‘The Message’ cuts to the human heart of the situation in Israel-Palestine, refusing to contort its argument to affirm other perspectives

Amr Kotb,New Lines Magazine, November 19, 2024

few nights ago, I attended a session of my writers’ group, a collection of talented artists in New York City who identify as Southwest Asian and North African. I wouldn’t say I know any of my fellow writers on an intimate level, but something about settling into my seat that night relieved me of a burden. I exhaled as I soothed myself: It’s OK, these are my people.

For a while now, I’ve subconsciously sought refuge among “my people.” By that, I’m not referring to a specific ethnicity or culture but rather those who do not see the cause of humanity as complicated.

This commitment has become salient as of late, given what we’re all watching in Gaza and Lebanon. And while I have learned to apply this simple morality of the humanization of our fellow beings to a wide range of social issues, the truth is that Gaza is where it all started. 

The subjugation of the Palestinians is a matter that was stitched into my subconscious at an early age. When I was 14 years old, I watched footage of 12-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah being shot to death by Israeli forces during the Second Intifada as he clung to his father’s T-shirt for protection. Unfortunately, the discourse around this conflict in particular has reached a level of perceived complexity — and, frankly, inhumanity — that requires me to inform you that both the boy and his father were unarmed civilians, unaffiliated with any militant groups. The father and son were just two among over 1 million Gazans living under a system of government that treated them as second-class citizens. Al-Durrah was only two years younger than me. His family spoke the same language I had learned from my parents.

The inequality and oppression of the Palestinians was always simple to me, and yet for some reason, I could never highlight this injustice without having to fold and twist myself into a pretzel. I couldn’t bring people’s attention to their conspicuous status without getting dragged down roads like “But what about terrorism?” “What about the Holocaust?” and “Israel has a right to exist.” The truth is that even as a teenager, I never saw these roads as relevant to the main issue: equal rights for all. But as I came of age during the 9/11 era and subsequent “war on terror,” I learned that these contortions were essential to my survival. I had to get my right ankle behind my left ear to be the “good Arab/Muslim” guy in the majority-white town I grew up in, to do the splits and announce “Well of course I’m against suicide bus bombings,” and pop back up into a twirl to concede “OK, right, so when I say that Israel has created an apartheid state that identifies Palestinians as less entitled to human rights and say South Africa is a great parallel, I concede that it’s not exactly the same,” or tap dance my way through another number of “I understand the need for a Jewish state after the ubiquitous oppression of Jewish people across the millennia.”

It’s not that I didn’t hold those opinions. It’s that they became bargaining chips on two fronts. The first was the issue itself. If I could spend more time on these contortions, then perhaps I could negotiate an eventual arrival to the kernel of inhumanity underneath it all. There was a hope that I could match these perfunctory affirmations of truth with much deeper ones: Peaceful civilians are losing their homes, children are being murdered, Palestinians are literally classified as “permanent residents” which is a formal declaration of their lack of equal rights.

The second was my own survival and livelihood. If I could show my peers and figures of authority in my life that I understood these points (which — duh by the way!) then hopefully teachers at my high school would still recommend me for prestigious programs, friends in college would still want to hang out, employers would still see me as promotable and, most importantly, people would stop seeing me as “too political.” 

My acknowledgment of the “complexity” of it all allowed me to move through life with joy and fulfillment. Eventually, that image of al-Durrah and the branches it sprouted became something of a secret, revealed only when it felt safe to do so.

But my teenage introduction to Gaza eventually led me elsewhere. It did not happen right away, but my simple perspective on the injustice and inequality suffered by the Palestinians gradually served as a guide to recognizing the same instances of dehumanization in and among other places and people.

