Ta-Nehisi Coates Finds Zionism ‘Disturbing,’ But Why?

Ta-Nehisi Coates wants the world to know that Israel practices “apartheid,” though he provides not a shred of evidence for that: “Ta-Nehisi Coates Compares Israeli Policies Toward Palestinians to American Jim Crow Laws at Campus Event,” by Corey Walker, Algemeiner, December 5, 2024:

“You know that during segregation [white people] were like ‘yes, but what about the crime rates?’” Coates said.

“I used to think, ‘wow, who could be the person who could actually argue for segregation?’ I’m talking to them. I’m talking to them now,” Coates added in reference to supporters of Israel….

What “segregation” do “supporters of Israel” promote? Could Coates give us a single shred of evidence that Israeli Jews are arguing for either “segregation” or “apartheid”? Israeli Jews have a simple desire: not to be the victims of endless wars and terrorism. That’s all. Is that hard to understand? Ta-Nehisi Coates doesn’t bother to mention what happened on October 7, 2023. He wants us to focus not on the terrorism — so greatly exaggerated, he insists, by the Israelis — but on Israel’s “apartheid.” Ta-Nehisi Coates can’t be fooled; he knows the Israelis are just putting on this fear of terrorism; it’s just an excuse to establish an “apartheid regime.”

Apparently Coates has convinced himself that Israelis are “white” and Palestinians “brown,” and therefore entitled to our sympathy. But more than half of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi Jews from Arab lands, and just as dark as the Palestinians Coates, a black racist, favors. There are also nearly 200,000 very dark Ethiopian Jews, known as the Falasha. But such “facts” don’t matter to Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The writer also called Zionism “disturbing,” claiming that when Jews established the modern state of Israel they did not “seek to eliminate” the same forms of oppression they suffered from. He asserted that Jews in Israel largely cared to “empower themselves” at the expense of the Palestinians.

What is so disturbing about Zionism? It is only a movement of national liberation, to allow the Jewish people to re-create anew their ancient homeland, in which they first began to live some 3500 years ago. When in the first years of its existence, Israel had to fight off five Arab armies that were hoping to snuff out its young life, at the same time it was trying to welcome, and integrate, hundreds of thousands of survivors of the Nazi death camps, many of whom were half-crazed with anguish and despair, and speaking many different languages, but almost none of them Hebrew, and at the same time the Israelis were trying to build up a country with almost no natural resources, and an army with very few weapons. Why should those Israelis also be expected to look after the needs of Arabs whose loyalty was uncertain? Why shouldn’t they want to “look after themselves” first, rather than looking after the Arabs who lived among them and wished them ill, and much, much worse? Coates pays no attention to the enormous difficulties the Israelis had to overcome in constructing a state with so many people who — survivors of the death camps — had arrived penniless and broken, and another group of Jews who arrived in the late 1940s and early 1950s, also penniless and broken, expelled or fleeing from the Arab countries where they had lived for centuries. At the same time, the Israelis had to fight off the attacks of Egyptian fedayeen on Jews living in southern Israel, and attempt to silence Syrian fire that rained down from the Golan Heights on Jewish farmers far below. And terrorists also infiltrated from Jordan into Israel, where they killed civilians, until Arik Sharon’s Unit 101 put paid to the practice with a devastating attack on October 14-15, 1953.

Ta-Nehisi Coates doesn’t like mere facts. So many of them are so inconvenient. So many of them get in the way of what he wants us to think. If they offend him, he leaves them out. That’s why in his book on Israel and the Palestinians he never mentions Hamas or Islamic Jihad. He doesn’t mention any of the facts that make his charge of Israeli “apartheid” ludicrous. He wants sympathy for the brown-skinned Palestinians who can do no wrong, and animus toward those “white-skinned” Israelis who can do no right. I used to think Ta-Nehisi Coates shared the title of World’s Greatest Authority with Cornel West. Now I think he deserves to hold that title alone.