Response to Coates

"The Message" is more propaganda than history

Near the end of the third and final essay in “The Message,” devoted to the Israel-Palestine conflict, Coates bluntly shuns, even condemns, “the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality … [the] elevation of complexity over justice.” And here lies the heart of the problem with “The Message,” which is propaganda rather than a serious contribution to understanding the conflict. Like a good post-modernist, Coates is telling his readers that facts be damned; what interests him, and what should interest his readers, is what is moral and just (of course, by his lights). And this subjectivism is what is all that is relevant – no matter what actually happened, no matter complex – yes, complex – realities, past and present.

Take the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and annexed East Jerusalem. Long pages in “The Message” are devoted to the (unfortunately very real) horrors of the occupation – the humiliating roadblocks, where Palestinians traveling to visit relatives, go to work, or see a doctor, are forced to spend hours by the wayside, imploring indifferent or sadistic soldiers to be allowed to pass; home searches in the middle of the night; home destruction (even of poor cave-dwellers, as in Susiya); mass arrests and the occasional killing, usually unintended, of innocents; no-go areas for Palestinian vehicles.

I, too, lament these often draconian, always oppressive measures. But Coates gives his reader no context apart from brandishing that vacuous phrase, “settler-colonialism” (of which more later). Not a word of explanation why these measures are in place. Never, once, throughout this book, does Coates mention “Palestinian terrorism;” indeed, as far as I can remember, the word “terrorism” makes no appearance in the book’s 232 pages. But how can a book on the conflict fail to even hint at one of its pervasive features, fail to even mention the Palestinian suicide bombers and drive-by shooters who prompted Israel to put these measures in place? In “The Message” there is no Palestinian agency, only victimhood. The book nowhere mentions the Hamas or the Fatah suicide bombers who almost daily blew up Israeli buses and restaurants in the 1990s, during the Second Intifada (2000-2004) and since killing and maiming dozens, man, woman and child, in Israel proper as in the occupied territories.

Coates’s world is binary and simple: It is divided into Black and White: blacks are victims and good, whites are oppressors and bad. In the Middle East, Arabs are black and Jews are white. Arabs remain good, even if in the recent civil wars in Syria, Yemen, Libya, Iraq and Sudan Arabs murdered more than half a million fellow Arabs (and, in Sudan’s Darfur, blacks, albeit Muslim blacks). Coates simply never mentions Muslim Arabs massacring or Palestinian terrorism. Perhaps Coates is color-blind.

Coates’s over-riding message is already conveyed in the book’s first two essays: Race is everything; race explains history. Race, meaning white supremacy and Africans and their descendants in chains. And I can understand Black Americans’ – Coates’s - obsession with race. But this is an insufficient, and often irrelevant, explanation of history. Certainly, it is not an explanation of the Israeli-Palestinian or Zionist-Arab conflict. Race may be in there somewhere. To be sure, some Jews are racists. So are some Arabs (though, of course, the only racists in “The Message” are Jews). I’m not sure Coates knows this, but the Arabs of the Middle East and North Africa, over the centuries, enslaved far more black Africans than did the European and American slave-traders. More recently, Saudi Arabia, the most Arab and most Muslim state, for decades refused entry to Jews, and still bars entry to Mecca to all non-Muslims. (Does the Vatican bar entry to the Sistine Chapel to Muslims or Jews?).

Palestine Arab terrorism pre-dates Israel’s 1967 occupation of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, indeed pre-dates the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948. “The Message” devotes not a few pages to Zionist thinking and actions during Ottoman and British Mandate days. But it fails to mention, let alone describe, however minimally, the Arab nationalist-motivated murder of Jews in pre-1914 Palestine or the Arab pogroms of 1920, 1921, 1929, and 1936-1939 during the Mandate. Not a word about the massacre of Jews in Hebron or Safad in 1929. To do so would confront the reader with “factual complexity.”

And here one enters the realm of meta-morality and meta-justice, and the larger question of historical indigeneity. The Arabs stormed out of Arabia – which is why they are called Arabs – and conquered the largely Christian, and pagan and Jewish, Middle East (including Palestine) and North Africa in the 7^th century and gradually Arabized and Islamized these areas’ populations. The Jews had lived in Palestine for more than fifteen hundred years before the Arabs arrived, and had ruled parts or all of the country for some of the centuries between 1200 BC and 70 AD, and continued to inhabit the country for hundreds of years afterwards. Then they dispersed to Europe and North Africa. And then, from the end of the 19^th century, they began to return home – Zionism - and have gradually increased their number for the past 140 years. Now, after generations of Israelis have been born and grew up in the Land of Israel, they, too, are natives, alongside the Arab natives. What do these two facts – the Jewish presence and government of two-three thousand years ago and the century and half of presence since the start of the Zionist influx, alongside the Palestinian Arab presence - mean regarding the claims of indigeneity, Jewish and Arab?

