Ta-Nehisi Coates On Visit to Israel/West Bank: “An Immoral Apartheid Regime”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Al Jazeera has come under further intense criticism and legal pressure from the Israeli government, which has now banned the network from operating inside Israel, and its offices in the occupied West Bank have been broken into and welded shut by Israeli troops. Now, our next guest says that he must confront the truth no matter how difficult. The award-winning journalist, Ta-Nehisi Coates, is doing exactly that in his new book, “The Message,” in which he journeys to Senegal, Israel, and the occupied West Bank. And he’s joining Michel Martin to

discuss what he found.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Ta-Nehisi Coates, thank you so much for joining us.

TA-NEHISI COATES, AUTHOR, “THE MESSAGE”: Thanks for having me, Michel.

MARTIN: I’m sure a lot of people know your previous work, especially “Between the World and Me.” But in this new book, you go to three different places. You write about your trips to three different places, to Senegal, to South Carolina, and to Israel, and to the Palestinian territories. You’ve already gotten a lot of attention for this book. Some of it quite heated, it has to be said. But I want to start where you start in the book, which is Senegal. I mean, this is your first trip there. You describe these feelings of real disquiet while you were there, sort of fear, just sadness, and a kind of a heaviness. Can you just describe why or what it is that you were feeling? And why you think you were feeling that?

COATES: You know, I’m of the generation of children born in, I guess, the ’70s, or maybe it started in the late ’60s, where it became popular to give your kids African names and to really, you know, raise children with, you know, different views and different notions of Africa and different ideas of Africa. And that effort really was to overcome a very racist telling and stories of what Africa was and thus, to justify the treatment of African Americans, and that in turn was counted with different versions of history. Some of them themselves quite mythical. But here I was confronted with the real thing. No more stories. No more narratives. This is it, buddy This is actually what it is, you know. And I was going to be crafting stories on my own to say nothing of the fact, which I actually think I took for granted, that this really was, you know, in some profound way, as cliche as it is, you know, the motherland, like that was really where I was going. And so, I just — I was terribly affected and maybe I was not totally prepared to be affected.

MARTIN: Can I throw something out? Were you afraid that you would be disappointed?

COATES: Disappointed? No, because of the age I went. Because of the age I went. And I understand why a lot of people are afraid by that. But actually, as I’m reflecting on your question, maybe I was. One of the things I talk about is — lurking in the back of my mind was, you know, what if all of those racist narratives were actually true? You know, that’s terrible to admit, you know. But certainly, that was in the back of my mind is something that was haunting me. You know, I didn’t expect to be, you know, welcomed with drums and, you know, welcome home, brother.

MARTIN: Brother. Yes.

COATES: No, no. I didn’t expect any of that. That wasn’t what I was looking for. But like I said, it was terrible to admit, perhaps I feared that I would not find a city in Dakar of human beings.

MARTIN: That is a hard thing to admit. So, what do you think you found there that you — that is important to the overall narrative that you’re sharing in this book?

COATES: You know, the first essay — and I guess we’ll talk about this in a minute, and the last essay are kind of in conversation with each other. When you’ve had a horrific, violent event happen to you, such that it really, you know, breaks lineage and breaks time. How do you reconstruct yourself? How do you reconstruct yourself in a way that is truthful, reflects your ethics, tell the stories that you really feel like embody your sense of justice? I think there is great temptation. When you suffer through an experience like we have and the humiliation that comes with it to go completely in the other direction, you know, and maybe in — you know, ignore some of the reality that actually makes you a human being. Senegal, Dakar was really my opportunity to confront some of those stories and some of those ideas that actually I was raised on myself, that embodied in my very name, actually.

MARTIN: In story, I guess, as you were — as you would say, in story, they were embodied in story and that story kind of infiltrated you in ways that you perhaps were not really aware of. So, then, May of 2023, you visited Israel and the Palestinian territories. So, in the book, you draw parallels between Jim Crow America and the Israeli occupation of these territories. You called it separate and unequal, alive and well. You say it’s a place where the glare of racism burned more intensely than anywhere else in your life that you had ever seen. So, tell us a little bit about why you say that.

