Ta-Nehisi Coates resumed his media tour on the Ezra Klein Show on Friday in promotion of his most recent book, which has captured national attention. After spending a week in the West Bank, the famed left-wing intellectual dedicated an inordinate amount of time to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Coates was rather dismissive in confronting the routine acts of Palestinian violence faced by Israelis. To him, it seems no level of terror could ever justify a systematic response.

“I don’t know man, when you start dropping bombs . . . on the people that are caged in, I don’t care what their leadership did,” Coates told Klein.

Well, that’s the problem. Few challenge the abhorrent conditions Gazans live under. But like most things, the complexity begins with asking the question: Why?

Peace overtures throughout the 1990s were met with routine suicide-bomb attacks inside Israel. The unilateral disengagement of every Israeli from the Gaza Strip in 2005 was similarly met with the democratic election of an Islamist mafia we now know as Hamas. The current multifront war, of course, began with Hamas’s October 7 atrocities.

Coates argued that Palestinian violence doesn’t justify Israel’s lack of commitment to democracy in the West Bank. But shaking your finger at the Jewish state for simply trying to preserve its existence is less than convincing, especially when you don’t want to explore why the Israelis fight back in the first place.