One could argue, and Coates does so by implication, that the whole of the Zionist enterprise, from 1882 onwards, was an act of aggression by the Jews against Palestine’s Arabs, and Arab “resistance,” meaning violence, meaning – often - terrorism, was a moral, just response. And it is true that the early Zionists, certainly down to 1937, sought Jewish sovereignty over the whole Land of Israel, from the River to the Sea. But in the summer of that year the mainstream of Zionism, led by David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, accepted, in principle, the recommendation of the British Royal (Peel) Commission that the country be partitioned into two states, one for the Jews (on less than 20 per cent of the land) and most of the rest for the Arabs. A compromise. And in November 1947 the UN General Assembly Partition Resolution (No. 181) resurrected the idea of partition and proposed, again, a state for the Jews and a state for the Arabs. Another offered compromise. But the Palestine Arabs, supported by the surrounding Arab states, said “no” and went to war against the Jews and the emergent State of Israel. Nowhere does Coates provide his readers with this “factual complexity.”

Coates’s focus, throughout the book, is the “occupation,” meaning of the West Bank and Jerusalem since 1967. But he fails to explain or even mention why and how the occupation came about, and why it has persisted down to the present day - and, from his standpoint, for good reason. Israel conquered and occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the June 1967 Six Day War. Why? Because on June 5 Jordanian gunners – Jordan had occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem back in the 1948 War – opened up with machineguns, mortars and artillery on Jewish West Jerusalem and on Tel Aviv’s suburbs. Before the Jordanians started firing, and then again after they had started, Israel, via UN and US officials, assured Jordan’s King Hussein that if his troops refrained from or ceased firing, Israel would not touch the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But the Jordanian army kept shooting and the IDF went over to the offensive and conquered East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

True, after 1967 successive Israeli governments, rent by ideological differences or dominated by right-wing parties, refused to give up these territories. But in the year 2000 Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Barak and US President Bill Clinton offered the Palestinians statehood in 95 per cent of the West Bank (with compensation from Israeli territory for the missing five per cent), East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in exchange for peace – and PLO leader Yasser Arafat said “no” and the Palestinians launched the Second Intifada, a failed rebellion in which four thousand Palestinians and one thousand Israelis eventually died. By saying “no,” Arafat in effect had said: let the occupation and the mutual terrorist-counter-terrorist bloodletting continue. One of Barak’s successors, Ehud Olmert, in 2007-2008 repeated the offer – and again – this time in the person of Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas – the Palestinians, in effect, said “no.” So the occupation or semi-occupation, with the Palestine National Authority in autonomous control of the West Bank’s towns, has continued.

Not a word of any of this appears in “The Message.” All Coates can say is occupation, occupation, occupation. And the occupation, or semi-occpation, has been in place during the past half-century. What Coates offers his readers in “The Message” is, at best, a half-truth. But a half-truth is not Truth and may, on occasion, be tantamount to a lie. Certainly, there is no confusing Coates’s tale with history.

So much for the past. As to the present, Coates, spent 10 days (I think in 2023, before the start of the current war) in what he calls at one point “the Holy Land.” He writes that he wanted to discover the “facts.” Before the visit, he implies, he had been guided by conventional (pro-Zionist?) wisdom about the conflict. (He even mentioned, in this context, not disparagingly, my history of the conflict, “Righteous Victims” (1999). Elsewhere in the book, I need say upfront, he is censorious of some of my reflections).

But it was not really the Holy Land but “Palestine” that Coates crossed the oceans to see. Bu “Palestine” he meant the occupied territories. During his stay he looked and he listened, exclusively to a variety of Arab Israel-bashers and dissident Israeli Jews. What he absorbed was “Palestine” undiluted, not Israel, not Israel-Palestine, just Palestine. The occasional mentions of the Israeli side of the Green Line are negative, supercilious or dismissive. For example, he lightly dismisses the ongoing mass 2023 street protests by the mainly Ashkenazi Israeli middle class against the Netanyahu government’s efforts to subvert Israeli “democracy.” Coates brackets (Israeli) democracy with inverted commas as, by his lights, the Jewish state is no democracy and never was. Walking or sitting around downtown Tel Aviv he sees only “carefree” men “in their tees and shades” and “the women happy in their cut-off shorts,” a city “flush with mass transit and interesting restaurants and cocktail bars.” This, in stark contrast with Coates’s earlier and subsequent descriptions of the impoverished, oppressed Palestinians of Hebron and Ramallah (no “tees” or “shades” there, though they actually abound there too).

