The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

And I thought how it all works not simply to misinform but to miseducate; not just to assure the right answers are memorized but that the wrong questions are never asked.

The statues and pageantry can fool you. They look like symbols of wars long settled, fought on behalf of men long dead. But their Redemption is not about honoring a past. It’s about killing a future.

Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere.

Jewish Israelis in Jerusalem are citizens of the state; Palestinians in the city are merely “permanent residents,” a kind of sub-citizenship with a reduced set of rights and privileges.

Any structure designed for gathering water requires a permit from the occupying power, and such permits are rarely given to Palestinians.

who leads Breaking the Silence, a group of former IDF soldiers who now oppose the occupation.

monitoring a criterion for humanity. Without this criterion, there can be no oppressive power, because the first duty of racism, sexism, homophobia, and so forth is the framing of who is human and who is not. But

Meir Kahane, the Jewish supremacist who as leader of the Kahanist movement (and a member of the Knesset) promoted the permanent annexation of the West Bank and Gaza and the enslavement of Palestinians.

Kahane’s name in which he and his mass-murdering acolyte were memorialized, a park that rested in a settlement sanctioned and subsidized by the state that claims to denounce him.

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.

We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.

They claim “the Land of Israel” as their homeland, and from there assert that no people can colonize their own home.

The early Zionists might have considered the land of Palestine as their rightful homeland, but they never imagined themselves as “natives.”

This narrative of a barbaric Palestine plagued by filth and chaos, as contrasted with an ostensibly pristine and orderly West, has never faded.

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.

is upon these ideals that the American republic was founded, and the

unbreakable bond between the United States and Israel was formed.”

In search of the pool, the City of David, along with the Israeli government, seized and destroyed the orchard of a Palestinian family. Evidence