Mick Hartley

Hadley Freeman in the Sunday Times:

But over the past 12 months people have said things to me about Israel that felt as if they were squeezing my sciatic nerve. Not because I disagreed with them but because what they were saying was so — here comes the technical term — ignorant. And the worst part is, they took pride in the ignorance, because things like “context” and “history” are seen now by too many as mealy-mouthed justifications for the killing of Palestinian and Lebanese citizens. They are not. But they are real.

In the US the big book out now is The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of the most revered American writers working today, whose articles about racism in the US have won pretty much every prize possible. In the new book he claims that Israel is analogous to the antebellum American South and Palestinians are analogous to the American slaves, and any claim that it’s more complicated than that is “horseshit”. When asked last week why he left out any references to Palestinian terrorism, Coates replied, “The reporters who believe more sympathetically in Israel’s right to exist don’t have any trouble in getting their voice out.” But if partial history is wrong in one direction, it is wrong in the other. Or, apparently, not: “I’m the child of Jim Crow. I have a moral compass about this, and perhaps it’s because of my ancestry,” he said. So whereas his ancestry gives him a moral compass, journalists who believe in Israel’s right to exist (to quote Liz Lemon from 30 Rock, “Jack, just say Jewish — this is taking for ever”) are full of horseshit.

Historical ignorance is not moral clarity. It’s narcissism, laziness and stupidity. And, as the war continues, the ignorance mushrooms, perhaps to simplify a conflict that is so complex. An English friend told me the other week that October 7 was “inevitable”, by which they meant “understandable”. Another described Israel as a “colonial settler country”, as though Holocaust survivors who couldn’t return to their native countries — including my Polish ancestors — were white supremacists. Others blame Israel entirely for what’s happened to Gaza, to which I say: google Yasser Arafat. How is it so hard for some people to understand that Binyamin Netanyahu is appalling and Hamas and Hezbollah are murderous terrorists who have sacrificed their own people’s lives because they hate Israel, Jews and the West? Are they stupid, or just stupid about Jews?

Just stupid about Jews, I'd say. It's an increasingly common phenomenon now, though it has an ancient dark history as – what it really is – antisemitism.

Jerry Coyne mentions the Ta-Nehisi Coates book (scroll down), and cites this review in the Free Press by Coleman Hughes:

His new essay collection, The Message, is a masterpiece of warped arguments and moral confusion. But it is important to take it seriously, not because Coates’s arguments are serious, but because so many treat them as if they are.

Coates’s overarching themes are familiar: the plundering of black wealth by the Western world, the hypocrisy at the heart of America’s founding ideals, and the permanence of white supremacy. If The Message departs from his earlier work in any way, it’s that his desire to smear America has been eclipsed by his desire to smear Israel—an exercise that takes up fully half the book. (More about that, which Coates has declared “his obsession,” in a bit.)

. . . His final essay is called “The Gigantic Dream,” a reference to one of Theodor Herzl’s diary entries, in which the founder of modern political Zionism explains how he came to the conclusion that the Jews needed a state. Coates begins by describing his visit to Yad Vashem, the magnificent and horrifying Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.

It quickly becomes clear, however, that acknowledging the Holocaust is but a throat-clearing exercise before the main event: over one-hundred pages of the most shamelessly one-sided summary of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I have ever read.

. . . For example, I was waiting for Coates to mention a single instance of Palestinian terror, but the moment never came. He does, however, find the space to mention so many of the Israeli policies that were implemented specifically to prevent the terror attacks that murdered so many innocents during the Intifadas—checkpoints in the West Bank, for instance.

Though Coates didn’t look into Israel-Palestine until his 40s, according to his recent New York profile that may be his “greatest asset”—a pair of fresh eyes, as it were. But far from an asset, Coates’s hasty research is a liability, resulting in errors that always come at the expense of Israel. For instance, as an example of Israel’s Jim Crow–like “two-tier society,” he asserts that “Jewish Israelis who marry Jews from abroad needn’t worry about their spouses’ citizenship,” whereas the state “tracks Palestinian noncitizens through a population registry” and “bars Palestinian citizens from passing on their status to anyone on that registry—abroad or in the West Bank.”

The implication conveyed by this sentence—that Israeli law treats Arab Israelis differently than Jewish Israelis—is simply not true. The law in question is neutral as regards the race of the citizen attempting to naturalize his or her foreign spouse. The restriction is instead based on the nationality of the spouse.

Yep, Not just ignorance about Israel, but wilful ignorance about Israel. Well, it sells books, and gets you a fawning NYT review.