With commendable frankness, Coates lays bare in a short bibliographical note – published not in the book but on an online link – details about his flying visit. He relates that he was pressed to “visit Palestine” (not “Israel” or “Israel and Palestine”) by Peter Beinart, a sharp American-Jewish critic of the Jewish state. The trip’s first five days (and, one assumes, the costly flights to and from, though he doesn’t mention them) were funded by “The Palestine Festival of Literature,” an intellectual promontory of the Palestinian National Authority. The remaining five days, he tells us, were self-funded but his itinerary was “crafted by Israeli anti-occupation activists Avner Gvaryahu and Yehuda Shaul.” But truth to tell, and Coates tells it, it is not merely the “occupation” that these Israelis bemoan. Coates quotes Gvaryahu, who walked him around Hebron, the bastion of the Jewish messianic settler movement, as saying: “I see the establishment of Israel as a sin. I don’t think it should have happened.” (p. 169) (How about the world’s 22 or 23 Arab states: was their establishment a “sin,” given the rivers of blood and suffering their establishment or evolution produced?)

Coates’s perspective on the world is racial: Everything that has happened and happens is race-driven, race-related. Racism is the motor force of world history. Hence, the Israel-Palestine conflict is about race, with the Palestinians playing the part of the local oppressed Afro-Americans. (He defines his home, the United States, as racist as Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa.) Everywhere, white supremacy, settler colonialism and oppression are the stuff of history. And for Coates, it is all very personal. One night he is stopped at the entrance to his (presumably West) Jerusalem hotel and asked to prove his identity. Coates doesn’t explain, but the implication is that the procedure was initiated because of the color of his skin – though the security guard may simply have been on guard against an Arab terrorist. (East Jerusalem has a relatively large community of black Arabs (whose family names, incidentally, are usually ‘Abd, meaning slave or servant, pointing to their descent from African slaves. Here is a truly “complex fact.”)

But back to Coates in the Holy Land, in East Jerusalem’s Old City. “Soldiers … with their enormous guns” barred his way for “forty-five minutes or so” at the entrance to the Temple Mount compound (he mistakenly calls the spot “Lion’s Gate”) as “groups of tourists streamed in and out … unmolested and unquestioned. But no one visibly Muslim passed through … in all the time we were made to wait …. [The] soldiers … steal our time, the sun glinting off their shades like Georgia sheriffs …” (p.123-124). As here, often Coates’s sentences incorporate both the Palestinian Arab experience and that of American blacks. Later, writing of dogs guarding Jewish settlements in the West Bank, his mind and pen veers to the “hell hounds” of the racist police in Montgomery Alabama and to American bluecoats massacring the West’s Native Americans.

Coates highlights the decades of Israeli confiscation of Arab land in the West Bank, and accurately relates that Israel has pillaged the territory’s water aquifer for Jewish use. He points out, accurately, that the Israeli settlers use ten times more of the region’s water than the Arab inhabitants. So Coates writes: “Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself.” And adds: “It occurred to me that there was still one place on the planet – under American patronage – that resembled the world that my parents were born into.”

And his parents crop up periodically in “The Message.” His father, he says, was a great influence on his intellectual maturation. Indeed, long before his trip to Palestine, Coates seems to attest, he had framed Palestinians as “Blacks” and Israelis as “White.” According to his father, there was “a long history of alliances between Palestinian freedom fighters and the radical Black activists to whom I traced my own roots.” He mentions a book by the Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad titled “Born Palestinian, Born Black,” and he comments: “This combination felt natural to me.” The fact that close to half of Israel’s Jews originate in the Arab lands, are, in effect, Arab Jews or their descendants and, skin-wise and facially, indistinguishable from Arabs, is irrelevant. (And, of course, there are also tens of thousands of black Jews in Israel, of Ethiopian origin. He even encounters one or two soldiering in the West Bank. But this is “complex” so he doesn’t delve into the matter or explain.)

