By Alex Welz
Friday, October 11, 2024
Ta-Nehisi Coates resumed his media tour on the Ezra
Klein Show on Friday in promotion of his most recent book, which aims to
tackle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (after just a ten-day trip to the
region by the author) and has captured national attention.
Coates was rather dismissive in confronting the routine
acts of Palestinian violence faced by Israelis. To him, it seems no level of
terror could ever justify a systematic response.
“I don’t know man, when you start dropping bombs . . . on
the people that are caged in, I don’t care what their leadership did,” Coates
told Klein.
Well, that’s the problem. Few challenge that the Gazans
live under abhorrent conditions. But like most things, the complexity begins
with asking the question: Why?
Peace overtures throughout the 1990s were met with
routine suicide-bomb attacks inside Israel. The unilateral disengagement of
every Israeli from the Gaza Strip in 2005 was similarly met with the democratic
election of an Islamist mafia we now know as Hamas. The current multifront war,
of course, began with Hamas’s October 7 atrocities.
Coates argued that Palestinian violence doesn’t justify
Israel’s administration of the West Bank. But shaking your finger at the Jewish
state for simply trying to preserve its existence is less than convincing,
especially when you don’t want to explore why the Israelis fight back in the
first place.
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