By Rich Lowry
Monday, November 06, 2023
Ta-Nehisi Coates is not reliable regarding things
he’s spent considerable time thinking about and studying here in the U.S., so
it’s presumably a mistake to put much stock in his newly formed opinions about
matters he barely knows anything about.
He proved as much in an interview about
the Israeli–Palestinian
conflict the other day on Democracy Now!
At the outset, Coates announced his opposition to
“complexity” and “complication,” and left little doubt about his sincerity in
that regard with a preposterous and perverse depiction of Israel as a
direct descendant of the Jim Crow South.
Repeatedly, Coates suggested he had great insight into
the situation because he knows about racism in the United States. He says he
understood the story of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict “immediately.”
If Coates weren’t simply retailing the familiar left-wing
critiques of Israel, his belief that there’s nothing to learn on the ground in
the Middle East that he doesn’t already know from growing up in Maryland in the
1980s and reading about the failure of Reconstruction might qualify as a
particularly high-handed and ignorant form of “Orientalism.” How dare this
American man, who says he spent all of ten days in Israel and the West Bank,
insist on imposing a U.S. narrative on peoples whose distinct histories,
cultures, and faiths seem to mean so little to him?
Coates makes much of a checkpoint that he encountered in
the city of Hebron. The way he tells the story, his Palestinian guide couldn’t
proceed down a certain street, but Coates was allowed to pass after an Israeli
guard questioned him about his religion and got it out of him that his
grandparents were Christian.
It’s hard to say too much about this incident without
knowing more detail and getting independent verification. It is certainly
true, however, that Hebron has many security checkpoints, more than other West
Bank cities.
Why?
Well, Coates doesn’t mention, if he even knows, that
Hebron is one of the four holy cities of Judaism.
He doesn’t mention, if he knows, that there was a
pogrom carried out there in 1929 that led to the evacuation
of the Jewish population. (Tablet notes of that massacre, demonstrating
how little things change, “The killings in Hebron were particularly barbaric,
with Arabs wielding hatchets against yeshiva students and women and babies.”)
He doesn’t mention, if he knows, that Jordan wiped away
places of Jewish cultural significance when it ruled the city prior to
1967.
He doesn’t mention, if he knows, that a small community
of Jews has returned to the city to reestablish the continuous Jewish presence
there since ancient times.
The extra security is, in part, to protect them. Perhaps
the checkpoints are overbearing, but without the Israeli security presence, the
community likely wouldn’t survive there, and Hebron would be more ethnically
and religiously pure than it is now. Is that what Coates wants?
Oh, sorry — complications. We’ve been told
that they aren’t necessary.
Coates is dismissive of Israel’s concerns about terror
attacks. “Now, what the authorities will tell you,” he said, “is that this is a
security measure. But if you go back to the history of Jim Crow in this
country, they would tell you the exact same thing.”
This is stupidly reductive. Because racist sheriffs
in the South falsely invoked security to justify their oppression doesn’t mean
that Israel doesn’t have legitimate security concerns. Not every place
Ta-Nehisi Coates dislikes is automatically Mississippi circa 1930.
The Second Intifada was a real thing. The West Bank is
not Gaza, but terrorism, including
in Hebron, is an ongoing concern. The Times of Israel reported on a late-August
terror attack in the city’s environs: “Israeli security forces arrested two
Palestinians early Tuesday morning on suspicion of carrying out a deadly terror
attack near Hebron a day earlier, in which a 42-year-old mother of three was killed and a man in
his 40s was seriously wounded when their vehicle came under fire from a passing
car on the Route 60 highway.”
Coates also gives no sign of knowing that Israelis
themselves are forbidden from traveling to so-called Area A territory in
the West Bank. Here is an impassioned opinion piece urging Israelis
to abide by these rules for their own safety and noting that “Area A includes
eight Palestinian cities, each under the full control of the Palestinian
Authority: Nablus,
Jenin, Tulkarm, Kalkilya, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jericho and 80 percent of
Hebron.”
If the various designations of territory with different
rules within the West Bank seem arbitrary, it’s worth noting that they were
hashed out in the Oslo Accords between the PLO and Israel in the 1990s.
