentioned.

Not surprisingly, as Jeffrey Blehar’s essay documents, his essay has no nuance and indeed, Hamas is never mentioned in the essay. Hence, one would not know that over the last two years, Hamas sent members into the West Bank and, with Iranian arms that passed through Jordan, has engaged in sporadic violence against Jewish settlers. This is not to justify in any way the disproportionate responses of settlers but to simply indicate that there is a backdrop to what Coates witnessed in the one week he spent in the West Bank.

Instead of addressing the complexity of the current situation, Coates focused his rhetoric on demonstrating that Israeli practices amount to apartheid by showing parallels to past South African and Jim Crow experiences. This enabled him to view Israel as engaging in white supremacy. When it was pointed out that half of the Jewish population consists of nonwhite, refugees from Arab countries and Ethiopia, Peter Beinart was quick to defend Coates: “In Israel, supremacy is based on Jewishness not (America’s) definition of whiteness. So Black and brown Jews – whatever discrimination they face – enjoy legal supremacy over Palestinians.”

Whatever one’s judgment on Israeli policies in the West Bank, Beinart’s assertion that black and brown Jews enjoy legal supremacy is a distortion. Yes, the state privileges Jewish immigration, stipulating that it is the homeland for all Jews. Indeed, from its inception it has been a haven for Jews facing severe discrimination: Jews fleeing the pogroms in Czarist Russia, fleeing the Nazi Holocaust, fleeing anti-Jewish actions in Muslim countries, fleeing Soviet communism, and fleeing religious discrimination in Ethiopia. However, even most right-wing Zionists have been quite clear that on an individual basis, Jewish and Arab citizens should be able to compete without prejudice.

The former prime minister, Naftali Bennett, has championed this position. He was crucial to the affirmative action efforts to integrate Arab citizens into the hi-tech sector. Today, their enrollment at Technion, Israel’s MIT, matches their share of the population; and Nazareth has become a hi-tech hub. He also championed a rapid increase in the Arab share of teachers in Jewish schools, particularly in teaching subjects other than Arabic.

Notably, there was unprecedented targeted funding of the Arab sector in the 2016 and 2021 five-year plans to correct gaps between Arab and Jewish communities. Indeed, the preamble to the first five-year plan quoted Zvi Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism:

After the formation of a Jewish majority, a considerable Arab population will always remain in Palestine. If things fare badly for this group of inhabitants, then things will fare badly for the entire country. The political, economic and cultural welfare of the Arabs will thus always remain one of the main conditions for the well-being of the Land of Israel.

Unlike during the 2021 Gaza conflict, there was no rioting in the mixed Jewish-Arab cities. On a national level, leaders of the southern branch of Israel’s Islamic Movement — affiliated with the Ra’am Party — began calling imams they knew, particularly in places that had experienced riots in 2021. The imams pledged to counsel their communities to renounce acts of violence.

Most telling, however, has been the increased attachment of Arab citizens to the Israeli state. For each year, 2016-2022, the share of Arab citizens who felt a part of Israel fluctuated between 39% and 43%. But directly after the 2023 Hamas attack, it increased to 70%; and even during November as the death and destruction in Gaza mounted, it only declined to 65%.

These attitudes were also reflected in a December 2023 survey that found a dramatic increase in support for Israeli institutions since the previous June 2023 survey. Indeed, a May 2024 survey found that “just over half of Arab Israelis (51.6%) felt that the prolonged war against Hamas had given rise to a sense of ‘shared destiny’ between Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel.” Moreover, 61.5% of Arab citizens agreed with the statement: “Hamas bears a great deal of responsibility for the suffering of Palestinian civilians.”

Another sign of the strength of their growing commitment to the state, more than two-thirds of Arab respondents believed that Arab parties should be willing to join a coalition government; 40.2% even if it was not a left-center coalition. Only 14.2% were firmly against Arab parties joining a ruling coalition.

All of this evidence indicates that while there are certainly barriers faced, Arab citizens’ embrace of the state and the gains made over the last decade undermines any notion of their living under Jewish supremacy or apartheid. As a result, Coates’s latest work is in line with the problematic claims he made about redlining and black deaths. Moreover, the primary example of apartheid today is the situation of Palestinians living in Lebanon. Though they have now lived there for three generation, they cannot become citizens and must live in restricted areas and have severe restrictions on the occupations they could enter. Maybe Beinart and Coates could highlight these abuses.

This op-ed originally appeared in The Times of Israel