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Ta-Nehisi Coates Jumps on the Anti-Israel Bandwagon Using Ignorance and Sympathy with Terrorists
Three things stand out in Ryu Spaeth’s 7000-word, flattering profile of Ta-Nehisi Coates in New York magazine.
Coates’ apparent blindness to any facts that don’t support his anti-Israel premise;
Coates’ desire for Jews to return to a state of powerlessness and vulnerability;
And the pretense that Coates has done something brave and daring, without regard to whether it will hurt his career.
Spaeth’s profile focuses on The Message, Coates’ new book, which has been released just in time for the one-year commemoration of October 7, 2023 — the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Unlike New York, my organization wasn’t given an advance copy of the book, so I must take Spaeth’s descriptions of Coates and his work on faith. But even in an otherwise fawning profile, Spaeth ever-so-gently points out that Coates doesn’t have a firm grasp on the events surrounding Israel’s re-establishment in 1948, and that the book overlooks “terrorist groups set on the state’s annihilation,” and “intifadas and the failed negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders going back decades.”
Coates, at least according to Spaeth, is heavy on moral judgments, but light on history.
Spaeth writes of Coates, “the point he is trying to make is that anybody can see the moral injustice of the occupation. ‘What is the experience that justifies total rule over a group of people since 1967?’ he asked me. ‘My mother knows that’s wrong.’”
Why Coates has invoked his mother isn’t clear, but perhaps his mother doesn’t know that Israel got into this situation as a result of a defensive war, or that Israel offered the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza a state in 2000 — and many times before or since.
Perhaps his mother doesn’t know that former President Bill Clinton faults Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat for rejecting the 2000 peace offer, or that the Palestinians again passed up independence in the West Bank in 2008, and again in 2014.
Perhaps she doesn’t understand that the walls and checkpoints in Israel are a response to terrorism. Perhaps she also doesn’t know that Israel’s experiment with unilateral withdrawal in Gaza was proven to be a failure by 2007, when Hamas started throwing its political opposition off of rooftops, and that this failure was confirmed with absolute certainty on October 7, 2023.
A better question is, does Coates know these things? Does he choose to ignore them?
Israel cannot get out of the West Bank by agreement, and cannot get out unilaterally, but Coates issues his moral condemnation freely, without regard to the facts.
Like others who promote the dissolution of the one Jewish state in the world, Coates feigns concern over the Holocaust.
On the topic of Yad Vashem he wrote, according to New York, “in a place like this, your mind expands as the dark end of your imagination blooms, and you wonder if human depravity has any bottom at all, and if it does not, what hope is there for any of us?” And yet, he is also able to say, at the same time, “‘Does industrialized genocide entitle one to a state? No.’ Especially, he said, at the expense of people who had no hand in the genocide.”
The statement is shocking as much for its ignorance as for its callousness.
The League of Nations Mandate “in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” was created in 1922, two decades before the Holocaust.
Moreover, about half of Israel’s Jewish population is descended from those who, after centuries of second-class status, fled or were expelled from other Middle Eastern countries. Does he realize that more than half of Israeli Jews would be considered “BIPOC” in the United States?
He also doesn’t seem to know that there would actually have been a Palestinian state if the Palestinian Arabs had accepted the 1947 Partition Plan. Instead, they — along with five Arab armies — tried to conquer the Jewish State, and kill or expel its Jewish residents.
More to the point, while it is not the Holocaust that entitles the Jews to a state, it was the Holocaust that opened many people’s eyes to the existential necessity of one.
But not Coates.
To the contrary, Coates, at least according to Spaeth’s telling, wants Jews returned to the stateless and powerless situation that were the predicate conditions for the Holocaust to occur.
After the above description of Yad Vashem, Spaeth writes, “but what Coates is concerned with foremost is what happened when Jewish people went from being the conquered to the conquerors, when ‘the Jewish people had taken its place among The Strong’….”
