The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Of all the worlds I have ever explored, I don’t think any shone so bright, so intense, so immediately as Palestine.

I now noted a symmetry in the bromides—that those who claimed Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East were just as likely to claim that America was the oldest democracy in the world. And both claims relied on excluding whole swaths of the population living under the rule of the state.

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.” Openly racist appeals are the

norm, as when Benjamin Netanyahu warned in 2015 that “the right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves.” For all my talk of being fooled by the language of “Jewish democracy,” it had been right there the whole time. The phrase means what it says—a democracy for the Jewish people and the Jewish people alone.

Journalists claim to be hearing “both sides” as though a binary opposition had been set down by some disinterested god. But it is the journalists themselves who are playing god—it is the journalists who decide which sides are legitimate and which are not, which views shall be considered and which pushed out of the frame. And this power is an extension of the

power of other curators of the culture—network execs, producers, publishers—whose core job is deciding which stories get told and which do not. When you are erased from the argument and purged from the narrative, you do not exist. Thus the complex of curators is doing more than setting pub dates and greenlighting—they are establishing and monitoring a criterion for humanity. Without this criterion, there can be no oppressive power, because the first duty of racism, sexism, homophobia, and so forth is the framing of who is human and who is not. But there is space beyond the brackets.

Every house in the Occupied Territories has a number. The number gives you basic intel on the people inside the house. If the people inside the house are somehow involved in any resistance, if someone in the family was imprisoned, if anyone was even blacklisted, that’s a house you will not take, because then

you’re risking your troops. So you enter houses of people you know in advance are innocent. Now, we never called Palestinians “innocent.” They were always “involved” or “not involved,” because no one’s “innocent.” You go into a house of that family and you basically use that house as your own as a military post. It’s elevated, it’s protected, but it’s also sort of the eye in the sky for the soldiers on the ground. There’s no privacy. There’s obviously no warrant. You don’t need to ask in advance. You don’t call in advance. You don’t send an email. You just barge in and usually handcuff and blindfold the head of the family. If there’s a teenager who looks at you the wrong way or an uncle who looks big enough that he could threaten you, you do the same…. You disconnect the phones, close the curtains, so they won’t tell anyone that you’re there with them and they sit inside scared, petrified with their heads down.

The fact is that the West Bank is occupied, meaning Israel exercises its will wherever it chooses.

The tools of control are diverse—drones and observation towers surveil from above; earth mounds and trenches block the roads below. Gates enclose. Checkpoints inspect. Nothing is predictable. A road that was free yesterday is now suddenly impeded by a “flying checkpoint,” a mobile gate and a squad of soldiers requesting permits and papers. But the randomness is intentional. The point is to make Palestinians feel the hand of occupation constantly—in Israel, in East Jerusalem, Area A, B, or C. “It’s not just ‘We’re here and you’re there,’ ” Avner told me, describing the relationship between the IDF and Palestinians in every jurisdiction. “It’s ‘We’re here, and we’re there.’ ” In this way, a people is sundered from itself, and old communal bonds are eroded. The cousin who was once just down the road is walled off. What was once, in living memory, a long walk to court a potential wife in another village is transformed into an impossible obstacle course. And this is built upon the sundering that began in 1948—the sectioning off of Palestinians in Israel proper

from those in East Jerusalem, and those in East Jerusalem from those in the West Bank, and those in the West Bank from those in Ga...

Sometimes I would be riding past a checkpoint and look out and, to my shock, see a young soldier with his rifle pointed at the road, which is to say at me. As soon as I would see this, I would search for a good reason, a justification, but eventually I started to realize there never was one.

Guy parked the truck, and I followed Avner out into Kahane Park—a small garden named for Meir Kahane, the Jewish supremacist who as leader of the Kahanist movement (and a member of the Knesset) promoted the permanent annexation of the West Bank and Gaza and the enslavement of Palestinians. Kahane’s political party was banned by the government in 1985, and he was assassinated in New York in 1990, but his disciple Baruch Goldstein took up his mantle. Four years after Kahane’s death, Goldstein entered the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron and gunned down twenty-nine Muslims while they were worshipping. In the park, we stopped to look at a small cylindrical memorial to Kahane and then walked a few paces more until we reached a massive stone slab raised just above the ground. It was the tomb of Baruch Goldstein, and across its top were twenty or so small stones. Avner explained that this grave is a kind of shrine, regularly visited by those who see Goldstein as a martyr. Kahane

and Goldstein were both officially pariahs—Kahane was shot in Manhattan, and Goldstein’s mass murder was condemned by the Israeli government. But whatever one wishes to make of the official denunciations of Kahane and Goldstein, I was standing in a park bearing Kahane’s name in which he and his mass-murdering acolyte were memorialized, a park that rested in a settlement sanctioned and subsidized by the state that claims to denounce him.

