NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {O} n Saturday, the New York Review of Books published “An Open Letter from Participants in the Palestine Festival of Literature.” First on the list of 82 signatories is Ta-Nehisi Coates. Presumably this was meant to highlight the involvement of such a prominent figure; the listing is non-alphabetical. While it is unclear whether Coates was involved in drafting the statement or merely lending it his immense prestige as the most lavishly praised public figure in American letters, it says a lot about Coates that he signed on.
What it says is that anti-Zionism has utterly rotted Coates’s capacity for moral judgment or human empathy.
The entire document reads like Hamas propaganda — worse, it reads as Hamas propaganda. Lord Haw-Haw would stand in awe at how smoothly it embeds that propaganda in the language of its target audience.
Start at the beginning: “We are writers and artists who have been to Palestine to participate in the Palestine Festival of Literature. . . . We have exercised our privilege as international visitors to move around historic Palestine in ways that most Palestinians are unable to.” To Palestine, you say? The festival, in referring to events “in cities across Palestine,” appears to include events held this year in places such as Haifa, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem. Advertising the first of three Haifa events in 2023, the organizers said on their website that they were “thrilled to bring Saleem Haddad to Palestine for the first time.”
Haifa is the third-largest city in Israel. It sits on the northern Mediterranean coast; relative to Israel’s small size, there are not many places in the country further from the borders of Gaza, the West Bank, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. To claim that even Haifa is part of “Palestine” is to assert that everything in Israel is “Palestine.” Coates has signed his name to a document whose very premise is that the State of Israel has no right to exist.
For good measure, the pinned tweet on the festival’s X/Twitter page, from August, advertises its next event, in London, with a blood-red image of an undivided territory composed of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza — iconography familiar to anyone who knows what Hamas and similar groups define as the Palestinian state:
“We now call for the international community to commit to ending the catastrophe unfolding in Gaza and to finally pursuing a comprehensive and just political solution in Palestine.” Notice that there is no reference to there being any catastrophe in Israel. Notice that there is no demand made upon Hamas — not even the release of hostages. Notice the demand that a “comprehensive” resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict — which has proven intractable for 75 years and shows no sign of becoming any less so — should now be interposed as an obstacle to any further Israeli action.
“One festival organizer is locked down with their child in Ramallah, sharing updates about the people killed by armed settlers last night.” Ramallah, of course, is not in Gaza. Also, “their” is a linguistic sop common in the Western-progressive milieu.
Israel has imposed what it calls a “complete siege” and told 1.1 million people in Gaza to evacuate within twenty-four hours. To where? After six days of bombing that have already killed 2,215 people, 724 of them children, in the fourth major aerial bombardment in the sixteenth year of closure the question—to where?—rings unanswerable around the world. . . . A population of over two million people, mostly from families that were made refugees in 1948, half of whom are children, have been living under an Israeli and Egyptian blockade since 2007, and to many of them, being told to leave again is not an option.
Wondering what would prompt Israel to impose such a thing? Thus far in the statement, you would have gleaned no information, as the statement frames the siege as simply a continuation of the past 16 years. Also, consider the word “closure”: Given the constant complaints about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, this is a curious way to describe a territory from which Israel, in 2005, completely withdrew, leaving it to be taken over by a terrorist organization. The blockade that followed was driven by concerns that Hamas intended to do precisely what it just did.
Oh, and for good measure, the statement carefully avoids reference to Hamas ordering the population of Gaza to remain in place and obstructing the way out. Hamas not only wants its people to suffer from the conflict it started with Israel; causing such suffering is central to Hamas’s strategy. Anyone on Planet Earth who knows the first thing about this conflict knows that; not all, however, have the moral courage to say it aloud.
When Israel’s top general refers to Palestinians as “human animals” and the US State Department deletes a statement calling for “a ceasefire,” then we fear we are watching an ethnic cleansing on a scale unseen in decades.
Hamas propagandists and their fellow travelers have gone to town on the use of that epithet. After Hamas massacred defenseless civilians ranging from babies to elderly Holocaust survivors, Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant indeed said that this fight is against “human animals.” With emotions running hot, as they do in the immediate aftermath of an atrocity, there has been a fair amount of such talk emanating from the Israeli government. The Israeli ambassador to Berlin called Hamas “bloodthirsty animals” and declared, “This is civilization against barbarity. This is good against bad. This is people who basically act as animals and do not have any, any respect for children, women.” It requires deliberate dishonesty to miss the point that both of them were characterizing the perpetrators of October 7 — not all Palestinians — as “animals,” and that Israel’s purpose is to destroy the organization that sent them forth. But deliberate dishonesty is a small price for a public intellectual to pay for the cause.
