The Electronic Intifada 4 April 2025
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates, One World (2024)
“Either apartheid is right or wrong. It’s really, really simple,” the Black writer Ta-Nehisi Coates replied to a CBS Morning Show anchor.
One of the presenters had just admonished Coates for not acknowledging in his newly published book The Message that Israel’s occupation and the system of apartheid imposed on Palestinians was a “complicated” issue.
The previous day a review of The Message in The New York Times raised the same objection, saying that Coates was “suggesting that ‘factual complexity’ is simply so much noise.”
The “It’s Complicated” narrative is a familiar one to Palestine solidarity activists who encounter it routinely. Although they generally recognize it for the ruse it is, it’s still very commonly used by Zionists. So Coates’ rejoinder that “it’s really, really simple” is a welcome one – and so is The Message itself.
Coates is a best-selling, award-winning journalist and essayist who received the National Book Award in 2015 for Between the World and Me, written as a letter to his son about his experiences growing up Black in the systemically racist United States. Many of his books consist of articles originally written when he was a longtime staff writer at The Atlantic magazine (which has never been known as an objective source on Palestine) until he left that position in 2018.
Coates is now a full professor who teaches writing at Howard University in Washington, D.C. The Message begins as a letter to students who took part in a summer writing workshop in 2022. He describes the three essays in his book as his promised writing assignment. And although each essay concerns separate journeys – one to Senegal, another to South Carolina, and a third to Palestine – his title seems to imply that there is a singular message to convey.
Discomfort
In the essay on the Senegal journey, Coates explores his African heritage, his father’s participation in the Black Panther Party in his youth, and the disconnect he sometimes feels as an African American traveling in Africa.
The trip to South Carolina stems from a request by a public school teacher who was forced to drop Between the World and Me from her lesson plan because supervisors claimed it made some of her students “feel uncomfortable.”
He travels there to give support to teachers, students and parents fighting a state budget prohibition that is drawn nearly word for word from President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 13950. Issued in 2020, the order prohibits the teaching of critical race theory or any “divisive concepts” that might provoke discomfort or guilt.
But the bulk of The Message is Coates’ account of a 10-day trip to Israel and the West Bank, half of it spent with other writers, editors and artists from various parts of the world invited by the Palestine Festival of Literature.
His tours of Jerusalem and Hebron, his encounters with checkpoints, his growing awareness of the legal distinctions between Jews and Palestinians, the pervasive separate and unequal nature of Israel’s apartheid, all remind him of the Jim Crow South that his parents were born into.
But when he learns about the control Israel exercises over water distribution, he realizes that Israel has taken the inequality one step further than segregated Jim Crow water fountains. Israel owns the water itself.
Then a remarkable passage occurs in The Message in the form of an apology to his writing workshop. While at The Atlantic, Coates wrote an article titled “The Case for Reparations,” in which he invoked Germany’s payments to Israel as an example of reparations like those still owed Black Americans for the centuries of slavery and semi-slavery.
He tells his students: “It hurts to tell you this. It hurts to know that in my own writing I have done to people that which, in this writing, I have inveighed against – that I have reduced people, diminished people, erased people. I want to tell you I was wrong. I want to tell you that your oppression will not save you, that being a victim will not enlighten you, that it can as easily deceive you.”
The glare of racism
Germany’s reparations were made to a state, not to a people, he notes. Living in “a world of white editors and white writers” at The Atlantic, Coates says he sought to reach for an analogy that might touch people who had trouble understanding the “truth and gravity of the debt of white supremacy.” And yet even as he went ahead with the argument, “I had then a vague notion of Israel as a country that was doing something deeply unfair to the Palestinian people.”
He concludes: “But my prototype was not reparations from a genocidal empire to its Jewish victims, but from that empire to a Jewish state. And what my young eyes now saw of that state was a world where separate and unequal was alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others was policy. I was seeking a world beyond plunder – but my proof of concept was just more plunder.”
Coates does not confine his outrage to conditions in the occupied territories alone but sees the apartheid within Israel as well, with its “admission committees” for housing and its openly racist appeals in electioneering. “Jewish democracy,” he writes, “means what it says – a democracy for the Jewish people and the Jewish people alone.”
But beyond the surface and obvious components of Israeli apartheid, Coates probes deeper and embraces the concept of Empire articulated by Palestinian intellectual Edward Said in his classic study Orientalism and its exposure of the “benign or altruistic empires.” That launches him into a discourse on the attributes of colonial empires and the common racist thread that runs through them all.
Returning to his hotel in Jerusalem where he is confronted by a security guard, he reaches the conclusion, “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel.”
Coates asks at the end of The Message: What accounts for “the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality” so apparent in the mainstream Western media’s justification of its coverage? It’s not so much to obfuscate, he concludes, as it is “to forge a story of Palestine told solely by the colonizer.”
It’s actually really simple.
Rod Such is a writer and activist based in Portland, Oregon.
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