The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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. Our guide there, Umar al-Ghubari, was concerned with the story of the massacre and was also interested that it ran counter to Israel’s own noble creation myth. The import of this counternarrative, of Palestinian vindicationism, became clear once we reached the site of the massacre. We stood on a traffic island across from the mosque, as our guide narrated the events, citing the words of the Israeli soldiers themselves. I looked over and saw an Israeli man in dark glasses standing off to the side of our little group. I knew he was Israeli only because of how he glared at our guide as he recited the history of the site. At first, I had the same semi-shocked reaction I have back home when those in power so violently object to words. It seemed absurd. Umar did not have any guns or knives. And he was standing on land firmly under Israel’s rule. Nevertheless, Umar presented a threat—the threat of the storyteller who can, through words, erode the claims of the powerful.