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The Appalling Attack on Ta-Nehisi Coates Is a Massive Media Failing
It is not antisemitic to defend Palestinian human rights. And it’s past time for more American Jews to say so to correct a media that’s lost the thread.
The Jewish high holidays—the 10 days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur—are built on the paradigm of “On Rosh Hashanah, your fate is written. On Yom Kippur, your fate is sealed.” In these 10 days, we are supposed to pray, repent, and commit good deeds to bolster our chances for the privilege of another year on earth—whatever we would say that privilege is at this point.
For all my life, I viewed this paradigm as a personal moral framework, a mandate to reflect on the past year, to take accountability for my failings, to consider how I could have contributed better or more to the community, which we are taught to view as the people who create the context of our lives: colleagues, friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens. What I loved about Judaism was this annual opportunity to take stock, not necessarily because I thought there was some greater being out there keeping tabs on me but because I felt my Judaism required that I reevaluate myself and recommit to continuous and just improvement.
That’s why as we approach this high holiday season, which in 2024 contains the one-year anniversary of the October 7 attacks on Israel and falls one month before the U.S. presidential election, I have never felt more alone, more upside down or more fearful for the next year.
To recognize Palestinians are human has become a flashpoint, a red line to not be crossed in Washington discourse, an invitation to be tagged as an antisemite, whether by your cousin at a Passover seder or by a network morning news anchor on live national television (more on that later). The Discourse tells us there is a “Palestinian-Israeli conflict” and that it is “complicated.” But somewhere in this word soup we have simmered long enough to deflect attention from how power works, who benefits from it and who loses everything, the remaining goop to be scraped from the bottom of the pot can no longer be accurately conveyed as “conflict” but instead a stark, wrong binary between Palestinian existence and a broad definition of antisemitism, which if we choose as a society to accept, will only serve to drive us deeper into the void.
This week, I was horrified to witness one such attempt to drag a reasonable and humane person into this toxic abyss, in the form of what was supposed to be an interview of award-winning writer, thinker, and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates by CBS Mornings’ Tony Dokoupil. Whatever promise of reasoned discourse producers may have made to Coates when they booked him for the show instantly vanished for the audience the moment Dokoupil started questioning the author. Dokoupil opened his questioning with a bizarrely aggressive monologue that patronized Coates by calling his book extreme and positing that it only could have been produced by someone who harbors ill will toward Jewish people.
“No country in this world establishes its ability to exist through rights. Countries establish their abilities to exist through force, as America did,” Coates told Dokoupil. “Israel does exist. It’s a fact. The question of its right is not a question I would be faced with, with any other country.
“There’s nothing that offends me about a Jewish state. I am offended by the idea of states built on ethnocracy, no matter where they are,” Coates continued.
To me, Coates’s calm in the face of the anchor’s aggression and willful misinterpretation of his work reminded me of the Passover parable of the four sons. In it, we are instructed on how to explain the story of the journey from Jewish enslavement to freedom to a son who does not even know how to ask a question, and our clear articulation to him of the meaning of freedom is what opens up our deepest understanding of the truth.
But what really struck me about this moment is that Coates’s treatment does not exist in isolation but rather as part of a pattern that systematically targets those who want to affirm the humanity of Palestinians or defend those who are fighting for that affirmation. Is this the price we must pay for just having a shred of humanity? Who among us has the power to challenge what needs to be challenged to set the conditions of possibility for progress? Who, ultimately, will bear the cost of silence?
It is extremely disorienting to find yourself in the season of personal accountability described above while also reckoning with the total abdication of accountability from the institutions that hold the actual power to grapple with and correct the utter destruction this past year has wrought—from establishment Judaism to American politics and the mainstream media. We have watched Israel kill civilians, parents, children, doctors, aid workers, journalists, and many more, ostensibly in the name of Judaism but more likely in the furtherance of Benjamin Netanyahu’s craven political career—and ultimately in the abandonment of every value our religion and basic human rights should uphold.
We have witnessed antisemitism get stripped of its meaning and used as a tool to silence legitimate criticism of these very structures and their failure to stop the killing. We are told consistently that there is no right way to speak out against a clear wrong because systematically every method of protest, from campus demonstrations to essays to books to social media posts to peaceful marches on the streets, is framed as an amorphous attack on Jews everywhere as opposed to focused critiques of a specific wrong being perpetrated by a few powerful individuals.
Coates is back in the news lately because his new book attempts to offer just such a focused critique of power: The Message, which in part detailed his travels to Israel and Palestine, what he witnessed there, and what he learned about how Palestinians were treated. As he even told CBS, he never set out to write a detailed dissertation on every moment in the history of Israel but rather provide a testimonial to give voice to those who have been overlooked, ignored, or erased from our discourse on the Middle East. When pushed on why it didn’t include more history on Israel, bombings of Israeli civilians, or the Intifadas, Coates (rightfully) pointed out: “There’s no shortage of that perspective in American media.”
In an interview with New York’s Ryu Spaeth, Coates broadly hints that The Message was not likely to endear him to everyone. But even he seemed blindsided when Dokoupil stated—with all the authority bestowed on an anchorman by his coif—that Coates’s book would “not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist” and not-so-subtly hinted that Coates is antisemitic, pressing him with loaded question after loaded question: “What is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state that is a Jewish safe place and not any of the other states out there?”
