The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The separate and unequal nature of Israeli rule is both intense and omnipresent—something I saw directly. The roads and highways we traveled were marked off for license plates of different colors—yellow, used mostly by those who are Jewish, and white with green lettering, used almost entirely by those who are not. As we drove these roads along the West Bank, our guide pointed out settlements—a word that I had always taken to refer to rugged camps staked out in the desert but in fact the settlements are more akin to American subdivisions, distinguished from the villages of the Palestinians by homes with large red roofs, as surely as a white picket fence denoted the suburbs of twentieth-century America and not its teeming cities.