As Coates’ book hits shelves, it is sure to spark further debate and discussion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as the role of public intellectuals in shaping public opinion on such contentious issues. With his powerful prose and provocative analysis, Coates is sure to continue to be a leading voice in conversations about race, identity, and justice, both in the United States and around the world.
For more information about “The Message” and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ work, be sure to check out the book and follow Coates on social media for updates and insights into his writing process and thoughts on current events.
Among the places he visited were Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, which is revered by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary; the West Bank city of Hebron, where Israeli troops guard a small enclave of Jewish settlers and restrict Palestinian movement; the Palestinian villages in the surrounding area; Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum; and cities including Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Ramallah.
Coates has spoken repeatedly about the ideas he seeks to advance in the book, including the parallel between Israel’s West Bank occupation and segregation in the United States, and his earlier perception that the conflict was too complex to understand.
“I thought I was going to another country, but in fact what amazed me was I actually felt that I was in the same country, but I was in a different time,” Coates said at a Nov. 1, 2023, event in New York City sponsored by Palfest. “I was in the time of my parents and my grandparents.”
He added that the conflict had been “made to sound as though you need a degree in Middle Eastern studies or somesuch, a PhD, to really understand what’s happening. But I understood the first day.”
“The Message” follows 2015’s “Between the World and Me,” which explored American racism and the Black experience, and his landmark 2014 article, “The Case for Reparations,” which elevated arguments for reparations for slavery to the forefront of the national conversation. In that article, Coates favorably cites reparations paid to Israel in the wake of the Holocaust, but now says that criticism of that comparison led, years later, to this book.
In interviews, Coates has questioned the justification for Israel’s establishment in the wake of the Holocaust. “Does industrialized genocide entitle one to a state? No,” he told New York magazine. At the November 2023 event, he said Israeli Jews “take the wrong lesson” from their own history of persecution.
And in the blog post that functions as a bibliography for the essay, he sketches out what he calls a “frightful” scenario: “The emancipated enslaves; the oppressed colonizes; the vanquished ethnically cleanses; a people survive a genocide only to perpetrate another.”
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