Coates describes how, during his visit, his Palestinian hosts pander to this “tradition [of Palestinian-Afro-American amity], invoking James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, or Angela Davis, explaining how these writers and activists revealed something of their own [Palestinian] struggle to them.” “I felt the warmth of solidarity, of ‘conquered peoples,’ as one of my comrades put it, finding each other across the chasm of oceans and experience.”

But it is here that Coates’s prejudices overwhelm common sense; he simply doesn’t understand the Zionist-Arab conflict at a basic level. In truth, the two experiences, the Black American and the Palestinian, are worlds apart. The history of blacks in America is one of slavery (and I can imagine nothing more evil, save the Holocaust), exploitation, marginalization and segregation, not of a native population subjugated or driven from their land by an imperial invader and colonized; it is a tale of a minority oppressed by a (racist) majority. But the history of the Zionist-Arab or Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not of imperial invasion and colonization by the sons or agents of that empire for strategic or economic gain. True, the Zionists trickling into Palestine during the Ottoman days, and in larger numbers during the British Mandate, set up settlements (moshavot, in Hebrew, which is the Hebrew word also for colonies, like Virginia on the Atlantic shore), but they were doing so – and in their ancient homeland, not some faraway Third World territory – to establish a state of their own, not to serve an imperial dispatcher. And, between 1882 and 1947, they purchased the lands on which they settled from very willing Arab sellers – they did not aggress and conquer the land as imperial powers did in the Americas or expansionist Russia, for example. The conflict that arose between the incoming Zionist settlers and the Arab inhabitants of the Land of Israel or Palestine was between two national movements and groups over a piece of territory. It was not, and is not, about minority rights or human rights or civil rights or racism – though all these feature as outliers, as issues that arose during the national struggle, which is still ongoing and whose ultimate outcome is yet to be determined.

Throughout the book, Coates fails to distinguish between the Arabs in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Israel’s Arab minority (some two million souls who constitute some 21-22 per cent of Israel’s citizenry). All of the Arabs between the River and the Sea, Coates argues, suffer from “apartheid.” He says of Israel’s Arab citizens (he calls them “Palestinians living in Israel”): “[They] have shorter lives, are poorer, and live in more violent neighborhoods [than the Jews].”

I’m not sure they are actually poorer (if you discount the beduins of the Negev, where many still live nomadic or semi-nomadic existences, in primitive conditions) or live shorter lives. As to violence, it is true that Israeli Arabs account for more than two fifths of the country’s murderers and well over half of the murder victims (invariably at the hands of fellow Arabs). Clearly, Israeli Arab society is far more violent, with its criminality, protracted tribal and familial blood feuds and honor killings, and indifference to or defiance of the rule of law, than Israeli Jewish society. This is largely a function of Palestinian Arab social and cultural norms.

But violence aside, Israel’s Arab citizens, like their Jewish counterparts, enjoy full civil rights – the vote, representation in the Knesset, freedoms of speech, movement, work, ownership of property. True, during 1949-1966, in the years after Palestine’s Arabs tried and failed to destroy the Zionist enterprise, these Arabs were under military government, deprived of many rights and freedoms. But since then, Israel’s Arabs have equality before the law and equality in most spheres of life. True, in wartime, as during the past 15 months, many Israelis, and the police and the security service, suspect that the hearts of most of them are with their embattled Muslim Arab brothers in Gaza and Lebanon and perhaps even with Muslim Iran rather than with the Jewish state, and the past months have seen as many as two hundred charged with war-related crimes such as “incitement” or “supporting terrorism.” A handful of Israeli Arabs have been caught carrying out or planning terrorist attacks in Israel’s cities. (But perhaps it is well to remember that unlike Japanese Americans and German-Britons during World War Two Israel’s Arabs have not been subjected to indiscriminate mass arrests and collective punishment in detention camps.) It is also true that, in peacetime, Israeli Arabs sometimes suffer from under-the-radar social discrimination, as when Arab students in Tel Aviv can’t find apartments to rent. As well, Arabs are sometimes barred from membership and domicile in Israeli settlements and do not enjoy certain government subsidies in home purchases, as afforded Israeli army reservists. Of course, Israeli Arabs economically benefit from not “wasting” years, as do most young Israeli Jews, as conscripts in the IDF.

Coates repeatedly mocks Israel’s “democracy” (he calls it a “tagline,” like “the Breakfast of Champions”) – which is currently under threat from Netanyahu’s vile government though a fair-minded person would probably take into consideration that most immigrants to the newborn state had come from authoritarian countries and lacked democratic norms or traditions; that the country had been virtually at war since inception and is surrounded by authoritarian or totalitarian societies that wish to destroy it.

