This week 
New York magazine has a long profile of Ta-Nehisi Coates that reminds once again of why I'm puzzled that he's held in such extraordinary esteem. It all started with "The Case for Reparations," his first big hit, which struck me as sort of a bloated term paper mostly cribbed from Wikipedia—and which fizzled out at the end with no actual call for reparations. I know how harsh that sounds—I'm reluctant to say it in public—and I think I was approximately the only liberal in the country who felt this way.
At around the same time Coates began reading up on the Civil War, which produced in him a sudden burning anger over how Black people had been treated. I was perplexed. Not because of the anger, which is obviously more than justified, but because I'm hardly a savant on the Civil War and the things he was pointing out struck me as fairly common knowledge if you'd read even a little bit about American history. How could a Black writer who's so smart not have known this stuff?
Now Coates is at it again. He visited Israel for ten days last year and came back, once again, burning with anger. And once again I don't get it.
On the ground in the occupied territories, he saw the segregated roads, the soldiers with their American-made weapons, the surveillance cameras, and the whole archipelago of impoverished ghettos. “I felt a mix of astonishment, betrayal, and anger,” he writes. “The astonishment was for me — for my own ignorance, for my own incuriosity … The betrayal was for my colleagues in journalism — betrayal for the way they reported, for the way they’d laundered ethnic cleansing, for the voices they’d erased.
It's not surprising that you might get angry when you see stuff in person that you've only read about before. But Coates apparently hadn't even read about it. How is that possible? Again: I'm no savant about the Middle East, but this is all pretty common knowledge unless you deliberately put yourself in a bubble (or simply pay little attention to the whole thing). Hell, Jimmy Carter wrote a bestseller about it two decades ago. How could Coates possibly not have known any of it?
Coates's message through all this is that Palestine is not a complicated situation. It's easy: Israelis treat Palestinians monstrously and that's that. But that's only true if you simply ignore the complexity, as he does:
The book is strongest when its aperture is narrow. There is no mention of the fact that Israel is bombarded by terrorist groups set on the state’s annihilation. There is no discussion of the intifadas and the failed negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders going back decades. There is even no mention of Gaza because Coates was unable to visit the region after the October 7 attack and he did not want to report on a place he hadn’t seen for himself.
This just flatly makes no sense. At the very least you have to ask yourself why Israel treats Palestinians so monstrously. I'd say the answer is fairly simple: Because they think it's the only way to keep from being constantly attacked by them. You might have a different take. Maybe you think it was all a land grab from the start. Or you might think Israel's fears don't justify their actions. That's fine. But you have to at least engage with it. How can you write a book about Israel without doing that?
> Maybe you think it was all a land grab from the start.
OF COURSE it was a land grab from the start. Even during Oslo, the Israelis continued to build new settlements, steal Palestinian land. The "final offer" they made to Arafat was a collection of bantustans, hemmed-in with Israeli highways, Israeli control of the Eastern border, and Israeli monopolization of water rights. And of course, it was a fraction of the Occupied Territories. Israeli has always wanted that land, and they've been using slo-mo ethnic cleansing to get it.
And it bears repeating that during the Oslo process, the PA worked -with- Israel to tamp down on militants and their attacks, to the point that the PA got a bad reputation among Palestinians for being the enforcers of Shin Bet.
One of these parties was bargaining in good faith; the other were liars and thieves.
+1
//Because they think it's the only way to keep from being constantly attacked by them//
spoken like an old school colonizer. Kevin, the first two Intifadas were largely *peaceful* marches. Do you know how Israel responded? The IDF shot children in their legs. so they were permanently injured...if not dead.
You bash Coates for “not knowing things he should know” and for “not reading the things he should be reading”. Sounds borderline racist but condescending at the least. But I digress. Maybe you should go *READ* the reports from the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B'Tselem, etc. all documenting the last 30 years of brutality and suffering of the Palestinian people. The people in the Warsaw Ghetto *rightly* fought back (even digging tunnels, who does that remind you of?). So why shouldnt the people in the Gaza Ghetto also fight back? Sounds like Arabs dont matter.
I have to agree with this. And also this: The US looks ridiculously weak in its dealings with Israel. Throughout the whole Netanyahu era Israel violated every commitment it made, it illegally moved the government to Jerusalem against US advice, it built new settlements when Washington asked for a stop. And there have never been consequences as a result. No wonder the US failed to achieve peace. Netanyahu didn't want peace and he took what he wanted and nobody in Washington (including Joe Biden who surely should know better) took any action. The last US administration that put serious pressure on Israel was George Bush the elder's (in the negotiations about Oslo). This is now almost half a human life ago.
