Ta-Nehisi Coates: I Was Told Palestine Was Complicated. Visiting Revealed a Simple, Brutal Truth

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Last night here in New York, hundreds of activists — Jewish and Jewish allies and Palestinians — rallied in Union Square for a vigil on the first anniversary of October 7th to mourn Israelis and Palestinians who have been killed and to call for an end to the Israeli massacre in Gaza and beyond. People performed prayers. There were rabbis there. And they read out the names of those who have lost their lives. One of those who spoke, I talked to afterwards, Eva Borgwardt. She is a spokesperson for the group IfNotNow.

AMY GOODMAN: Right now people are wearing signs that say “No U.S. money for bombs.” And talk about the motto of this October 7th vigil.

EVA BORGWARDT: So, the motto is “every life a universe,” and it’s from ”pikuach nefesh,” which says that to destroy a life is to destroy an entire world, and to save a life is to save an entire world. And our government is not treating every single life as a universe. They’re treating Palestinian lives as less sacred.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you get so involved with this issue?

EVA BORGWARDT: I got involved through the Ferguson uprising. And I was watching Black and Palestinian activists trading tips on Twitter about how to deal with tear gas, and it became clear that Palestinians in the West Bank are facing a military charged with policing, and Black Americans are facing a militarized police force. And that was my entry point, where I said, “I need to organize my community,” which was unable — or, which was limited in being able to show up for the civil rights fight of our time, for the Black Lives Matter movement, because they were upset about the messaging for a free Palestine in those protests. And so, I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life working on building the movement of Jewish Americans who are calling for equality, justice and a thriving future for all, no matter where people live.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Eva Borgwardt of the group IfNotNow, one of hundreds of people here in New York City in Union Square for two large rallies on the anniversary of October 7th. Our guest today is Ta-Nehisi Coates, the prize-winning journalist and author of the new book, The Message, in part about a visit he took last year, organized by the Palestine Festival of Literature, PalFest, to the West Bank and Israel. Talk about this whole journey you took. You were part of the PalFest, and then you also stayed.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Yeah. And I guess, to be honest, my journey began 10 years ago, when I published “The Case for Reparations.” And there was a section — again, as a writer, as a journalist, you’re always trying to make people feel things, make things real. And there was a section where I offered an analog for reparations, for how it could possibly look. And it was from West Germany to the state of Israel — and I need to be very specific about that — not to Holocaust survivors, but to the state of Israel itself. And that part of that essay came under quite a bit of critique — and what became clear to me was, deservedly so. It took 10 years for me to get it fixed, because writing takes a long time, you know? But I knew I had to — like, that I was going to have to go at some point. You know, I knew it wouldn’t be enough for me to, you know, appear at a rally, do a slogan, whatever.

And long story short, I began talking to PalFest in 2016, finally got there in 2023, just in time for The Message. I spent five days with them, mostly traveling through the Occupied Territories and through East Jerusalem as a Palestinian would, getting a sense of what their daily life was. And then, the next five days I spent mostly in the company of a group called Breaking the Silence, former IDF veterans who are against the occupation, and I saw the country largely through the views of an Israeli, how they move through the world, how they move through Jerusalem, how they move through the roads. But I also, again, spent a lot of time actually talking more to Palestinians.

It was revelatory. It was — I don’t think the average American has a real sense of what we’re doing over there — and I emphasize “what we’re doing” because it’s not possible without American support. I have heard people say over and over again, “There are great evils happening the world, states across the world perpetrating evils against whole groups of people. Why pick on Israel?” And the thing I say is, “I’m an American. This is the thing that we have our fingerprints on.” Those bombs over Gaza, the planes that drop bombs on Gaza, the plaques that I saw, for instance, in Jerusalem, all of that is America. And we are going around the world propping ourselves up as the font of democracy. We are going around the world propping Israel up as the only democracy in the Middle East. This is a deep, deep fiction, a very, very dangerous fiction that must be addressed. And that’s what I tried to do in the book.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You write in the book, quote, “It occurred to me that there was still one place on the planet — under American patronage — that resembled the world that my parents were born into.” Can you elaborate?

TA-NEHISI COATES: Yes. And I think I talked about it the last time I was here, actually. These are the words I have even now, and they are probably insufficient to what a Palestinian would offer who experiences this, but the words that come to me are “segregation.” When you are on the West Bank, there are separate roads. There are roads for Israeli settlers and citizens of Israel, and there are roads for Palestinians. These roads are not separate and equal; these roads tend to be separate and unequal. It tends to take longer to get where you want to go if you’re a Palestinian. If you enter a city like Hebron, for instance, Hebron is quite literally segregated. There are streets that Palestinians cannot walk down. There are streets that Israeli settlers are given complete and free movement of. Moving throughout the West Bank in general, there are checkpoints everywhere for Palestinians. These checkpoints are sometimes normal checkpoints that they know are there. Sometimes checkpoints appear out of the blue, what they call flying checkpoints. Your basic movement is constantly in peril.

