The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Begin’s delineation—separating Jewish redeemers from the uncivilized natives—was reinforced by the West. In 1946, a British and American alliance dispatched an “Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry” to decide upon the fate of Mandatory Palestine, as well as its six hundred thousand Jews and 1.1 million non-Jews. In Jaffa, the delegates wrote of an “overgrown Arab village” filled with “squalor and a population diseased and beaten by life.” But in Jewish Tel Aviv they marveled at the “thoroughly civilized community” with its “tree-shaded boulevards, with opera and theaters, with playgrounds and modern schools, with busses and apartment houses.” Zionism would free the Arab race from “the veil, the fez, the sickness, the filth, the lack of education.”