What the row over Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book reveals about free speech
The deep message of “The Message” is about narrow-mindedness, not Israel
It is a common response among visitors to Israel, even before the war in Gaza. They see the “teeming cafés” and “cocktail bars” of Tel Aviv, as Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it, and, in the West Bank, hardship and expropriation. The contrast offends natural justice and inspires compassion for Palestinians. It would be odd if it did not. The book Mr Coates has written on the basis of such impressions, and the controversy it has ignited, together spotlight an urgent issue—but perhaps not the one he intended.
Mr Coates has justly won acclaim and fame for his trenchant essays on race in America. “The Message”, out in Britain next year and in America now, recounts trips he made to a slave-trading site in Senegal and to South Carolina, where obtuse book banners targeted another of his titles. These chapters introduce his theme of the use and abuse of stories in the service of repression. But the main story he tells is about Israel and the West Bank, where in 2023—before the atrocities of October 7th—he spent ten days.
Therein lies a glaring problem with “The Message”. It is discourteous to both your subjects and readers to spin a book out of a ten-day visit to a bitterly contested foreign land. First impressions can be valuable—and Mr Coates’s observations on the wrongs of Israeli settlements are powerful—but they are also incomplete. His is “a stranger’s story”, he acknowledges, yet he tells it anyway.
The second problem is what, in a passionate indictment of Israel, Mr Coates intentionally leaves out. He alludes to Israel’s wars with hostile neighbours without saying why they were fought. He makes no mention of Palestinian terrorism, nor of what the failures and fanaticism of Palestinian leaders have cost their own people. The only Israeli views to feature are those of chastened peaceniks. All this contradicts the journalistic credo that Mr Coates himself sets out: that writers must “walk the land” they mean to describe.
Excluding the context of Israel’s actions, which he calls “patently immoral”, nobbles his analysis. On the plus side, it helps him liken the Palestinians’ plight to the long oppression of African Americans. This flawed analogy between Zionism and white supremacy—between a tragic internecine struggle and a one-sided subjugation—is axiomatic on the “anti-colonial” left. With talk of the “separate and unequal nature of Israeli rule”, Mr Coates labours the comparison. As much as a political dispatch, his book reads as a bid to prove his bona fides to his comrades.
So “The Message” is pompous and misguided. Importantly, however, it is not—as some have unfairly alleged—hateful or antisemitic. Its faults are not disqualifying. Mr Coates had a perfect right to publish it.
And critics have an equally perfect right to interrogate it and him. Tony Dokoupil, a morning show host for CBS, did that on September 30th. During an interview to promote “The Message”, he suggested it would “not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist”, and asked whether Mr Coates was questioning Israel’s right to exist.
Cue a brouhaha that is as much about media ethics as about the contents of the book. Keyboard activists called Mr Dokoupil racist (he is white and Jewish; Mr Coates is black). Meanwhile, some of his colleagues at CBS complained about the interview to executives, who admonished the presenter for falling short of editorial standards. Shari Redstone—whose conglomerate, Paramount Global, owns CBS—stood up for Mr Dokoupil and rebuked his bosses.
The episode was profoundly troubling: the shaming of Mr Dokoupil, not the interview. That was robust but cordial. Mr Dokoupil ensured Mr Coates had time for his answers and ended by calling him “buddy”. It fell squarely within the bounds of responsible broadcasting. Evidently, though, some at CBS and beyond think certain in-group orthodoxies are too sacred to be challenged. (To his credit, Mr Coates did not encourage the pile-on, insisting he “can take care of myself”.)
This is the message that “The Message” has crystallised. It is not about the conflict in the Middle East but the Western intellectual malaise it has exacerbated. Legitimate opinions of all stripes are increasingly seen as inadmissible, and reasonable questions as unaskable. For some, disagreement is grounds for character assassination or censorship. In that insidious way of thinking, free expression is a conditional right—in other words, not a right at all.
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