Jim Crow?

This pro-Israel tweeter believes "of course, to Coates, the specifics hardly matter, as he admits this is less about what you believve, and more about getting elected."

In the relevant portion (way below) of the conversation betwee Ta-Nehisi Coates and Chris Hayes of MSNOW, the two fellows agree that Barack Obama probably wouldn't have been nominated for President in 2008 had he not opposed the Iraq War. (That's another reason for hating that war- that year, Hillary Clinton otherwise would have been nominated, probably would have won, and would have been a better President than Barack Obama. Ask Ukraine.)

Ta-Nehisi Coates: "I don't know how you stay consistent by claiming an anti-apartheid legacy here in the United States of America while enforcing it abroad."

Coates is implying that Israel, a state that guarantees full rights to all citizens regardless of background, is an… pic.twitter.com/BMTpCRGiJG

— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) June 21, 2026

So, too, was Zohran Mandami wise to oppose Israeli actions in Gaza, without which, Coates notes (and Hayes agrees), Mandami likely would not have been elected mayor of New York City. Coates believes Mandami, in taking an anti-Israel (and anti-Semitic, others of us recognize) position "has the right and correct moral view. So I think even from a practical perspective there's no choice."

From a practical perspective, it appears so.  From a "moral" perspective, however, no. Fortunately, the tweeter notes that Coates took "a trip to the West Bank, which he concludes is an apartheid." That trip, "to Israel and teh Palestinian territories in the summer of 2023," formed the basis of an October, 2024 review of Coates' The Message. Helen Andrews writes of the author

The conclusion he comes to is that the Jewish state is the equivalent of the Jim Crow South. “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. “‘Jim Crow’ was the first thing that came to mind, if only because ‘Jim Crow’ is a phrase that connotes an injustice, a sorting of human beings, the awarding and stripping of the rights of a population. Certainly, that was some part of what I saw in Hebron, in Jerusalem, in Lydd.”

 If his luck had been different, and he were less self-involved, Coates could have come up with a better checkpoint anecdote than the lame one he offers. Something like the incident in November 2009 when a Palestinian music teacher on his way to teach a lesson was held at the Beit Iba checkpoint and forced to take out his violin and play it while Israeli soldiers laughed. There you have something more than inconvenience, a vivid and poetic illustration of the dehumanization ordinary Palestinians often face. There, too, you have a rebuttal: The 2001 Sbarro pizza shop bombing in Jerusalem, which killed 16 Israelis including a pregnant woman, was committed by a Palestinian who hid his bomb in a guitar case.

These are the kinds of complexities Coates has no time for.

Many supporters of Israel, especially on social media, also have no time for complexities. Their critics notice that Coates and others are consumed by a blind and ahistorical view of a democratic state while pining for a Judenfrei "Palestine". 

The latter are fabulists whose hatred of a country with a land mass one-sixth the size of Florida and less than 1% of the size of Saudi Arabia coexists with a lingering infatuation for a "'state' with no border, no government, no economy, and no control over its claimed territory".

Sometime after October 7, 2023, Ta-Nehisi Coates and his fellow ethnic-obsessed ideologues found a hill to die on. Worse judgement on the left would be nearly impossible to come by.

 

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