I kind of had Coates pegged as the quintessential Obama-Era liberal consensus thinker. But he’s spitting on Israel in this article
This time, he lays forth the case that the Israeli occupation is a moral crime, one that has been all but covered up by the West. He writes, “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel
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.”
“All states at their core have a reason for existing — a moral story to tell,” he told me. “We certainly do. Does industrialized genocide entitle one to a state? No.” Especially, he said, at the expense of people who had no hand in the genocide.
On the ground in the occupied territories, he saw the segregated roads, the soldiers with their American-made weapons, the surveillance cameras, and the whole archipelago of impoverished ghettos. “I felt a mix of astonishment, betrayal, and anger,” he writes. “The astonishment was for me — for my own ignorance, for my own incuriosity … The betrayal was for my colleagues in journalism — betrayal for the way they reported, for the way they’d laundered ethnic cleansing, for the voices they’d erased. And the anger was for my own past — for Black Bottom, for Rosewood, for Tulsa — which I could not help but feel being evoked here.”
One of his first encounters with the Israeli state is a soldier stopping him on the street to ask him his religion, a confusing question for an atheist. It becomes clear that if he does not give the correct answer — “Jew,” “Christian,” anything but “Muslim” — he will not be allowed to pass. “On that street so far from home,” he writes, “I suddenly felt that I had traveled through time as much as through space. For as sure as my ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man, Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere.”
In Coates’s eyes, the ghost of Jim Crow is everywhere in the territories. In the soldiers who “stand there and steal our time, the sun glinting off their shades like Georgia sheriffs.” In the water sequestered for Israeli use — evidence that the state had “advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself.”
In the book, he writes of the pain he observed in two of his Israeli companions: “They were raised under the story that the Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had been confronted with an incredible truth — that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing.”
“The fact of the matter is,” he said, “that kid up at Columbia, whatever dumb shit they’re saying, whatever slogan I would not say that they would use, they are more morally correct than some motherfuckers that have won Pulitzer Prizes and National Magazine Awards and are the most decorated and powerful journalists.”
“What I suspect,” he told me, “is that American media in general thinks of itself as separate from the ends and goals of American power. And I don’t think that’s true.”
What “dumb shit” are protesters saying if he sees the truth of Israel’s crimes? ‘Palestine will be free’?? He confuses me and I find it hard to trust him even if he is correct in a lot of ways, I don’t know many details of things he’s said though.
The generous reading would be, the worst hot take of any Columbia protester is nothing compared to the whitewashing of genocide the mainstream media with a much louder megaphone are doing.
There were people at protests I attended that used genuinely antisemitic language. I don’t know if they were personally antisemitic, but they have always been taught that Israel=Jews, and not Israel=Zionists. I’m not trying to say it is excusable, but an emotional young person lacking nuance and a deeper understanding of issues is nothing new.
Liberals always have to believe themselves the smartest people in the room. That is the central pillar of their ego.
They can admit to being morally wrong and doing an evil thing, but they can never admit to be intellectually incorrect and stupid. He’s come up with a way to be superior to the evil Zionists AND the stupid protesters. The true Liberal perfect position.
My reading is that he means stuff like “Globalize the Intifada” which he, a liberal, thinks are basically correct but unnecessarily inflammatory
I like how he starts out with anger that everything he believed was a lie and all his colleagues are full of shit and then ends it with the conclusion “but optics! Let me give advice when I just admitted I didn’t have any idea what I was talking about just minutes ago”