"The Message": American Writer Takes 10-Day Trip to Israel, Writes Book About It

Ta-Nehisi Coates is just following a tired and unoriginal script

Everyone goes here on their first trip to Israel. Photo by Josh Appel on Unsplash

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a perfect example of what happens when brilliant marketing and PR are used to mask the shallowness of one’s ideas. Coates became famous with his blockbuster book Between the World and Me, which Oprah helped to popularize. His newly released book The Message combines his perspective as a Black American with perfunctory (yet hardly unique) observations of Israel.

I’m from Coates’s hometown of Baltimore. As a close-knit, relatively small city, we like to elevate our neighbors who do great things. Elijah Cummings comes to mind. Michael Phelps. Billie Holiday. Thurgood Marshall. Moses Ingram. Brooks Robinson. Henrietta Szold. All of the legends on this list achieved great accomplishments in their respective fields. Self-awareness is a quality that Coates lacks severely, so his glib condemnation of the Jewish state appears motivated not by a desire to find truth, but by a clear intention to seek out another’s immorality with his own myopic lens. This is hardly an accomplishment.

Coates’s PR team went into full overdrive to promote his newest book. He’s already been an invited guest on several prominent programs, like Amanpour & Co.:

The most telling part of the exchange is when the interviewer asks him about his intentions in writing about his visit to Israel:

Interviewer: Is there a point at which you said to yourself I can not only see this, I have to write about it and accept what comes with writing about it? Or was (writing about it) always the plan?

Coates: That was always the plan. But I knew it was going to be hard.

Interviewer: What’s hard? Say more about what’s hard.

Coates: I don’t like hurting people’s feelings. I don’t enjoy telling people unpleasant things. And to be really direct with you, people I’ve had in my life, who I cared about, colleagues of mine, who I’ve spent time around, their feelings were hurt. I believe what I witnessed was an immoral apartheid regime. Those are my conclusions. I don’t take saying that lightly. I would rather not feel like I have to say it, but I did based on what I witnessed and what I read afterwards.

That would be what he “witnessed” during his 10-day trip to Jerusalem’s Old City and the West Bank and what he read from highly reliable sources like Amnesty International. As far as I know, that was his first and only trip there. Here are some things he says with complete confidence both in his book and in interviews about the book, based on his observations during his guided tour:

• The Old City of Jerusalem “feels fake.”

• What he witnessed during his 10-day experience is akin to the Jim Crow South that his parents told him about.

• He was “held” (by which I think he means “waited outside for entry”) for a full 45 minutes before being granted entry to Al-Aqsa mosque. This is the experience that he assumes all Palestinian visitors to the mosque must endure. I truly hope that Coates one day heals from that trauma.

• In Hebron, he claims to have walked on streets “just for Christians” that were inaccessible to his Palestinian guide, the separation enforced by “armed guards.” This claim would be laughable if it weren’t so stupid. Hebron is over 99% Muslim and less than 1% Jewish. The common wisdom is that there are currently zero Christians in Hebron, but at one point in the 90s the Christian population was an estimated 3 to 7 people total (not %) out of 200,000. Those must be some clean Christian-only streets if hardly anyone can walk on them!

Too bad Coates didn’t sign up for our Birthright Palestine program. Instead, he opted for City of David, a company specializing in tour packages tailored for those on their first trip to Israel. Plus you have a guide to help you order a falafel sandwich at some Jerusalem tourist trap.

He’s not wrong about fakery in the Old City. I’ll give a specific example based on my own understanding: more than 300 years elapsed between the existence of Jesus and the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. In the interim, multiple Roman legions conquered and pillaged Jerusalem. I actually have an image in my mind of Helena wandering the city, more than a thousand miles from her home, and getting some version of the following: “blondie, blondie, you want to see where Jesus died? I show you, good price!” The church isn’t even located where the city limits were at the time Jesus walked them. But people from all over the world have been scammed at that exact location for thousands of years, so I can’t really blame Helena or the worshippers who believe they’re praying over Jesus’s final resting place.

Someone with at least a basic knowledge of Jerusalem—and achieving a basic knowledge of such a lengthy history does take some dedication—would know that the myths mixed with the real in the Old City are simply part of the fabric of the place. It doesn’t detract from the fact that two prominent Jewish temples once stood there, the most recent one destroyed in 70 CE. It doesn’t take away from the authenticity of the Jews’ connection to it. Coates just chooses to dismiss this reality. When Coates encounters a fact that interferes with the simple Jewish oppressor/Palestinian victim narrative that he’s there to tell, he just omits it from his analysis (I’m being generous calling it that). If he must bend the truth (or lie by omission) in the service of his righteous mission, we just need to let it go.

There’s no doubt that the inequality that exists in Israel and especially in the West Bank (and definitely in Hebron, where 20% of the Palestinian population is under Israeli military occupation and the rest under the PA) warrants serious discussion from knowledgeable observers. Coates just isn’t one of them. He doesn’t speak the relevant languages, he hasn’t studied the place in a real way (that he cites Amnesty as a reliable source betrays this fact), and he hasn’t spent enough time with actual Israelis and Palestinians to form a nuanced view. Rather, he simply relies on his preconceived notions formed by own experience and identity, all of which bear little relation to Israel and its problems. His task is to jam what he’s seeing on a curated tour into an existing framework rather than open his mind to the possibility that the framework might have been flawed from the get-go.

This takes me back to when Eat, Pray, Love, another wholly overrated text by an American author made famous for her profound narcissism, became popular. Elizabeth Gilbert took a year-long odyssey to three different exotic locales, where she accomplishes the following: eating pasta, meditating, and having sex with Javier Bardem. It’s a shallow display of indulgence because the author herself is shallow. She also inspired an entire generation (read: mine) to fantasize about using travel as a bizarre way to “find yourself” but sans the fat book advance that Gilbert had to do it.

But the difference between Gilbert and Coates is that Gilbert never pontificates about the supposed “morality” of the societies that she visits, two of which where the majority of the locals live on less than $2 per day. Instead, it’s just about Gilbert, about “finding herself” in lands that she did not know before arriving to and doesn’t show any understanding of after returning home, because the foreign places were simply backdrops for a movie in which she’s the main character and the natives are supporting cast. Coates takes it a step further: the place he visits also serves as a blank screen upon which to project his anger about his own country’s sins. Here is how his movie plays out: the main character is Coates, the protagonist-victims the Palestinians, and the antagonists the Jews. Simple and clean.

Getting angry at Coates for falling into the same trap that has consumed many of his activist-writer colleagues is just too easy. So I don’t, because I know that the problem isn’t really Coates. He’s merely a symptom, regurgitating a narrative that he knows will work with his audience. This audience is comprised largely of Americans who might have a genuine interest in race relations, but whose view of Israel/Palestine has been shaped largely by what they’ve seen on TikTok. The real problem, in my opinion, is that renown publishers and media outlets are willing to put out such egregious misinformation to their large followings and pass it off as truth. In the case of Coates, as long as his screed on Israel is attached to a name that Oprah endorses, it doesn’t matter whether or not it’s true.

What Coates’s new book shows—and he is absolutely not the first person to do this; in fact he’s just following in the footsteps of a growing number of western writers and journalists who are engaging in the same behavior—is how certain discourse on Israel and Jews has become a performance of sophistry that follows a very specific script. That script does not require any real knowledge of the place you’re speaking of, only adherence to the narrative already spoon-fed to you before you board the plane. After you pass through Tel Aviv customs (which is an experience in and of itself), you get a curated visit of a country where you get to retire to your hotel for a beer and a hummus plate after touring the main attractions for a few hours each day. Then, you can go home and moralize about it with no threat to your safety.

Coates thinks that he “hurt people’s feelings” because he pointed out new information that others needed to hear. Wrong. What’s offensive about him is that after 10 whole days in Jerusalem’s best tourist traps, he published an entire book arrogantly and erroneously claiming that Israel and the Jewish oppressors running it embody the worst historical aspects of his own country (namely de jure segregation). As wrong as these ideas are, they’ve become impossible to ignore, and increasingly difficult to combat. Coates is actively contributing to the current cesspool of misinformation, and that he cannot recognize this fact is his own mortal sin.