Ta-Nehisi Coates, Palestine, and a message of resistance

 

In The Message, Coates writes of a constellation of shared experiences and renews a call for global solidarity

In East Jerusalem, roughly a dozen participants in the Palestine Festival of Literature, including American author Ta-Nehisi Coates, are met by Israeli soldiers outside the Al-Aqsa complex and are made to wait. “No justifications were given, no questions asked, no instructions offered,” Coates writes. The following day, in the West Bank, as the group of authors are navigating the many checkpoint of Hebron, a soldier asks Coates his religion. When Coates replies that he has none, the soldier inquires about the religion of his parents. “When I told him they were Christian, he allowed me to pass.” On his visit to the West Bank, Coates sees the cisterns, or water reservoirs, that collect rainwater atop the homes of Palestinians—a survival strategy in the face of unequal access to water. He also sees the metal fences ahead of revolving gates and autonomous turrets that fire “non-lethal” rounds via remote control.

Coates’ trip lasted only 10 days, but what he took away from his brief stay and relates in his new book The Message is varied and deep. Coates, a Black man from the United States, found what he witnessed in Palestine reminiscent of Jim Crow in the American South, and of South African apartheid. He sees Israel as being, “like its American patron, an expansionist power” that wants “the land without the Palestinians on it.”

Some would say it is that expansionist drive that connects the everyday indignities, inconveniences, humiliations, and brutalities Palestinians have faced since Israel’s formation with the current moment of live-streamed genocide in Gaza.

Jason Hickel, a professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the University of Barcelona, also attributes US support for Israel to expansionism and, more precisely, its determination to “maintain the conditions for capital accumulation and geopolitical hegemony.”  (more...)

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Palestine, and a message of resistance