Don’t buy The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates, it’s antisemitic

Ta-Nehisi Coates explains on his official website that he set out to write his new book, The Message, “in the tradition of Orwell’s classic ‘Politics and the English Language.’” Coates certainly evokes Orwell but not in the way he intended. The longest chapter of the book, describing Coates’ 10-day trip to what he calls his “travels to Palestine,” seems inspired by Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in 1984, where facts are permanently expunged, history is rewritten, and reality is deliberately obscured to fit a preferred political narrative. Coates begins by refusing to acknowledge that he visited Israel even though much of his trip was inside this country. Coates confirms this erasure in the first sentence of the chapter by describing Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial situated firmly within Israel’s internationally recognized borders as located in “Palestine.” This is not an oversight but a deliberate effort to deny Israel’s legitimacy, reflecting the broader agenda that underpins Coates’ work. By omitting Israel from the landscape, he lays the foundation for a narrative in which Jews are portrayed as evil and racist invaders with no legitimate claim to the land.

Coates’ historical revisionism is far deeper than simply refusing to say he traveled to Israel. After only a short visit to the City of David, an archaeological site in Jerusalem, Coates dismisses the Jewish connection to the land as a “poorly wrought fairy tale and an enormous con.” He describes the Jewish historical claim to the land, evidenced by what he disdainfully calls “Zionist archeology,” as a “search for self in an epic, mythic past filled with kings and sanctified by an approximation of science.” He claims that Jews in Israel sought “an unbroken narrative, stretching back to time immemorial, of Jewish nationhood” and a “desperate need to assert royal lineage and great ancestral deeds.” Coates essentially considers the Jewish Kingdom of Israel as fictional, reducing it to a fantasy on par with the make-believe African kingdom of Wakanda, which he has written about in his comic books. Coates is so horrified by the mere presence of the City of David site that Jews dare claim is part of their history that he compares it to the offense of a Confederate flag to African-Americans, a disgusting comparison and distortion.

Coates harps on his skepticism of Jewish history throughout the book, mentioning the City of David 25 times, as if this brief visit has endowed him the definitive perspective on the ancient history of the Jewish people. No need to pore over the 656 pages of Paul Johnson’s The History of the Jews or to visit dozens of other ancient Jewish historical sites in Israel. He summarily dismisses centuries of archaeological research, historical scholarship, physical artifacts, and the lived experiences and passed down culture of Jews who have maintained an unbroken presence in the Holy Land for 3,000 years, opting instead for a simplistic and falsified narrative in which Jews are interlopers and the Palestinians are the true indigenous people. This antisemitic denial of Jewish history matches the viewpoints of Palestinian leaders, like Mahmoud Abbas, who in 2017 said Jews are “really excellent in faking and counterfeiting history.”

Coates’ dismissal of Jewish history sets the stage for his broader indictment of Israel as a modern-day colonial power, oppressing the indigenous Palestinian population. To Coates, Jews are not a people who returned to their ancestral homeland after centuries of exile and persecution; they are white settlers, conquerors who imposed their will on a defenseless native population. Coates grafts America’s racial history onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, casting Jews as “white oppressors” and Palestinians as “black victims” in a reductive and false analogy. The reality of Israel—a country where over half of the Jewish population is of Middle Eastern or African descent who were forced out of these countries—does not fit into Coates’ racial framework, so he willfully ignores it entirely.

Coates goes beyond the simplistic comparison of Israel to American racism. He claims that Israel “had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South” and that it is the “one place on the planet” out of more than 190 nations where racism is this extreme. The charge is breathtaking in its lack of nuance and application of double standards. Israel, a democratic state surrounded by hostile neighbors that identify as Muslim nations, is singled out as the world’s most egregious violator of human rights, while authoritarian regimes in the region escape unscathed in Coates’ telling. Even Jewish security guards in the Old City of Jerusalem, who are there to prevent terrorist attacks, are likened to “Georgia sheriffs” enforcing segregation. This lazy comparison strips away the realities and complexities of Israel’s legitimate security concerns and reduces them to racist policies, ignoring the very real and ongoing threats Israelis face from terrorism. Coates even describes a mundane encounter with a security guard at his hotel, who asked if he was a guest, as evidence of Jewish racism. In his telling, the hotel lobby guard was not doing his job but enacting racial surveillance. In Coates’ view, Israeli security measures are purely about racial domination, with no consideration of the reality of terrorist attacks that have killed countless Israeli civilians, such as more than 100 suicide bombing attacks that characterized the Second Intifada, and of course 10/7 which is amazingly missing from Coates’ fake narrative.

In order to sustain his fictional dystopian Jewish totalitarian racist regime, unique on planet earth, Coates falsifies, misrepresents, and omits nearly every essential fact about Israel and the conflict with Palestinians. His narrative ignores the existence of Arab-Israeli citizens, deliberately not writing the words Arab-Israeli once in some 100 pages, who comprise 20% of Israel’s population and enjoy full rights as citizen (no doubt experiencing discrimination similar to minorities in many nations), including serving in the Knesset, the judiciary, proportional representations in Israel’s top universities, leading doctors working side-by-side with Jewish doctors, and other prominent positions. The fact that Arab-Israelis are integrated into Israeli society at all levels, living in mixed cities like Haifa, contradicts Coates’ depiction of Israel as an apartheid state, so his Ministry of Truth simply erases them from the narrative.

Coates confuses a political, national and territorial conflict in the West Bank and Gaza as one driven by simply racism. Coates has no answer to the experience of Israeli-Arabs, so he is reduced to fabricating Israeli policies both large and small in an attempt to fabricate apartheid. He falsely claims that Israelis regularly tour Al-Aqsa Mosque while Palestinians are barred from the Western Wall, when, in reality it’s the exact opposite—non-Muslims are restricted from the Al-Aqsa Mosque by the Jordanian Waqf, and Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike can visit the Western Wall. He suggests that Muslims are prevented from entering Jerusalem’s Old City through the Lion’s Gate simply because when he was there he did not see anyone “visibly Muslim” pass through, a claim that is easily debunked by anyone familiar with the area. Coates falsely claims that only Jewish Israelis can live as citizens in all of Jerusalem while Palestinians are relegated to being “permanent residents.” In fact, all Palestinian citizens of Israel are permitted to live in Jerusalem and many do. Coates also misrepresents the law regarding non-citizen Palestinians who marry Israeli citizens, falsely claiming that the law is different for Israeli Jews and non-Jews. In fact, the law applies equally to all Israeli citizens—Jewish, Palestinian, and Christian—and reflects security concerns about the automatic granting of citizenship to non-citizens. These security concerns are real, with 48 documented examples of terrorist actions taken by non-citizens who abused spousal citizenship laws.

The falsehoods and omissions pile up as Coates continues his narrative. He falsely suggests that “Jewish Israelis” have yellow license plates while Palestinians are relegated to green ones, once again conflating non-citizen Palestinians in the West Bank with Palestinian citizens of Israel, who have the same license plates as Jewish citizens. He falsely asserts that Palestinians owned 90% of the land in Israel before 1948, even though about 80% of the land was state owned (Israel is 60% desert) and Jews legally purchased much of the land they inhabited before the war. He falsifies a quote from Israeli historian Benny Morris, claiming that he called all Palestinians “barbarians” when a review of the interview reveals Morris was specifically talking about Palestinian terrorists. Coates claims that Israel seized a Palestinian orchard to uncover the Pool of Siloam when in reality the land was sold legally by the Greek Patriarchate to a nonprofit organization, with the sale upheld in court. Coates suggests that Israel built the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem by razing a Muslim cemetery, when it turns out the lot had already been constructed upon 50 years earlier with no objections in the intervening decades, likely because Muslim leaders themselves had approved prior construction. These numerous inaccuracies are not simply errors—they are deliberate misrepresentations designed to bolster the false claim that Israel is an apartheid state. Coates has no choice but to fabricate and omit—if Arab citizens of Israel can vote, hold office, attend Israel’s top universities, live the same cities, seek and provide care in the same hospitals and lead Israel’s top financial institutions—then Israel cannot be the racist dystopia, even worse than Jim Crow, that he imagines.