And later in the essay, he reiterates, “in [Coates’] hands, the story of Israel is a cautionary tale of the corrupting influence of power, a warning to the oppressed who might dream of one day exerting their will over an otherwise unkind world.”
And while many saw the events of October 7, 2023, as proof of what Hamas and other jihadist groups would like to do to Jews without the protection of the state of Israel, Coates — as he has in the past — excuses the attack in his interview with Spaeth: “‘part of me is like, What would I do if I had grown up in Gaza, under the blockade and in an open-air prison …. And if that wall went down and I came through that wall, who would I be? Can I say I’d be the person that says, “Hey, guys, hold up. We shouldn’t be doing this”? Would that have been me?’”
The conceit of the New Yorker article, however, is that writing all of this about Israel is brave and risky for Coates, with the always-insightful Peter Beinart declaring that, “Ta-Nehisi has a lot to lose.”
Spaeth writes, “what matters to Coates is not what will happen to his career now – to the script sales, invitations from the White House, his relationships with his former colleagues at The Atlantic and elsewhere. ‘I’m not worried,’ he told me, shrugging his shoulders. ‘I have to do what I have to do. I’m sad, but I was so enraged. If I went over there and saw what I saw and didn’t write it, I am f***ing worthless.’”
In certain circles, Israel is today’s most fashionable bogeyman. Taking rhetorical aim at the Jewish State while it is under physical attack from multiple directions, is likelier than Coates’s unmade movie scripts to bring him more of the accolades and attention to which he seems to have become accustomed — certainly more so than the chapter of the book on Senegal will. (Just look at how much of the New York essay discusses Senegal.)
The type of one-sided analysis that New York describes can appeal only to the most uninformed of readers. Time will tell whether there are enough of them to make Coates’ book the success he seems to be looking for.
Karen Bekker is the Assistant Director in the Media Response Team at CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.
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Iranian Media Claims Obtaining ‘Sensitive’ Israeli Intelligence Materials
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
i24 News – Iranian and Iran-affiliated media claimed on Saturday that the Islamic Republic had obtained a trove of “strategic and sensitive” Israeli intelligence materials related to Israel’s nuclear facilities and defense plans.
“Iran’s intelligence apparatus has obtained a vast quantity of strategic and sensitive information and documents belonging to the Zionist regime,” Iran’s state broadcaster said, referring to Israel in the manner accepted in those Muslim or Arab states that don’t recognize its legitimacy. The statement was also relayed by the Lebanese site Al-Mayadeen, affiliated with the Iran-backed jihadists of Hezbollah.
The reports did not include any details on the documents or how Iran had obtained them.
The intelligence reportedly included “thousands of documents related to that regime’s nuclear plans and facilities,” it added.
According to the reports, “the data haul was extracted during a covert operation and included a vast volume of materials including documents, images, and videos.”
The report comes amid high tensions over Iran’s nuclear program, over which it is in talks with the US administration of President Donald Trump.
Iranian-Israeli tensions reached an all-time high since the October 7 massacre and the subsequent Gaza war, including Iranian rocket fire on Israel and Israeli aerial raids in Iran that devastated much of the regime’s air defenses.
Israel, which regards the prospect of the antisemitic mullah regime obtaining a nuclear weapon as an existential threat, has indicated it could resort to a military strike against Iran’s installations should talks fail to curb uranium enrichment.
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Israel Retrieves Body of Thai Hostage from Gaza
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz looks on, amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, in Jerusalem, Nov. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
The Israeli military has retrieved the body of a Thai hostage who had been held in Gaza since Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack, Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Saturday.
Nattapong Pinta’s body was held by a Palestinian terrorist group called the Mujahedeen Brigades, and was recovered from the area of Rafah in southern Gaza, Katz said. His family in Thailand has been notified.
Pinta, an agricultural worker, was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz, a small Israeli community near the Gaza border where a quarter of the population was killed or taken hostage during the Hamas attack that triggered the devastating war in Gaza.
Israel’s military said Pinta had been abducted alive and killed by his captors, who had also killed and taken to Gaza the bodies of two more Israeli-American hostages that were retrieved earlier this week.