Israel is surely the biggest pain in the ass of all US allies. And by a wide margin.
The US looks ridiculously weak in its dealings with Israel.
We don't just "look" ridiculously weak in our dealings with Israel.
I specifically bookmarked a YouTube discussion on the history of Palestine from Roman times to the present. Quite good, quite fair, made by two professors of history with quotes and screenshots of the documents we've discussed many times over, the Balfour declaration, etc. Among other things, it discussed how Israel has consistently misrepresented these documents and, well, let's just say it showed Zionism in a less than flattering light.
When I clicked on the bookmark, I was informed that this video no longer exists. That's what these mofo's do, that's how they operate, that's who they are.
Land-grabbing thieves and terrorists basing their actions on an extremely fundamental reading of the Torah. Though to be fair, their no worse than our mofo's who justified slavery based upon an extremely fundamental reading of the
Bible.
"This just flatly makes no sense. At the very least you have to ask yourself why Israel treats Palestinians so monstrously. I'd say the answer is fairly simple: Because they think it's the only way to keep from being constantly attacked by them. You might have a different take. ..."
It's because Israel has never accepted that they have any responsibility for their welfare.
I've long thought that the Israel-Palestinian conflict--and especially the recent Gaza stuff--looks a lot less like two powers grappling over land, and a lot more like a civil war.
If Israel were to build schools and hospitals and good roads and provide job training for Palestinians (like, y'know, a decent wealthy country would do for poorer areas within its borders), I suspect that the death-to-israel crowd would swiftly have a lot less support among the Palestinian people. That support would collapse even faster if Palestinians were given citizenship, and the ability to vote, etc.
Stanley Milgram, who was Jewish, was born in New York City in 1933 where he grew up watching the horrors inflicted upon the Jews of Europe by Nazi Germany. His insight came from self-reflection. "How is it possible, I asked myself, that ordinary people who were courteous and decent in everyday life, can act callously, inhumanly, without any limitations of conscience?"
He didn't answer the question with his famous experiment, but he did demonstrated that a majority of ordinary Americans selected at random in the early 1960s were as capable of inhumanity toward their fellow human beings as the majority of ordinary Germans selected at random in the early 1930s.
There is no excuse for inhumanity by any group of people toward any other group of people, but if you're just an ordinary person, then the odds are that you would be doing the same thing they are if you were in their shoes.
If all the "ordinary" people believed that the intrinsic value of any human life is equal to the intrinsic value of every other human life, then all the "ordinary" people would be treating each other humanely.
Milgram's experiment has been significantly debunked. Attempts to replicate it show that many humans will resist the instructions with just minor tweaks in the conditions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
Quite a few participants recognized they were being asked to act inhumanely, but went along with it as a 'gag'. Milgram's experiment was apparently too obviously a trick to them.
But I don't think he was wrong to suspect there was something there to investigate.
You mean like, uh, including older people? There's a reason the military likes to recruit 'em young and dumb.
Thanks for pointing that out. I'll be more skeptical of the experiment in future. But if "the whole experiment was designed to see if ordinary Americans would obey immoral orders, as many Germans had done during the Nazi period," we don't need the experiment to tell us that the answer is yes. All we need to do is observe how many Americans are willing to passively observe or actively participate in MAGA's efforts to (God forbid) change the most powerful nation on Earth from an (imperfectly) egalitarian democracy into an authoritarian autocracy.
My point is that more Americans, and more people in general, need to more aware of living in a glass house before throwing stones at other countries.
Your own link says the opposite re: the experiement being debunked.To wit:
"Thomas Blass of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County performed a meta-analysis on the results of repeated performances of the experiment. He found that while the percentage of participants who are prepared to inflict fatal voltages ranged from 28% to 91%, there was no significant trend over time and the average percentage for US studies (61%) was close to the one for non-US studies (66%)."
"In a book review critical of Gina Perry's findings, Nestar Russell and John Picard take issue with Perry for not mentioning that "there have been well over a score, not just several, replications or slight variations on Milgram's basic experimental procedure, and these have been performed in many different countries, several different settings and using different types of victims. And most, although certainly not all of these experiments have tended to lend weight to Milgram's original findings."
