As one would expect with an intellectual of his stature, the celebrated author Ta-Nehisi Coates has caused waves with his new book, The Message, which includes a large section on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Coates spent 10 days traveling around both Israel and the Palestinian Territories in the West Bank, yet the weight of his own perspective ultimately gave him an inaccurate lens through which to view the conflict. Coates sees Israel’s treatment of Palestinians today as analogous to the injustices suffered by African Americans in the U.S. But the truth about the conflict is much more complex, and America’s racist past simply does not map neatly onto the Middle East.
In his interview with Ezra Klein for The New York Times, Coates says that his understanding of the conflict growing up amounted to “the Israelis are doing something bad to the Palestinians, and the Palestinians are basically the Blacks in that situation, that’s a rough translation of it.” Yet his current view doesn’t seem to have emerged from this flawed analogy. While it is true that Palestinians have suffered immensely, there is also a history of enslavement, displacement, and segregation on the other side. Two millennia ago, the Jewish state of Judea was conquered by the Romans. Jews were expelled from the land, enslaved, and forced into exile, and over the centuries, Jews lived under various degrees of segregation in North Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.
It is from this history rather than any analogy to white supremacy that Zionism emerged: An oppressed people whose ancestors had been displaced and mistreated for millennia wanted to return to the land their ancestors had inhabited thousands of years previously and reclaim their self determination.
Of course, Palestinian Arabs have their own sense of identity and belonging. My ancestors did not want their home to be repopulated by another group of people, and this led to the development of Palestinian nationalism, setting up the conflict that burns til today.
Anyone looking at the situation through an accurate understanding history should be able to arrive at the conclusion that there is much to sympathize with on both sides. This conflict has been an utter disaster for Palestinians, including for my own family. We should all be able to recognize that innocent Palestinians do not deserve to die from Israeli bombs, and innocent Israelis do not deserve to be kidnapped or killed by Hamas or suicide bombers. Both Israelis and Palestinians deserve to live normal, peaceful lives.
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The real question is how do we achieve that. And the answer can never be through terrorism. This is something many Palestinians understand.
Unfortunately, Coates gives too much sympathy to the view that violence is somehow legitimate. In an interview with Trevor Noah, Coates acknowledges the horror of Hamas’s October 7 massacre, yet he then equivocates about whether, if he were Palestinian, he would have thought that the mob went too far. He compares the attack to Nat Turner’s slave rebellion.
Here’s where the analogy breaks down: Nat Turner’s slave rebellion was the result of humans being subjugated in the extreme, who had been reduced to property as chattel slaves. Whatever suffering there was in Gaza prior to October 7, it’s just not the same as that. Palestinian leaders, especially Hamas, also had agency in how bad things have gotten, both in Gaza and in the West Bank.
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and the blockade Israel imposed started after Hamas used Gaza as a base for attacks on Israel. The West Bank barrier was built during the Second Intifada as a consequence of the Israelis’ desire to prevent suicide bombings. Constant rocket fire from Gaza and Lebanon has been a reality for Israelis since Hamas and Hezbollah took control of those areas.
This is not a civil rights struggle akin to 1960s America or apartheid South Africa. It’s a fully-blown military conflict between two separate nationhoods. At some point, war became inevitable when Hamas continued to use Gaza as a launching pad for attacks. Ignoring this won’t help anyone. Hamas and Hezbollah do not want to coexist with Israel; they want to destroy it.
Unlike Coates’ hypothetical Palestinian version of himself, millions of actual Palestinians living in Palestine are certain that Hamas went too far. In the most recent polls of Palestinians, like this one by AWRAD published in September, support for Hamas has fallen dramatically—to just 6 percent of the population. Indeed, the same poll shows that 62 percent of Gazans now favor a two-state solution.
Gazans understand that Hamas and October 7 have totally failed them. It’s something of a tragedy that the Palestinians most impacted by Israel’s war have more intolerance for violence than Coates.
The October 7 massacre did nothing to help Palestinians achieve self-determination; it only deepened the conflict and worsened conditions for ordinary Palestinians. And if you give Hamas a fully-independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, they will simply use it as an opportunity to launch the next war.
We have to be clear that that is the wrong path. The only people who are qualified to lead a Palestinian state are the ones who want to peacefully coexist along with Israel—not jihadists dreaming of conquest and plunder. We need a peaceful, optimistic, futuristic vision, not a mediaeval diorama of inter-ethnic conflict.
That is the means by which we can return to a serious peace process. The Oslo process was derailed by extremists on both sides—including both Hamas and the extremist right-wing Israeli settlers who killed Yitzhak Rabin, but it remains the most viable model.
To return to the abandoned peace process, we need to recognize that oversimplifying the conflict and placing all the blame on the more powerful side is not an intellectually serious approach and ignores the fundamental issues that continue to perpetuate the conflict.
I believe Ta-Nehisi Coates is an empathetic and thoughtful person who truly believes that everyone is equal and believes both Israelis and Palestinian are deserving of life—and a good life. But he has fundamentally misunderstood the Middle East. Just blaming Israel for everything is not going to get the future he says he wants.
I wish he could learn to see the conflict as so many of my fellow Palestinians do one year after a horrific and devastating war. Violence will never be the answer.
John Aziz is a British-Palestinian musician, peace activist, and analyst of Middle East politics and history.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
