The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has gotten far more attention than he deserves for his new book, “The Message,” which contains a blistering condemnation of Israel. The response from Israel’s defenders has been equally and deservedly blistering.
The heart of their criticism is pretty simple: Coates doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He visited Israel for 10 days on a literary junket run by critics of Israel and returned to write, by his own account, a one-sided, wholly impressionistic indictment of the country.
When I say by his own account, I mean it. Coates insists that he wants to tell the story of the victims — the oppressed Palestinians — not of their Israeli oppressors. That’s why he doesn’t mention the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks or really discuss terrorism or history at all.
Indeed, he has declared that complexity itself is to be rejected in favor of black-and-white morality, Israel being the bad guys and the Palestinians the good guys. According to Coates, the very idea the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “complicated” is a way of shielding Israel from the condemnation it deserves. He says the idea is ” horsesh—.”
And here is where I largely agree with him: The problem Israel faces isn’t morally complicated at all. It might have been on Oct. 6, 2023. But after Oct. 7, things got simple.