TNC's blind spot

How the victims become victimizers.

I’ve been a fan of Ta-Nehisi Coates for a long time. Before “The Case for Reparations” and “Between The World and Me,” I was a fan of his blog at The Atlantic — attracted to his curiosity, his humanity and his willingness to learn in public. I loved his lesser-known memoir “The Beautiful Struggle” about growing up in Baltimore. It’s fair to say his approach to examining the Big Questions was a model for what I have aspired to in my own writing.

So I was excited by the New York Magazine cover story about his “return” to nonfiction writing with a new book that examines the Israel-Palestinian conflict in a way that centers the experiences of Palestinians under occupation. And I still am: I’ll buy the book when it’s available and read it quickly, I’m sure.

But the magazine story makes me a little bit nervous.

Here’s a description of his 10-day visit to the West Bank:

He was astonished by the plain truth of what he saw: the walls, checkpoints, and guns that everywhere hemmed in the lives of Palestinians; the clear tiers of citizenship between the first-class Jews and the second-class Palestinians; and the undisguised contempt with which the Israeli state treated the subjugated other. For Coates, the parallels with the Jim Crow South were obvious and immediate: Here, he writes, was a “world where separate and unequal was alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others was policy.” And this world was made possible by his own country: “The pushing of Palestinians out of their homes had the specific imprimatur of the United States of America. Which means that it had my imprimatur.”

That it was complicated, he now understood, was “horseshit.” “Complicated” was how people had described slavery and then segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”

Straightforward moral clarity. And it’s tempting.

But that moral clarity leads to someplace that can get a bit disconcerting. Here he is talking about October 7:

“If this was the 1830s and I was enslaved and Nat Turner’s rebellion had happened,” Coates told me that day in Gramercy, “I would’ve been one of those people that would’ve been like, ‘I’m not cool with this.’ But Nat Turner happens in a context. So the other part of me is like, What would I do if I had grown up in Gaza, under the blockade and in an open-air prison, and I had a little sister who had leukemia and needed treatment but couldn’t get it because my dad or my mom couldn’t get the right pass out? You know what I mean? What would I do if my brother had been shot for getting too close to the barrier? What would I do if my uncle had been shot because he’s a fisherman and he went too far out? And if that wall went down and I came through that wall, who would I be? Can I say I’d be the person that says, ‘Hey, guys, hold up. We shouldn’t be doing this’? Would that have been me?”

This is, I think, admirably empathetic. But it also reveals a blind spot.

Let’s sum it up like this:

“Context” for me. “‘Complicated’ is horseshit” for thee.

You see the problem, right?

Because I can see that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is executed in a straightforwardly racist way, I can see that its war in Gaza is done with wholesale disregard for innocent Palestinian life, and also I can see how, for Israelis, this all happens in a context.

Israel, the modern state, was created out of the ashes of the Holocaust. That’s context. It’s a whole lot of context. And while that does not justify the occupation, it perhaps makes Israeli actions something that’s perhaps straightforwardly evil at times, but also not just straightforwardly evil — acts committed out of a desperate sense that survival required it.

Again: That’s not justification. It is context.

It’s easy enough to start writing myself in rings here. The Israeli invasion of Gaza is a moral disaster. Yes, but October 7 was a moral disaster. Yes, but the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank were and are moral disasters. Yes, but to be Jewish in the world is to be forever a threatened minority. Yes, but that doesn’t open the door to permission to oppress others. Yes, but … yes, but … yes, but.¹

We can do this all day.

I think Coates is doing something admirable, for what it’s worth, by spending his cultural capital to draw attention to the Palestinian experience of occupation. I think he’s right that the American media tends — with occasional exceptions — to tell the story primarily through an Israeli-centric lens.

But.

I think — I hope — a fully realized expression of the sensibility I’ve previously glimpsed in Coates’ writing would hold room for the disasters and fears and terrors that both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims have endured, collectively, for decades and centuries. It is difficult to have have the clarity to call out oppressive systems where they are found, but also to be willing to grapple with the context that called those systems forth. To do otherwise — to pick one side of the narrative and say that’s the one that really matters — is simply glib. It does little to solve and everything to perpetuate an ugly cycle that already seems well-nigh irresolvable.

I suspect that’s the way the world works most of the time. But I expect better of Ta-Nehisi Coates. Complication can indeed be a way of making simple moral questions murky. It can also be the result of recognizing that your opponents have a humanity you might otherwise be tempted to dismiss. Give me more of that.

1. Honestly a reason I’ve tend to avoid writing over-much about the topic. Certainty seems to be the enemy of humanity here.