The Radicalization of Ta-Nehisi Coates

Review of The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates (One World, 2024)

Zionism, and the century-long history of Palestinian opposition to it, resist easy analogizing. While the economy created by the Dutch in South Africa or the French in Algeria relied primarily on the exploitation of indigenous labor, an arrangement that made minority rule impossible to sustain, the first act of the Israeli state was to launch a war of expulsion that redrew the region’s borders and displaced 750,000 Palestinians, tipping the demographic balance in favor of Jews, who have made up around 75 percent of the population of Israel since 1948. For some, this has provided grounds for a not-unjustified pessimism about the fate of Palestinians subject to Israeli occupation and rule. In her 2000 book, Liberation and Democratization: The South African and Palestinian National Movements, the sociologist Mona Younis argued that the inability of Palestinian labor to exert influence over Israeli society had closed off the possibility of a South African–style road to democracy.

Geopolitical considerations also undermine comparisons to previous anti-colonial struggles. In the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab states in 1967, Palestinian organizations like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine envisaged a conflict that could turn “the Arab region into a second Vietnam” in which Arab states could act as a “[North] Vietnam with respect to the south.” The difference, of course, was that Vietnam fought off French and American invaders by developing a sophisticated military-industrial complex supported by allies — China inconsistently and the Soviet Union throughout — who saw their own…