I think you can think three things on this issue at the same time:
1. Israelis doing land grabs and annexations in the West Bank are a moral crime and ethnic cleansing;
2. I don't think there would be peace between Palestinians and Israelis, or Israelis and the greater Arab region around them, even if they hadn't been doing it. The 1967 War happened without it, and nothing's stopping a coalition of neighboring countries just outright saying they'd make peace with Israel if it stops annexing West Bank land and lets the Palestinians there form a true independent state. But they don't.
3. What happened in 1946-48 was essentially the story of nationalism in the early 20th century. It involved a lot of brutal ethnic cleansing as part of nationalist projects, to create more "homogenous" countries. Millions of Germans got ethnically cleansed out of the rest of Europe at the end of World War 2 back into Germany proper, Turkey and Greece ethnically cleansed most of their ethnic Greek and Turkish minority populations respectively, India and Pakistan had a brutal population exchange in their formations, and Israel and Palestine involved a land division that led to a conflict with heavy population exchange (Israelis drove a lot of Palestinians out of Israel proper, most of the Arab states around it responded with ethnic cleansing of their Jewish populations).
As for Coates, I don't think he has anything to offer on this topic. Not even really credibility - his peak reach as a Public Intellectual was 5-10 years ago, and he's spent most of the past decade out of the country writing comic books. Will it even be news in a week that he condemned the occupation of the West Bank?
Not very good comic books either. I was tempted into buying his Black Panthers by reviews lauding him - but I was not impressed.
Try the local public library first next time.
It is interesting that the point that is meant to show the Arab side as unreasonable has already largely happened. The Saudis are practically desperate to make peace along those lines, the UAE, Morocco, and Sudan have made peace deals even without that promise from Israel. Egypt and Jordan, Israel's two main neighbors, have kept the peace for decades now. And that is all in the face of Israel acting actively to make peace impossible.
There is this incredible drive to make it look like there are two sides to the story to pass over the war crimes that you allude to in your first point, but there really aren't. Those war crimes make Israel less safe in the name of preventing peace.
"... The 1967 War happened without it, and nothing's stopping a coalition of neighboring countries just outright saying they'd make peace with Israel if it stops annexing West Bank land and lets the Palestinians there form a true independent state. But they don't."
What neighboring countries are you talking about? Jordan and Egypt are already at peace with Israel. Syria and Lebanon are too weak to threaten Israel. So any such peace offer would be pointless.
Lot's of personal comments/attacks on Coates were needed to set up criticism of his position on this issue. And its really not even a criticism of the position, its just another criticism of Coates.
I'm not sure of its an accurate take on Coates' new book, but Kevins approach is....curious.
The Israel/Palestine issue does weird things to people's brains. Specifically the people (the commentator class) who know all about every topic on earth. The fact that someone doesnt pretend to be deeply informed on every topic is SHOCKING! OUTRAGEOUS!
"The fact that someone doesnt pretend to be deeply informed on every topic is SHOCKING! OUTRAGEOUS!"
No. What's outrageous is that Coates gets this big megaphone to announce how ignorant he is. I'd much rather hear from someone who has, you know, something to say.
When white guys get a big megaphone yet clearly ignoramuses nobody reacts like they do when a Person of color gets a big megaphone, no matter what, no matter how qualified and thoughtful they are they all get the treatment.
I think much self reflection is needed by many - his Atlantic article on reparations was very good, yes as a historian I already knew all that but still the narrative and weaving in lived experiences made it valuable as a means to get non-historians to understand the baked in impact decisions 100 years ago are into today's society.
Sure, I've *never* heard anyone call Trump, Vance, or Lindsay Graham, for example, ignoramuses.
To call Trump an ignoramus would be a compliment...
Hmm, Those are politicians. How about Tucker Carlson?
Google "Tucker Carlson ignorant" sometime when you have an afternoon to spare.
Why google him? He is the best example of a white, non-intellectual pretending to be an intellectual. I mean he is "just asking questions". He was given a huge megaphone for reasons that no intellectual agrees with.
He isnt 'getting' a microphone. He created it. Fairly large difference.
There is a lot of material from people who deem themselves well informed and very knowlegeable. You can choose that.
There is a lot of material from people who are demonstrably and widely recognized as well informed and very knowlegeable. You can choose that.
