Ta-Nehisi Coates on Palestine and 'The Message'
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Writer and journalist; author of 'Between the World and Me'
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.
In May 2023, the American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates spent ten days in Israel and the West Bank, roughly half the time guided by Breaking the Silence, an organization of former Israeli soldiers critical of the occupation. The trip anchors the longest of the three essays in The Message (One World, October 2024), in which Coates describes what he saw — separate roads, checkpoints, military rule for Palestinians alongside civil law for settlers — as a system of segregation comparable to the Jim Crow South his parents grew up in, and explicitly as apartheid. He wrote:
“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.”
The book became a bestseller and a flashpoint. Coates told the New York Times’ Ezra Klein that he “felt lied to” by major media organizations about the reality of the occupation, and a combative CBS Mornings interview about the book drew internal criticism at the network. Critics, including some reviewers sympathetic to his earlier work, argued that he flattened a complex conflict and projected American racial categories onto it; defenders replied that the book is explicitly an account of how narratives — including his own prior ones — obscure lived reality.
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