One topic I became acutely interested in was the Civil Rights Movement, the underlying and still-prevalent ills of police brutality and systemic racism, and the indispensable role of white supremacy within American culture and society. Though these issues still came with plenty of false complexity, there were relatively fewer twists and turns involved in speaking to the simple inhumanity underneath it all than with Palestine. It was a lot easier to say something like, “Redlining was a racist housing policy led by the Federal Housing Administration from the 1930s through 1968 that systematically sought to confine Black Americans to low-income and underserved neighborhoods” than, “In 1948, the state of Palestine was stolen and given to Israel by force and it is now a militarized apartheid regime where Palestinians live as second-class citizens.” Even friends who weren’t especially political would nod along to the first, whereas more political friends would see plenty of caveats and complexity regarding the second. Civil rights and the oppression of Black Americans felt like a safe place for me to continue my interest in addressing and learning about injustice. And that’s how, years ago, I came across my now-favorite writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

As it stands today, I have read every one of Coates’ books and seen him speak on three occasions. He’s like a clock, ticking regularly, second by second, with an impeccably reliable record of adherence to humanization. What has always attracted me to his work is his earnest, simple commitment to humanity and a morality that both rejects and elegantly transcends manufactured complexity. It does not matter if he’s writing about reparations, housing policies, Malcolm X’s impact on the Civil Rights Movement, or policing — the humanity of Black Americans and the oppressed is plainly centered and, more importantly, unassailable. In his second and most popular book, “Between the World and Me,” he sets to work on the morass of race, debunking the idea altogether as a social construct created in the interest of establishing hierarchy. “Race is the child of racism, not the father,” he says. He shows his awareness of my folding and twisting when he tells his son, “my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.”

Later, in 2018, Coates addressed Kanye West’s dissociation from being Black and vocal support for Donald Trump in a piece for The Atlantic. Coates compared West’s self-destructive disposal of his Blackness — a byproduct of our hierarchical society’s notions of superiority and inferiority and the part race plays in them — with Michael Jackson’s. He seems self-aware about the simplicity of his lens when he wonders at the end of the piece, “And maybe this, too, is naive, but I wonder how different his life might have been if Michael Jackson knew how much his truly black face was tied to all of our black faces, if he knew that when he destroyed himself, he was destroying part of us, too.” 

In 2017, Coates published “We Were Eight Years in Power,” a collection of essays on the Barack Obama era that deepened my understanding of the role of systemic racism within our country’s story. His essays opened my eyes to the reality that even when Black Americans are “well-behaved” and those in power practice what Coates terms “good Negro government” — referencing the observation by W.E.B. Du Bois on post-Civil War reconstruction that “If there was one thing that South Carolina feared more than bad Negro government, it was good Negro government” — they will be subject to racism. Postbellum America vaulted around 1,500 Black Americans to various political offices, and in spite of their “good Negro government” an era of white supremacy followed, leading to the introduction of Jim Crow and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Coates draws a parallel to the Obama years that dropped on me like a bucket of cold water. Putting the actual merits and faults of his policies aside, Obama’s administration was completely free of scandal. There was no corruption. Moreover, he was a model father and husband. But none of that did anything to dispel the racism he was exposed to or the backlash that followed. Coates bluntly points to the infamous “beer summit” Obama organized between a Black Harvard professor and the police officer who arrested and charged him with “disorderly conduct” after he tried to force the jammed door of his own home open. The summit followed right-wing rage heaped upon Obama in response to his public assertion of the stupidity of the officer’s actions. Although it was the officer who had done wrong, he was the one who was “feted in the halls of American power, honored by being invited to a beer summit with the man he arrested and the leader of the free world.” Why was a Black president having to create a medium where the Black professor entering his own home and the officer who discriminated against him existed as two equal sides to one issue, as if they just needed to converse and understand the other’s perspective?

I could fill pages and pages with quotes and appreciation for the way Coates has masterfully centered humanity across all of his essays, books and even his 2019 debut novel, “The Water Dancer.” But I’d rather share another aspect of his craft that truly cemented him as my favorite writer: His ability to reliably tick to a beat of humanity is always interlaced with his humble quest to figure himself out, to understand his beginnings as a Black kid in Baltimore born to a former Black Panther, to negotiate his status as an “other” in a multicultural Western world and ultimately evaluate how this is juxtaposed to his longtime interest in writing and eventual success as an author. 