FIFY
lol, if that makes you feel better, then yeah sure, there is a surplus of experts who also like to opine. Limiting your intake to these experts might make you feel smarter and its certainly the best way to pretend you are more informed.
Focusing on the expertise and credentials to the exclusion of the material is a bad way to become more informed, but it is a good way to stay siloed. This might be understandable for choosing a Dr....but choosing a book full of opinions and observations? Umm, lol.
There are two specific kinds of rhetorical technique at work here:
1. "Personal narrative" as a means to get at a story. This is legitimate; more to the point, it is at least partly culturally influenced and determined. Enslaved Blacks in parts of the pre-war South were not literate, for example, and in some cases could be punished for trying to become literate; if you cannot read, your recourse to authority is sharply limited, but your stories about your own experiences remain accessible to you. (Chaucer had his Wife of Bath make a similar point centuries earlier about women.)
2. Humility topos crossed with education/outrage: Suppose you think your audience is massively ignorant of something. You could write to educate them starting by calling them out for their massive ignorance, suggesting that they're remaining willfully blind to injustice because if they were forced to confront it they would confront their own complicity. Is anyone still reading at that point? Or, you can call YOURSELF out, say you should have known better but didn't, that YOU were complicit... and then add a target, someone to blame, the media. In this case, as a member of the media, Coates gets to play into the "humble me" topos by saying that while he was failed by members of the media, he himself had failed us as readers... UNTIL NOW, at which point he drops the educating on us. He gets to absorb all the blame for ignorance (we were more clued in than him, surely), and it's not any of our faults, it's the media who failed us all, but now we know better because Coates educated himself and passed that along.
Coates may not be deploying these well; you may dislike him; you may dislike how he deploys them. But being outraged? Tucker Carlson massively overused the ignorance angle (witness his frequent deployment of the "concerned/confused/getting educated" expression). Conservatives deploy this stuff all the time. Rejecting an effective educative tool seems like an indulgence, whatever you think of Coates. I don't understand him as being critically important to any specific movement or ideology; maybe I'm genuinely ignorant there.
At the very least you have to ask yourself why Israel treats Palestinians so monstrously.
This sounds obvious, but that doesn't stop a lot of people from not asking themselves why the Palestinians hate the Israelis so much.
Here's a hint: The entire Zionist project was a bunch of Europeans deciding to immigrate to a territory that already had a native population, with the avowed intent of creating a state that would exclude 95% of that population from full citizenship. And the colonial power that controlled the territory allowed that population zero say in the decision to allow that immigration.
Had anything happened to that population immediately beforehand? Or was it just a random choice?
There are always things that happen to a population immediately before some other things happen. You're going to have to be less cutesy, and actually make a statement.
Good point! The Palestinians really brought this on themselves by committing the Holocaust.
What's that you say? It was Europeans who did the Holocaust? Well, even so--those Palestinians probably had it coming anyway.
+1
Yes, I'm also clicking on the nonexistent Thumbs Up icon.
Good point! The Palestinians really brought this on themselves by committing the Holocaust.
Wait, he's talking about the Holocaust? The reason I didn't figure that out is because it's stupendously untrue. I talked about the beginning of the Zionist project, which was more than a half century prior to the Holocaust.
How about the hundreds of thousands (now millions, the majority of Jews in Israel) who for some reason decided to leave Mideastern countries around 1948?
But it's true that there weren't that many Jews in Israel before 1948. Holding a massacre every few decades is a great method of population control, if you go in for that sort of thing. And they sure did! It's no wonder Palestinian leaders were early supporters of Hitler.
So you are thinking the best way to defend Israel is fiction? You are probably right.
How about the hundreds of thousands (now millions, the majority of Jews in Israel) who for some reason decided to leave Mideastern countries around 1948?
They left or were forced out as a consequence of the creation of Israel. Without the Zionist project, they'd still be living where they did previously.
But it's true that there weren't that many Jews in Israel before 1948.
Which is just as irrelevant to my comment as invoking the Holocaust. When the Zionist project was initiated, some seventy years earlier, the Jewish population of Palestine was about 5%.
Holding a massacre every few decades is a great method of population control, if you go in for that sort of thing. And they sure did!
Maybe, just maybe, telling people that you are moving to their country in order to create a state that excludes them from full citizenship was a really bad idea. The enmity of Arabs for Jews didn't happen in a vacuum. It was the result of the arrival of the Zionists and the British refusal to allow the Arabs any say in that immigration policy.
