Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Not A Lone Voice Crying in the Wilderness But A Lion with a Pen

 

There is an African proverb that says: “Until the lions have their own historians the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” I was galled and annoyed (to put it mildly) witnessing the September 30^th interview on CBS Mornings between acclaimed author Ta-Nehisi Coates and Tony Dokoupil. Dokoupil’s unprofessional questions and biased comments attempting to discredit Coates’ scholarship, CBS later acknowledged “fell short of editorial standards.”  

The truth of the matter is that the conclusions that Coates emphasized in his new book, The Message, and the assertions that many others have made about the Israeli and Palestinian perpetual war is far from slipshod, naïve, or parochial. All one must do is to examine past critical analyses and deconstructions of the Israeli and Palestinian conflict and they will find that Coates’ assessment is not an anomaly. In fact, public criticism by Black academicians, sociopolitical observers and activists calling out the Israeli government (not its people) for acting as an imperialist hegemon date back to the 1950s. In the 1960s and 70s famous Black activists like Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson, and Muhammed Ali issued public pronouncements on the Arab Israeli conflict. In 1966, SNCC expanded its publicly denouncement of the Vietnam War to the Israeli attacks against the Palestinian people, which drew widespread condemnation and accusations of anti-Semitism. In 1967, SNCC used a summer issue of its newsletter to offer a searing indictment of Isreal’s violent Zionist conquest.

Black people in general have often viewed the Jews in Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza as special and unique cases with histories similar to our own in America. Many draw parallels of the violence inflicted upon innocent Palestinian people  today to the attempts to extinguish the Native Americans, the abhorrent acts of police brutality against Blacks, and the manifold forms of structural inequity and racism that have kept African Americans (in the collective) chained to its origin in America as second-class citizens.  Many Black defenders of the Palestinians’ right to exist under a two-state solution in Gaza did not come to that conclusion without first supporting and empathizing with the plight of the Jews. For many, their affinity for Isreal changed after the 1967 war when Israel defeated its Arab neighbors--Egypt, Jordan, and Syria to occupy the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza, and the West Bank, as well as the Golan Heights. It was then that many Black people would begin to question Isreal as a sympathetic and empathetic friend of Arab and African people and begin to see the Israeli political class as a byproduct of fascist and imperialists compulsions.

Russell Rickford wrote in his article “To Build a New World” (2019):

Israel itself was a product of Western imperialism, having sprung from the British Mandate for Palestine. Seeing Israel as a liberatory enterprise meant accepting the erasure of displaced Palestinians while reifying settler-colonial myths about the cultivation of a modern civilization on a barren frontier. Yet in the aftermath of the Holocaust, few Western observers heeded or even grasped these realities.

African Americans largely identify as Christian.  It is the Christian belief that the Israelites are God’s “chosen people” combined with recognizing that as descendants of slaves brought to and who built America that we know all too well what it feels like to be treated inhumanely and  perceived as the “other” in the only land we know. We view the Jewish holocaust experience and the genocide that is happening now to the Palestinian people at the hands of Isreal through the lens of America’s holocaust –slavery. However, it has been the tyrannical and inhumane decisions made by the elite political class in Isreal (not the Jewish people in the collective) with support of course of the American political elite, which have caused many Black people to side with the Palestinians and condemn Isreal.

From the past to the present, it is a shared anti-imperialist imperative that bind Black/African American to Palestine. The tie that binds us is a simple and larger world view shared by many comrades in the struggle against hegemonic sociopolitical systems built and sustained by race and class hierarchies, white and European supremacy, and colonizer ways of thinking, believing, acting, and being. It is not about hating Jewish people or being antisemitic like so many spinmeisters cleverly and deceitfully propagate. It is about doing what the sacred scriptures in both the Torah and Bible demand: “to do justice and love mercy” and to know that God has no respect of cultures or people. Our destinies and our histories are intricately intertwined. In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”