As an Arab American born to immigrant parents, with a lifelong interest in a range of creative pursuits, in understanding my identity, in my otherness, I felt a strong connection to Coates. If he could be this artist with these values and find a way to use his craft as a place to present them while exploring himself, and succeed, then maybe I could too. It is hardly surprising that when I heard about Coates’ latest book, “The Message,” my neurons were sent into an anticipatory frenzy.

In “The Message,” we find Coates working within three frameworks: Senegal and the legacies of chattel slavery; a Columbia, South Carolina, school board meeting on the banning of “Between the World and Me”; and Palestine. When I first heard about the book, I wasn’t sure I read that last part right. The leader of the resistance to pretzel-twisting had turned his attention to the last topic that still made me fold. The news of this sent me running through the halls of time, running through annals of my own history, running to retrieve that image of Muhammed al-Durrah, still there, waiting.

Within a month of the book’s release in October, I read it, attended a live discussion with Coates and watched all the interviews he did with the press. The first two sections on Senegal and South Carolina showed me the same Coates I’ve always known and loved: part elegant critic of inhumanity and part earnest excavator of his otherness and quest to become a writer. In the first section, he writes of the effort that white people put into justifying slavery by highlighting Black people’s alleged inferiority. Coates smoothly admits that “it may seem strange that people who have already attained a position of power through violence invest so much time in justifying their plunder with words. But even plunderers are human beings whose violent ambitions must contend with the guilt that gnaws at them when they meet the eyes of their victims.”

Later in this section, he describes the beauty of being truly invisible in Senegal. No longer seen as a Black guy, as in the U.S., he moves through the country without a second thought. It made me think of my first time in Egypt without my parents, living and working there as an adult, an outsider fitting in on the surface as an insider, looking quite similar to nearly everyone else on any given street. I’ll never forget walking down the block in Cairo when I heard someone call out my name; it was the first time in my life I did not even turn around — I knew they were talking to a different Amr.

In describing his trip to South Carolina, Coates writes of “Between the World and Me” being one of many titles that create discomfort among those in power. He contextualizes the fight against the ban with observations of the Statehouse, which still exalts klansmen and enslavers with statues, flags and memorials. He says his book and other titles join “trans Barbies, Muslim mutants, daughters dating daughters, and sons trick-or-treating as Wakandan kings” in causing that discomfort by signaling a future world “in which the boundaries of humanity are not so easily drawn and enforced.” He closes this section of the book with a warning: “The statues and pageantry can fool you. They look like symbols of wars long settled, fought on behalf of men long dead. But their Redemption is not about honoring a past. It’s about killing a future.”

And then came the final section. I turned to Page 115 and took a deep breath. My heart racing, my mind fixed on that picture of al-Durrah next to his father. Was it safe?

I blazed through the last section of the book in what felt like minutes. In it, Coates drops many of the “deep truth” facts I mentioned before with sobering simplicity. He tells us about special residency cards. He shares personal accounts from former Israeli soldiers who explain the way they would systematically enter the houses of Palestinians they knew were innocent, handcuff and blindfold the family, disconnect their phones and proceed to use their homes as “military posts.” He details Israeli control of Palestinian water supplies; constant surveillance in the form of drones and observation towers; and a father struggling to help his daughter use the bathroom in their own home, a gun cocked to his face while his daughter eventually pees her pants. He explains that Israeli settlements are a lot less like the dust bowl images the term conjures and more like a gated community in Bel Air, California, illegally supplanting an existing Palestinian neighborhood. First-time homebuyers in these settlements get subsidized mortgages at low interest rates, made possible by the fact that the land is stolen. 

These were the deep truths I had spent a lifetime trying and failing to tack onto those perfunctory affirmations. Leave it to Coates to discard that paradigm entirely, just like he did when he criticized Obama’s “beer summit.” I felt justified, but at the same time I knew where he’d come down on this. What amazed me was the way he once again, in a completely new topic for him, still contextualized these deep truths, these facts I had always known, not with acknowledgment of complexity but with his patented commitment to humanity, ability to identify parallels to other instances of dehumanization, and earnestly curious — and even critical — exploration of himself.

