I read his interview with Ezra Klein and was so angry by halfway through that I could barely finish it.
Leaving Klein aside (with whom I often disagree) I see Coates’ mission as an antisemitic one, as part of what I call the Oppression Olympics. That’s why he ducked so cleanly around the murderous history of the Palestinians and whiffed on the question of why they aren’t accepted anywhere else in the Arab world. He doesn’t acknowledge that the tragic deaths of the many thousands of Palestinian innocents is exactly as Hamas intended, and the world’s response is exactly as Hamas intended, where it’s so easily dismissed that Israel was not the attacker, but the attacked.
His embrace of the myths of Africa to which he ascribes his ancestors’ historic grief and longing, feelings I fully understand, is no different than mine and my ancestors’ longing for a safe and secure place. Israel. I don’t care whether they know King David’s city is real because they found his mailbox. I care that a tiny, scrubby piece of land was made fertile and beautiful and ours because our people were slaughtered. There are fewer Jews now than before the Shoah. THAT is what “genocide” is.
In spite of all of the above I believe that the settlers are horrible people, that they should be forcibly sent back across the wire, and that Netanyahu should have been in prison years ago. This war is Hamas’ fault, but its continuation is Bibi’s.
Sorry for the rant, kind of. Your review is very good. I’m not trying to criticize a book I will not read, just Coates’ intentions as he expressed them to Klein.
"Leaving Klein aside (with whom I often disagree) I see Coates’ mission as an antisemitic one, as part of what I call the Oppression Olympics."
He's also wedded to viewing the history of region through a single lens: colonialism. And that obscures as much as it reveals. Did Palestinians even exist before 1948? I'd argue no, for the same reason that Americans and Canadians didn't exist before 1776. Both wars caused a massive shift in how the people of a region viewed themselves, creating new senses of identity. And the region has only a brief history of local autonomy, over 2,000 years ago; for all the rest of that time, it was a province of a succession of larger entities. That's a LONG history of colonization, and not all of it by Europeans. And does he know that most of the Jews now in Israel were either born there or came from countries in the Middle East (after being kicked out of lands THEY have lived on for hundreds of years in 1948), and that most of the Palestinians who bring up the issue of the Right to Return were NOT born ion the land currently held by Israel proper, so they'd be returning to a place they'd never actually lived (just as the Ashkenazi Jews Coates derides as colonizers were doing in 1948)?
The whole situation is a tragically tangled, complicated mess, and over-simplifying it serves neither side well.
I imagine he’d argue that one’s only available perspective is one’s own perspective (exactly his position in the Klein interview) which I think is purposely limited. If one doesn’t enter a place with a specific mindset, there’s a risk of bumping into inconvenient truths.
I don’t believe Coates even mentioned the words “Hamas” or “Hezbollah” once in his book. He certainly avoided mentioning any of the reasons for the 1948 war, such as Israel was attacked by Egypt, Iraq, Saudia Arabia, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. Coates make it seem Israel launched the war out of national pride
I mean, bro, cmon. At least put up a patina of historical accuracy
I read his interview with Ezra Klein and was so angry by halfway through that I could barely finish it.
Leaving Klein aside (with whom I often disagree) I see Coates’ mission as an antisemitic one, as part of what I call the Oppression Olympics. That’s why he ducked so cleanly around the murderous history of the Palestinians and whiffed on the question of why they aren’t accepted anywhere else in the Arab world. He doesn’t acknowledge that the tragic deaths of the many thousands of Palestinian innocents is exactly as Hamas intended, and the world’s response is exactly as Hamas intended, where it’s so easily dismissed that Israel was not the attacker, but the attacked.
His embrace of the myths of Africa to which he ascribes his ancestors’ historic grief and longing, feelings I fully understand, is no different than mine and my ancestors’ longing for a safe and secure place. Israel. I don’t care whether they know King David’s city is real because they found his mailbox. I care that a tiny, scrubby piece of land was made fertile and beautiful and ours because our people were slaughtered. There are fewer Jews now than before the Shoah. THAT is what “genocide” is.
In spite of all of the above I believe that the settlers are horrible people, that they should be forcibly sent back across the wire, and that Netanyahu should have been in prison years ago. This war is Hamas’ fault, but its continuation is Bibi’s.
Sorry for the rant, kind of. Your review is very good. I’m not trying to criticize a book I will not read, just Coates’ intentions as he expressed them to Klein.
"Leaving Klein aside (with whom I often disagree) I see Coates’ mission as an antisemitic one, as part of what I call the Oppression Olympics."
He's also wedded to viewing the history of region through a single lens: colonialism. And that obscures as much as it reveals. Did Palestinians even exist before 1948? I'd argue no, for the same reason that Americans and Canadians didn't exist before 1776. Both wars caused a massive shift in how the people of a region viewed themselves, creating new senses of identity. And the region has only a brief history of local autonomy, over 2,000 years ago; for all the rest of that time, it was a province of a succession of larger entities. That's a LONG history of colonization, and not all of it by Europeans. And does he know that most of the Jews now in Israel were either born there or came from countries in the Middle East (after being kicked out of lands THEY have lived on for hundreds of years in 1948), and that most of the Palestinians who bring up the issue of the Right to Return were NOT born ion the land currently held by Israel proper, so they'd be returning to a place they'd never actually lived (just as the Ashkenazi Jews Coates derides as colonizers were doing in 1948)?
The whole situation is a tragically tangled, complicated mess, and over-simplifying it serves neither side well.
I imagine he’d argue that one’s only available perspective is one’s own perspective (exactly his position in the Klein interview) which I think is purposely limited. If one doesn’t enter a place with a specific mindset, there’s a risk of bumping into inconvenient truths.
He avoids inconvenient truths a lot.
And that makes him just as intellectually dishonest as so many of those he criticizes.
I don’t believe Coates even mentioned the words “Hamas” or “Hezbollah” once in his book. He certainly avoided mentioning any of the reasons for the 1948 war, such as Israel was attacked by Egypt, Iraq, Saudia Arabia, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. Coates make it seem Israel launched the war out of national pride
I mean, bro, cmon. At least put up a patina of historical accuracy