COATES: You know, there are two sides to me, one is a part of me that, you know, does not like, you know, mixing it up and, you know, fighting with people. There’s also a part of me that says, there is something dishonorable and actually unloving about witnessing certain things that you think are important and not saying anything about them. The fact of the matter is I went to the old city of Jerusalem on two different times. The first time I went in the way that typically Palestinian Muslims go and we were held for about 45 minutes by armed guards before they, you know, gave us entrance. There was no reason —

MARTIN: You went to Al-Aqsa, the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

COATES: Al-Aqsa Mosque. And you know, no reasoning was given or anything like that. They just held us just because they could. And then when I came back in the way that an American tourist might come, or a Christian typically might come, it was so easy. I just breezed through. It was the easiest thing in the world. And this, you know, control of time and space extended out into the West Bank, where, you know, there are roads for Palestinians and then there are roads for Israeli settlers, which immediately set off my — you got two different roads for two different classes of people. So, that immediately sets off alarm bells for me. You know, you’re seeing in the territory and you can see one place where settlements are and where settlers live and they’re marked in a certain way. And then, you can see other areas where they’re Palestinian villages and Hamlet’s and where they live. And you can see that these are completely separate. You go to the old city of Hebron, as I’ve talked about, and their streets where I am allowed to walk down, if it is made clear to the guards that my mother was a Christian, that I am a Christian and my grandmother was a Christiane, but my Palestinian guys do not have access to. That’s just in brief of what I saw. So much more, but that sets off certain things for me. And then, I came back and had to do the reading and the research on top of that to understand the governance and the structures that are beneath that, that make that possible and, in some ways, mandate that. And I was left with the conclusion. And in fact, what I was witnessing was separate and unequal, that it was, you know, the closest that I would see in my time to the Jim Crow that my parents were born into.

MARTIN: So, is there a point at which you said to yourself, I cannot only just see this, I have to write about it and accept whatever comes with my writing about it in this way? Was there like a pivotal moment or was that always the plan?

COATES: That was always the plan, but I knew by saying, I’m going to — like, I just know, this is going to be hard. This is going to be rough.

MARTIN: And what’s — say more about what’s hard. What is hard?

COATES: I don’t like hurting people’s feelings, man. I just — and that sounds, I’m kind of laughing, but it’s actually true. I don’t like — I don’t enjoy telling people things, telling people unpleasant things. And it — to be really, I guess, direct with you, there are people who I have had in my life who I care about, some of whom have been colleagues of mine, you know, I’ve spent very intimate time around, whose feelings this will hurt. Have very, very different view of the State of Israel than I do have ties to it. You know, I believe that what I witnessed was an immoral apartheid regime. That — those are my conclusions. That’s what I say in the book. I don’t take saying that lightly. I would rather not feel like I have to say it, but I did based on what I witnessed and what I read afterwards.

MARTIN: So, your core conclusions are, it’s an apartheid regime, the life there for Palestinians is unbearable, it’s unbearable, it’s demeaning, it’s dehumanizing, and it’s morally unjustifiable. Is that — would that be —

COATES: That would be correct. That would be correct. And I just — you know, I want to add two things to that. The first thing is, this — I know this word apartheid, you know, is harsh. It’s one that —

MARTIN: It’s fraught.

COATES: Yes, it attracts a lot of debate. I don’t want people to think that I’m just throwing, you know, that around casually. It was not just what I observed, it was reading the reports of Amnesty International, where they made the case for apartheid. It was reading the reports of the human rights, the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, where they made the case for apartheid. It was reading Human Rights Watch and their reports. It was reading the reports of Al-Haq. It was actually doing that. It was actually reading the words and the quotes of people like Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak or Ehud Olmert, and them warning that Israel was, in fact, tipping into apartheid. That is really what it was rooted in. So, I know that is a heavy word for a lot of people, but I don’t want them to think that I’m just sort of casually, you know, lobbying grenades for the heck of it.

MARTIN: So, let me go into just some of the criticism of the work already. The book is just out, but a lot of people have already read it. Some of the criticism is you went for 10 days. You went for 10 days. This is a nation state that has existed in its current form for 75 years at this point. But this is — these are people who have indigenous claims to this land for centuries. You have to — not just the Palestinians have indigenous claims to this land, but also the Hebrew people, the Jewish people have indigenous claims to this land, and these borders have moved back and forth for centuries. This is one of the things people often criticize journalists for. They say, well, you go someplace for 1- days, and then you’re entitled to tell the world about it. So, what do you say to that?

COATES: What I say to that is that there are things that we hold at our moral core that we witness that context, 600-word books, reports, even more time won’t make OK. There’s nothing that I can imagine that I will see that will make it OK that one group of people lives in a settlement and another group of people lives in a village. And there is perhaps a half a mile between those two- group of people, and one group has direct access to water and the other does not. There’s very little that I’m going that I can imagine seeing — there’s nothing that I can imagine seeing that allows for a society in which there are tiers of citizenship, and at the top tier of that is a group of people, be they Jewish or whoever, but in this case, because it’s Israel. Be they Jewish, you have the top tier of citizenship and everyone else is something less. There’s not something that I would have seen in 30 more days. And I will add that even that criticism is familiar to me. Because, in fact, during the civil rights movement, what white southerners would often say is, you white northerners who come down here and start stirring up trouble, you don’t know the Negro like we do. You haven’t been down here. You don’t live down here. You don’t really know what it is.

