The creepy thought experiments of Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Brendan O'Neill, October 11, 2024.
I cannot believe this needs to be said in 2024, but there is no context in which killing innocent Jews becomes understandable. Everywhere one looks these days, people are ‘contextualising’ pogroms. Among the cranky online right there is a creepy new trend of excuse-making for the Nazis’ extermination of Europe’s Jews. And among the woke left, there’s a rush to provide context for Hamas’s butchery of 7 October. Gaza is hellish, they say. Its people are oppressed, they insist. As if any of that explains the rape of Jewish women or the hurling of hand grenades into Jewish children’s faces. No political grievance, not one, makes sense of Jew murder.
The most striking thing about Coates’s latest artless intervention into the discussion of Israel-Gaza is how he puts himself slap bang in the middle of it. Many of today’s moral relativists who masquerade as progressive thinkers have said, or at least implied, that 7 October was a prison-break by the persecuted, a revolt of the downtrodden. But Coates goes a step further. He wonders what he would do. He puts himself in the shoes of the pogromists. I’m all for empathy. But trying to get into the hearts and minds of the men who raped Jewish women and then shot them? Yeah, that’s where my empathy dries up.
Coates’s thought experiment speaks not only to the moral disarray of contemporary ‘progressive’ thought, but to its narcissism, too. As with his new book, The Message, which includes a long section on a trip he took to Israel and Palestine, Coates seems hell-bent on centring his own emotions and hang-ups. The entire wartorn Middle East is reduced to a therapist’s couch for a moneyed American trying to make sense of his own life experiences. His interest in the region seems little more than an extension of his own ceaseless self-reflection as the literary establishment’s anointed truth-teller on race.
So in The Message he likens Israel to ‘the Jim Crow South’ – a spectacularly historically illiterate claim that could only make sense to a man for whom America is the centre of the universe and whose own story is the only story that counts. He writes about ‘the glare of racism’ he felt in Israel. He describes one incident where he and his party were made to wait 45 minutes at a checkpoint outside Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. That’s it? How quickly his empathy evaporates when it comes to Israelis. How striking that the man who understands why a 20-year-old Gazan might join a fascistic pogrom seems incapable of understanding why a Jewish nation surrounded by hostile armies of anti-Semites might politely ask you to wait 45 poxy minutes before accessing a religious site.
Coates’s bending of the sorrows of the Middle East to his own petty agenda of grievance-mongering sums up what ‘Palestine’ has become for the 21st-century progressive. It has become a tool of vicarious victimhood, a means for the rich of the West to metaphorically mingle with the wretched of Gaza in the hope that some of their glow of suffering might rub off and add a little depth to these people’s identitarian complaining. When Coates says he felt the ‘glare of racism’ in Israel, and wonders what he would do if he were a downtrodden Gazan, he exposes the coveting of suffering that motors so-called Palestine solidarity. There’s an ironically neo-colonial vibe here, where a foreign nation is mined not for its resources or territory, but for that other most prized asset in the era of woke: the feeling of victimhood.
As to his confession that, in another life, he might not have been ‘strong enough’ to resist joining the rampage of 7 October – you couldn’t ask for better proof that pity for Palestine is a gateway drug to unhinged hatred for the Jewish nation. And that the modern politics of grievance teeters always on the brink of a politics of vengeance. Listen, if the end result of your ideology is wondering out loud about the circumstances under which you’d possibly join a pogrom, you need a new ideology.
Why the hell is Coates wondering if he would have joined in Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October?
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