Ta-Nehisi Coates and the recent attack on Israel

The latest book by Ta-Nehisi Coates, The messageis dominated by his essay on the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank, based on a short trip there he took in the summer of 2023. A number of reviews and commentaries have questioned his credibility and there is no evidence that he provided nuanced readings on the history of the conflict. In fact, The Atlantic The reviewer noted that Coates refused to speak to anyone who was in any way sympathetic to Zionism.

His essay has no nuance; Hamas is never mentioned.

Not surprisingly, as Jeffrey Blehar’s essay documents, there is a lack of nuance and, in fact, Hamas is never mentioned in the essay. Therefore, it is not known that over the past two years Hamas has deployed members to the West Bank and sporadically committed violence against Jewish settlers using Iranian weapons that passed through Jordan. This is in no way intended to justify the settlers’ disproportionate responses, but simply to point out that there is a background to what Coates witnessed in the one week he spent in the West Bank.

Instead of addressing the complexities of the current situation, Coates focused his rhetoric on showing that Israeli practices amount to apartheid by drawing parallels to previous experiences in South Africa and Jim Crow. This enabled him to view Israel as seeking white supremacy. When it was pointed out that half of the Jewish population consists of non-white refugees from Arab countries and Ethiopia, Peter Beinart Coates quickly defended: “In Israel, supremacy is based on Jewishness, not on (America’s) definition of whiteness.” brown Jews—regardless of the discrimination they face—legal supremacy over Palestinians.”

Whatever one’s view of Israeli policy in the West Bank, Beinart’s claim that black and brown Jews enjoy legal supremacy is a distortion. Yes, the state privileges Jewish immigration and stipulates that it is the homeland of all Jews. In fact, from the beginning, it was a refuge for Jews facing severe discrimination: Jews fleeing the pogroms in Tsarist Russia, the Nazi Holocaust, anti-Jewish actions in Muslim countries, Soviet communism, and religious discrimination in Ethiopia . But even most right-wing Zionists were clear that Jewish and Arab citizens should be able to compete with each other on an individual basis without prejudice.

Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has taken this position. He was crucial to affirmative action efforts to integrate Arab citizens into the high-tech sector. Today, their enrollment at the Technion, Israel’s MIT, corresponds to their share of the population; and Nazareth has developed into a high-tech center. He also advocated for a rapid increase in the Arab proportion of teachers in Jewish schools, particularly in teaching subjects other than Arabic.

In particular, there was unprecedented targeted funding to the Arab sector in the 2016 and 2021 five-year plans to close the gaps between Arab and Jewish communities. In fact, the preamble to the first five-year plan quoted Zvi Jabotinsky, the founder of revisionist Zionism:

After the formation of a Jewish majority, a sizeable Arab population will always remain in Palestine. If this population group does poorly, then the entire country will also do poorly. The political, economic and cultural well-being of the Arabs will therefore always remain one of the main conditions for the well-being of the Land of Israel.

Unlike during the 2021 Gaza conflict, there were no riots in the mixed Jewish-Arab cities. At the national level, leaders of the southern branch of Israel’s Islamic Movement – which is affiliated with the Ra’am Party – began calling known imams, particularly in places where there had been unrest during 2021 violence.

Most telling, however, is Arab citizens’ increasing attachment to the Israeli state. For each year, from 2016 to 2022, the proportion of Arab citizens who felt part of Israel fluctuated between 39% and 43%. But right after the Hamas attack in 2023, it rose to 70%; and even in November, as deaths and destruction increased in Gaza, it only fell to 65%.

These attitudes were also reflected in a December 2023 poll, which showed a dramatic increase in support for Israeli institutions since the previous June 2023 poll. In fact, a May 2024 poll found that “just over half of Arab Israelis (51.6%) believed that the ongoing war against Hamas had led to a sense of ‘common destiny’ between Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel.” In addition, 61.5% of Arab citizens agreed with the statement: “Hamas bears great responsibility for the suffering of the Palestinian civilian population.”

In 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 strongly opposed to Arab parties joining a governing coalition.

All of this evidence suggests that while there are certainly obstacles, Arab citizens’ acceptance of the state and the gains made over the last decade undermine any notion that they are living under Jewish domination or apartheid. As a result, Coates’ latest work is consistent with the problematic claims he has made about redlining and black deaths. Furthermore, the most important example of apartheid today is the situation of Palestinians living in Lebanon. Although they have lived there for three generations, they cannot become citizens and are forced to live in restricted areas and are subject to strict restrictions on the exercise of professions. Perhaps Beinart and Coates could highlight these abuses.

This editorial originally appeared in The Times of Israel