Ta-Nehisi Coates shakes up Palestine debate in America

You may wish to see Ta-Nehisi Coates strictly as he is seen by his cohorts in the world of literati — a public intellectual, a political commentator and author of several much lauded books, including Between the World and Me (2015), which won the National book Award, one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the world.

I, for one, prefer to see him, in addition to that, as the 49-year-old African American virtuosic stylist whose clear-eyed expositions on being Black in America follows in the tell-it-like-it-is tradition of Fredrick Douglas and James Baldwin.

Still, Coates is not a one-issue social critic. His work has engaged with the disparities that exist between the Global North and the less fortunate Global South; with the pieces that colonialism left for African nations to pick up after it took its final bow as a predatory power in the 1950s; and now, in his recently released book, The Message, with the surrealistic havoc that defines the world that Palestinians inhabit today in their occupied homeland.

To be sure, The Message (which Coates finished writing before the Gaza War) is a collection of essays that includes a letter to his writing students at Howard University, the historically Black research university here in Washington; a travelogue in Senegal, once a site for the slave trade; and a meditation on how the power of literature can change the world.

Two-tier apartheid system

But it was the last half of The Message, the core of the book, that attracted attention, controversy and heated debate — the 10-day trip that Coates took last year to Palestine, where he saw for himself the degradations an occupied people are subjected to by their occupiers, degradations he equated to the Jim Crow conditions that Black folks once — not in the too distant past — had had to endure in the Deep South.

Still, Coates’ essay is more a polemical meditation on than a journalistic narrative of the conditions under which Palestinians live, and here, yes, he does indeed tell it like it is, angrily calling out early Zionists’ views of a “barbaric Palestine plagued by filth and chaos” — an evocation, one imagines, of the claim by Theodore Herzl in his book, A Jewish State (1896) that “We shall there [in Palestine] a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism” — and the two-tier apartheid system imposed on the occupied territories, where during his time there he found himself wandering into a park named after none other than fascist zealot Meir Kahane.

This not a review of The Message but a review of how in the discourse on the Palestine Question in America today is shifting considerably, with pro-Israel commentators progressively losing their long-held ownership of the narrative.

Consider this telling and, as it panned out, exceedingly controversial interview — which has made news in and by itself and since airing earlier this month has been viewed many millions of times on streaming websites — between Coates and “CBS Mornings” anchor Tony Dokoupil.

And here’s the first question, off the bat, asked by the interviewer of his guest in a how-dare-you-criticise-Israel tone of voice: “I have to say that when I read your book [I found] the content of that section [on Palestine] would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist”

Coates replied that there is no shortage of views similar to his in the media.

Then Dokoupil wondered, a touch patronisingly, why a “talented author” like Coates would “leave out so much”, such as “the fact”, as he put it, that “Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it [and] leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it”.

And so it went with the hectoring questions, to which Coates found himself having to respond to by asking his own questions of Dkoupli — about which more later.

To their credit, CBS executives — along with multiple correspondents and producers, who felt that Dokoupil betrayed bias toward his guest — said the interview with the acclaimed author did not meet the network’s editorial standards.

Subjugating people based on race

Then the anchor came under fire also from media folks outside the network, notably from the Washington Post columnist Karen Attiyeh, the Texas-born daughter of Nigerian immigrants, who wrote in her column on Tuesday, “The problem with Dokopouli’s questions was not that they were tough. No, the really tough questions were posed by Coates, who asked why there are no Palestinian voices in the upper ranks of the American media; who asked why (Dokoupli) recognised a superstructure similar To Jim Crow in Israel’s treatment of Palestinians; who asked why we should accept policies subjugating people based on race and ethnicity ... And Dokoupli’s ‘backpack of an extremist’ jab at Coates was most troubling”.

It was troubling, wrote Attieh, because “When the idea of humanising Palestinians is recast as a form of extremism or as a threat to Western civilisation, we are in dangerous territory. Dokouplis’s implied message is that merely questioning the condition of Palestinians might be a rationale for censure — or much worse”.

The ‘much worse” here, we all know, refers to how criticising Israel in the US has been for a long time cause to have you stigmatised as an anti-Semite, a label now so repeated to the point of litany, and with such robotic mindlessness, that it no longer retains any meaning.

I see l’affair Ta-nehisi Coates as a window into the shifts that are transforming the public discourse on the Palestine Question — in the past shifts that transformed at an unendurably slow pace, and today, during the saga of human suffering in Gaza, at a gallop.

About time.

— Fawaz Turki is a noted academic, journalist and author based in Washington DC. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile