Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Sentence Downplaying The Importance Of Complexity Proves How Important Complexity Is

The matter of complexity is simple

I’m not going to rehash all the criticism Ta-Nehisi Coates has received for his lengthy essay about Israel in his new book The Message. Having read it (but not the rest of the book), I thought all the most viral critiques leveled at it were completely valid: it just seems insane for him to have devoted so little time to recent Israeli history. He mentions neither October 7th, which occurred after his trip to Israel, nor the Second Intifada, which was a signal event in Israeli history. 

Coates has every right to criticize Israel harshly, and his essay does strike some fair blows. If you’re a staunch supporter of Israel, you should read it. But if a harsh critique of Israel is your goal, why not at least try to understand how Israelis’ perceptions of their own safety contribute to the policies you despise? Just about every Israeli, after all, knows someone, or knows someone who knows someone, who was killed last year. And just about every Israeli over a certain age knows someone, or knows someone who knows someone, who was killed during the Second Intifada.

You can acknowledge these facts — and acknowledge that every new flareup of violence inevitably leads to far more Palestinian than Israeli deaths — while also casting a harsh eye on Israel. But to not even try to understand why Israelis feel the way they do about their security feels like journalistic malpractice. It would have been very easy for Coates to do the normal journalistic thing and let a “pro-Israel” (not a fan of that framing) group take him around for a few days. (I did both during my own trip to the region, and I wouldn’t have gone if I hadn’t been able to. I’m not tooting my horn — I think this is the same decision most journalists would make were they in my position of knowing very little about the conflict and having 10 free days.)

To the extent Coates tries to climb inside the Israeli mindset, it’s by plucking some of the more offensive passages from the history of Zionist writing, and by tying that colonial project to other colonial projects, and to white supremacy in general — though Coates’s treatment of race here is more nuanced and less prone to rank essentialism than certain other attempts to explain and critique Israel through a racial lens. (The early Zionists themselves described their project as colonial in nature, so I agree with Coates that it isn’t derogatory to call it that, as long as we’re referencing the original effort to move Jews to what is now Israel.)

Overall, though, there isn’t much nuance here. Then again, the whole thing is a bit slippery, because one of Coates’s primary and most provocative theses is that this conflict isn’t complex — that’s just what we’ve been deluded into believing by one-sided coverage.

That’s the passage I, a card-carrying pervert for nuance, want to focus on: