Within establishment media and politics in the United States, there have been two dominant viewpoints of Israel’s genocidal war in the Gaza Strip. 

One of the viewpoints is highly supportive of Israel while expressing a tiny bit of concern for Israel’s Palestinian victims. An example of this was found in the November 24th Washington Post editorial which denounced the International Criminal Court for issuing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant for overseeing war crimes in the Gaza Strip. 

While the Post editors allowed that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed and maimed” by Israel’s barbaric war, they also argued that Israel had the right to attack Gaza in self-defense after hundreds of Israeli civilians were kidnapped or murdered by Hamas on October 7th.  They also put forward the evidence-free assertion typical among Israel’s supporters that Palestinian civilians have been killed because Hamas uses them as human shields against the Israeli military. They suggested idiotically that Israel “as a democratic country that is committed to human rights” would thoroughly and honestly investigate itself for war crimes once the war ended. They urged the ICC to stop harassing Israel and instead concentrate its firepower on what they felt were the world’s real war criminals such as Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. 

The second of the two dominant viewpoints sees Israel as a holy state capable of no wrongdoing while Palestinians themselves are portrayed as subhuman savages worthy of slaughter. This viewpoint was on display by Bill Maher on his Club Random podcast in September. In a discussion with the writer/director Henry Winkler, Maher claimed that Israel was making every effort not to harm civilians in Gaza. “Are you watching the same footage I’ve been watching?” Winkler replied incredulously. Maher asked Winkler if he really believed that Israel was deliberately killing civilians, as if it was the most inconceivable idea that he, Maher, had ever heard of in his life. Rather than say that Israel was deliberately killing civilians, Winkler chose to describe Israel’s bombing as “indiscriminate.” Winkler noted the obvious: that Maher seemed to endorse the mass killing of Palestinians with his argument that just as the American carpet bombing of Japan during World War II destroyed Japanese fascism by killing many Japanese “lunatics” so similarly Hamas’s evil ideology could be wiped out by Israel’s massive bombing of Gaza. Maher disingenuously denied that he endorsed the mass killing of Palesstians.  In the face of Maher’s belligerence towards his own very mild pushback against the podcast host’s fanatical endorsement of Israeli war crimes, Winkler backed down and expressed understanding toward Maher’s position.

It is obvious, of course, to every rational person that Israel is deliberately killing civilians in Gaza by the tens of thousands, deliberately destroying hospitals, schools, residential neighborhoods, universities and farmland while spreading disease and starvation. Various authorities on international law and human rights–from the International Criminal Court to Amnesty International–have concluded that Israel has engaged in massive war crimes and genocide in the Gaza Strip. It has operated multiple sites of detention where thousands of Palestinians have been subjected to hideous torture, including rape: in the most prominent recent example, Sky News–owned by Rupert Murdoch, one of Netanyahu’s leading financial benefactors–reported that Adnan al Bursch, the prominent Gazan orthopedic surgeon, had been murdered in Israeli custody through multiple methods of torture–including rape. Shortly after Bill Maher and the Post editors prattled on about Israel’s ethical military operations and virtuous democracy, Netanyahu’s former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon proclaimed on multiple media forums that Israel was engaged in ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza and “perpetrating war crimes.” 

In light of the scope and intensity of Israeli war crimes, the criticism of Israel by American liberals for those crimes has been feeble when not totally supportive of the country’s genocidal policies. For much of the period since Israel launched its war of extermination after October 7th, the best stance on Israel among American progressives has been from the likes of Bernie Sanders who has harshly condemned Netanyahu’s government for ethnic cleansing and war crimes while also insisting that Israel had the right to invade Gaza in self-defense after October 7th. Most American liberals–with a few exceptions like Jon Stewart and Senator Jeff Merkley–have not even gone as far as Sanders in criticizing Israel. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib has been almost alone among American Democratic politicians in her willingness to vigorously attack Israel and has, predictably, suffered extensive smears and abuse from Israel’s supporters. 

The performance of some Israeli liberals has been much more impressive than their American counterparts. In early November, Amos Shocken, publisher of Haaretz, Israel’s leading liberal newspaper, publicly declared that Israel had imposed a system of “cruel apartheid” on Palestinians and that Palestinians resisting Israeli occupation were “freedom fighters” not terrorists. Shocken’s comments caused writers for his own newspaper to scramble to distance themselves from him. Haaretz writers–producing material critical of Netanyahu’s war but also mindful of the McCarthyite, even pogrom-like atmosphere against anti-war dissenters within Israel–hastened to assure readers that they unequivocally condemned Hamas’s atrocities on October 7th and thought Hamas soldiers were terrorists, not freedom fighters. Meanwhile, members of Netanyahu’s far right government proposed repressive legislation against Haaretz, claiming the newspaper had been undermining Israel’s war effort. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Courage to Dissent 

