I suspect only someone ignorant of the history of Israel and only an erroneous understanding based on Zionist propaganda would view this as a masterful rebuttal. the whole premise of his rebuttal is that a conquering colonizing occupying force is morally justified to use ethnic cleansing and genocide as retaliation and defense against violent resistance by native factions. which is a strategy and argument of every expansionist sith lord throughout history and the future in the universe.
After a reasonable amount of time, I would love to see this article made available to unpaid subscribers or the general public. As you have pointed out, the Message will undoubtedly be the main source of information for many on Israel/Palestine and wider circulation of this article would be helpful. Thanks for writing Coleman!
Thank you, Coleman, from this Jewish Zionist, for taking the time and energy to sensitively and methodically address and refute Coates’ egregious retelling of the Israel-Palestine story. My people and homeland need more voices like yours in this conversation.
I suspect more voices like Coates appearing as people learn more about the history of Zionism. the mythological history and story that the the apartheid state of israel tells about itself will become more and more diluted by the truth.
Why is it that every politicized topic I follow (climate, gender, race) has activist representatives that must admonish - in detail - the nation of Israel?
It is this common behavior that reveals a truth which does not require semantic analysis: their positions on topics in their focus area AND on Israel are a steaming pile of horseshit.
well it could be that israel is receiving the most financial aid of any other country by far and it's relatively a small population and they think that maintaining the defense of a genocidal apartheid pseudo ethno state is not a good use of tax money and could be better used on whatever causes they are activists for. ever thought of that?
I explain in very thorough detail why the state of Israel should be admonished here:
I believe that there is a category of highly intelligent sociopaths which understands that a leadership role over the losing side of a perpetual struggle is an extremely stable and favorable position for those who inhabit it. The assumption of such a position requires that the sociopath actively subvert the best interests of the entity that they represent because growth and progress would engender judgement based upon results, whereas perpetual struggle against a restrained but far more powerful opponent requires only the appearance of steadfastness. Such leaders are the bitterest enemy of oppressed peoples.
I don’t mind Ta-Nehisi Coates, but I feel like his thinking hasn’t had the chance to evolve. In the West, as we’ve moved away from Christianity, there’s been a trend toward creating a simplistic morality, reducing New Testament teachings like "the meek shall inherit the earth" to "weak people are good, strong people are bad."
At one point, I had a similar perspective, but our backgrounds differ, which led my views to change. Coates, a Black American descended from slaves, may feel the need to construct an ancestral narrative, which might explain his support for ideas like the "Black Egypt" argument. However, you can look at Egyptian genetics and see that modern Egyptians are descendants of ancient Egyptians. In contrast, I come from a Ghanaian family, where my parents and grandparents taught me our history, which I’ve also read extensively. I'm Asante, from the Asante Empire, which traces its roots to the Bonoman state, likely descended from the Ghana Empire (in present-day Mali or Mauritania). There’s no need to believe West Africans descended from Egyptians when there’s so much pride to take in West African empires like the Ghana Empire, Mali Empire, Takrur, and others.
I wonder if Coates grapples with the fact that the Asante King, along with others like those in Dahomey and Kongo, were complicit in the slave trade. Europeans couldn’t penetrate the interior of Africa due to diseases like sleeping sickness and malaria until they developed remedies in the 1800s. They relied on African kingdoms to obtain slaves. Even after the slave trade ended, the Asantehene (Asante King) tried to bribe British representatives with gold and prostitutes to revive the trade. These kingdoms sought European weapons to expand their power.
Understanding this complexity reveals that history isn’t as simple as "strong equals bad, weak equals good." Unfortunately, I feel Coates may never explore these nuances. It’s a shame because, while he’s a talented writer, his worldview remains factually flawed, giving him a narrow sense of moral clarity.
