The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

I understood that this space had a story that was not inert or ancient; it was alive, and it was being used to promote what I could now see as a slow but constant ethnic cleanse. Everywhere I went that week, in the Occupied Territories, in East Jerusalem, in Haifa, and in the stories told by Palestinians and even by Israelis, I felt that the state had one message to the Palestinians within its borders. The message was: “You’d really be better off somewhere else.” Sometimes, the message was conveyed brutally, as when Nasser and his family were driven out of their home. But here in Jerusalem, the tactics were more subtle. The City of David simply made it extremely uncomfortable for Palestinians to be here. I thought back to my visit to Columbia, South Carolina, and all the monuments to the enslavers and advocates of Jim Crow. I thought of how the Confederate flag had once flown over the State House. I thought of the kind of people who came to see those monuments, who thought the flag to be important. And then I imagined the state that ruled over me and my family importing all of that to my very front door. And what I was seeing here seemed about as credible as the history behind those Confederate memorials. The City of David employed a sheen of ancient provenance and archaeological science, but it was still unclear to me whether this had ever been a city or had ever been ruled by a king named David. “Is this the City of David?” I asked Alon. “It is an Iron Age city from two ...