Coates is back and wants the world to know it, for he is filled once again with moral righteousness. His cause this time? The elimination of the Jewish state.
Elvis was a hero to most
But he never meant sh** to me
Straight up racist that sucker was
Simple and plain— Chuck D., “Fight the Power”
Ta-Nehisi Coates never meant a thing to me, for the simple reason that I missed his heyday. I was just an observer sitting in the stands back during the Obama era, and thus was under zero professional obligation to pretend he was “America’s most important essayist,” or anything other than an obsequiously overpraised writer of middling observational talent whose revealed politics ranged from obnoxious to poisonous. The poisonous aspect of his political character, apparent long ago, has finally resurfaced once again.
It is in fact presently something of a bitter, retrospective joke across the journalistic industry that Coates — long before George Floyd, mind you — was slavishly elevated to the dais as America’s most blazingly relevant political commentator, and not out of merit so much as what hardheaded Marxist Freddie de Boer accurately labels the Left’s fetish for “deference politics.” Coates was there at the right time with the right profile employing the right buzzwords with the right amount of craft; his literary deification was thus a symbolic act of token appreciation to salve elite egos, and to his credit Coates himself seemed to grow uncomfortably aware of it over time.
So he dropped out of it all, Chappelle-style, and became a writer of comic books. You didn’t read them, I didn’t read them, a bunch of people made fun of them on Twitter, and they didn’t sell. But I honestly respected his decision to simply leave it all behind at a certain point and do what amused him instead; one assumes he made enough money off of his Obama-era memoirs to live comfortably doing what pleased him, and whether it’s writing preachy woke comic books or (what I hope was) an attempt at young adult fiction for that matter, then more power to Coates. It seemed like a healthy and self-aware reaction to overpraise. (You made your money, might as well enjoy it. I’d buy a bunch of out-of-print history books, myself.)
Alas, Coates is back and wants the world to know it, for he is filled once again with a moral righteousness the likes of which he has not felt since the days when speaking fees in the post–George Floyd era began to crater. His urgent cause, according to New York magazine, which just profiled him for the unveiling of his newest book? You guessed it: The elimination of the Jewish state.
You see, Ta-Nehisi Coates spent a few weeks in Israel last year before and during the October 7 massacres, and figured this entire situation out. In particular, he concluded that Israel is the true enemy and Palestinians the true collective victim in the only great moral battle of our times. The first inklings of his views were evident on October 14, 2023, when — mere days after the massacre by Hamas — Coates headed up the list of signatories on an open letter condemning Israel for, in essence, bringing the slaughter upon themselves, one which strongly implied that all of Israel was properly Palestinian territory.
Now in his New York profile he is transparent: “Does industrialized genocide entitle one to a state? No.” Israel is illegitimate; the idea of a Jewish state is inimical to proper woke conceptions of justice and must be ended to return it to the terrorists who wish to butcher or enslave its current Jewish inhabitants to the last man. Not even the author of the profile is entirely convinced, if this attempt at praising Coates’s upcoming tract is anything to go on:
The book is strongest when its aperture is narrow. There is no mention of the fact that Israel is bombarded by terrorist groups set on the state’s annihilation. There is no discussion of the intifadas and the failed negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders going back decades. There is even no mention of Gaza because Coates was unable to visit the region after the October 7 attack and he did not want to report on a place he hadn’t seen for himself. (“People were like, ‘Gaza is so much worse,’” he told me. “‘So much worse.’”) What there is, instead, is a picture of the intolerable cruelty and utter desperation that could lead to an October 7.
Yes, it’s certainly interesting to muse idly upon what could lead to an October 7, is it not? Meanwhile, here in the real world, what did lead to October 7 was Hamas, under direct supervision of Iran, having directed all aid money toward a devastating terrorist offensive rather than to bettering the lives of its own citizens in Gaza. Morally, it’s certainly easier to write about the victims you wish existed, rather than the aggressors that actually do, but Coates’s journey to the dark is as contemptible as it is predictable.
It’s predictable because I remember what Coates wrote (and was praised for writing) back in 2015, in his reputation-making memoir Between the World and Me, about his reaction to 9/11.
I could see no difference between the officer who killed Prince Jones [a friend in Prince George’s county shot by a corrupt cop] and the police who died, or the firefighters who died. They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were the menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.
It’s been nearly a decade since that book was published, and I well remember how almost every mainstream critic treated the 9/11 sections of Coates’s book, oohing and aahing over the bracing psychological revelations of that paragraph without for even a second stepping back to assess what exactly was revealed about Coates’s mindset. To him, one bad cop in Prince George’s County morally canceled any humane response to police and firefighters rushing to their deaths heroically in the Twin Towers. His explicit inclusion of firefighters in his bleak moral equation is the true tell for how monstrously unbalanced his core settings are: Guiltless as they are in the “enslavement of black bodies,” they nevertheless represent Authority and thus don’t even rate as body-count on his moral scales.
Ta-Nehisi Coates doesn’t need refuting in his newfound fervent anti-Zionism. If anything, he perhaps needs explaining. I would advise you not to ask why he has moved from race essentialism to anti-Zionist fervor. Instead, ask yourself why it took you this long to understand that he starts from the framework he applies, a simple victim–wrongdoer worldview learned from childhood. That clumsy heuristic deranges his moral judgment. But then I find it less interesting how a certain well-defined personality type ends up an anti-Zionist than to ponder the empirical reality that so many find their way there. To me, nothing about Coates’s moral journey from pre-Floyd race-philosopher to anti-Israel eliminationist is surprising at all; rather, the journey ended exactly where I would have expected. What stands between the world and him is his own warped perception of it.