One could claim, fairly, that some Western powers were sorely concerned that anti-Semitism endangered Jews across the world, especially in parts of the world (like the Soviet Union) with meaningful prior populations alongside refugees, and that encouraging these people to "return" to Israel would secure their safety and help atone in small part for Western complacency about the Holocaust.
One could also claim, fairly, that many of the Western nations which had, over the course of the war, admitted Jewish refugees (although they also turned many away), were themselves still hotbeds of anti-Semitism, and that the creation of the state of Israel would provide a convenient way to both channel remaining refugees to a single place and to reduce the number of Jews living within their borders.
Nor is the withdrawing British Empire blameless: unquestionably the creation of Pakistan was a (successful) attempt to destabilize a nation that Britain was supposedly returning sovereignty to; the idea that anyone could seriously believe a new Jewish state surrounded by Islamic states would be safe is suspect, although one can see how Zionists might be more comfortable with the idea of having armed forces to protect their own state, especially if they compared with the extent Jews had been protected by local military and police during the Holocaust.
One certainly can say that a lot of nations previously colonized by the British seem to have neighbors they hate a lot more than they do the British.
The important question: Who is happy with the current state of affairs? Sadly, I think many of the hard-right members of both communities (Israelis and Palestinians alike) are happy with escalation; unsurprisingly, that's led to escalation. It's unclear how this gets fixed: relying on imperial powers to externally impose peace when they are largely responsible for the mess to begin with seems suspect.
Same old schtick form Coates. I'm surprised that anyone still pays attention to him.
He could try Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Jews
Now don't get me wrong, this is no excuse for what they are doing in Israel / Palestine / Lebanon etc.
Maimonides, who had to flee from Almohad-controlled Iberia with his family, said "God has hurled us in the midst of this people, the Arabs, who have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us. Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they. We bear the inhumane burden of their humiliation, lies and absurdities, being as the prophet said, 'like a deaf man who does not hear or a dumb man who does not open his mouth' ... Our sages disciplined us to bear Ishmael's lies and absurdities, listening in silence, and we have trained ourselves, old and young, to endure their humiliation, as Isaiah said, 'I have given my back to the smiters, and my cheek to the beard pullers.'
Revenge. That's all this is.
The thing is that "The Case for Reparations" was the jumped-the-shark moment for Coates. His earlier writing was thought-provoking and captured some things really well. (I still think his article about why he doesn't carry a gun is the best articulation of the responsibilities of gun-carrying I've ever read.)
His entire catalog of writing about George Zimmerman was the "jumped-the-shark" moment. He heard things never said and not heard by anyone else. Constantly used deceptive images of the two and just could not tolerate being corrected.
"Maybe you think it was all a land grab from the start."
Obviously. I don't think anyone can argue against that. The question is whether the land grab was somehow justified by everything that went before it, or simply a way for the west to assuage its guilt without, you know, paying any price itself.
But the history of the Middle East since then is white people steal land, brown people object to white people stealing land, brown people get salughtered.
It definitely has been a land grab from day 1 -- the Israelis have been building settlements since 1967 at an almost constant rate.
But calling the Israelis white and the Palestinians black is bizarre. The history of the world has been pretty much one group of people stealing land from others.
I was a member or the horde; I know a few other folk who comment here who also commented there, too.
And I do think you've got Coates backward; at least concerning the Civil War.
And a key point to understanding the thread of his research is that he knows even the most suppressed person has his or her own agency; and that part of the history is typically unrecorded and ignored.
Absolutely agreed -- thank you for saying so.
I was a huge fan of Coates's blog after I discovered it (although I never commented). What I liked best was the nuance he brought to topics. For examplle, he spent a lot of effort trying to get a real understanding of the mindset of a white slave-holder. For him, it was not enough to say "This practice is abominable!" -- which it obviously was -- but also to ask, "So how does an otherwise decent person justify it to himself?"
I also think a key to his writing was how often he admitted that he was *not* an expert on the topic, but he was taking you along on the journey of learning. I have taken to borowing the phrase he often used when he asked commenters for explanations and suggestions: "Talk to me like I'm stupid."
+1 This notion that you have to be an expert before you can write about anything, indeed, deny that you're anything but an expert is a poison.
Well said.
Yep. (hi zic!) Count me as a charter member of the Golden Horde. It started in early 2008. We talked a lot about the D primary that year - he backed Obama, of course.
