Educating Americans about the reality Of Israel

A decade ago, in June 2014, The Atlantic published The Case for Reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates's much-lauded essay about housing and financial discrimination against African Americans.

- Aditya Mani Jha

During an event organised by the magazine at a Washington DC synagogue afterwards, a woman in the audience asked Coates a question about the essay: he had mentioned reparations paid by Germany to Israel after the Holocaust as a potential model for America, but what about the Palestinians whose oppression at the hands of Israel was ongoing (and moreover, aided and abetted by the US)? This encounter was the starting point of Coates's latest book of essays, The Message. In a recent interview to New York Magazine, the author admitted that the question about Palestine had bothered him and he "should have done better". With this book he does, in fact, do better. This carefully structured triptych of essays culminates in The Gigantic Dream, Coates's 70-page account of his trip to Palestine and Israel in May 2023. Blending reportage with elements of historiography, and on occasion, autobiography, the author makes a compelling case for Israel as a modern-day "Jim Crow" state, rooted in colonial occupation and apartheid-like laws. This conclusion doesn't arrive in a vacuum; the connective tissue of the book is the theme of cathartic, discomfiting travels.

In the opening essay, a visit to Dakar brings meditations on Coates's Senegalese ancestors and the spectre of "Niggerology", a 19th-century strain of pseudo-historic literature deployed to justify slavery. The middle essay is set in South Carolina, where Coates meets a teacher who is fighting against a politically motivated ban on his 2015 book Between the World and Me. Along the way, Coates is subjected to increasingly elaborate American Civil War recreations mythologising the Confederate army (not to mention dozens of Confederate-soldier statues staring at him).