Ta-Nehisi Coates vs the Nation-State

The Nation-State Wins

Ta-Nehisi Coates ventures into the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Source: Gemini AI

As the author of a myopic memoir disguised as journalism, Ta-Nehisi Coates may very well be a narcissist. But, ironically, his self-absorption contains multitudes. I’m less interested in the specific shortcomings of his new anti-Israel book, The Message, which have been described elsewhere, than in the messenger himself. As an individual, Coates is an unoriginal interlocutor whose revelatory “insight” is that the Israel–Palestinian conflict isn’t actually that complicated: it’s good vs evil, black vs white, oppressor vs oppressed. Nevertheless, his navel-gazing observations take in more than just his navel. They reflect the psyche of a whole wardrobe of Coates now emerging from the anti-Zionist closet. For that reason, it’s worth engaging with his deeper motivations, however shallow his understanding.

For Coates, Israeli oppression is an opportunity to consider “the deeper conflict between nationalism and humanism.” He calls himself a product of American black nationalism, and wonders “what I would do on behalf of my own people’s welfare. What was my relationship to the nationalism that made me?” His answer is that he values the black struggle “to destroy the structures of racism” and the “collective experience: the stories, the songs, the philosophies, the corpus,” which has lessons “for all humanity.” But those lessons would be eradicated by “marrying the imaginative, the idealistic, to the amoral ambitions of a state.” For Coates, “A world where our essence is expressed in state power above all is a world in which I am a stranger to my own people.” A comic-book writer, he prefers the fantasy of black pharaohs to the reality of political responsibility.

Coates plays a careful game with his writing. He notes that he approaches Israel “from the perspective of someone who has never faced a campaign of industrialized extermination” and that “I don’t feel myself qualified to assess the souls of the Jewish people.” Nevertheless, he is obviously contrasting a black nationalism based on anti-racism and culture with a Jewish nationalism centered on power and statehood. For him, Israel is what happens when you draw the wrong lessons from a history of persecution: “The emancipated enslaves; the oppressed colonizes; the vanquished ethnically cleanses; a people survive a genocide only to perpetrate another.” After the Holocaust, Jews who attempted to return to their homes in Poland were subject to pogroms, with as many as 2000 killed. When survivors requested help from a Polish bishop, he refused, stating that “when Jews began to interfere in Polish politics and public life, they insulted the Poles' national sensibilities.” Presumably, Coates would have preferred Jewish survivors teach the bishop their lessons “for all humanity” rather than seek the dignity of life in a homeland.

What Coates proposes instead of a nation-state is the moral purity of powerlessness. He’s disappointed that the Jews, who spent well over a millennium as the exemplar of a pure but powerless people (and were much loved for it!), ultimately decided on statehood instead. But it’s not just the Jews who chose the practical benefits of territory and an army over the moral superiority of dispersion and subjugation. In the wake of their own experience of genocide, the Armenians achieved statehood for the first time since the Middle Ages (though that state was soon absorbed by the USSR, before being reborn again after its collapse).¹ Other peoples who’ve lost sovereignty and regained it at least a century later include the Irish, Poles, and Balts. More broadly, the number of UN member-states swelled from 35 in 1946 to 127 in 1970, largely due to the end of European colonial empires. And many peoples today still prefer Coates’ “amoral ambitions of a state” over their present condition, including the Kurds, Tibetans, and, of course, Palestinians.

But Coates never questions the legitimacy of Palestinian, as opposed to Jewish, aspirations for statehood. He doesn’t moralistically ruminate that “the vanquished ethnically cleanses” in the context of October 7. Instead, he compares that day’s massacre to Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion because, for him, everything always comes back to the black American experience. But the Palestinians are very much seeking the “essence expressed in state power” that Coates rejects, not some anti-racist utopia. The Palestinian National Charter calls Palestine “the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people.” And even leaving aside Hamas’s Gazan theocracy, the Palestinian Authority’s Basic Law establishes Islam as the official religion and Sharia law as the main source of legislation in its West Bank territory. A Palestinian state would have no less—and almost certainly, much more—of an explicitly ethnic and religious character than Israel.