It also seems that he doubts Jews are native to the land of Judea, but he could easily read Roman historians like Tacitus, who in Histories refers to Judea as a province where Jews lived. Suetonius also mentions Jews and their expulsion from Rome. Archaeological evidence, such as coins and inscriptions, further supports this. For example, the Pontius Pilate inscription explicitly names Pilate as the prefect of Judea under Emperor Tiberius, confirming Roman governance in the region before it was renamed Syria-Palestina.
Well if you read the Torah, it's clear that the land was conquered through genocide. they were invaders. in the Torah israel is established through ethnic cleansing.according to their own mythology the people of israel were not native to Judea any more than Europeans are natives of north America. the fact that "Jews" lived in "Judea" sometime in history is as relevant to nativity as the fact that Christians live in Michigan or that Americans live in America.
I go into great detail about Jewish racial mythology and its irrelevance to their territorial claims here:
Activism has become a major racket. The ultimate form is the perpetual resistance against the oppressor, in which the leadership prospers at the direct expense of their followers.
If living well is the best revenge, the Arabs of Palestine are miserable failures at it.
Despite the rhetoric of genocide, now coming from both directions, neither side has made a serious attempt since the ‘70s. 7 October was a classic barbarian raid, with all the traditional atrocities. It had no purpose beyond distracting the people of Gaza from their squalor while Hamas leadership grew fat.
Presumably Hamas leadership didn’t expect to be hunted down.
A systematic starvation of an entire population and destroying most of a civilian infrastructure while making biblical genocidal references to genocide by political leaders and soldiers is not a serious attempt at genocide? Historically recognized genocides by the U.S. and international courts of the past would disagree with your perspective. The death count is likely to be comparable to that of the Darfur genocide.
There were plenty of Arabs living well in Palestine before the genocide began. Arab Christians for example were mostly minding their own business living simple lives in the way they could in an occupied territory of their *oppressors* before the IDF started indiscriminately dropping US bombs on them and sniping at their grandmas with US bullets. The Christian Arabs were not seeking any kind of revenge in their life paths that I’m aware. But they were attacked out of vengeance by the IDF for what Hamas did.
Best piece of read in months. Pure intellectual three-dimensional chess of a rarefied order. Were Coates to attempt refutation in any particular direction, he would be check-mated only moments later by his own strange world of analogy.
I did particularly enjoy “like a Korean claiming India”.
My big question is “why?”
Why does Coates waste his talent on demonizing Israel?
“I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel”
Maybe Coates doesn't like his tax money misused to fund genocide and ethnic cleansing by an expansionist pseudo ethnic religious apartheid state. Maybe his justice compass isn't totally broken. I agree with Coleman about affirmative action but his defense of genocide is deplorable. let's just hope ignorance is simply the explanation.
I haven't read "The Message", but what I have read is Toby Wilkinson's "The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt" and I find Coates' idealization of the pharaohs extremely strange.
Ancient Egypt was a highly totalitarian society where, so Wilkinson, "[t]he relationship between pharaoh and the population was based on coercion and fear". Wilkinson mentions North Korea as the most similar political entity in all of history (since both states funnel such a large amount of resources to the leader while completely disregarding the wellbeing of the regular population).
But what really baffles me is that Coates doesn't seem to care (more likely: doesn't know) about Ancient Egypt's centuries of oppression, colonization, and exploitation of Nubia.
The Nubians, in modern Sudan, had the misfortune of living in an area of large gold deposits, which made them a target of Egyptian military force and occupation. Ancient Egypt was also highly xenophobic. There are even some artifacts comparing Nubians to monkeys.
(And, interestingly, this long period of suppression led the Nubians to idealize the stronger Egyptian culture and model it in their own customs. The Nubian pyramids are, in my opinion, more beautiful than the original Egyptians ones. Later, when the New Kingdom collapsed after a Libyan invasion (forcing Egypt to withdraw from Nubia and giving them time to build up their institutions), the rulers of Nubia became such hardliners when it came to Egyptian religion and culture that they staged a military intervention to return Egypt to its traditional ways.)