The justice system, which is deeply familiar for African Americans today, is quite literally segregated. There is a civil justice system that the minority of Israeli settlers, as Israeli citizens, enjoy, and then there is an entirely separate justice system that Palestinians on the West Bank are subject to. You can be arrested, for instance, as an Israeli citizen, and you are, you know, due all the due rights that we are familiar with. You have to be told what the charges are, etc. If you are arrested as a Palestinian, you can just be taken. In another political context, we would call those hostages, because nobody has to say why you’re taken, nobody has to say what you were taken for, nobody has to inform your family. You are under the jurisdiction of the military.

It has been this way since 1967. And the word we use for that is “occupation,” which is a kind of a deeply vanilla word that does not actually describe what is going on. How a country that maintains this separate and unequal system, how a country that does not even allow the, quote-unquote, “Palestinian citizens” of the state full equality with its Jewish Israeli citizens is allowed to refer to itself as a democracy is a mystery to me. And the closest analog I can think of is the time in which the United States of America referred to itself as a democracy even as it was disenfranchising whole swaths of Black people in the Southern states. And so, when I say Jim Crow, when I say segregation, that is because that is the period that immediately comes to mind for me.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about being stopped by an Israeli soldier, Ta-Nehisi.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Oh, well, we were stopped all the time, to be clear, you know, because we were on the roads. We were constantly stopped. You know, I was — you know, you just kind of got used to it after a while, which was also weirdly familiar. But I think the instance you’re referring to is when I was in Hebron, which is a flashpoint for anybody that’s been over there.

I was walking down a street attempting to patronize a Palestinian vendor, and a guard, IDF guard or IDF soldier, stopped out — he was young enough to be my son — stopped out and asked me what was my religion. It was clear that I had to state my religion in order to pass. When I told him that I was not religious, he asked what my mother’s religion was. When I told him my mother wasn’t particularly religious, he asked what my grandmother’s religion was. And this is a very, very important thing, because when you start asking what my mother and grandmother’s religion is, you are referring to something beyond do I accept Christ as my personal savior or what god I pray to. You are asking a deeper question about my ancestry. And it became clear that if I did not give the right answer to that question, I would not be allowed to pass.

I highlight this because when you hear Palestinian and Palestinian American activists make the charge of racism, this is what they’re talking about. Why does who my grandmother or my mother worshiped matter, if we’re strictly talking about a god? Not that it would be right even in that sense. But when you hear the charge of racism, this is what people are referring to.

AMY GOODMAN: Ta-Nehisi, this is a powerful book, and you went on CBS This Morning recently to talk about the publication of it. And I want to go to that interview —

TA-NEHISI COATES: Oh, that will be fun.

AMY GOODMAN: — on CBS This Morning. The New York Times is now reporting CBS News has rebuked one of the morning anchors, Tony Dokoupil, over what he did in that interview to you, and, maybe you could also say, to his fellow anchors as he dominated this. CBS executives said the interview fell short of the network’s editorial standards. This is an excerpt of that interview.

TONY DOKOUPIL: Ta-Nehisi, I want to dive into the Israel-Palestine section of the book. It’s the largest section of the book. And I have to say, when I read the book, I imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards and the acclaim, took the cover off the book, the publishing house goes away, the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist. And so, then I found myself wondering, “Why does Ta-Nehisi Coates, who I’ve known for a long time, read his work for a long time, very talented, smart guy, leave out so much?” Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the First and the Second Intifada, the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits? And is it because you just don’t believe that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?