Endemic to the colonialism underpinning the foundation of the Israeli state is the same white supremacy that required so much self-justification. Coates employs multiple quotes from Israel’s founding fathers and from colonial powers that sought to establish inferiority among Palestinians that all but outright invited the formation of the Israeli state on their land. He mentions “The Jewish State,” the manifesto of the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, in which Herzl refers to Israel as “An outpost of civilization against barbarism” and a “portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia.”

Coates tells the story of bestselling novelist Leon Uris’ “Exodus.” Uris did not like the depiction of “weak Jews” and wrote of an Israel that “spits in the eye of the Arab hordes.” In Uris’ mind, the Jewish people could restore the honor they lost to the Nazis by switching them out for Palestinians, or as Coates explains, “third world barbarians embodying the depraved native in the colonial mind. The Aztec. The Indian. The Zulu. The Arab.” “Exodus,” which was later adapted into a movie starring Paul Newman, depicts Arabs as “cowardly and prone to rape,” which Coates says will be familiar to anyone who’s seen the depiction of Black people in D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation.” 

He spends a significant part of the last chapter covering the Holocaust, not as a perfunctory affirmation but rather an examination of the dehumanization and suffering of the Jewish people and the connection of these to the dehumanization and suffering of Palestinians. Coates visits Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, a place he describes as a “striking site of mourning,” where he encounters the infamous Book of Names, 17,500 pages of nearly 5 million murdered Jews, the “braided whips” for those imprisoned at concentration camps, and a map showing staggering statistics, such as 3 million of the total 3.25 million Polish Jews “wiped out.” He writes of the way the center ultimately connects the horrors of the Holocaust to the redemption stemming from the creation of the Israeli state.

But he qualifies that a home is not the same thing as a state. Coates tells readers of the eventual alliance between Israel and apartheid South Africa. Before he was prime minister of a South Africa with deep ties to Israel, John Vorster was an Afrikaner politician who lobbied for his country to enter World War II on the side of Germany, citing Christian nationalism’s alliance with fascism in Italy and national socialism in Germany. When Vorster came to Israel in 1976, one Israeli man’s protest was “interrupted by a man with an Auschwitz tattoo” who told him that Israel would “make agreements with the devil to save Jews from persecution and to secure the future of this state.” This quote made me think of Uris’ admonition of “weak Jews.” It also reminded me of a recent public appearance, where Coates suggested that perhaps the founders of Israel took “the wrong lesson from genocide,” and went on to suggest a deeper appreciation for Martin Luther King Jr.’s commitment to nonviolence, noting the unfathomable strength it took to see his people on the receiving end of so much violence and dehumanization and remain steadfast in his purely peaceful quest for equal rights. Coates eventually learns that Yad Vashem itself was built a short drive from a small village that no longer exists, Deir Yassin, which was taken over by Zionist militias in 1948 as they paved the way for the formation of Israel. The proximity of the two sites rocks him and further elucidates the connection of one people’s dehumanization to another’s.

The book did things to my brain chemistry. Coates had driven the credibility of the “deep truths” up by several orders of magnitude. He did it not by bothering with perfunctory affirmations but by ignoring them, sometimes firing directly at them in the interest of uncovering parallels to other instances of dehumanization, keeping his watch reliably set to unassailable humanization and, of course, weaving it all together with his personal transformation and exploration. I felt him speaking to me directly when he said, “the elevation of complexity over justice is part and parcel of the effort to forge a story of Palestine told solely by the colonizer.” Is that really so different from the future they are desperately seeking to prevent in South Carolina?

I watched Coates take on this elevated complexity in a series of interviews: Ezra Klein, CBS Mornings, Fareed Zakaria and more. I listened to him tell Klein that he “can’t accept” the idea that violence by Palestinian actors is the primary reason for Israel’s trepidation around making peace. I later watched him take this a step further in an interview where he drew a parallel between Oct. 7, 2023, and the Nat Turner rebellion of enslaved peoples.