Goldstein’s rampage was stopped by the Palestinian worshippers themselves, who rose up, disarmed him, and beat him to death. In the wake of the street protests that exploded in the city, Israel segregated the streets of Hebron and set curfews for its Palestinian residents. To this very day, the legacy of that crackdown endures. Walking the streets of Hebron, as I had, seeing the shuttered storefronts and the soldiers patrolling the streets, it was hard to avoid the feeling that Goldstein had won. And this feeling held true for me across the West...

were signed, the settler population was 111,000. Today it...

Goldstein and the subsequent Israeli reaction to Palestinian unrest in Hebron are manifestations of an uncomfortable reality: 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 father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, first considered Argentina, believing that it would be in that “sparsely populated” country’s “highest interest…to cede us a portion of its territory.” When Herzl turned to Palestine, he viewed Palestinians, as historian Benny Morris puts it, as little more than “part of the scenery.” The scenery was savage: “We should form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia,” Herzl wrote in his 1896 manifesto, The Jewish State. “An outpost of civilization against barbarism.” A year earlier, Herzl claimed in a diary entry that Zionism would ultimately benefit those whose lands he sought to occupy; further, “it goes without saying” that those who sought to raise the banner of civilization would still “respectfully tolerate persons of other faiths and protect their property, their honor and their freedom.” Such protections would set for “the entire world a wonderful example.” But this benevolent spirit was undercut by the marching orders Herzl offered in that same entry: We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.

As for an “anticolonial” Zionism, if such a thing could be spoken of it would come as a shock to the ideology’s founders. “The land of our fathers is waiting for us; let us colonize it,” wrote Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, linguist and godfather of modern Hebrew, in 1880. “And, by becoming its masters, we shall again be a people like all others.” This mastering of the land meant economic control. Zionist Ber Borochov urged Jews to assume “the leading position in the economy of the new land” in 1906, and in this way “Jewish immigration may be diverted to colonization of the undeveloped country.” And mastery also meant violence. While many Zionists spoke of peaceful accord between their aims and the aims of Palestinians, Jabotinsky never allowed himself the liberty of such euphemism: There is no such precedent…. The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage.

“Culturally they are five hundred years behind us,” wrote Jabotinsky. “They have neither our endurance nor our determination.” The early Zionists might have considered the land of Palestine as their rightful homeland, but they never imagined themselves as “natives.” Natives, in colonial discourse, were savages with no capacity to improve the land and thus no right to it.

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.”

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.”

The notion that a colonialist Zionism exists merely in the hallucinations of leftist professors and the chants of their wayward students ignores a crucial source—the very words of Zionists themselves.

Sometimes, you are blessed with a moment where all the dissembling, all the shame, all the politesse are stripped, and evil speaks with clarity.

Settlements like Kiryat Arba are not the work of rogue pioneers; much like our own redlined suburbs, they are state projects. 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.

what I was beginning to see was that settlement, itself, was violent.

When Israel constructs settlements in the West Bank, it extends its borders past the settlements—sometimes onto Palestinian farmland. Palestinian access to this land is almost always contested, and generally granted based on a maze of permits or the mood of the security forces who guard the settlements. In any clash between Palestinians and settlers, the soldiers can be expected to take the side of the settlers. And the settlers are, themselves, often armed perpetrators of violence. “The settlements play a political and a strategic role in taking over land,” Avner explained. “Imagine a pond. You throw a rock in a pond and it creates a ripple, right? The settlements create a ripple effect of violence everywhere they are. That’s the way they’re built.”

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.

Susya is in that broad swath of land deemed to be Area C, where Israelis have total control. The vast majority of settlements are in Area C, and it was here that the ripples of violence Avner spoke of were the most intense. But open, direct violence is just one of the tools of land theft on the West Bank. What I was beginning to see was an arsenal of weaponry—highway construction, water restriction, gated villages, forbidden streets, checkpoints, soldiers, settlers—all employed to part the dowry from the bride.

In 1985, when Nasser was just a baby, a group of Israeli visitors came to visit the original village. The villagers greeted the people warmly—there was tea, just as I was being served now. But later it became clear that the “visitors” were running reconnaissance. Having discovered an ancient synagogue on the land, Israel declared the village of Susya an archaeological site. The state placed the management of the site in the hands of local settlers, who immediately moved to push the Palestinian residents out of their homes and off the land. Nasser’s people were dispersed across the West Bank. Nasser’s family moved to their farmland to the south, hoping to find solace there. But they were now hemmed in between the settler-controlled archaeological site and an actual settlement. And then there was the law.

Land in Israel and the areas where it has direct control—Jerusalem and most of the West Bank—are tightly managed by the state. In much of the country, land cannot be outright purchased but must be leased from the state. And in Area C, communities must submit an application, with an attendant array of documents, aerial photos, and legal briefs, to receive a building permit. The adjudicators of the process, like the managers of the Susya archaeological site and the judges who handle appeals, are often themselves settlers who are living in the colonies of the West Bank. Nonetheless, Nasser’s people submitted a plan, including an application, to have their new community recognized by the planning commission in Area C. This went nowhere, and at that point Nasser’s people abandoned working through the system. “Why submit? The whole committees are against us,” he told me. “These are settler-led communities. There’s no Palestinian representatives.”

