The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

I knew here, in this moment, how I would have fallen in the hierarchy of power if I had told that Black soldier that I was a Muslim. And on that street so far from home, I suddenly felt that I had traveled through time as much as through space.

For as sure as my ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man, Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jew...

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.

Throughout the West Bank, I saw cisterns used to harvest rainwater. These cisterns were almost certainly illegal—the Israeli state’s hold on the West Bank includes control of the aquifers in the ground and the rainwater that falls from above. Any structure designed for gathering water requires a permit from the occupying power, and such permits are rarely given to Palestinians.

Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself.

It is a precarious life. At the same time, there is a strong will to stay and keep working. There are communities whose villages are destroyed eighty times and they come back. It becomes part of how you live. It’s a mode of survival. This is how you live on the land. We will keep going back, building the things they keep destroying.

That its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn’t trust the evidence of one’s eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.

This putative “Jewish democracy” is, like its American patron, an expansionist power. Zionism demands, as Levi Eshkol, prime minister of Israel during the 1960s, once put it, “the dowry, not the bride”—that is to say, the land without the Palestinians on it. And every expansionist power needs a good story to justify its plunder.

My readers have a general idea of the history of colonization in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonization being carried on with the consent of the native population.

It’s worth lingering on Jabotinsky’s invocation of “colonization.” Modern Zionists recoil in horror at any association between their own ideology and colonialism. They claim “the Land of Israel” as their homeland, and from there assert that no people can colonize their own home.

This formulation evinces, at best, a deep ignorance of the history of Israel’s patron state. In 1816, a group of white elites decided that, in the matter of Black people, eth...

When I was young, I felt the physical weight of race constantly. We had less. Our lives were more violent. And whether by genes, culture, or divine judgment, this was said to be our fault. The only tool to escape this damnation—for a lucky few—was school. Later I went out into the world and saw the other side, those who allegedly, by genes, culture, or divine judgment, had more but—as I came to understand—knew less. These people, white people, were living under a lie. More, they were, in some profound way, suffering for the lie. They had seen more of the world than I had—but not more of humanity itself. Most stunningly, I realized that they were deeply ignorant of their own country’s history, and thus they had no intimate sense of how far their country could fall. A system of supremacy justifies itself through illusion, so that those moments when the illusion can no longer hold always come as a great shock. The Trump years amazed a certain kind of white person; they had no reference for national vulgarity, for such broad corruption and venality, until it was too late. The least reflective of them say, “This is not America.” But some of them suspect that it is America, and there is great pain in understanding that, without your consent, you are complicit in a great crime, in learning that the whole game was rigged in your favor, that there are nations within your nation who have spent all of their collective lives in the Trump years. The pain is in the discovery of your own...

The “Middle East” is the insanity of suicide bombings, the backwardness of a woman peeking out from her niqab. “Democracy” is a flag over Iwo Jima, Washington crossing the Delaware, a working man rising in a town meeting. Overlay the two phrases and a collage emerges—a visual representation of Herzl’s dream of “an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” And this collage is a technology, as functional as any other: Who can judge democratic Israel, which must exist in “that part of the world” where child brides, chemical weapons, and bin Laden reign?

The earnestness of it all made it hard to stay angry. These people were sincere. I thought back to my conversation with Avner and Guy and how hard it is to truly acknowledge your place in a system whose actions indict your conscience. But now, seeing the shape of my travels these past couple of years, I think of Josiah Nott, of D. W. Griffith, of all the literature assembled to hide the truth of an oppressive class from itself, to assure itself that it is indeed right with the universe.

Before the establishment of the Israeli state, Palestinians owned 90 percent of all land in Mandatory Palestine. Most of this land was seized and incorporated into Israel. “From 1948 to 1953, the five years following the establishment of the state, 350 (out of a total of 370) new Jewish settlements were built on land owned by Palestinians,” writes Noura Erakat in her book Justice for Some.

I now understood what Nasser meant by a “tourist center dedicated to biblical times.” And I recognized the fragile triumphalism here, the desperate need to assert royal lineage and great ancestral deeds. And I could not help but wonder if this triumphalism was born out of refutation—out of a need to prove that one’s people are not “animals” who have “ruined every country they ever entered.” I’d seen it all my life in the invocations of great kingdoms and ancient empires—a search for provenance and noble roots. It was the oddest thing—the conqueror still conquered by Niggerology. And now Zionism had moved into a dark third act wherein noble roots must yield noble privilege.

There was something insecure about that chimera too, about whoever had engineered it. To construct what amounts to a wall of devouring, you must be really afraid of something. Maybe that’s what happens when annihilation is no longer speculative but a fact of national and personal history. That’s the easy answer. The more disturbing one is that this wall represented nothing new, that it was no more spectacular than the rituals of lynching, that the mob too was insecure, that its rituals too spoke to white men’s violent impotence. And oddly enough, I had the same feeling as I left the City of David—that I was in the presence of a violent impotence. It all felt so fake. And beholding the redemption of Eretz Israel, the ostensible homecoming of an ancient people, announced in 3D projection and accessed via zip line, I could not escape the feeling of being in the presence of a poorly wrought fairy tale and an enormous con.

the prime purpose of any “settler organization” was to push Palestinians out and to move Jewish Israelis in.

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 ...

to be Palestinian is to be more than a victim of Zionism. And there’s something else.

defines the crime of apartheid as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.”

As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.

Morris described Palestinians as “barbarians who want to take our lives.” There was but one way to constrain the threat: “Something like a cage has to be built for them…. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another.” Pushed to reflect on the fate of those to be “locked up,” Morris could barely muster a shrug. Instead, Morris approvingly invoked a genocide. “Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians.”