In “The Message” Coates zooms in on Israel’s ills: The minority of extreme right-wingers and Kahanists - like Israel’s former national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who honors, indeed adulates, murderers like Baruch Goldstein, who mowed down 29 Arab worshippers in a Hebron mosque in 1994 – and their deeds and pronouncements. The inexpert reader will come way from “The Message” with the impression that that is Israel. “Goldstein has won,” he tells us. And maybe down the road he will. But he hasn’t yet and maybe he won’t. And certainly this wasn’t the picture during most of Israel’s lifetime. Wokists may not pardon me, but I still believe that Ehud Barak hit the nail on the head when he described Israel as “a villa in the jungle.” Coates, after a ten-day junket spent mostly among Arabs and in the occupied territories, and reinforced by selective reading, mostly by Israel-haters, is essentially ignorant. A little modesty is perhaps in order, even by a person perched on the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair in the English Department of Howard University.

But back to the Arabs in the West Bank. Their lives are radically different from those of Israel’s Arabs. They are occupied, they live under military law (while their Jewish settler neighbors live under civil Israeli law), and suffer serious restrictions of freedom amounting to apartheid. But it is an apartheid based on nationality and nationalism, not on race. Given his racial blinkers, Coates doesn’t see this. And the lives of the West Bank Arabs are ultimately shaped by this clash of nationalisms.

The status of the 400,000 Arab residents of East Jerusalem lies somewhere between Israel’s Arab citizens and those living in the occupied territories. The East Jerusalemites had the option of obtaining Israeli citizenship (and some possibly still do) but preferred to remain non-citizens. But their permanent residency status entitle them to a variety of privileges unavailable to West Bankers – Israeli health care (one of the best such systems in the world), social benefits, municipal voting rights (which many in the past have preferred not to exercise), etc.

At one or two points Coates seems to cast doubt on the historicity of the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel. Which reminded me of an incident during the American-Israeli-Palestinian summit at Camp David in July 2000. Over dinner, President Clinton mentioned Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, a major bone of contention between Israel and the Palestinians. Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the PLO and the leader of the Palestinian delegation, famously said: “What Temple?” – meaning there had never been a Jewish Temple at the site, meaning, by extension, that the Jews had never ruled or lived in Jerusalem during the first millennium BC, implying that the Jews had no rightful claim to the Land of Israel, called by the Romans and the Christians and, subsequently, the West, Palestine. Clinton was left gaping. (Later, Arafat rejected, while Israel accepted, various possible solutions to the Temple Mount problem proposed by Clinton: Bifurcated sovereignty, with the Palestinians ruling the surface area, containing the two historic mosques, while Jews would have the (fictitious) sovereignty over the earth below; international (UN Security Council) sovereignty over the mount; or Israeli-Palestinian condominium).

Coates spent a few hours in the “City of David,” the area just south of and adjacent to the Temple Mount, the site, according to most biblical archaeologists, Israeli and foreign, of the Jebusite city which King David turned into his capital around 1000 BC. David’s son, Solomon, extended the city northwards to Mount Moriah, now called the Temple Mount (in Arabic, Haram a Sharif, the noble sanctuary), where he built the First Temple. Coates was guided on his tour of the City of David by Israeli archaeologist Alon Arad, director of an NGO called Emek Shaveh, which is critical of what it sees as the Zionist messaging informing Israeli archaeology.

Coates: “It was still unclear to me whether this had ever been a city or had ever been ruled by a king named David. Is this the City of David?” I asked Alon.

“It is an Iron Age city from two hundred years later than King David’s reign,” he said.

Coates: “So he’s basically dead by the time this -“

Alon interrupted, “I don’t think he ever lived.” (Since the discovery three decades ago of an Aramaic stele from the 9^th or 8^th centuries BC at Tel Dan which referred explicitly to “the house of David,” most scholars now agree that there had been a King David. Remaining in dispute are the contours, organization and heft\power of David’s kingdom.)

Coates’s conclusion: Alon had “swatted” away “the kind of myth a layperson would take as history.”

Coates never explicitly propounds Arafat’s message because he knows that Western scholarship, based on myriad archaeological findings and documentary evidence, buttresses the traditional take that, indeed, the Jews lived in and resided in the Land of Israel\Palestine between say 1200 BC and the 7^th century AD. As to the Temple Mount, he fails to mention that archaeologists, Israeli and foreign, have never been allowed to dig beneath the Temple Mount esplanade, where they might find traces of Solomon’s First Temple and certainly would find remnants of the Herodian reconstruction of the Second Temple.