Coates presents the 1948 Israel War as nothing more than the “advancing Israeli Army” banishing and driving out Palestinians from their land. There is no mention of what led up to this war: the Arab rejection of a partition plan voted on by the UN to create an Arab state and Jewish state, a historic compromise to accommodate the national aspirations of both sides, which the Jews accepted, and the Arabs rejected. Palestinians proceeded to attack Jews and were later joined by surrounding Arab states in what was described as war of elimination, only three years after more than one-third of Jews worldwide were exterminated. It would be similar to describing American action against the Japanese in WWII as unjustified aggression and not mentioning Pearl Harbor. Coates ignores the wars in 1967 and 1973, in which Arab states sought again to destroy Israel—then refusing to negotiate a land for peace deal in the famous “three nos” of Khartoum—resulting in the occupation of the disputed West Bank. Once again, the Ministry of Truth erases the entire arc of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

There is also no mention by Coates of several sincere attempts by Israel to end the conflict by agreeing to a Palestinian state, first at Camp David in 2000, then the Clinton Parameters a few months later and Ehud Olmert’s offer in 2008. Each of these offers were rejected first by Yasser Arafat (in what Saudi Prince Bandar called a “tragedy” and a “crime”) and then by current Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Israel’s complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 is also unmentioned, a move that allowed Palestinians to fully control a territory and a border with the outside world (via Egypt). The fact that Hamas took over in a bloody coup in 2007, leading to a subsequent Israeli blockade, and used billions of dollars of aid to militarize Gaza is irrelevant to Coates. In a recent interview Coates whitewashed Hamas crimes on 10/7, suggesting that it was understandable given the horrible conditions in Gaza and that under the same conditions he may not have been “strong enough” to resist committing the same crimes by Hamas on that day.

And finally we arrive at Coates’ most glaring omission: the total absence of Palestinian terrorism or violence of any kind. In The Message, there is no mention of Hamas, no discussion of rocket attacks, suicide bombings, pay-to-slay policies where Palestinians who murdered Jews (and others, like American Taylor Force by knifing in Jaffa) are literally paid lifetime salaries. There is no mention of the unprovoked Arab massacre of dozens of Jews in Hebron in 1929, before the State of Israel was born and before any occupation. It would be interesting to ask Coates what oppression he could point to in this instance, where even he may not have had the strength to resist joining this massacre. There is no mention of Iran who often calls for the destruction of Israel and backs this goal by funding terrorist proxies surrounding Israel. Instead, Coates mentions Baruch Goldstein, the Jewish terrorist, 13 times and writes “terrorists” only once—referring to “Zionist terrorist groups” who battled British rule. Coates’ worldview where there has never been and there is no Palestinian violence against Jews reduces every interaction in Israel to a racial power struggle, refusing to engage with the actual security realities that shape daily life in the country. The distortion of history, the omission of key facts, and the manipulation of identity politics in The Message are not just academic errors—they are intellectual and moral failures.

Here is a partial list of all the words and concepts Coates completely omits in more than 100 pages of text: 1929 Hebron massacre, partition plan, Arab invasion of Israel in 1948, Khartoum Resolution, Yom Kippur War, Palestinian terrorism, suicide bombings, pay-to-slay, Taylor Force Act, Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority, Camp David, Clinton Parameters, Olmert statehood offer, Fatah, PLO, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah. Finally, there are zero mentions of 10/7 or Hamas even though the book was published a year after this date. This was a deliberate choice by Coates to absolve all Palestinians of any fault for anything that has ever happened in the Middle East.

Coates’ The Message is not an honest examination of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is a grotesque distortion of history that relies on erasing Israel’s legitimacy, denying Jewish history, and ignoring Palestinian agency and violence. The tragedy of The Message is that it didn’t have to be this way. Coates could have written an honest, nuanced account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one that grapples with the real issues on both sides. He could have explored the history of Palestinian rejectionism, the repeated offers of statehood that were turned down by Palestinian leaders, the challenges Israel faces as a small democracy in a hostile region and the major strides to improve the conditions of Israeli-Arabs (for example, in the prior government under Naftali Bennet, an Arab party joined the governing coalition for the first time). Instead, Coates chose to double down on a narrative that ignores the facts and demonizes one side. Like his works on Wakanda, Coates paints a cartoonish, one-dimensional portrayal of Israel as the ultimate villain that that feeds into the worst stereotypes and ancient hatreds of Jews. His rhetoric crosses the line into blatant antisemitism, as he systematically misrepresents historical facts, manipulates narratives and relies on blatant double standards to portray Israel, the only Jewish state, as the most evil and oppressive nation on earth. For someone who has written so powerfully about racism in America, it’s a sad irony that The Message traffics in the same kind of simplistic, binary thinking that Coates himself has long fought against.