The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This narrative of a barbaric Palestine plagued by filth and chaos, as contrasted with an ostensibly pristine and orderly West, has never faded. In 2013, Israeli journalist Ari Shavit published My Promised Land, a bestselling apologia for Zionism in which he tracks his great-grandfather’s 1897 voyage into Mandatory Palestine. In Shavit’s telling, his ancestor arrives into “the chaos of Arab Jaffa.” This is a city of squalor—of “hanging animal carcasses, the smelly fish, the rotting vegetables” and “the infected eyes of the village women,” one where Shavit’s ancestor is forced to contend with “the hustling, the noise, the filth.” Jaffa is not unique. In Jerusalem, this ancestor is faced with “the misery of the Orient: dark, crooked alleyways, filthy markets, hungry masses.” This is an amazing account, if only because Shavit’s ancestor was coming from London—a city so notoriously filthy that it was nicknamed “The Great Smoke.”