I'm not sure why Coates doesn't know this, given that it's his job is to be knowledgable about ancient African empires. And I'm also a bit confused why he tries to identify with an ancient totalitarian regime of white people who brutally occupied and exploited their black southern neighbours.
The most likely explanation is that Coates' thinking on this is not based on historical fact at all. That he just randomly picked the pharaohs as an example of ancient African leaders because they were cool and powerful.
But in doing this, he implicitly demands a certain charity that he himself is unwilling to offer to others.
I haven’t read Coates’ book, so I’m unable to question any of your points about it. I am unhappy that your historical paintbrush in the early paragraphs is so broad and so wrong. Even in the half-millennium right before European conquests and colonization began, their success in those activities was not rooted in ‘the rule of law,’ etc. It depended instead on their near-constant history of armed conflict and rapid development of military technologies. The conquerors in the Americas and Africa didn’t win with lawyers, they won with guns. All the way through today, armed people from lawless Yemen would run right through the unarmed people in law-abiding Costa Rica should the former appear on the latter’s beaches.
Which makes me think there’s an important element in Coates’ argument that you’re not acknowledging: irrespective of the ancient or recent history, Israel right now, today, sustains itself almost exclusively through military force and action and appears to have largely abandoned persuasion and moral force as the means to achieve its purported ends. That’s a snapshot analysis, as Coates’ maybe is too, but as long as Netanyahu benefits from keeping the nation on a war footing, it seems likely to be true.
Thank you Coleman for that brilliant rebuttal based in facts. Coates is deeply irresponsible for peddling a narrative that is not only inaccurate but fueling more hate.
The hate being fueled seems to be greater toward him than anything else. Although maybe you’re right that he probably is fueling hate toward apartheid and genocide, which I’d count as a good thing. It comes with loving justice.
It is quite sad for me to see such a promising young spirit who has expressed such eloquent arguments against racial tribalism take such a sympathetic stance toward a pseudo ethnic religious state's military policies, which includes ethnic cleansing and genocide.
"If America were a tiny country surrounded by annihilationist terror groups attacking us with constant rocket fire (and much worse), we would take hard-line security measures, too. Our citizens would demand it. Being fair to the Israeli side requires grappling with that ongoing reality—something Coates is uninterested in. "
Hamas, the terror group that was responsible for October seventh, was cultivated by the Israeli state itself. And we have recorded video of benjamin Netanyahu claiming that he purposely attempted to undermine the peace process. If America responded to a terror group that it cultivated by carrying out a genocide in attempt to ethnically cleanse a territory that it has actively been avoiding trying to make peace with, Id hope that most americans would vigorously protest it. the Israeli government's desire to annex more land, including Gaza and the west bank, has been reported on extensively. Since we are talking about what americans would do-how do you think americans would respond if china took over the united states and pushed most inhabitants to canadian wilderness and set up a system of laws that privileged a pseudo racial religion over *everyone* else and then began establishing settlements and established military control in canada as well-even selling property in canada to religionists in china? It sounds like you are suggesting that americans would be morally obliged to just accept it and any security measures would be justified by the conquerors.
"If Israel intended to commit genocide against the Palestinians, they could have done so decades ago. Instead, the opposite trend has occurred: The Palestinian population has multiplied many times over. If Israel, with all of its power, had genocidal intent, why would they allow such a population boom to occur?"
The Darfur genocide never reached the proportions of those genocides conducted in world war 2. A genocide needn't destroy an entire population and a population can still grow. Your statement is incongruent with the history of recognized genocides. Systematically starving an entire population while the prime minister, other politicians, and soldiers make genocidal references from a religious text should be sufficient evidence of genocide for anyone who does not have enormous bigotry toward that population or toxic blinkered loyalty to the offending actors. What has happened after October seventh to Gaza is sufficient to meet the criteria of genocide both in intent and act. Bringing up palestinian population increases over the past few decades is irrelevant. It's such an astonishingly bad point to make for someone of your intellectual caliber that I can only surmise that you are allowing your hate *or love* to blind you.
