New York: Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Ready to Take on Israel and the American Media

The cover of New York magazine says, "The return of Ta-Nehisi Coates," although we sadly never noticed he'd gone away. He's back, though, and as the magazine says, he's ready to take on Israel, Palestine, and the American media. We're super curious to hear his stand on Israel and Hamas.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s writing on race fueled a reckoning in America. Now he wants to change the way we think about Israel and Palestine.

Read our new cover story now: https://t.co/oMU9ZAXoBx pic.twitter.com/9iKLYTAjWo
— New York Magazine (@NYMag) September 23, 2024

Coates traveled to the region on a ten-day trip in the summer of 2023 and was told the situation there was complicated:

… For Coates, the parallels with the Jim Crow South were obvious and immediate: Here, he writes, 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.” And this world was made possible by his own country: “The pushing of Palestinians out of their homes had the specific imprimatur of the United States of America. Which means that it had my imprimatur.”

That it was complicated, he now understood, was “horseshit.” “Complicated” was how people had described slavery and then segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”
How could he have been so wrong before? The fault lay partly with the profession he loved. In journalism, he had found his voice, his platform, his purpose in life. And yet, as he sees it, it was journalistic institutions that had not only failed to tell the truth about Israel and Palestine but had worked to conceal it. As a result, a fog had settled over the region, over its history and present, obscuring what anyone at closer range could apprehend easily with their own two eyes.

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.

So October 7 was the Jews' fault.

Their true colors never fail to shine through.
— Cat Master (@CatMaster81) September 23, 2024

Coates' racism is why I cancelled my Atlantic Monthly subscription after many years. Marxism has parasitized so much of legacy journalism, feeding off it's hard-earned success until it collapses in bankruptcy, as it does with all institutions and societies, as we're experiencing.
— john kevin swint (@johnkevinswint) September 23, 2024

He’s the white liberal’s (mostly women) favorite intellectual “of color.” I know of what I speak based on certain family members. Quoting this guy is guaranteed entrance into the cool leftian kids club.
— Col Bat Guano (@RealColBatGuano) September 23, 2024

I was forced to read his book in undergrad.

Academia is a joke, but not as big of a joke as this grifter.
— Mr. Sarcastic Logic (@Sarcasm_n_logic) September 23, 2024