The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

And for much of my time as a journalist, I have been surrounded by people who, on some level, think of me as an exception that does not disprove their theories of white supremacy.

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.

I’d spent most of my time in the Occupied Territories, a world of minority rule. But even in the state proper, caste reigned. Palestinians living in Israel have shorter lives, are poorer, and live in more violent neighborhoods. 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.”

What I have always wanted is to expand the frame of humanity, to shift the brackets of images and ideas. So that in thinking about my trip, in setting my sides upon the field, my frame excluded any defense of the patently immoral. And I would sooner hear a defense of cannibalism than I would hear any brief for what I saw with my own eyes in Hebron.

In the settlements, first-time homebuyers are eligible for subsidized mortgages at low interest rates to build houses on land they lease at discounted rates—a discount made possible on account of the land being stolen. Factories and farms are propped by a similar array of discounts and subsidies. All infrastructure—roads, water, power, public synagogues, and mikvahs—is heavily subsidized by the state. In this web of subsidies is an incentive to further colonize the land of Palestinians, because further colonization advances a primary interest of the Israeli state—the erosion of any grounds for a future Palestinian state.

Netanyahu once warned that if Palestinian citizens ever reached 35 percent of Israel, the Jewish state would be “annulled.” Looking at the “absurd” borders of Jerusalem, the former deputy mayor Meron Benvenisti summarized the policy behind them as “the aspiration to include a maximum of land with a minimum of Arabs.”

Justice exists only for those whose fists and stubbornness make it possible for them to realize it…. Do not believe anyone, be always on guard, carry your stick always with you—this is the only way of surviving in this wolfish battle of all against all.

“Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians.”

the power to haunt people, to move people, and expand the brackets of humanity.

Palestine is not my home. I see that land, its peoples, and its struggles through a kind of translation—through analogy and the haze of my own experience—and that is not enough. If Palestinians are to be truly seen, it will be through stories woven by their own hands—not by their plunderers, not even by their comrades.