MARTIN: You don’t understand the situation.

COATES: You don’t understand the situation. But if you ask the black folks there, they would tell you, you understand it perfectly, you know. And so, I just — you know, I get it. I get that. You know, I would like to know more, like to do more, but I can’t help but feel that if I had a different political perspective on this, the very people who are criticizing might just, you know, only going there for 10 days would think 10 days were actually quite enough.

MARTIN: The other criticism is you did not include in the book people who defend the government. In fact, you criticize the idea of what we call — what we have started to call both siding the issue, especially in journalism. But I still want to ask you about your unwillingness to include, for purposes of this report, other views because, you know, we are constantly being instructed, especially in this very polarized time that that’s fundamental to empathy. And if we don’t at least engage in that practice, that we’re not being true to that fundamental value of trying to see other people as human. So, how do you answer that?

COATES: The first thing I would say is the pro-Israel point of view, the Zionist point of view, those who view the Zionist project as a good thing, as a moral thing, as a just thing, they are not unrepresented in the vehicles of American media in our newspapers, in our magazines, in our television shows. That viewpoint is not unrepresented. On the contrary, it’s one that I was very much exposed to. And what the purpose of that last essay really is, is I am someone who went somewhere and saw something and came back struggling with how it could be that what I saw was so different than what — than the story that I was consuming in my media on a regular basis. And I really wanted to understand why. And I thought that the way to do that, my tool for doing that was to privilege the words of those who I believe have been, you know, unjustly pushed out of the frame, and that is, you know, the Palestinians. My feeling is that many of the publications that were large, that criticism, would do well to look at their own bylines and count how many Palestinians they’ve published over the past 10 or 15 years. And so, it is quite rich to me that I am being criticized or that I would be criticized for not talking to people who would defend what I believe to be an unjust order, you know, in publications that I think are actually part of how that order maintains itself. When you don’t allow people to speak, when you don’t allow them a place, not just in your individual work, but in the entirety of the conversation, it becomes a lot easier to do things to them.

MARTIN: You know, I’m wondering if though, you — is the fundamental problem here that one faith group is privileged over other faith groups or is the — because that is not unique to Israel. Israel is not the only country that privileges one faith group over another faith group. Is the fundamental problem here that Israel is seen as different, that Israel sees itself as different?

COATES: I just want to make sure I’m not excluding a very important group of people, and that’s Palestinian Christians who I — you know, I interviewed some of them and felt as discriminated against as anybody else. There’s an, you know, incident I described happening in Hebron where I’m asked my religion. But you know, it was very interesting about that, I was also asked my mother’s and my grandmother’s religion. And when you start asking that, you are asking something besides, do I accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior? There’s something deeper going on. You know, there was great evil in this world. You know, and I am wary of singling, you know, Israel out as somehow singular or more evil or whatever. But the point I would make is that I am responsible as an American, and particularly, as a citizen of a country that takes somebody like Martin Luther King as its patron saint, that walks around talking about, you know, with great pride about the triumphs of the civil rights movement and equality. How can I then go to a country where we boast about our special relationship with and see a two-tiered society literally with citizenship is decided by ethnicity, religion and rights are decided by ethnicity and religion, and then just say, you know what, there’s a lot of other evil in the world too? And turn my back. I just don’t have that in me to do that.

MARTIN: Before I let you go, and I’ve been struggling to find this passage, but it’s — this is when you were walking at Yad Vashem, which is the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. You say that, it hurts to know that in my own writing I have done to people that which, in this writing, I have invaded against, that I have reduced people, diminished people, erased people. I want to tell you that I was wrong. I want to tell you that your oppression will not save you, that being a victim will not enlighten you, that it can just as easily deceive you. I learned that here. In Haifa. In Ramallah. And especially here at Yad Vashem. So, this is another story about writing, about power, about settling accounts, a story, not of redemption. Who are you talking to?

COATES: Myself. But I was talking to my students. I think that your imagination has to be slightly ahead and maybe even more ahead than the present politics. And I think there is great, great danger in thinking that because you lack power in a particular moment, you don’t have the ability to hurt and damage other people. I am not in that case making a narrow critique of Israel or of Zionism. This is, I think, a very, very human impulse. To think that because you went through some horrific experience, you therefore have a kind of moral authority and are therefore, then not capable of inflicting horrors on other people. And as much as I feel like I saw that, you know, what I mean, in my travels over there, you’re — I mean, I was talking to us too. I was very much talking to us, too. And I think that was like really important for me to say.

MARTIN: Ta-Nehisi Coates, thank you for speaking with us.

COATES: Thank you, Michel. Thank you so much.