But in another post, he complained about the then VA governor (an R) declaring "Civil War History Month" or something like that - this was in 2008. I suggested, and others too, that maybe looking more closely at the Civil War would not show the things that some people thought they would show.
For instance, Coates was the first person I know to say, "here's a link to the South Carolina Articles of Secession, go read them yourself and see if you still want to say that the Civil War wasn't about slavery" I think it's likely he started that.
And he dug into the history of the USCT the black men who fought in the Federal army. There was a lot more than in that movie with Matthew Broderick.
I recall him saying that black people he knew had not been all that interested in the civil war, but he was discovering lots of reasons to change that attitude.
And remember, this was in 2008.
On another front Coates' writing on CTE and professional football (and professional wrestling in a couple posts) was also spot on. He split apart "It's their right to do that" from "I don't want to feed it".
And if a man can be judged by the company he keeps, there's several folks from those days that I remember with considerable fondness.
Of course the trolls - probably there is some overlap with people here whining about him - had to come in the blog and smear crap all over the walls. And so a very good thing in my life came to an end.
It was Coates who introduced me to the writing of James Baldwin, whom Coates strove to emulate - I would summarize his description of Baldwin as "both completely forthright and honest (about racial matters) and completely compassionate."
Baldwin, after all, is the guy who said, 'If the white man learns to love himself, there will be no race problem'
His first memoir - "A Beautiful Struggle" was a very good read.
So yeah. Not everybody likes every writer. That's as it should be. I never much liked the much-admired Christopher Hitchens, but I don't write posts saying, "why do all you idiots like Hitch so much?"
Beautiful comment, Doctor Jay. Thank you.
TNC taught us how to conversate. And about hair cuttery. And these were things I welcomed learning in a group with others on-line. I agree; a very good thing in my life came to an end, and there is no replacement for it.
As is so often the case, I read a lot of finger-pointing and blame-gaming in these comments. I hope most agree that the goal here should be peace. Doing the "it's their fault," "No it's THEIR fault!" will not move us in that direction. We have Hamas and Hezbollah who profess religious motivation to destroy Israel and create an Islamic state. We have a right wing militant Israeli government and a people who have been bombed and terrorized by their neighbors, who happen to be their ancestral relatives, for generations. Some Israelis have responded with militance and hatred, and some people under the rule of Hamas and Hezbollah have been raised to hate Jews for the crime of being Jews, or for stealing as opposed to settling in and being granted land that is now inhabited by 21% Arabic people with full Israeli citizenship, many of whom were expelled from their homes in Arab ruled countries. This is not stated to start a new round of the blame game. I'm just trying to describe what is technically called a Rubik's cube of a multi-dimensional clusterfuck. The problem before us is not to point fingers, but to work toward a solution. Hamas and Hezbollah and their pernicious influence in miseducating young people must somehow be disempowered. Netanyahu and his militant advisors have to be voted out. This can happen gradually if peace and mutually dependent prosperity were allowed grow. Or it can happen after intense negotiation as it did with Egypt, Jordan and perhaps soon with the UAR - to mutual advantage. No wars, no missiles, no terrorism, but instead: Economic prosperity. How do we put out the fires of religious and vengeful hatred now burning in Palestine, which includes Israel, Gaza, and in earlier times, southern Lebanon and Jordan? I'm not enough of a historian or politician to know. But I do know that we need to hold that goal in mind. And that blaming one side or the other, despite any convictions you may hold dear to your heart, is... just...not....helpful.
Hezbollah would not exist had Israel not invaded Lebanon and occupied the southern part of the country for twenty years...
What you miss, somehow, is that Israel has actively acted to prevent the possibility of peace under every government, not just Netanyahu, and that Hamas and Hezbollah both formed under Israeli occupation.
The Israeli/Palestinian issue really isn't that hard. Palestinians deserve the same rights as everybody else. That means they should either be citizens of a single state with Jews, or citizens of a separate state from Jews. The world has settled on a deal for two states which would give the Jewish minority 78% of the territory and leave the Palestinians with a divided 22% of the territory. As it happens, the safest thing for Jews would be to self-separate their population from the stateless Palestinians along that same 78% for the minority 22% for the majority formula. Israel does not want to do so. The US is sworn to protect Israel even if it doesn't. And so Israel controls it all and keeps millions of Palestinians stateless.