In the midst of the appalling and disgraceful complicity of mainstream American politicians and media with Israel’s staggering crimes in Gaza, an occasional ray of light has shown through within the establishment. One such exception to the darkness comes from African American journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates’s controversial recent book The Message. The book–the majority of which is a portrait of Israel as an apartheid state–is somewhat unusual to be coming from the likes of Coates. Coates has spent the bulk of his career ensconced within establishment American journalism–he was for many years a staff writer on The Atlantic. While relatively radical in his stance on racial issues, on economic issues he has aligned himself with the banal neoliberalism of Barack Obama. He is known as a particularly devoted partisan of Obama. In 2008, he praised Zionism. In a 2014 article for The Atlantic entitled “The Case for Reparations” he used reparations paid by West Germany to Israel in 1952 as compensation for Nazi crimes as a historical precedent for potential reparations for African Americans. 

Now, in The Message, he reveals his regret that he ever came to consider Israel’s West German reparations as a model of justice for African Americans. For, during his ten day trip to Israel and the West Bank in 2023 (before the October 7th atrocities), he came to realize that Israel embodied the values of settler colonial white supremacy that he had been fighting in the United States. He realized that Palestinians deserved his solidarity, not Jewish Israelis who were following the vision of Theodore Herzl, modern Zionism’s founder, for Israel to serve as an iteration of European colonialism in the Middle East. Herzl, who died in 1904, wrote in his diary that his vision for a Jewish state was that of a “rampart of Europe against Asia,” “an outpost of civilization” in the midst of Middle Eastern barbarism. Herzl also advised that as many of Palestine’s indigenous Arabs should be cleansed from the territory as “discreetly and circumspectly” as possible to make way for a Jewish ethno-nationalist state.

Coates observes that the Zionist settlers, upon founding Israel in 1948, ethnically cleansed 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. After Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, it began establishing the foundation for apartheid in the territories, stealing Palestinian land and resources for Jewish settlements. Currently, the settlements, along with roads which only Jews are allowed to use, break up the geographical contiguity of Palestinian communities in the West Bank, destroying the basis for any future Palestinian state. Meanwhile Jewish supremacist settlers and soldiers regularly invade Palestinian communities, arbitrarily detaining and beating residents, destroying crops and vandalizing homes. The settlers enjoy the full protection of the Israeli military, mirroring the relationship between law enforcement and the KKK in the pre-civil rights US south. Coates’s book offers a few highlights of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that has been ongoing since 1948 such as the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948 and the destruction of the Moroccan Quarter neighborhood in front of the Wailing Wall after Israel captured East Jerusalem in 1967. 

It is amazing that Americans have been so indoctrinated with the Israeli perspective and Palestinians have been so dehumanized–one of many examples of this dynamic was when media hacks like CBS Mornings host Tony Dokoupil attacked Coates for criticizing Israel in The Message, including describing it as an apartheid state.  It should be obvious to any rational observer that Israel subjects Palestinians to apartheid.This is not only true regarding Palestinians living under Israeli military law in the West Bank–to say nothing of Palestinians being starved and slaughtered in Gaza–but also to Palestinian citizens of Israel itself. 

Coates is one of the premier writing talents of our age: his prose is simple, unpretentious and beautiful, reminding one of the late James Baldwin.  It is a blessing that someone of his talents has decided to speak up on behalf of the Palestinians in a manner that is extremely intelligent and thoughtful. The Message is a book that features much meditation on the subject of searching for the truth, especially within the context of settler-colonial societies like the United States and Israel where powerful forces work to suppress histories of ethnic cleansing and racial supremacy. The majority of Coates’s book deals with Palestine but there is also a section dealing with an attempt to remove his 2015 memoir Between the World and Me from the curriculum of an advanced placement high school English class in a predominantly white South Carolina community. The attempt to remove Coates’s book occurred in the wake of a right wing backlash against “wokeness” after the 2020 George Floyd protests. Coates’s description of white supremacy in the United States in Between the World and Me made some conservative leaning students and parents uncomfortable.

Coates’s defense of Palestinians is one of a few bright spots in the midst of a mainstream media and political culture that is staunchly pro-Israel and pro-genocide. One of the other bright spots has been the anti-genocide protests that erupted on college campuses last spring. However the protests have been subject to repression by police and college administrators backed by both Republican and Democratic politicians. Federal government agencies–including the FBI–have also joined the repression against the pro-Palestinian protestors. With the arch-Zionist, crypto fascist authoritarian Donald Trump once again set to assume the presidency, the battle against US support for Israel’s genocide will only become more intense.

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