The death of Yahya Sinwar is clarifying because the ongoing killing of civilians in Gaza and Benjamin Netanyahu’s promise that it won’t stop show (to those who want to see) that Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza isn’t directed at Hamas but Palestinians as a people and Palestine as an idea. Israel will continue to terraform its neighbourhood, levelling villages, displacing populations, destroying schools, hospitals, universities, mosques and olive groves, erasing nature, culture and history to make Zion habitable for its chosen people.
The non-Jews killed in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, in this story, are suicidal communities which brought this upon themselves; that or collateral damage and, in both cases, landfill. As the Israel Defense Forces’ meat grinder whirs around non-Jewish enclaves, the pretence of being the most moral army in the world is set aside for the satisfaction of frog-marching Gazans up and down the Strip, decimating them all the while in the name of Hamas. Used in this way, ‘Hamas’ is less a name than a type of holy water that properly sprinkled makes the murder of Palestinians a virtuous cause.
Central to this narrative is the claim that the killing of civilians, especially women and children, is inadvertent, the responsibility of a cowardly enemy that hides amongst non-combatants. The story varies; sometimes Israelis will claim that there are no real civilians in Gaza, that all Gazans are complicit in Hamas’s violence, but for the most part the existence of innocents is allowed. What is not allowed is any suggestion that the IDF kills non-combatants deliberately. This became unsustainable when The New York Times recently carried a long story that consolidated the testimonies of healthcare workers who had worked in Gaza and had seen multiple cases of pre-teen children shot in the head and chest, most of whom died.
The killing of children and civilians by Israeli snipers had been common knowledge well before the publication of this article but the imprimatur of The New York Times made it real for a Western readership. A handful of Israeli apologists tried to suggest that the story was unreliable, that the x-ray images of gunshots to the skull were faked. The New York Times issued a statement that the paper had fact-checked the story
and vouched for the authenticity of the images.
Howard Jacobson, the British novelist and commentator, wrote an opinion piece for The Observer where he argued that the images and videos constantly shown on television of Palestinian children killed by Israeli bombardment amounted to a modern version of the medieval blood libel where Jews were falsely accused of murdering children and using their blood to make bread. Later, in an interview with The New Yorker, Jacobson made the same case again, that showing children killed by the IDF amounted to saying that Jews in general were child-killers.
Pressed by Isaac Chotiner, his interviewer, Jacobson said “… if you are telling me that you know for sure that the Israelis are going out there and they’re picking off civilians for the fun of picking off civilians, I agree with you. That’s unforgivable if that’s what they’re doing.”
The New Yorker interview happened after the publication of The New York Times article documenting the deaths of Palestinian children killed by sniper bullets. I’d like to think that Jacobson would concede that picking off children with head shots was unforgivable but given the self-serving incoherence of his responses to Chotiner’s questions, it’s hard to be sure.
The same newspaper that published Jacobson’s piece (The Observer is the Sunday edition of The Guardian) spiked a commissioned piece by the Palestinian writer, Susan Abulhawa, because she used the word, “holocaust”, to describe Israel’s violence in Gaza and wouldn’t replace it with genocide. This might have been defensible had The Observer not, by publishing Jacobson, suggested that the mass murder of children in Gaza was debatable. This inconsistency made it clear that pro-Palestinian writers could be tone-policed while pro-Israeli voices like Jacobson’s were free to make the grotesque case that showing babies killed by the IDF was an anti-Semitic libel.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his new book, The Message, addresses this inconsistency directly. Written in the form of a personal essay, the book consists of chapters on his travels in Senegal, South Carolina and Palestine where he constantly uses his experiences as a black writer in America to make sense of these places. His chapter on his ten-day visit to the West Bank and Jerusalem in 2023 doesn’t refer to Gaza at all. There is no mention of Hamas’s October 7 rampage or the Israeli reprisal. Coates focuses entirely on his impressions in the time he was there.
This has left some book reviewers unimpressed. Reviews in The New York Times and The New Yorker by Jennifer Szalai, Jay Caspian Kang and Parul Sehgal describe Coates’s book as unoriginal, inflated, turgid, self-absorbed and simplifying. Kang writes that Coates’s belief that writers should write to save the world is a bad idea because it leads to “… leaden, predictable prose”. Parul Sehgal in a longer review makes the same set of arguments: Coates’s essay is a self-indulgent meditation on his epiphany about Israel and Palestine, it tells us nothing that we don’t already know from more imaginative and better informed writers like Isabella Hammad, Pankaj Mishra and Rashid Khalidi. Common to all three reviews is a critique of the way in which Coates privileges first-hand experience over wide reading and reportage and his refusal to engage with the historical context and complexity of Israel-Palestine.
Having just read the book, I can, for what it’s worth, say that I disagree. Coates finds parallels with Jim Crow, segregation and apartheid, connections that have been made before but are made here with a moral force and presence that derive from his evolution as a Black writer in America. His blunt refusal to countenance ‘complexity’ as an explanation/justification for the subjection of Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories is a feature, not a bug. The knowingness of these reviews is worth unpacking because it tells us something about the hole that The Message fills in contemporary discourse about Palestine.
It’s hard to review a book that takes the world as personally as The Message does. Coates talks about his own writing and its reception constantly, sometimes with artless pleasure, and it’s easy to condescend to that. But there is a barely suppressed contempt to these reviews of The Message that makes sense only if the book is seen as an act of presumption. Who do you think you are is the question these reviewers are asking. Kang cuts Coates down to size by recommending irony and self-deprecation: “Our job is to type.” Sehgal’s verdict is that the book “suppurates with such self-regard that it feels composed by the very enemy of a writer who has so strenuously scorned carelessness and vague pronouncement.”
Metropolitan reviewing is a contact sport, but suppurates? To suppurate is to be rotten with pus. This lack of control in a review that is otherwise composed of diligently buffed sentences, suggests that Sehgal finds Coates’ determination to boil down the historical complexity of Israeli apartheid to a moral question—how is this okay?—peculiarly provoking. In this, she and her fellow reviewers find common ground with the master narrative about Israel/Palestine that Coates attacks: its complexity, its intractability, its history, the proper deference with which it is to be approached.
Coates just wades in, announcing that ‘I want to tell you that your oppression will not save you, that being a victim will not enlighten you, that it can just as easily deceive you.’ The wound that he tries to lance with this little book suppurates with something worse than self-regard. The service that The Message does is to show us that the supremacist rot in the state of Israel isn’t hard to name or understand.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com