One obvious reason why israel wouldn't just entirely exterminate the Gazan population like it did to various Canaan populations in its mythical literature is because the world is watching it this time. Torturing the population and devastating the population while sometimes dropping warning leaflets to move to bomb drop zones clearly gives more space for people like yourself to propagandize on behalf of israel. israel still needs the support of the united states and if it made absolutely no effort to cover up its intent you wouldn't be able or willing to sell it like you are. Regardless it's still tough though since its soldiers are tiktoking their atrocities live and political and civil leaders are frothing at their mouths openly fantasizing about property in gaza and telling the world that the people of gaza should leave. Your loyal lack of imagination is probably both appreciated and expected though.
"One wonders if Coates is curious why, for example, the Houthis of Yemen—a country that ethnically-cleansed its Jewish community, which predated Christianity or Islam, after the creation of the Jewish state—has as its motto: “Allah is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.”
Yes the united states should not not fund or arm Yemen and its genocidal Islamic state or Israel and its genocidal Judaic state. Right? Since you dislike double standards so much. I cannot tell from what you've written here what sort of policies you think the united states should have towards the genocidal expansionist Jewish state. I can only glean that you believe Israel has the right to carry out genocide and ethnic cleansing, just like it did in the Tanakh, to fulfill its religious fantasies of territorial dominion of Canaan, particularly today if it's deceptively sold as self-defense. Ancient mythological Jews, like Joshua, who Benjamin Netanyahu glorified at the commencement of his genocide, had the luxury to commit their genocides without any obfuscation and claiming the mandate of heaven. Israel wisely has learned it must be way more politically astute than Yemen if it wants to keep any popular loyalty of Americans for it's apartheid pseudo ethno religious state that explicitly has laws that give more rights to Jews than non Jews even in its non occupied territories(eg in the nation state laws and various property laws).
Fortunately for Israel most americans have been effectively conditioned to be terrified of being accused of antisemitism, which can be delivered for any amount of irreverence toward a Jew, Judaism, Zionism, or Israel, even if there's no evidence that the person being plausibly slandered even believes that the Jewish mythical race imagined by nazis and zionists exists. The belief in a Jewish race is so prevalent in american society even ostensibly non Jewish secular atheists are found to believe in the imaginary race. It's peculiar. Its like if Richard Dawkins believed in adam and eve. And it seems these days many of the same people who have been very adamant about how frivolous accusations of racism should be stopped, particularly toward "white" people for racism towards "black" people, are now quite trigger happy about accusing people of racism towards Jews for any disparagement of anything related to Judaism, a religious tribe like Christianity or Islam or Buddhism. People who have built careers disparaging islam as a political terror or Christianity as idiotic and insisting on the necessity of distinguishing between a person's race, religion, and politics now first assume any disparagement of judaism, Zionism or israel are fundamentally driven by racism. in fact congress is trying to pass legislation to make the spirit of that a legal axiom and undermine the first amendment. But those people who would be outraged by any legislation that tried to criminalize criticism of islam or Christianity often seem to be more likely troubled by things like Ta-Nehisi Coates' fondness for pharaohs or his opinion that Israel, a religious state established through ethnic cleansing named after a slave state in the Tanakh that was supposedly established through genocide and ethnic cleansing, is an apartheid state carrying out a genocide in the same territory that it did in the myth. Some peculiar priorities.
Benjamin Netanyahu:
"I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction."
Please stop helping him try to move America in the wrong direction. I hope you are redeemable.
Thank you Coleman for this masterful rebuttal of Coates and his magical mystery version of Israel.
I suspect only someone ignorant of the history of Israel and only an erroneous understanding based on Zionist propaganda would view this as a masterful rebuttal. the whole premise of his rebuttal is that a conquering colonizing occupying force is morally justified to use ethnic cleansing and genocide as retaliation and defense against violent resistance by native factions. which is a strategy and argument of every expansionist sith lord throughout history and the future in the universe.
My take:
https://minorityreport.substack.com/p/the-children-of-amalek
After a reasonable amount of time, I would love to see this article made available to unpaid subscribers or the general public. As you have pointed out, the Message will undoubtedly be the main source of information for many on Israel/Palestine and wider circulation of this article would be helpful. Thanks for writing Coleman!
Seconded.
Coates has a rare talent of expressing his hate in very poetic yet devoid of truth language. There is nothing else, good or bad I can add to it.
Thank you, Coleman, from this Jewish Zionist, for taking the time and energy to sensitively and methodically address and refute Coates’ egregious retelling of the Israel-Palestine story. My people and homeland need more voices like yours in this conversation.
I suspect more voices like Coates appearing as people learn more about the history of Zionism. the mythological history and story that the the apartheid state of israel tells about itself will become more and more diluted by the truth.
Why is it that every politicized topic I follow (climate, gender, race) has activist representatives that must admonish - in detail - the nation of Israel?
It is this common behavior that reveals a truth which does not require semantic analysis: their positions on topics in their focus area AND on Israel are a steaming pile of horseshit.
well it could be that israel is receiving the most financial aid of any other country by far and it's relatively a small population and they think that maintaining the defense of a genocidal apartheid pseudo ethno state is not a good use of tax money and could be better used on whatever causes they are activists for. ever thought of that?
I explain in very thorough detail why the state of Israel should be admonished here:
https://minorityreport.substack.com/p/the-children-of-amalek
I believe that there is a category of highly intelligent sociopaths which understands that a leadership role over the losing side of a perpetual struggle is an extremely stable and favorable position for those who inhabit it. The assumption of such a position requires that the sociopath actively subvert the best interests of the entity that they represent because growth and progress would engender judgement based upon results, whereas perpetual struggle against a restrained but far more powerful opponent requires only the appearance of steadfastness. Such leaders are the bitterest enemy of oppressed peoples.
Who are you saying is such a sociopath in this case? Coates or some other person/people?
I don’t mind Ta-Nehisi Coates, but I feel like his thinking hasn’t had the chance to evolve. In the West, as we’ve moved away from Christianity, there’s been a trend toward creating a simplistic morality, reducing New Testament teachings like "the meek shall inherit the earth" to "weak people are good, strong people are bad."
At one point, I had a similar perspective, but our backgrounds differ, which led my views to change. Coates, a Black American descended from slaves, may feel the need to construct an ancestral narrative, which might explain his support for ideas like the "Black Egypt" argument. However, you can look at Egyptian genetics and see that modern Egyptians are descendants of ancient Egyptians. In contrast, I come from a Ghanaian family, where my parents and grandparents taught me our history, which I’ve also read extensively. I'm Asante, from the Asante Empire, which traces its roots to the Bonoman state, likely descended from the Ghana Empire (in present-day Mali or Mauritania). There’s no need to believe West Africans descended from Egyptians when there’s so much pride to take in West African empires like the Ghana Empire, Mali Empire, Takrur, and others.
I wonder if Coates grapples with the fact that the Asante King, along with others like those in Dahomey and Kongo, were complicit in the slave trade. Europeans couldn’t penetrate the interior of Africa due to diseases like sleeping sickness and malaria until they developed remedies in the 1800s. They relied on African kingdoms to obtain slaves. Even after the slave trade ended, the Asantehene (Asante King) tried to bribe British representatives with gold and prostitutes to revive the trade. These kingdoms sought European weapons to expand their power.
Understanding this complexity reveals that history isn’t as simple as "strong equals bad, weak equals good." Unfortunately, I feel Coates may never explore these nuances. It’s a shame because, while he’s a talented writer, his worldview remains factually flawed, giving him a narrow sense of moral clarity.