TA-NEHISI COATES: Well, I would say the perspective that you just outlined, there is no shortage of that perspective in American media. That’s the first thing I would say. I am most concerned always with those who don’t have a voice, with those who don’t have the ability to talk. I have asked repeatedly in my interviews whether there is a single network, mainstream organization in America with a Palestinian American bureau chief or correspondent who actually has a voice to articulate their part of the world. I’ve been a reporter for 20 years. The reporters of those who believe more sympathetically about Israel and its right to exist don’t have a problem getting their voice out. But what I saw in Palestine, what I saw on the West Bank, what I saw in Haifa, in Israel, what I saw in the South Hebron Hills, those were the stories that I have not heard.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Ta-Nehisi, you sitting on the set of CBS This Morning with the former football player, now anchor, Nate Burleson, Gayle King, very well known, both African American anchors, and Tony Dokoupil. He dominated the discussion, talking about your book belonged, could be found in an extremist’s backpack. Talk about the backlash on this, the aftermath of this, and also who you felt was most wronged in this.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Well, it wasn’t me. I mean, at that point, let me tell you, it was not me, you know? It certainly — and I don’t know that it was anybody on that set. Look, I think there is a meta-conversation that happens here, where we end up — because we’re media, where we end up talking about media and media politics. But I do think it’s really important to broaden the frame from the few people that were there, and talk about what was actually excluded and who was actually excluded from that conversation by the very structure itself. I just don’t want to lose sight of that.

I don’t really have a problem with a tough interview. You know, I knew what I wrote. You know, I knew I’d be confronted. You know, was he rude? Was he aggressive? You know, like, I can’t really get into that. Like, it’s not really something that I think too much about.

The question I would ask, though, is: How often on CBS, on NBC, on ABC, or on any major news organization, do you see someone who is a defender of the Israeli state project get confronted in that kind of way, given a tough interview in that kind of way? When was the last time you saw, for instance, a defender of Israel, a defender of Zionism confronted with the fact that major human rights organizations say that Israel is practicing apartheid? How do you defend that? When is the last time you’ve seen an interviewer, how often do you see interviewers — because I don’t want say it never happens — how often do you see interviewers say, “Listen, we have the former head of Human Rights Watch that says you are practicing genocide right now in Gaza. How do you respond to that?” How often do you — how often do you see that? How often do you see, “How do you define yourself as a democracy when fully half the people under your rule are not equal?”

There is no problem with confronting me. You know, I would like to see some other people confronted. And the second part of that is: Who gets to do the confronting in the first place? I have said, and I will continue to say, I am a little uncomfortable with this role and a little uncomfortable with the publicity, not because I feel like I do not know, but because I feel like there are people who are going through this experience and who have gone through this experience, who know so much more, who are completely out of the frame. And those are Palestinians and Palestinian Americans. So, it’s not just the issues that are raised in the confrontation. The question I would ask is, you have to imagine a world where a Palestinian American journalist could be on a mainstream show like CBS This Morning and confront someone who wrote a book that, say, defended Israel or defended Zionism with that kind of aggression. It’s fine if I get it, but I want to live in that world, too, you know?

And that really is, you know, like, one of the things I was really, really trying to get at in the book, in The Message, you know? It’s the questions we ask. It’s the stories we get to tell and the stories that we don’t tell. And perhaps most importantly, it’s who gets to tell them and who doesn’t. And I just — I really feel this passionately. This is not about me. This is not about Tony. This is not about Gayle. This is not about Nate. We’re going to be fine. It’s the people who are invisible. It’s the people who were not in that set — you know, on that set to begin with, who were not part of that conversation.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Ta-Nehisi, this criticism that you weren’t sufficiently taking into account the history, when the reality is here we are on the anniversary of the October 7th attacks, and very little discussion occurs about what was Gaza like before October 7th of last year and how were the residents of Gaza being treated, essentially, in an open-air prison.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Yes, no, I completely agree. Look, I love the young lady who was saying earlier in the lede in, “Every life is a universe.” I truly, truly believe that. And so, you know, as I’ve said before, like, there really is no part of my politics that has the ability to look at October 7th and not mourn the death, the massacre, the atrocities perpetrated. I just wish that some of my countrymen — especially my countrymen, especially Americans who are responsible for this, who are propping this up — had that same sort of compassion and that same sort of energy for October 6th, October 5th, etc.

You know, this kind of abstracting events outside of their historical context is really necessary to the political order, because it allows us to justify ourselves and not have to think harder or not have to ask much deeper questions. You really have to be able to hold both. And I know that that sounds a bit cliché, but I truly do believe that you have to, you know, believe in this idea that I actually just heard today, that every life is a universe. You know, I think that’s a really, really beautiful articulation, you know? And that has to be true for all life. That has to be true on October 7th, you know, and loudly said, but it has to be true on 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 also.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And also, I wanted to go back for a second, because we are running out of time, and ask you about —

TA-NEHISI COATES: I’m sorry my answers are so long.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah — about President Trump and the upcoming election. The great surprise to me, all these years now, is the enormous support that Donald Trump still has among huge swaths of the American public. To what do you attribute this?

TA-NEHISI COATES: Darkness. There’s a darkness in all of us. I mean, this is — this is not new. You know? And if you just took American history from the perspective of an African American, and I suspect from the perspective of the Indigenous people of this continent, what they would tell you is there is nothing new in people using power, in people using the worst tropes in the world to win and to dominate. For any Black person that grew up in the South from — I don’t know — 1876 to 1964 and probably beyond — I’m being very conservative by saying that — this is what politics was. Like, this is just what we grew up under.

And so, I think maybe we thought, or we allowed ourselves to believe, that somehow we had escaped the gravity of history. But no people, no country escapes the gravity of history. We live within it. We are part of it. And so, I think it’s a very, very dangerous thing that our leaders led us to believe in 2016 that this was like a thing that could not happen in America, you know, whereas had we looked at history from another perspective, we would know that this actually is very American. You know, that doesn’t make us inhuman or somehow demonically evil; on the contrary, it just makes us human. It means that we’re subject to, you know, the darkness in our souls like any other group of people would be.

AMY GOODMAN: Ta-Nehisi, I wanted to go to that point you say of who gets heard. We were at the Democratic convention. Everywhere we were interviewing people —

TA-NEHISI COATES: I saw you out there.

AMY GOODMAN: We saw you in the background.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Yes, yes, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: We were interviewing the delegate from, what, Michigan, from Florida and from Connecticut —

TA-NEHISI COATES: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — who unfurled a banner in the Florida delegation that said “Stop arming Israel.”

TA-NEHISI COATES: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: You were there as we were interviewing them in the hallway. When we were outside, when they were about to begin the sleep-in overnight, demanding that Kamala Harris allow a Palestinian American to speak, you were there. And then, the next day, you wrote a piece in Vanity Fair about your experience, “A Palestinian American’s Place Under the Democrats’ Big Tent?” the piece looking at the “uncommitted” movement and their unsuccessful efforts to have such a speaker. This is Ruwa Romman of the uncommitted movement. She’s a Palestinian American Georgia state representative. This is part of what she would have said if she was chosen.

RUWA ROMMAN: For 320 days, we’ve stood together demanding to enforce our laws on friend and foe alike, to reach a ceasefire, end the killing of Palestinians, free all the Israeli and Palestinian hostages, and to begin the difficult work of building a path to collective peace and safety. That’s why we are here, members of this Democratic Party committed to equal rights and dignity for all. What we do here echoes around the world. They’ll say this is how it’s always been, that nothing can change. But remember Fannie Lou Hamer, shunned for her courage, yet she paved the way for an integrated Democratic Party. Her legacy lives on, and it’s her example we follow.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s the Georgia state Representative Ruwa Romman. And needless to say, there was not a Palestinian American voice on the stage. Last night, Kamala Harris did an interview with 60 Minutes — at least they played it last night. This is what she had to say about Israel-Palestine.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: When we think about the threat that Hamas, Hezbollah presents, Iran, I think that it is, without any question, our imperative to do what we can to allow Israel to defend itself against those kinds of attacks. Now, the work that we do diplomatically with the leadership of Israel is an ongoing pursuit around making clear our principles, which include the need for humanitarian aid, the need for this war to end, the need for a deal to be done which would release the hostages and create a ceasefire. And we’re not going to stop in terms of putting that pressure on Israel and in the region, including Arab leaders.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris speaking on 60 Minutes last night. As we wrap up, you were just talking about Trump. Talk about what the position of the Biden-Harris administration is right now. They did hold two separate commemorations yesterday. President Biden was at the White House, and he lit a candle and also, I also, crossed himself right after. And Kamala Harris, the vice president, in the Naval Observatory, planted a tree, a pomegranate tree.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Well, you know, that’s good and appropriate, you know. Like I said, we don’t want to have a politic that does not take life serious and does not take loss of life serious. On the larger question, and maybe even as an extent of that, but we have to take all life seriously. I don’t think we’re doing that. This is morally untenable.

What I saw was — and this is the first time I’ve ever said this or put this in this frame, and maybe the uncommitted delegates understood this — there was as much a moral gap between what I saw in Chicago, that is to say, to go on stage and promote these values of diversity, humanity, big tent, and to exclude the peoples whose families are being bombed right now, as it was in the early 1960s and before, when the Democratic Party claimed to be for the working man and the working person while millions of workers all through the South were effectively in a system of indentured servitude, and they refused to give those people political representation. It is a gigantic moral gulf, that is troubling, disappointing, heartbreaking and deeply, deeply personally upsetting.

AMY GOODMAN: Ta-Nehisi Coates, award-winning journalist, author, professor. His new book is The Message. That does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman in New York, with Juan González in Chicago.