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David Harsanyi
Washington Examiner, Oct. 1, 2024
“Coates is less a one-note thinker than a toddler banging on a snare drum with a mallet.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates begins the Israeli-Palestinian section of his new book, The Message, with a visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. The excursion, taken on the last day of his 10-day junket to the Palestine Festival of Literature, isn’t meant to elicit sympathy for the Jewish people or offer context about the founding of Israel. Rather, it is a literary device used to accuse the Israelis of becoming the thing they most revile. You see the irony, of course. It’s like unfurling one of those Israeli flags with a swastika painted on it — but in swirling prose.
Indeed, The Message may well be the most beautifully crafted blood libel ever published. Each turn of phrase oozes with a loathing of the Jewish state. As with his previous work, history is a poetic truth in which white people are innately and inexorably evil — the Jew perhaps most of all.
Coates, in fact, severs the Holocaust from Jewish history, as if this is within his power, noting that he sees “Yad Vashem at a distance from Israel itself” because of “echoes to white supremacy, colonial roots, its apartheid policies.” Even a casual student of history knows this rendering of Zionism is absurdly juvenile. But it is his telling of the Palestinian plight that is criminally misleading.
The Palestinians of The Message are uncannily peaceful, yearning to write poetry and plow the “sacred land” beneath their feet. Nowhere in his book, not once, does Coates bother mentioning “Hamas” despite writing it right after one of the largest massacres of Jews in history. Nowhere in his polemic about the Palestinian struggle does Coates type the words “Palestinian Liberation Organization” or “PLO” or “Fatah,” much less “Hezbollah” or “Iran.” “Yasser Arafat” wasn’t important enough to make an appearance.… [To read the full article, click here]