It also seems that he doubts Jews are native to the land of Judea, but he could easily read Roman historians like Tacitus, who in Histories refers to Judea as a province where Jews lived. Suetonius also mentions Jews and their expulsion from Rome. Archaeological evidence, such as coins and inscriptions, further supports this. For example, the Pontius Pilate inscription explicitly names Pilate as the prefect of Judea under Emperor Tiberius, confirming Roman governance in the region before it was renamed Syria-Palestina.
Well if you read the Torah, it's clear that the land was conquered through genocide. they were invaders. in the Torah israel is established through ethnic cleansing.according to their own mythology the people of israel were not native to Judea any more than Europeans are natives of north America. the fact that "Jews" lived in "Judea" sometime in history is as relevant to nativity as the fact that Christians live in Michigan or that Americans live in America.
I go into great detail about Jewish racial mythology and its irrelevance to their territorial claims here:
https://minorityreport.substack.com/p/the-children-of-amalek
Activism has become a major racket. The ultimate form is the perpetual resistance against the oppressor, in which the leadership prospers at the direct expense of their followers.
people shouldn't resist oppressors? let me guess you like the character yahweh?
If living well is the best revenge, the Arabs of Palestine are miserable failures at it.
Despite the rhetoric of genocide, now coming from both directions, neither side has made a serious attempt since the ‘70s. 7 October was a classic barbarian raid, with all the traditional atrocities. It had no purpose beyond distracting the people of Gaza from their squalor while Hamas leadership grew fat.
Presumably Hamas leadership didn’t expect to be hunted down.
A systematic starvation of an entire population and destroying most of a civilian infrastructure while making biblical genocidal references to genocide by political leaders and soldiers is not a serious attempt at genocide? Historically recognized genocides by the U.S. and international courts of the past would disagree with your perspective. The death count is likely to be comparable to that of the Darfur genocide.
There were plenty of Arabs living well in Palestine before the genocide began. Arab Christians for example were mostly minding their own business living simple lives in the way they could in an occupied territory of their *oppressors* before the IDF started indiscriminately dropping US bombs on them and sniping at their grandmas with US bullets. The Christian Arabs were not seeking any kind of revenge in their life paths that I’m aware. But they were attacked out of vengeance by the IDF for what Hamas did.
Best piece of read in months. Pure intellectual three-dimensional chess of a rarefied order. Were Coates to attempt refutation in any particular direction, he would be check-mated only moments later by his own strange world of analogy.
I did particularly enjoy “like a Korean claiming India”.
My big question is “why?”
Why does Coates waste his talent on demonizing Israel?
“I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel”
He certainly doesn’t get out much.
Thanks again.
Maybe Coates doesn't like his tax money misused to fund genocide and ethnic cleansing by an expansionist pseudo ethnic religious apartheid state. Maybe his justice compass isn't totally broken. I agree with Coleman about affirmative action but his defense of genocide is deplorable. let's just hope ignorance is simply the explanation.
I haven't read "The Message", but what I have read is Toby Wilkinson's "The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt" and I find Coates' idealization of the pharaohs extremely strange.
Ancient Egypt was a highly totalitarian society where, so Wilkinson, "[t]he relationship between pharaoh and the population was based on coercion and fear". Wilkinson mentions North Korea as the most similar political entity in all of history (since both states funnel such a large amount of resources to the leader while completely disregarding the wellbeing of the regular population).
But what really baffles me is that Coates doesn't seem to care (more likely: doesn't know) about Ancient Egypt's centuries of oppression, colonization, and exploitation of Nubia.
The Nubians, in modern Sudan, had the misfortune of living in an area of large gold deposits, which made them a target of Egyptian military force and occupation. Ancient Egypt was also highly xenophobic. There are even some artifacts comparing Nubians to monkeys.