The rest is obfuscation.
A bit of paragraphing might be useful next time, OK?
Drum has repeatedly shown that he has grown up with a kindergarten version of the region told from the Jewish perspective. That is sad in itself, but it becomes particularly weird when he uses that simpleminded view of the situation to complain that other people are being simpleminded.
Israel is often called a great friend of the US. We treat Israel like a friend. But it is an apartheid state that has received an oddly small amount of violence given the amount that it abuses the population that it keeps stateless. In fact prior to 10/7 it has been able to tell Jews outside of Israel that they could be quite safe in Israel, supposedly safer than in countries like France or the US, something predicated on the idea that they had completely broken the spirit of the Palestinians who would largely accept statelessness into the indefinite future.
This was idiocy,=but it was easy enough to believe if one bought into the kindergarten version that Drum seems to have grown up with. And sadly that kindergarten version is what people learn in the US. It is not really that surprising that seeing the reality would make someone mad. What is more depressing is how much abuse of the Palestinians Drum is able to rationalize without getting mad.
So this would be the kindergarten version of the region from Palestinian perspective, then?
I wish it was. When people talk about peace between the two sides they have in mind the Jewish minority getting 78% of the territory and the Palestinian majority getting a divided 22%. The most serious peace negotiations have fallen apart because this is considered unfair, by the Israelis who feel they are entitled to part of the Palestinian 22%. It is hard to write that without thinking one is being unfair to the Israelis, but that is the reality. It is hard to be unfair to the Israelis in this situation.
Amazingly in the US people take seriously the idea that Israel has had no choice but to move a civilian population onto occupied territory (in violation of international law) for safety purposes. How slanted does discussion have to be to miss that moving civilians into occupied territory makes them less safe not more safe. The only reason to move civilian populations into occupied territory is the same one that Stalin had for moving Russian populations into the other SSRs, to make sure that there could be no peace without violence.
If you think that is simpleminded by all means point out how. But I hope it is more than complaining that the people who have been held stateless for decades have not adopted pacifism in the face of that occupation. For one thing the PA has actually cooperated with Israel on security in the West Bank, and Israel has responded by expanding its settlements more quickly.
"There is no mention of the fact that Israel is bombarded by terrorist groups set on the state’s annihilation"
Oh, brother. You're a numbers guy, Kevin. How about some comparative numbers: Setting aside Oct. 7 - a singular event much like our own Sep 11 - how many Israeli civilians are killed by said terrorist groups? How many Palestinian civilians are killed by Israeli troops? How much land have Palestinians taken from Israelis? How many Palestinian homes have been bulldozed to make way for Israeli settlers? If Palestinians are "bent on Israel's annihilation," how do Israelis feel about Palestinians? https://theintercept.com/2023/10/25/israel-hamas-opportunity/
You don't have to set aside 10/7 to make the comparison, and it would be odd to do so. But it is often repeated that 10/7 was the most devastating attack against Jews since the Holocaust, without noting that it is far from the most devastating attack in the region Israel controls. It is just that all of the other ones were done by the Israelis.
It would be a ghastly irony of history if the next Holocaust was actually perpetrated by Israel.
Is anyone willing to bet that it won't happen?
"How many Palestinian civilians are killed by Israeli troops?"
Define "civilian"...
Are you willing to define as non-civilian according to the definitions of Hamas or Hezbollah who are happy to claim, for example, that anyone who works with the Israeli state, or in an Israeli industry, or lives in certain portions of Israel, or who helps the Israeli armed forces, is ipso facto no longer civilian?
Do you have special psychic insight into which dead Palestinians are "civilians"? Or you simply believe whatever you are told in this respect, regardless of how often it's proved a lie?
I like how you present the inclusion of all males as legitimate targets as if it is a Hamas/Hezbollah practice that is not shared by the Israelis. You are right that taking Israeli counts of combatant deaths serious requires accepting the standards of Hamas and Hezbollah that you criticize. And yet oddly you don't see that as a criticism of Israel. You seem to be arguing that it is outrageous that Hamas would do such a thing, but just fine that Israel does it. But then that is how most discussion of Israel goes in the US.
"Do you have special psychic insight into which dead Palestinians are "civilians"?"
Not a paranormal insight, but, most of 'em, probably: soldier-to-civilian ratios are always extremely low, esp. in poor places like Gaza.
But certainly at least the dead children, right?