“What I was seeing here seemed about as credible as the history behind those Confederate memorials [in Columbia, South Carolina],” he writes confusingly, conflating ancient Jewish history and the story of the Confederate South.

Coates goes one further in this conflation. Indeed, he exploits his description of his tour of the City of David to vent his anti-Americanism, killing, as it were, two birds with one stone. He tells us of a plaque at the site bearing an American flag and the name of a formed US ambassador to Israel. The plaque reads: “The City of David brings Biblical Jerusalem to life at the very place where the kings and the prophets of the Bible walked. The spiritual bedrock of our values as a nation comes from Jerusalem. It is upon these ideals that the American republic was founded, and the unbreakable bond between the United States and Israel was formed.” And Alon Arad adds his two bits: “When you talk about white supremacy … this is why I think that the Evangelical church and the settlers [in the West Bank] found each other as a perfect match… Their mindset is the same.”

For Coates, “the settlers” are Israel – though most Israelis would dispute this - as the Evangelicals are America – though many, perhaps most, Americans would similarly contest this. It is perhaps worth recalling that the Afro-American campaign to achieve equal rights during the 1960s and 1970s would probably have gotten nowhere had it not been for massive support by northern whites, and some southern whites, including President Lyndon Johnson.

Near the end of the essay on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Coates unsurprisingly relates the story of Deir Yassin. But he doesn’t play it completely straight. He tells us that the assault on that Palestinian village, just west of West Jerusalem on 9 April 1948, almost midway in the 1948 War, “was led by the Irgun and …. [the] Lehi,” two dissident Jewish groups. The implication of the “led” is, perhaps, that the main Jewish militia, the Haganah, also participated. In fact, the assault was carried out by 130 Irgun (IZL) and Lehi troopers; the Haganah supplied only one or two squads in the middle of the battle, and they played only an insignificant role – they ferried in ammunition and extricated Irgun and Lehi wounded. Secondly, at Deir Yassin there was a battle: Four of the dissident troopers were killed and a dozen or more were wounded. About 100 Arabs died in or just after the battle, most of them civilians; some of these, according to Haganah intelligence reports, were executed. (In his retelling, Coates adds that the Lehi defined the Jews as a “master race” and the Arabs as a “slave race.” I am not familiar with these quotes and they do not express mainstream Lehi ideology. The Lehi, curiously, was composed of right-wing breakaways from the Irgun and left-wing anti-imperialists.

But Coates’s ropes in Deir Yassin for an ulterior purpose. The ruins of Deir Yassin, he points out, are “just a short drive from Yad Vashem [Israel’s memorial to the Holocaust]. The proximity of the two sites staggered me.” Coates’s message is clear: How could the Jews, who suffered six million dead at the hands of the Nazis, massacre Arabs? And he comments: “I knew that some Zionists invoked the Holocaust to justify their repression of the Palestinians” – and “a memorial to genocide was built within walking distance of a massacre that had made that memorial possible.” Implicit here is the absurd equation favored by Arab propagandists: Holocaust=Nakba. But in the Holocaust, the German state, for no reasonable reason, simply murdered six million unarmed Jews; in the second, Israel and the Palestinians fought a war over territory they both claimed and the Israeli militias won and crushed Palestinian society (and, along the way, here and there massacred Arabs as here and there during that war Arabs massacres Jews). The uninformed reader, as most of Coates’s American readers are, will, of course, be seduced into accepting the equation.

But I learned two things from “The Message.” One, surprisingly, was about Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s prophet and, in effect, founder. Coates quotes a long passage (which I had never encountered) in which Herzl bemoaned the “disaster” of Africa, “which remains unresolved to this day, and whose profound tragedy only a Jew can comprehend. This is the African question. Just call to mind all those terrible episodes of the slave trade, of human beings who, merely because they were black, were stolen like cattle, taken prisoner, captured and sold … Once I have witnessed the redemption of the Jews … I wish also to assist in the redemption of the Africans.”

The second, and I was previously unfamiliar with Coates’s writings, was his way with words. His homily is emblazoned with catchy phrases. But the end result is a curse. Shakespeare’s Caliban had it right. There, in the “Tempest,” the colonized African tells us he learnt language from his oppressors, the white Anglos, but all that he could do with it was to curse.