(And, interestingly, this long period of suppression led the Nubians to idealize the stronger Egyptian culture and model it in their own customs. The Nubian pyramids are, in my opinion, more beautiful than the original Egyptians ones. Later, when the New Kingdom collapsed after a Libyan invasion (forcing Egypt to withdraw from Nubia and giving them time to build up their institutions), the rulers of Nubia became such hardliners when it came to Egyptian religion and culture that they staged a military intervention to return Egypt to its traditional ways.)
I'm not sure why Coates doesn't know this, given that it's his job is to be knowledgable about ancient African empires. And I'm also a bit confused why he tries to identify with an ancient totalitarian regime of white people who brutally occupied and exploited their black southern neighbours.
The most likely explanation is that Coates' thinking on this is not based on historical fact at all. That he just randomly picked the pharaohs as an example of ancient African leaders because they were cool and powerful.
But in doing this, he implicitly demands a certain charity that he himself is unwilling to offer to others.
I haven’t read Coates’ book, so I’m unable to question any of your points about it. I am unhappy that your historical paintbrush in the early paragraphs is so broad and so wrong. Even in the half-millennium right before European conquests and colonization began, their success in those activities was not rooted in ‘the rule of law,’ etc. It depended instead on their near-constant history of armed conflict and rapid development of military technologies. The conquerors in the Americas and Africa didn’t win with lawyers, they won with guns. All the way through today, armed people from lawless Yemen would run right through the unarmed people in law-abiding Costa Rica should the former appear on the latter’s beaches.
Which makes me think there’s an important element in Coates’ argument that you’re not acknowledging: irrespective of the ancient or recent history, Israel right now, today, sustains itself almost exclusively through military force and action and appears to have largely abandoned persuasion and moral force as the means to achieve its purported ends. That’s a snapshot analysis, as Coates’ maybe is too, but as long as Netanyahu benefits from keeping the nation on a war footing, it seems likely to be true.
Thank you Coleman for that brilliant rebuttal based in facts. Coates is deeply irresponsible for peddling a narrative that is not only inaccurate but fueling more hate.
The hate being fueled seems to be greater toward him than anything else. Although maybe you’re right that he probably is fueling hate toward apartheid and genocide, which I’d count as a good thing. It comes with loving justice.
It is quite sad for me to see such a promising young spirit who has expressed such eloquent arguments against racial tribalism take such a sympathetic stance toward a pseudo ethnic religious state's military policies, which includes ethnic cleansing and genocide.
"If America were a tiny country surrounded by annihilationist terror groups attacking us with constant rocket fire (and much worse), we would take hard-line security measures, too. Our citizens would demand it. Being fair to the Israeli side requires grappling with that ongoing reality—something Coates is uninterested in. "
Hamas, the terror group that was responsible for October seventh, was cultivated by the Israeli state itself. And we have recorded video of benjamin Netanyahu claiming that he purposely attempted to undermine the peace process. If America responded to a terror group that it cultivated by carrying out a genocide in attempt to ethnically cleanse a territory that it has actively been avoiding trying to make peace with, Id hope that most americans would vigorously protest it. the Israeli government's desire to annex more land, including Gaza and the west bank, has been reported on extensively. Since we are talking about what americans would do-how do you think americans would respond if china took over the united states and pushed most inhabitants to canadian wilderness and set up a system of laws that privileged a pseudo racial religion over *everyone* else and then began establishing settlements and established military control in canada as well-even selling property in canada to religionists in china? It sounds like you are suggesting that americans would be morally obliged to just accept it and any security measures would be justified by the conquerors.
"If Israel intended to commit genocide against the Palestinians, they could have done so decades ago. Instead, the opposite trend has occurred: The Palestinian population has multiplied many times over. If Israel, with all of its power, had genocidal intent, why would they allow such a population boom to occur?"
