The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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. In Hebron, Jewish settlers are subject to civil law, with all its rights and protections, while stateless Palestinians in the same city are subject to military courts, with all their summary power and skepticism.

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.

On seeing these cisterns, it occurred to me that Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself. And more, it occurred to me that there was still one place on the planet—under American patronage—that resembled the world that my parents were born into.

I know there are writers who can imagine a world from nothing. But I’m not one of them. The sense of beauty I was seeking had to emerge from knowledge.

As I wrote, I could feel it flowing through me—all the study of language, all the reading, all the reporting—all of it coming together in what felt to me like a dissertation with an audience of one.

and Germany’s efforts to pay off its own inconceivable debt by making reparations to the state of Israel.

I felt my deep ignorance of the world beyond America’s borders and, with that, a deep shame.

in 1967, Zalatimo too was driven out by Israeli forces. He and his family were banned from returning, except for day visits. Zalatimo died in 2001.

Sahar explained that these militiamen come as the feeling strikes them, vandalizing the land they believe to be their homeland, given to them by God.

There are communities whose villages are destroyed eighty times and they come back. It becomes part of how you live.

I thought back to our tour of Lydd, a city inside the borders of Israel where in 1948 the nascent Israeli Defense Forces massacred a group of Palestinians by, among other means, tossing grenades into a mosque.

Nevertheless, Umar presented a threat—the threat of the storyteller who can, through words, erode the claims of the powerful.

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.

In this sense, the case was not even mine; it was ancestral. And its target was one of the world’s most malevolent inventions—racialized slavery and everything that flowed from it.

And I feel a portion of what they felt—a portion of their love, rage, hope, despair—and that portion is the power I try to convey in my own writing. I am not alone. I am in a tradition.

But most of it was the specificity of this place—how much it seemed to embody the West and its contradictions, its claims of democracy, its foundations in exploitation. Of all the worlds I have ever explored, I don’t think any shone so bright, so intense, so immediately as Palestine.

I now noted a symmetry in the bromides—that those who claimed Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East were just as likely to claim that America was the oldest democracy in the world. And both claims relied on excluding whole swaths of the population living under the rule of the state. Riding in that taxi toward Jerusalem, the truth of this struck me as undeniable. I’d spent most of my time in the Occupied Territories, a world of minority rule. But even in the state proper, caste reigned.

Certain neighborhoods in Israel are allowed to discriminate legally against Palestinian citizens by setting “admission committees.” The committees, operating in 41 percent of all Israeli localities, are free to bar anyone lacking “social suitability” or “compatibility with the social and cultural fabric.”

The phrase means what it says—a democracy for the Jewish people and the Jewish people alone.

I say the words “Jim Crow” and a casket opens before me, and inside is a boy beaten out of his own humanity. I say “Jim Crow” and I see the flag of slavery waving above a state capitol. I say “Jim Crow” and I see men on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel pointing toward the shot. I say “Jim Crow” and Detroit Red turns to me and asks, “Who taught you to hate?” I say “Jim Crow” and I hear “poll tax,” “redlining,” “grandfather clause,” “whites only,” and each of these phrases conjures additional images too. But “Jim Crow” was the language of analogy, of translation, not the thing itself. As much as anything, my mission in Palestine was to grow new roots, to describe this new world, not as a satellite of my old world but as a world in and of itself.

In fact, it was a turret designed to lock on and immobilize a target using “nonlethal” rounds fired via remote control. The device’s name—“Smart Shooter”—was written on the side.

and I had little reason to feel that such trailblazing efforts would remain in Palestine. And at that I despaired.

What it was not was an empty declaration to “hear both sides.” I had no interest in hearing defenses of the occupation and what struck me then as segregation. Journalists claim to be hearing “both sides” as though a binary opposition had been set down by some disinterested god. But it is the journalists themselves who are playing god—it is the journalists who decide which sides are legitimate and which are not, which views shall be considered and which pushed out of the frame. And this power is an extension of the power of other curators of the culture—network execs, producers, publishers—whose core job is deciding which stories get told and which do not. When you are erased from the argument and purged from the narrative, you do not exist.

because the first duty of racism, sexism, homophobia, and so forth is the framing of who is human and who is not.

What I have always wanted is to expand the frame of humanity, to shift the brackets of images and ideas.

So you enter houses of people you know in advance are innocent. Now, we never called Palestinians “innocent.” They were always “involved” or “not involved,” because no one’s “innocent.” You go into a house of that family and you basically use that house as your own as a military post. It’s elevated, it’s protected, but it’s also sort of the eye in the sky for the soldiers on the ground. There’s no privacy. There’s obviously no warrant. You don’t need to ask in advance. You don’t call in advance. You don’t send an email. You just barge in and usually handcuff and blindfold the head of the family. If there’s a teenager who looks at you the wrong way or an uncle who looks big enough that he could threaten you, you do the same…. You disconnect the phones, close the curtains, so they won’t tell anyone that you’re there with them and they sit inside scared, petrified with their heads down.

The fact is that the West Bank is occupied, meaning Israel exercises its will wherever it chooses.

But the randomness is intentional. The point is to make Palestinians feel the hand of occupation constantly—in Israel, in East Jerusalem, Area A, B, or C.

And this is built upon the sundering that began in 1948—the sectioning off of Palestinians in Israel proper from those in East Jerusalem, and those in East Jerusalem from those in the West Bank, and those in the West Bank from those in Gaza, and those in Gaza from the world.