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Ta-Nehisi Coates's ‘The Message’: Educating Americans about the reality of Israel
Summary
As Donald Trump returns to the White House, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book. ‘The Message’, offers an urgent and anguished message for the US
A decade ago, in June 2014, The Atlantic published The Case for Reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s much-lauded essay about housing and financial discrimination against African Americans. During an event organised by the magazine at a Washington DC synagogue afterwards, a woman in the audience asked Coates a question about the essay: he had mentioned reparations paid by Germany to Israel after the Holocaust as a potential model for America, but what about the Palestinians whose oppression at the hands of Israel was ongoing (and moreover, aided and abetted by the US)? This encounter was the starting point of Coates’s latest book of essays, The Message. In a recent interview to the New York Magazine, the author admitted that the question about Palestine had bothered him and he “should have done better".
With this book he does, in fact, do better. This carefully structured triptych of essays culminates in The Gigantic Dream, Coates’s 70-page account of his trip to Palestine and Israel in May 2023. Blending reportage with elements of historiography, and on occasion, autobiography, the author makes a compelling case for Israel as a modern-day “Jim Crow" state, rooted in colonial occupation and apartheid-like laws. This conclusion doesn’t arrive in a vacuum; the connective tissue of the book is the theme of cathartic, discomfiting travels.
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In the opening essay, a visit to Dakar brings meditations on Coates’s Senegalese ancestors and the spectre of “Niggerology", a 19th-century strain of pseudo-historic literature deployed to justify slavery. The middle essay is set in South Carolina, where Coates meets a teacher who is fighting against a politically motivated ban on his 2015 book Between the World and Me. Along the way, Coates is subjected to increasingly elaborate American Civil War recreations mythologising the Confederate army (not to mention dozens of Confederate-soldier statues staring at him).
“It was not just the conscience of the enslaver that had to be soothed but multiple consciences beyond his: the slave drivers and slave breakers, slave hunters and slave ship captains, lords and congressmen, kings and queens, priests, presidents, and everyday people with no real love for the slave but with human eyes and human ears nonetheless," Coates writes in the first essay, describing the writings of 19th century “Niggerologist" Josiah Nott. “For such a grand system, a grand theory had to be crafted and an array of warrants produced, all of them rooted in a simple assertion of fact: The African was barely human at all." Nott’s writing was aimed at “cleansing Ancient Egypt of any taint of Blackness", claiming that Black people in Egypt had only ever been captives and/or slaves, that the notion of a Black Pharaoh was laughable.
If you replace “African" with “Arab" at the end, the paragraph cited works for 20th century propagandist works like Leon Uris’ novel Exodus (1958), a heavily fictionalised depiction of the foundation of Israel. Exodus presents Coates with the perfect opportunity to depict US and Israel’s collaboration in the political and cultural demonising of Palestine—in the resultant Hollywood movie, released in 1960, the chiselled all-American hero Paul Newman is chased by a horde of barbaric, “savage" Arabs.
Like many autodidacts, Coates is an excellent teacher, methodical and thorough with a diverse array of cultural analyses (Shakespeare, Toni Morrison, the MC/rapper Rakim), punctuating every chapter, informing every argument. These essays are addressed to his creative writing students at Howard University, providing a genteel narratorial effect not unlike his second book Between the World and Me, which was addressed to his teenaged son.
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The chosen structure also serves a more obvious purpose—to educate Americans about the reality of Israel from a place of professorial authority. Coates demonstrates how the US media and ruling class have been guilty “of the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality". It’s not just about lies and historical distortions, it’s also about the systematic suppression of Palestinian voices in mainstream literature and journalism.
If you’ve read Palestinian writers Adania Shibli or Najwan Darwish, Coates’s descriptions of Israeli checkpoints, anti-Palestinian laws and relentless, murderous raids by IDF soldiers will come across as trodden ground. This is where The Message’s America-centrism becomes a weakness. To an extent, this can be excused because Coates is primarily trying to reach apathetic, propaganda-guzzling US readers, and because he is candid enough to admit this in the book’s concluding passages, asserting that Palestinians deserve to be known by “stories woven by their own hands".
Take this passage where Coates is describing being stopped at a checkpoint for no reason by an Israeli soldier. A frustrating interrogation ensues, where the author is asked about his faith: “If this had happened in America, I would have told you that the soldier who stopped me was Black, and I guess he was here too. In fact, there were ‘Black’ soldiers everywhere lording their power over the Palestinians, many of whom would, in America, have been seen as ‘white’. Again I felt the mental lens curving against the light and was reminded of something I have long known, something I’ve written and spoken about, but still was stunned to see here in such stark detail: that race is a species of power and nothing else. And I knew here, in this moment, how I would have fallen in the hierarchy of power if I had told that Black soldier that I was a Muslim."
These are multi-modal observations about power structures, not merely individual acts of injustice. When Coates is comparing Israel and the US, he isn’t placing Israelis as “white" and Palestinians as “Black"—the paragraph’s opening lines make that abundantly clear. This isn’t an analytical frame with one-to-one correspondence; it is a comparison tailored to a specific audience. It’s a subtle move and there’s no way Coates could have sprung all this on American readers without first laying down the theoretical parallels between America’s Jim Crow era (when the Southern US had laws to segregate and limit freedom of Black people) and Israel in the preceding essays.
Less than a month after 11 September 2001, Susan Sontag called the World Trade Center attacks a “consequence of specific American alliances and actions" in The New Yorker. At the time, she was heavily criticised, even derided by a wide range of American publications. Today this episode is remembered as an example of fearless truth-telling. Something similar is happening with Coates right now. Wide swathes of nominally liberal US media is hopping mad because he has shown them the mirror—during a recent, super-hostile CBS interview with Coates, anchor Tony Dokoupil equated the book to “something found in a terrorist’s backpack". In time though, The Message will be remembered as a masterpiece, an anguished literary condemnation of an ongoing crime against humanity.
Aditya Mani Jha is a writer based in Delhi.
