The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

To write like this, to imagine the enslaved, the colonized, the conquered as human beings has always been a political act.

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.

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.

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 pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else. I could hear that same pain in Avner’s and Guy’s words. They were raised under the story that the Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had been confronted with an incredible truth—that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing.

“There’s no justice for Palestinians,” Nasser said in reference to the courts. “It’s the opposite. Lack of justice. The courts are a tool of the oppressor, a tool of the occupation.”

The Israeli flags proudly announced that this territory was being actively colonized. And thinking back on Alon’s explanation, 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.

At this moment, all that I had seen across the days began to avalanche—the cave evictions, the massacre in Hebron, the monuments to genocide, the checkpoints, the wall of devouring, and so much more. Those who question Israel, who question what has been done with the moral badge of the Holocaust, are often pointed in the direction of the great evils done across the world. We are told that it is suspicious that, among all the ostensibly amoral states, we would single out Israel—as though the relationship between America and Israel is not itself singular. But the plaque was clear: “The spiritual bedrock of our values as a nation come from Jerusalem.” This effort that I saw, the use of archaeology, the destruction of ancient sites, the pushing of Palestinians out of their homes, had the specific imprimatur of the United States of America. Which means that it had my imprimatur. This was not just another evil done by another state, but an evil done in my name.

I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel. There are aspects I found familiar—the light-skinned Palestinians who speak of “passing,” the Black and Arab Jews whose stories could have been staged in Atlanta instead of Tel Aviv. But for most of my time there, I felt like I was outside the crosshairs. The attitude in that hotel, for instance, was less “Nigger get out” and more “What the fuck are you doing here?” They were right. The hotel was very nice. But knowing how it had been gotten, knowing how it was secured, knowing the gigantic Dream that had drawn most of its guests, and knowing how I had imagined that there could be some break from it all, some comfort amid an active ethnic cleanse, an active colonization, I could only ask myself, What the fuck am I doing here?

On April 9, 1948, as Zionist militias fought to establish a Jewish state, they closed in on the small village of Deir Yassin. The advance was led by the Irgun and their offshoot Lehi—two Zionist militias notorious for murdering civilians. The Lehi were openly racist, describing Jews as a “master race” and Arabs as a “slave race.” Setting up outside Deir Yassin, they battled the village’s Palestinian defenders throughout the day and, after taking the town, slaughtered at least a hundred inhabitants. The news of the massacre quickly swept across Palestinian communities and greatly aided the efforts of the advancing Zionist militias to purge the land of Arabs and build a “Jewish democracy.” I didn’t find out about Deir Yassin until I was back in America, but I likely drove past it several times. The remnants of the village are in Jerusalem, just a short drive from Yad Vashem. The proximity of the two sites staggered me. I called Sam Bahour, a Palestinian-American friend I’d made in Ramallah, and vented my surprise. “They do this all the time,” he said. He told me about the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem—another site of memory, this one built directly on top of a Muslim graveyard.