There was no immediate comment from the Mujahedeen Brigades, who have previously denied killing their captives, or from Hamas. The Israeli military said the Brigades were still holding the body of another foreign national. Only 20 of the 55 remaining hostages are believed to still be alive.
The Mujahedeen Brigades also held and killed Israeli hostage Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, according to Israeli authorities. Their bodies were returned during a two-month ceasefire, which collapsed in March after the two sides could not agree on terms for extending it to a second phase.
Israel has since expanded its offensive across the Gaza Strip as US, Qatari and Egyptian-led efforts to secure another ceasefire have faltered.
US-BACKED AID GROUP HALTS DISTRIBUTIONS
The United Nations has warned that most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is at risk of famine after an 11-week Israeli blockade of the enclave, with the rate of young children suffering from acute malnutrition nearly tripling.
Aid distribution was halted on Friday after the US-and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said overcrowding had made it unsafe to continue operations. It was unclear whether aid had resumed on Saturday.
The GHF began distributing food packages in Gaza at the end of May, overseeing a new model of aid distribution which the United Nations says is neither impartial nor neutral. It says it has provided around 9 million meals so far.
The Israeli military said on Saturday that 350 trucks of humanitarian aid belonging to U.N. and other international relief groups were transferred this week via the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza.
The war erupted after Hamas-led terrorists took 251 hostages and killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, in the October 7, 2023 attack, Israel’s single deadliest day.
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US Mulls Giving Millions to Controversial Gaza Aid Foundation, Sources Say
Palestinians carry aid supplies which they received from the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in the central Gaza Strip, May 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed/File Photo
The State Department is weighing giving $500 million to the new foundation providing aid to war-shattered Gaza, according to two knowledgeable sources and two former US officials, a move that would involve the US more deeply in a controversial aid effort that has been beset by violence and chaos.
The sources and former US officials, all of whom requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that money for Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) would come from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which is being folded into the US State Department.
The plan has met resistance from some US officials concerned with the deadly shootings of Palestinians near aid distribution sites and the competence of the GHF, the two sources said.
The GHF, which has been fiercely criticized by humanitarian organizations, including the United Nations, for an alleged lack of neutrality, began distributing aid last week amid warnings that most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is at risk of famine after an 11-week Israeli aid blockade, which was lifted on May 19 when limited deliveries were allowed to resume.
The foundation has seen senior personnel quit and had to pause handouts twice this week after crowds overwhelmed its distribution hubs.
The State Department and GHF did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Reuters has been unable to establish who is currently funding the GHF operations, which began in Gaza last week. The GHF uses private US security and logistics companies to transport aid into Gaza for distribution at so-called secure distribution sites.
On Thursday, Reuters reported that a Chicago-based private equity firm, McNally Capital, has an “economic interest” in the for-profit US contractor overseeing the logistics and security of GHF’s aid distribution hubs in the enclave.
While US President Donald Trump’s administration and Israel say they don’t finance the GHF operation, both have been pressing the United Nations and international aid groups to work with it.
The US and Israel argue that aid distributed by a long-established U.N. aid network was diverted to Hamas. Hamas has denied that.
USAID has been all but dismantled. Some 80 percent of its programs have been canceled and its staff face termination as part of President Donald Trump’s drive to align US foreign policy with his “America First” agenda.
One source with knowledge of the matter and one former senior official said the proposal to give the $500 million to GHF has been championed by acting deputy USAID Administrator Ken Jackson, who has helped oversee the agency’s dismemberment.
The source said that Israel requested the funds to underwrite GHF’s operations for 180 days.
The Israeli government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The two sources said that some US officials have concerns with the plan because of the overcrowding that has affected the aid distribution hubs run by GHF’s contractor, and violence nearby.
Those officials also want well-established non-governmental organizations experienced in running aid operations in Gaza and elsewhere to be involved in the operation if the State Department approves the funds for GHF, a position that Israel likely will oppose, the sources said.
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