The Darfur genocide never reached the proportions of those genocides conducted in world war 2. A genocide needn't destroy an entire population and a population can still grow. Your statement is incongruent with the history of recognized genocides. Systematically starving an entire population while the prime minister, other politicians, and soldiers make genocidal references from a religious text should be sufficient evidence of genocide for anyone who does not have enormous bigotry toward that population or toxic blinkered loyalty to the offending actors. What has happened after October seventh to Gaza is sufficient to meet the criteria of genocide both in intent and act. Bringing up palestinian population increases over the past few decades is irrelevant. It's such an astonishingly bad point to make for someone of your intellectual caliber that I can only surmise that you are allowing your hate *or love* to blind you.
One obvious reason why israel wouldn't just entirely exterminate the Gazan population like it did to various Canaan populations in its mythical literature is because the world is watching it this time. Torturing the population and devastating the population while sometimes dropping warning leaflets to move to bomb drop zones clearly gives more space for people like yourself to propagandize on behalf of israel. israel still needs the support of the united states and if it made absolutely no effort to cover up its intent you wouldn't be able or willing to sell it like you are. Regardless it's still tough though since its soldiers are tiktoking their atrocities live and political and civil leaders are frothing at their mouths openly fantasizing about property in gaza and telling the world that the people of gaza should leave. Your loyal lack of imagination is probably both appreciated and expected though.
"One wonders if Coates is curious why, for example, the Houthis of Yemen—a country that ethnically-cleansed its Jewish community, which predated Christianity or Islam, after the creation of the Jewish state—has as its motto: “Allah is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.”
Yes the united states should not not fund or arm Yemen and its genocidal Islamic state or Israel and its genocidal Judaic state. Right? Since you dislike double standards so much. I cannot tell from what you've written here what sort of policies you think the united states should have towards the genocidal expansionist Jewish state. I can only glean that you believe Israel has the right to carry out genocide and ethnic cleansing, just like it did in the Tanakh, to fulfill its religious fantasies of territorial dominion of Canaan, particularly today if it's deceptively sold as self-defense. Ancient mythological Jews, like Joshua, who Benjamin Netanyahu glorified at the commencement of his genocide, had the luxury to commit their genocides without any obfuscation and claiming the mandate of heaven. Israel wisely has learned it must be way more politically astute than Yemen if it wants to keep any popular loyalty of Americans for it's apartheid pseudo ethno religious state that explicitly has laws that give more rights to Jews than non Jews even in its non occupied territories(eg in the nation state laws and various property laws).
Fortunately for Israel most americans have been effectively conditioned to be terrified of being accused of antisemitism, which can be delivered for any amount of irreverence toward a Jew, Judaism, Zionism, or Israel, even if there's no evidence that the person being plausibly slandered even believes that the Jewish mythical race imagined by nazis and zionists exists. The belief in a Jewish race is so prevalent in american society even ostensibly non Jewish secular atheists are found to believe in the imaginary race. It's peculiar. Its like if Richard Dawkins believed in adam and eve. And it seems these days many of the same people who have been very adamant about how frivolous accusations of racism should be stopped, particularly toward "white" people for racism towards "black" people, are now quite trigger happy about accusing people of racism towards Jews for any disparagement of anything related to Judaism, a religious tribe like Christianity or Islam or Buddhism. People who have built careers disparaging islam as a political terror or Christianity as idiotic and insisting on the necessity of distinguishing between a person's race, religion, and politics now first assume any disparagement of judaism, Zionism or israel are fundamentally driven by racism. in fact congress is trying to pass legislation to make the spirit of that a legal axiom and undermine the first amendment. But those people who would be outraged by any legislation that tried to criminalize criticism of islam or Christianity often seem to be more likely troubled by things like Ta-Nehisi Coates' fondness for pharaohs or his opinion that Israel, a religious state established through ethnic cleansing named after a slave state in the Tanakh that was supposedly established through genocide and ethnic cleansing, is an apartheid state carrying out a genocide in the same territory that it did in the myth. Some peculiar priorities.
Benjamin Netanyahu:
"I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction."
Please stop helping him try to move America in the wrong direction. I hope you are redeemable.