Coates spends ten days in the Holy Land looking at Israeli/Palestinian relations through the lens of Jim Crow. But America’s black/white divide has never been a conflict between two nations. Rather, it has concerned the character of a single nation to which both races belong. Black nationalism is a cultural posture—as reflected in the adoption of names like “Ta-Nehisi”²—not a program for secession. Regardless of their differences, black and white Americans largely speak the same language, practice the same religion, and share the same political loyalty. Their histories are separate strands of the same intertwined story. That is generally not the case with the Israelis and Palestinians, who embody distinct national identities.³ (Though many Palestinians deny the legitimacy of Israeli nationhood, and a smaller but significant number of Israelis reject the legitimacy of Palestinian nationhood, which only exacerbates the conflict.⁴)

Israel’s Declaration of Independence refers to “the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate in their own sovereign State, like all other nations.” It also promises to “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex.” Israel should rightly be criticized when it fails to live up to that promise. But for Coates and many like him, Israel’s foundational claim, the right of the Jews to a state, makes true equality impossible. In 1948, when Israel achieved sovereignty, the notion of a national right to a state seemed “natural.” But today, the legitimacy of the nation-state itself is under question. In the West, this usually takes the “soft” form of supplanting national identity with multiculturalism, supporting open borders without regard to assimilation, and rewriting history to only emphasize collective sins. Coates himself was a contributor to the historically inaccurate 1619 Project, which claimed that the United States was founded to preserve slavery.

But Israel faces more than just a culture war. Its very survival as a nation-state is actively threatened, and thus it acts accordingly. As Coates’ ruminations make clear, criticism of Israel is often rooted less in any specific conduct than in offense at the mere idea of national self-interest. In Gaza, Israel has gone to war to defend its citizens and reclaim its hostages after an act of foreign aggression. Every believer in the nation-state, regardless of nationality, would expect their country to do the same. That’s not to say Israel’s war is without reproach; or even that its policies are ultimately in its own self-interest. But the intensity with which many Westerners criticize (or defend) Israel often has much to do with their own attitudes toward nationality and statehood. When they are in conflict, should a country prioritize the lives of its people over others? While granting minorities equal rights, should a country safeguard the cultural identity of the majority? The answers to these questions typically map onto Western attitudes toward Israel.

In the confessional spirit of Coates, I’ll share my own thoughts on the seeming conflict between nationalism and humanism. I say “seeming” because they need not be in conflict. Our humanity is universal, but it is filtered through our particularity, which is shaped by the nation to which we are born. Nations seek statehood both to ensure political representation and cultural preservation, and to avoid oppression and assimilation. Nation-states are expressions of humanism insofar as they reflect a universal human desire for identity and belonging. Thus the solution to national conflict isn’t the quixotic abolition of nation-states; it’s mutual recognition of national rights. In the case of the Israelis and Palestinians, that means the partition of a disputed territory between two sovereign nation-states. The alternative isn’t a single post-national, secular humanist Holy Land; it’s perpetual warfare. Jewish history does have lessons for all humanity, chief among them the limits of moral purity.

1. Like the Jews, the Armenians were also once the demographic minority in their homeland.

2. “Ta-Nehisi” is derived from the ancient Egyptian word for Nubia, a region to which most black Americans have no actual roots.

3. Though most are ancestrally related to each other and the ancient Canaanites, with additional admixture from other groups.

4. The Palestinian National Charter ahistorically states that “Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality.” But as Hillel Halkin notes:

What was invented at the outset of modernity was not Jewish peoplehood, which—as all the evidence that has come down to us amply bears out—had been taken for granted throughout history by Jews and Gentiles alike. It was Jewish non-peoplehood, whose first important formulator was the eighteenth-century French count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre. A leader of the fight for Jewish emancipation at the time of the French Revolution, it was Clermont-Tonnerre who famously declared that French Jews should be “granted everything as individuals and denied everything as a nation.”

Far from not being a nationality, Jews (or better, Judeans, to emphasize the word’s rootedness in the land of Judea) are one of the oldest extant nations in existence. The Jewish nation is so ancient that it predates the Pauline distinction between nationality and religion that the Charter so blithely upholds.

The Charter also says that “the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation,” which seems to support the argument that the Palestinians are not really a nation, but merely a collection of Arabs who happened to live in the Holy Land. But while a distinct Palestinian identity is obviously of much more recent provenance than Jewish identity, and is in many ways a direct reaction to Zionism, that doesn’t make it unreal. Whether Palestinians are a unique brand of Arab or not is also irrelevant to the case for partition. If, as one Saudi analyst proposes, the West Bank and Gaza merge with Jordan to form a Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine, that is as legitimate a two-state solution as any other. The point is that most Palestinians are not, and don’t desire to be, part of the Israeli nation, yet are entangled with it; not their exact status within the framework of pan-Arabism.