It's easy: Hatred of competence.
Hatred of competence is THE unifying thread of the "Left". Once you realize that, everything else makes sense. If you refuse to realize it nothing really makes sense.
You can argue about whether this is envy ("kill the rich") or just Harrison Bergeron level demands for forced equity, no matter what; but that's much less important than the fact that, either way, the hatred is for competence of any sort.
"Hatred of competence is THE unifying thread of the 'Left'"
Exactly! Which is why the left elects people like Obama, and the right elects people like Trump. We just can't stand competence!
Oooh, that Trump and his extreme competence! It just makes us lefties so mad how he seems to effortlessly do everything competently, be it spelling words, remembering if the woman he raped was or was not his wife, or correctly identifying which pets are being consumed by whom.
“I think I was approximately the only liberal in the country who felt this way.”
Definitely not. I’m one more! Coates may very well be a good writer in the sense that he can write eloquent passages, but I do not consider him to be a particularly insightful or perceptive writer. If he were simply treated as a good writer, that would be one thing, treating him as some sort of prophet (with Between the World and Me regularly assigned to high school and/or college students) is frankly ridiculous.
But the key word in Kevin’s quote above, as he surely knows, is “Liberal.” There have indeed been plenty of public critics of Coates. But they tend to be Conservative. A quick Google search comes up with Andrew Sullivan pointing out Coates’s reductive nihilism and Rich Lowry condemning Coates’s “monstrous passage about 9/11” (look it up).
Add up the facts that Coates is black and that he’s been criticized by Conservatives, and you have a pretty good explanation for why Liberals keep their criticism to themselves. But bravo to Kevin for stepping up as one of those few Liberals who will (sometimes) call out his own side.
I have read very little of Coates and don't really care that much either way. But Kevin seems to be claiming to mind-read him, or he isn't providing the full quotation: for example, at what point does Coates claim he never read anything about checkpoints in Israel? Or that he knew nothing about the American Civil War? Coates is obviously subject to criticism; as someone not well-informed, I look for better evidence than what I'm seeing here.
The message of the article seems to be a clear "I got the picture of 'security checkpoints' as being like airport TSA lines, but then I went there and it wasn't anything like that." Suggesting that it's just "common sense" that these checkpoints are a certain way and it's objectionable to visit one and be shocked at the mismatch between our perception here and the reality on the ground seems strange to me, whatever you think about Coates specifically. When did you last visit a checkpoint, Kevin? I never have; I've watched news stories; I suspect I might nevertheless be shocked to see one in person.
I can't seem to easily find the number of Palestinians shot (for whatever reason) at checkpoints in 2023, or, for that matter, the number of injuries or deaths of Palestinians, Israelis, or others. Maybe Israel posts that information and an English language search isn't producing it. If the TSA had frequent incidents of finding people with guns and bombs who they then shot, and incidents of being attacked, I'd like to think that someone would keep track of the numbers.
It's hard to see how routinely delaying people for hours at a checkpoint improves either safety or peace, or how repeatedly strip-searching Palestinian elected officials advances the cause of peace. If you treat the moderates that way, it starts looking like you want to deliberately radicalize everyone.
I wish Mr. Drum had more tightly focused his indignation on Coates instead of allowing this to become yet another Israel/Palestine slugfest in the comments. Because I too have wondered why Mr. Coates has turned into this sort of white-knight-of-progressivism figure when he's demonstrably pretty mediocre. I figure that, like pretty much everyone else currently prominent in the media, his primary talent is self-promotion.
PS: Also I don't understand why you pronounce the first "i" in his name as an "ah".
PPS: That photograph of him is terrible, way too wide of a lens bordering on fisheye.
You know your criticism of Coates would seem less farcical if you did not add on a criticism of how he pronounces his name and of his photo. It might be harder to miss the lack of content in your main criticism if you did not tack on additionally criticisms that seem designed to make you look silly.
"I think I was approximately the only liberal in the country who felt this way."
I, for one, have never been impressed with Coates. I distinctly recall reading an article years ago that seems to have been deep sixed from the web and I can't recall the details. But I do remember him deliberately misquoting you because I read you every day. He left out just enough of the quote to make it sound like you said the exact opposite of what you actually said so that he could argue against it.
That isn't even freshman term paper level of analysis. It's just a lie. I haven't been interested in reading him since.
A large number of black intellectuals only really care about black problems.