Organised tours to Israel are not rare. The Israeli lobbying groups in the US routinely organise tours for Senators and Congressmen to influence their votes favourably. The participants are treated lavishly, wined and dined, and taken only to places and events that Israelis wish them to see. A trip to the Palestinian areas of the West Bank is unlikely to be included in their itinerary. The guests return the favour in the form of billions of dollars in grants and an unlimited supply of US weapons to Israel.
A recent 232-page book, The Message, authored by an African American professor and noted author Ta-Nehisi Coates, provides a compelling first-hand account of the plight of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. The book has been on the bestselling list for months in the US. It comprises three sections: a visit to Senegal, South Arizona, and the occupied West Bank. However, the part about Palestine has attracted the most attention and evoked fierce backlash against the author. He has been harshly criticised and accused of being an antisemite by Israeli supporters, a charge readily levelled at everyone who dares to criticise Israel. Professor Coates has received numerous awards, including the National Book Award and MacArthur Fellowship. He occupies the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair at Howard University, Washington, DC.
Senegal, now a modern African country, once served (from approximately 1526 to 1867) as a gateway for the transatlantic slave trade, shipping millions of captured men, women, and children into slavery in the Americas. It is now a popular destination for African American scholars, academicians, and tourists exploring their African ancestral roots. For Coates, it was a pilgrimage to his family’s past, arousing deep emotions and promoting intense reflection. In 2023, he also visited the infamous Goree Island off the coast of Senegal, which was the last stop for the captured people on their way to the Americas. It has been labelled “doorway of no return.” Coates commented in his book, “I experienced a deep sense of triumph in my life. I thought that I had somehow beaten history itself. I thought of all my exponential grandmothers forcibly taken from this side of the world into a vast ocean. I thought of their frustrated dreams of getting back home. I carried a part of them with me, every one of them.”
The next section of the book is about Coates' journey to South Carolina, which once had a Black majority and played a vital role in the slave trade. Wherever Coates travels, he feels he carries with him the burden of history, the anguish of centuries of captivity of his people. Being an intellectual and literature teacher makes him extra sensitive to the plight of all disadvantaged people. Coates narrates his experience visiting Chapin, South Carolina, where his books and teaching of critical race theory have been banned in schools and libraries. He expresses his torment at finding the “sprawling twenty-two-acre State House ground in Columbia a shrine to White supremacy. A collection of giant statues sits on raised platforms so that men like the late Strom Thurmond, a senator whose career was rooted in promoting segregation, looms like God.”
The book’s third section is devoted to the author’s visit to the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The Palestine Festival of Literature sponsored the summer of 2023, and the group included authors, poets, writers, and artists from various countries. It happened before Israel’s catastrophic and vengeful attack on Gaza following Hamas's vile attack on Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023. He records episodes based on his observation of overt discrimination against and mistreatment of Palestinians. What he saw powerfully resonated with him as they summoned Black people's historical perspective and collective memory in the US. Coates recalls that in his younger days, “He had a vague notion of Israel as a country that was doing deeply unfair things to the Palestinian people, though I was not clear exactly what.” He goes on, “And what my young eyes saw of that state was a world where separate and unequal was alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others was policy.” He notes that Palestinians living in Israel proper have shorter lives, are poorer, and live in violent neighbourhoods.
Coates finds a fascinating interplay of race and religion. The soldier who arrogantly stopped him was black. There were black soldiers everywhere, lording their power and authority over helpless Palestinians
For the writer, the ten days spent in the Holy Land daily brought new revelations. During the visit to the old city of Hebron, a Palestinian recounted that when he was a child, the town was open and bustling, and a stream of visitors came to Al-Haram Al-Ibrahimi, believed to be the burial place of Prophet Ibraham. Now, Israeli soldiers exercised absolute control over all movements in the town. While the Palestinians are barred from using the main street, Jewish settlers move freely. Discrimination is ubiquitous. The water consumption by Israelis in their illegal outposts in the West Bank is nearly four times that of Palestinians living under occupation. “You can find country clubs with large swimming pools, while the Palestinians subsist on collected rainwater. The illegal settlements are built brazenly by the government, which offers subsidised mortgages and discounted leases to encourage Jewish migration. The author believes these manoeuvres are designed to make the two-state solution impossible.
Hebron's most visible features were its numerous checkpoints and massive gates with metal turnstiles. The soldiers patrolling act on a whim, usually to hassle the Palestinians. Coates watched two Palestinian girls walking who were gratuitously stopped by a soldier and directed to go back the way they had come. As the author walked to a bookshop, a soldier from a checkpoint popped out, stopped him, and asked what his religion was. He replied that he had none. He was let go when he told them that his grandfather was Christian. Coates finds a fascinating interplay of race and religion. The soldier who arrogantly stopped him was black. There were black soldiers everywhere, lording their power and authority over helpless Palestinians. On the author, the irony of the situation was not lost. In America, these soldiers would be just Black, and the Palestinians would be White, their roles reversed. It is incredible how oppressors become the oppressed, given the right environment. Common hostility to the Palestinians has the effect of uniting disparate ethnic groups populating Israel, but the day this glue is dissolved, ethnic divisions will reemerge, and Israel will be a different country.
For Coates, the visit was not fun. He spent ten days in the Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns. “And I had a moment of profound despair every day I was there. I wanted to look away and go home. I would have done it. But I am a writer and a steward.” Ultimately, he felt he had a responsibility for people living under Israeli guns to tell their stories, and so he made a literary and moral contribution by writing the book.