In a truly laughable argument, Coates said he was shocked
during his trip “when it suddenly dawned on me that I was in a region of the
world where some people could vote and some people could not.”
It is certainly true that Palestinians can’t vote, but
this isn’t the doing of the Israeli government. There hasn’t been an election
in the Palestinian territories since 2006. The people who currently run the
West Bank fear they would lose — and for good reason. Hamas won the legislative
elections last time around, and then waged a brief factional war to eliminate
their Fatah rivals in Gaza.
In Israel proper, there are about 2 million Arab
citizens, or roughly 20 percent of the population. They have the right to vote
and the other rights of Israel citizens.
But I know, complexity — as well as its
close cousins, knowledge and moral discernment — only get in the way here.
The balance of Coates’s outrage was directed at the
Israeli military operation, in typically simplistic and stilted terms.
“I keep hearing this term repeated over and over again:
‘the right to self-defense,’” he noted. He will have none of it. He countered
with “the right to be able to sleep at night.”
“Because what I know is,” he explained, “if I was
complicit — and I am complicit — in dropping bombs on children, in dropping
bombs on refugee camps, no matter who’s there, it would give me trouble
sleeping at night. And I worry for the souls of people who can do this and can
sleep at night.”
No matter who’s there.
That’s an interesting formulation. Because we know who’s
there — Hamas operatives and fighters. Coates didn’t mention that. In fact, he
didn’t say the word “Hamas” or mention the October 7 attack in a nearly
30-minute interview.
It obviously makes no sense to render sweeping moral
judgment on the Israeli military campaign abstracted from the actual
circumstances that led to the campaign and that require it to be fought in
civilian areas. Israel didn’t attack Hamas out of the blue. It was in response
to a terror attack that violated every rule of warfare and humanity.
If Coates has trouble truly grasping or acknowledging the
enormity of that day, maybe he should think of it as the Tulsa race riot —
except on a larger scale, and with a military and geopolitical component.
As for civilian casualties, Coates further intoned, “And
I think at a certain point we have to just stop and say, ‘They believe it.’
They believe it. They believe bombs should be dropped on children. They just
think it’s okay. They think it’s okay, or at the very least they think it’s the
price of doing business.”
Of course, the only one who affirmatively wants bombs
dropped on children in this situation is Hamas. There’s a reason that it places
its military operations and matériel in the most sensitive civilian sites, and
a reason it has been trying to prevent civilians from fleeing the fighting. It
wants civilian casualties for propaganda purposes — they give the likes of
Ta-Nehisi Coates yet more reason to denounce Israel.
This actually isn’t complicated, and it isn’t a secret.
You can listen to the leader of Hamas openly discuss the usefulness of the blood of innocents.
Finally, Coates hit African-American politicians who are
supportive of Israel. He wondered how anyone “could see what is happening right
now, could see the bombs being dropped, 9,000 people dead, an ungodly number of
them children, in service of Jim Crow and segregation, which we have exported,
and be okay with that.”
This makes it sound as if in the existential struggle
between Israel and Hamas, it is Israel that is the force for intolerance. (Has
Coates, with his commitment to nonviolence and multiracial democracy, ever
mused about why it is that Arab countries have vanishingly few Jews living in
them?)
And one wonders how we allegedly exported Jim Crow. Did
we eliminate it here, but conclude that it would be just the right system for
Israel? And both Republican and Democratic administrations pursued this policy
while hiding it from the American public and, presumably, their own state
departments?
This is childish drivel.
As a high priest of woke progressivism, Coates was never
going to be anything other than a fierce critic of Israel and useful idiot for
Hamas. He is a particularly instructive instance, though, of trying to take the
Left’s racial categories here at home and apply them to a conflict with its own
fraught dynamics established long ago with no reference whatsoever to America’s
racial history.
“It’s actually not that hard to understand,” Coates
maintained of the Israeli–Palestinian dispute. “It’s actually quite familiar to
those of us with a familiarity [with] African-American history.”
If Coates has accomplished anything, it is demonstrating
that this is wholly and indisputably false.
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