The camp where Nasser now lives is illegal, meaning that, at any moment, Israeli bulldozers could appear and demolish everything. But the bureaucracy that rules over Susya still has its own opaque internal rules. For now, instead of taking down the entire camp, they have settled for demolishing one structure at a time. The result is a kind of limbo—Nasser goes to bed every night not knowing whether his roof will be collapsed in upon him and his family. A few years ago, a massive blizzard hit the South Hebron Hills, destroying many of the village’s shelters. Families spent the night shoveling snow out of their housing. “One of our residents has a heart condition, and this was during this blizzard, and we called the p...

“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.”

In 1881, as a wave of pogroms was unleashed on Russian Jews, American clergyman William E. Blackstone despaired that “these millions cannot remain where they are, and yet have no other place to go.” But for Blackstone the tragedy was compounded by the fact that there was an obvious solution to the Land of Palestine—“a land without a people, and a people without a land.” Blackstone gave language, pithy and poetic, to an idea that would recur repeatedly in Zionist thought: that the Palestinian people did not exist. “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine, considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country from them,” argued Golda Meir. Buried in the claim is another notion—that the worth of a people is defined by their possession of a homeland incorporated as a state. The Palestinians, lacking such a state, had no right to the land and perhaps no rights at all.

In 1958 Leon Uris published his bestselling novel Exodus, which was later adapted into a movie starring Paul Newman. Uris hated any depiction of “weak Jews” and believed that many Israelis felt the same due to their “strong feelings about Jews who will not fight back.” And the people that they were to fight back against was clear. “This is Israel,” wrote Uris in a 1956 letter to his father, the “fighter who spits in the eye of the Arab hordes and dares him.” Thus, the Jewish people could restore the honor lost to the Nazis by warring against Arabs in the breach. But better than substitute Nazis, the Palestinians gave Israel savage Nazis, third-world barbarians embodying the depraved native in the colonial mind. The Aztec. The Indian. The Zulu. The Arab. In Exodus, the image of marauding Arabs, cowardly and prone to rape, will be familiar to anyone who has seen the depiction of Black people in Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. For just as the vulgar caricature of Black people served the cause of white Redemption, so too did the Arabs in Exodus serve the cause of Zionism.

A fan of the Western genre, Uris wrote Exodus to appeal to American “gentiles.” The reception for his book, which dovetailed with the cause of Israeli redemption, was rapt. Nine years after Exodus’s publication, the Six-Day War consecrated an American martial love of Israel. It was 1967, and America was embroiled in a war with a colonized enemy in which it was losing both the physical battles and the moral high ground. But in Israel, Americans saw Western warriors vanquishing the savages. These were not soldiers but righteous, reluctant defenders of a long-persecuted people, killing only when forced to the brink.

Righteous violence vented on some brutish, blighted lower caste has always been the key to entry into the fraternity of Western nations.

By routing the savage “Arab,” by murdering his leaders, by confining him to the Bantustans of Tuba, or the reservations of Gaza, or the ghettoes of Lydd, Jewish national honor was restored in the traditional manner of Western European powers.

Having vanquished its Arab foes and established itself as a state, Israel began the process of securing as much land as possible for its new state while keeping as many Palestinians as possible beyond that state’s borders. This ethnocratic approach to state-building had deep roots in Zionism, which held that majority status within a strong Jewish state was the only true bulwark against antisemitism. Implanting this majority presented an obvious problem—the Palestinians. “There is only one thing the Zionists want, and it is that one thing that the Arabs do not want,” wrote Jabotinsky, for that is the way by which the Jews would gradually become the majority, and then a Jewish Government would follow automatically, and the future of the Arab minority would depend on the goodwill of the Jews; and a minority status is not a good thing, as the Jews themselves are never tired of pointing out. So there is no “misunderstanding.” The Zionists want only one thing, Jewish immigration; and this Jewish immigration is what the Arabs do not want.

By 1948, Israel no longer had to consider what “the Arabs” might want. Over seven hundred thousand Palestinians were uprooted from their own lands and banished by the advancing Israeli Army. Many of these people believed that they would be able to return to their homes after the war. But such a return would destroy the Israeli state project by turning Jews into a minority—the very thing Zionists sought to prevent. So the Palestinians were denied the “right of return,” and their land was confiscated by the state and handed over to other Israelis. The transformation was stunning: Before the establishment of the Israeli state, Palestinians owned 90 percent of all land in Mandatory Palestine. Most of this land was seized and incorporated into Israel. “From 1948 to 1953, the five years following the establishment of the state, 350 (out of a total of 370) new Jewish settlements were built on land owned by Palestinians,” writes Noura Erakat in her book Justice for Some.

The threat of losing demographic supremacy still hangs over Israel. In 2003, future prime minister Ehud Olmert called on Israel to “maximize the number of Jews” and “minimize the number of Palestinians.” A “Muslim majority” would mean the “destruction of Israel as a Jewish state,” claimed former prime minister Ehud Barak. 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 deput...