All things considered, some heated words are a pretty poor excuse for drawing a moral equivalence between what Hamas did a little over a week ago and what Israel intends to do. Recall: Hamas gave no warning. It made no demands. It drew no distinctions in its targets, except perhaps to deliberately seek out civilians. It gave no quarter. It has offered no terms. It obeyed none of the laws of war, or international relations, or civilization.
“Ethnic cleansing on a scale unseen in decades” is a nice bit of side propaganda to whitewash what China has been doing to the Uyghurs and Russia has been attempting to do to the Ukrainians.
By denouncing the deletion of Antony Blinken’s ill-considered tweet calling for a ceasefire, Coates and his co-authors appear to suggest that Israel should be condemned for seeking to root out and destroy Hamas by military force in order to prevent a repetition of the October 7 attack. Having implied this, they then come right out and say it:
The governments of the USA, UK, France and others are participating in this crime by ramping up military support for Israel as it wages a war that its officials have plainly stated aims to turn Gaza into a city of tents, or even worse, empty of its people.
It’s a “crime” to do anything to break the power of mass murderers of Jews. Chew on that one. Imagine suggesting such a thing to Ulysses S. Grant when he was trying to eradicate the Klan in the 1870s after repeated massacres of black Americans. This letter contains not a word, not a syllable, of criticism for Hamas, which evidently is simply to be left in power in Gaza. It suggests no consequences that ought to be faced by Hamas.
Finally, we get to the tiniest mention of the less-than-ideal fact that Hamas mowed down children in their beds, raped women, and shot grandmothers in their own living rooms:
On Saturday, after sixteen years of siege, Hamas militants broke out of Gaza. More than 1,300 Israelis were subsequently killed with over one hundred more taken hostage—some of them friends and family of signatories to this letter. We deplore the loss of all innocent life and now, as we write this letter, Israel is executing the largest expulsion of Palestinians since 1948 as it bombs Gazans without discrimination.
Our words feel small in this terrifying escalation.
Go through this one again. “After sixteen years of siege, Hamas militants broke out of Gaza.” One could hardly pen words more polished to present this as a just breaking of a military blockade. Picture a man with his first cup of coffee on one side of his keyboard, a copy of the New York Times on the other, and the bright morning sun shining over his balcony as he smoothly crafts this sentence to paper over the horrors we have all just witnessed. Oh, he thinks, now the passive voice must be used: “More than 1,300 Israelis were subsequently killed with over one hundred more taken hostage.” By whom, we need not say. “Subsequently” implies that a natural order of events was simply allowed to unfold. “We deplore the loss of all innocent life” is not only a grim invocation of “All Lives Matter” that would be side-splittingly hilarious in its irony if the context were not so grisly, but also a careful sidestepping of the question of whom, exactly, the signatories consider an “innocent life.” Maybe that Jewish toddler whose lifeblood was oozing out of his onesie was a colonialist, eh? Mustn’t say otherwise explicitly. Oh, and of course, it is Israel that is engaged in a “terrifying escalation.” Nothing Hamas did is frightening, you see; only regrettably necessary.
George Orwell in 1946 understood men such as Coates:
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. . . . Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. . . . A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.
And finally, the coup de grâce: “After so many years and so many deaths we must all, together, say this has to end, and that it can only end with a free Palestine.” Can it also end with a free Israel? That is certainly not considered essential, by Ta-Nehisi Coates and his co-authors. “Palestine” being defined as it is at the outset, it would appear that they see the survival of Israel as not just inessential but intolerable.
Anti-Zionists are those who oppose the existence of the State of Israel, those who discuss it and treat it as a nation sitting on land stolen by colonization, and those who see its territory as properly belonging to the Palestinians. Never mind that the Jewish people have never had any other home, that they had a kingdom in Judea and Samaria centuries before the births of Homer or Socrates, that they were the ones driven off the land by European imperialists when the Romans burned the Second Temple, and that the Palestinians who fled in 1948 did so at the urging of Arab armies who wanted a clear shot at driving all the Jews out of Israel.
A frequent complaint of anti-Zionists is that it is unfair to tar them as antisemites. But this is why the two go together as night follows day. Time and time again, as we see in this statement, anti-Zionism means holding Jews to standards never demanded of anyone else. Even a writer as determinedly vague about his desired ends as Coates would not ask or even imply that any other nation on earth be abolished, or ask that its people absorb the sort of routine brutality that its enemies visit on Israel, or insist that any other of the world’s peoples have no right to a state of their own. Violence against Jewish bodies is excused, while those who openly aim at Jews’ extermination are not asked even politely to restrain themselves, to relinquish power, to refrain from war crimes, or to return their hostages.
That way always lies moral rot. It may begin as a form of sympathy for the suffering or the weak, but it always ends in the same place, with words that seek to muffle the sound of the goose step, and eyes averted from the smallest of shallow graves.