Ta-Nehisi Coates has been occupying too much space in my brain of late. While I have been consistently disappointed by institutional misreporting on Israel and Jewish history, I thought a black author would be sensitive to exploitation of a minority’s narrative. I didn’t imagine I’d need to worry that he would capitalize on his public identity in service of antisemitism.

Since the release of his book The Message, I’ve come across numerous posts on what Coates gets wrong about Israel and the outright lies he uses to support his reading.*

Additionally, I’ve seen outlets publish articles about Coates’ antisemitic father to explain his perplexing worldview**. I won’t dwell on how incomprehensible I find his choice to be — to perpetuate what are common antisemitic Israel myths.

I had hoped his book would go away because I am tired of these debunked lies. But today I saw that he was on Trevor Noah’s podcast, and Trevor Noah also repeated outright lies. Noah who has never been to Israel but was born under apartheid South Africa. You’d expect him to know the difference between apartheid and problematic-but-common first world racism. I’m sure his viewers who don’t know much about apartheid or Israel will just take his word for it.

Calling out this dangerous misrepresentation isn’t excusing Israel’s real racial divisions. You can’t begin to heal those racial divisions without correctly identifying them. Because to successfully address Israeli institutional racism you will have to use different solutions than you would to dismantle apartheid.

But you have to want to solve the actual divisions.

If instead you want to, say, dismantle a country, then you need a justification severe enough to get public buy in. What is more severe than apartheid and genocide?

I’ll stick with the debunked apartheid claim for now: there are no separate and unequal institutionalized laws in Israel. Palestinians serve in the Knesset. There are no marriage or miscegenation laws in Israel; no separate public spaces created to segregate Jews, Arabs, Druze, and Christians like there were in South Africa. The inequalities that do exist have happened because the lack of a Palestinian state has created all kinds of administrative holes, pockets of rightwing extremism in response to the conflict, and the ongoing promise of violence from a neighbor legally dedicated to your destruction. All that to say: Israel is not an apartheid state.

Some years ago, a misogynist gay writer taught me that queer people who claim to be pro-queer rights and call for the binary’s downfall may still be prejudiced against groups that logically deserve their support. We all have blind spots. His was that he couldn’t give workshop feedback to women because he’s a man and can’t relate to women’s writing. Women are a different species, after all.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is an antisemite, but that word in its specific connection to discrimination against Jews actually denies us the justice that terms like racism help minorities identify.

So on that note, let’s be clear: Israel is in a bloody, complicated territorial conflict, but it is not an apartheid state. Ta-Nehisi Coates is a black man subject to systemic white racism in the U.S. He is an antisemite, and he is also a racist.

I feel betrayed and depressed yet again by another so-called progressive male writer abandoning a community whose status he then uses for his own gain, a black man whose humanity white supremacists deny is now failing to support human truths that happen to be very personal to me and to the humans I love.

For now, I will hold onto the truth I know because it is written in factual history, and after three decades, my autistic instinct to beat a fact to death can now sometimes accept that like many things in life the current anti-Israel stance is illogical and somehow also supported by large swaths of people on the left, my left, but because it is only a current, I can tell that loud instinct in me that it will eventually pass like it’s done every single time before.

A reminder: Deligitimizing Jewish or Palestinian connections to the homeland is a bad look. Peace is the right look. Let’s focus on that.

*An excerpt from a long twitter thread analyzing the misinformation in The Message

** https://jewishinsider.com/2024/09/paul-coates-antisemitic-conspiracy-theory-slave-trade-the-jewish-onslaught/