It is hard to imagine another author, especially a white author, on any other topic, being summarily and unapologetically questioned and dismissed in this way on national television. The interview was biased (Dokoupil never disclosed his ex-wife and two children live in Israel) and racist (sorry, the presence of two other anchors who happen to be Black but said nothing does not change this interpretation). We’ll wait forever for CBS’s apology.
We’re waiting for similar reparations from another television news outlet that engaged in similar slander. A week prior to Coates’s on-air mugging, Representative Rashida Tlaib was baselessly smeared on CNN, with anchor Jake Tapper fabricating comments from Tlaib to frame a “gotcha” question for Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, trying to get Whitmer to condemn Tlaib as antisemitic for something she never said. When Whitmer wouldn’t, another CNN anchor, Dana Bash, did a very special segment where she stated antisemitism is a both-sides problem and then refused to apologize for having mischaracterized Tlaib, in a follow-up segment to address the widespread criticism of her first.
CNN harmfully distorted a legitimate critique: Tlaib, in an interview with a Detroit news outlet and in alignment with the position of the American Civil Liberties Union, opposed Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s decision to charge peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Michigan, saying, “This is a move that’s going to set a precedent, and it’s unfortunate that a Democrat made that move. We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest. We’ve done it for climate, the immigrant rights movement, for Black lives, and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs. But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs.”
But on a deeper, darker level, CNN’s refusal to interrogate why it is allowed to comb every word Tlaib says for antisemitism while never having to confront whether wrongly and constantly accusing Tlaib of antisemitism—a serious accusation!—is Islamophobic is part and parcel with our society’s refusal to recognize Palestinians as full people. Because if Palestinians do not get to exist fully in the world, then certainly the first Palestinian woman elected to Congress cannot enjoy the full benefits and privileges afforded to every other member of the House of Representatives.
We need to be clear that policing who gets to make criticisms, how and when, is not a hallmark of a functioning democracy, and again, that using claims of antisemitism to subvert legitimate critiques of government—in this case, Nessel’s decision to prosecute peaceful campus protesters—cheapens antisemitism and threatens everyone’s freedoms.
Which brings me to my final, and perhaps most important, point: One of the reasons CNN was so set on baselessly attacking Tlaib in this fashion was because she criticized Nessel the same week former president and current Republican nominee Donald Trump preemptively blamed “the Jews” for his potential loss in November. Trump said “a lot of bad things will happen” if the Jews, held by Democrats in a “curse” to oppose him, succeed in getting Vice President Kamala Harris elected. That special segment from Bash? By design, it treated Whitmer and Republican Senator Tom Cotton, who refused to denounce Trump’s comments, as equal.
In our current media landscape, threats to civility must be presented as a dysfunction equally held by both major American political parties if they’re to be discussed on broadcast news at all. This is dangerous and dissonant, especially given what happened in the 2020 election. We know the result of Trump’s preelection threats and theories in 2020: an actual attack on the United States Capitol by those convinced by Trump that they could just “hang Mike Pence” so Trump could take back the White House.
What might happen in January 2025 with these overt threats to Jews in 2024? Why are we downplaying this, and who is served by it? Why are we pretending that Tlaib’s generalized complaint about the right to dissent is the same thing as Trump’s constant incitements to political violence? The effort expended on bothsidesing us into meaninglessness inoculates those in power from criticism and simultaneously emboldens a reckless wannabe dictator.
My biggest fear is that we are on the verge of losing what’s left of American democracy because Netanyahu—who was indicted for corruption in his own country and facing International Court of Justice charges on war crimes for his actions in the past year—is pushing the Middle East into a wider war with one eye on America’s electoral calendar, and that Jews will be blamed no matter how the election goes: either by Trump, who is preemptively holding them responsible for another “rigged” result, or more indirectly, if Harris loses firewall states like Michigan because Democrats did not show up to vote after being legitimately disillusioned by our government’s role in what is unfolding in the Middle East. What will we make of antisemitism then? Who will defend us?
If you believe in freedom and justice, there is no sanitized whataboutism that can erase war crimes from history’s ledger, no matter how much our out-of-touch cable news talking heads, keyboard warriors, and clout-chasing politicians try. There is only what we do now, what we pursue as the truth, and how we, as a society, treat the people with the courage to stand up to powerful institutions that are not oriented toward the faithful protection of human rights.
I am not afraid of Ta-Nahisi Coates chronicling Palestinian life. I am not afraid of Rashida Tlaib asserting that the state should not be prosecuting protesters. I am not afraid of the discomfort that will inevitably come when we allow Palestinians to be seen and grapple with our complicity in dehumanizing them. Instead, I am afraid that those who have championed Israel at all costs will soon get to live at home in the kind of theocracy they covet abroad.
For the high holidays this year, I am choosing the radical good deed of saying so out loud, despite how much more isolated that might make me within my own faith community. One should not have to be Jewish to call out wrongs in plain sight, whether they happen on the relatively comfortable couches of morning television or in the streets of Gaza, without fear of widespread retribution. But in this media and political landscape, it is incumbent on Jewish Americans who see these wrongs to use their voices and create the permission structure for legitimate criticism and debate.
Right now, as Jews, Americans, and citizens of the world: We are writing our fate. And I worry we are running out of time to change it, before that fate is sealed.
© 2024, The New Republic
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