The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Benjamin Netanyahu (“For the Jewish people, apartheid is the ultimate abomination. It is an expression of the cruelest inhumanity. Israel will do everything possible to eliminate this odious system”).

By the time Menachem Begin took office in the late 1970s, no single country was buying more Israeli arms than South Africa.

from 1974 to 1993, total annual exports from Tel Aviv to Pretoria averaged $600 million a year.

international law, which defines the crime of apartheid as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.”

“What wounds you most,” writes Darwish, “is that ‘there’ is so close to ‘here.’ ”

Through a fifty-year period stretching from 1970 to 2019, Nassar found that less than 2 percent of all opinion pieces discussing Palestinians had Palestinian authors. The Washington Post ranked at a dismal 1 percent. The New Republic during this period did not publish a single piece on Palestine from the perspective of Palestinians.

I know that there are a lot of writers who believe they have access to a kind of artistic magic that allows them to inhabit any community in the world and write about it as if it is their own. I think those writers overestimate the power of their talent and intelligence, and underestimate how wisdom accrues over time, among nations and peoples, across ancestry.