In 1831, an enslaved preacher named Nat Turner led a violent uprising in South Hampton County, Virginia. It was the deadliest rebellion in antebellum America, claiming the lives of men, women and children. Coates revisits the gruesome details of this violent event. Certainly, it was abhorrent and inhumane, but did it justify slavery? Taking that a step further in my mind, I thought: It in no way legitimates slavery’s continued existence, any more than the horrors of Oct. 7 legitimate the continued subjugation of Palestinians. I watched him decline to tango with CBS’ Tony Dokoupil on the role of “Palestinian agency” within their own subjugation, instead reminding him of a simple truth that he is “against a state that discriminates against people on the basis of ethnicity,” that “there is nothing the Palestinians could do that would make that OK,” and that his book is not based on their “hypermorality.” It’s the same as being against the death penalty regardless of the crime. And yes, for him that includes Dylan Roof, the white supremacist who, in 2015, opened fire on and killed nine Black Americans while they were conducting a Bible study at Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. 

Toward the end of “The Message,” Coates goes to Chicago to meet with the elderly Hassan Jaber, who was barely a teenager when the militias came to his home village of Deir Yassin in 1948. Coates writes of interacting with Jaber’s family, the coffee and knafeh they were served, the 5-year-old great-grandson who gave them a tour of his toy collection. Of Jaber’s story, he writes that his father had passed away before the battle and his widowed mother left early that morning, joining the men to defend the town. He was still a boy, deemed too young to defend the village, whose older brother had been blindfolded and executed that day by the militias, who was given the task of carrying his sisters, aged 3 and 5, away to safety, never realizing that he was leaving for good. 

Afterward, Coates joins Jaber’s granddaughter for a meal with a group of Palestinian activists. He writes of delicious food I’ve been eating my whole life: fattoush, yalanji, kubbeh and hummus. He sips Arabic coffee and watches as the group periodically busts into a sing-along “for someone’s birthday or some other celebratory occasion.” He later writes of the group’s discussion of politics “in a manner of communal intimacy — the way my people speak when no white people are around.”

I remember reading these last few pages of the book. I closed it and sat facing the East River, observing what remained of the sunset on a chilly fall evening. I remembered all the family outings I had attended in Egypt, my younger cousins and their toys, singing along to songs as my relatives clapped, eating my dad’s famous ful every Sunday, and yes, discussing politics with “my people,” both Arab-American and others. Tears came to my eyes. I couldn’t believe just how simple our humanity was after all. 

The next day, I tuned into one last media appearance. It was an interview with Coates on an episode of comedian Trevor Noah’s podcast. Noah and his co-host, Christiana Mbakwe, were not interested in perfunctory affirmations and contortions any more than Coates. As the three of them discussed apartheid South Africa, slavery and their own experiences with the far-reaching tentacles of these injustices and racism, both in the U.S. and abroad, a palpable, warm kinship materialized among them. It was like the shared aspects of their experiences had created a microcosm in which the three of them seemed so safely ensconced. 

When the podcast ended, I felt I had crossed a threshold. I thought about those formative experiences with Palestine and my cultural connection to it. I felt the presence of 15-year-old me, horrified by 9/11, horrified again by the way my government responded to it and the subsequent discrimination I both faced and played into: the group project where I played a terrorist, the phone call from the neighbors to my mom on 9/11 asking if we were Muslim, and the same unbridled anger I feel today at the televised mass murder of civilians in another part of the world. These were my counterpoints to the stories of Coates, Mbakwe and Noah and I could now feel myself safely ensconced alongside them. I could see the personal experiences of others in my life with this same commitment to the powerful simplicity of humanity next to us. I thought of my partner — born and raised in Lebanon, airlifted out of Beirut in 2006 in a helicopter to make it to a foreign exchange program in the U.S. Her relatives live in southern Lebanon, relatives she didn’t even meet for the first time until the year 2000, when the Israeli occupation of Lebanon ended. She has watched her home city of Beirut be destroyed over and over and over and she’s watching it again right now. We were all a family of sorts and our relationship to one another was our power, a power we could draw upon to reject the twists, turns and acquiescences. In “The Message,” Coates introduces the idea of expanding and shifting the brackets of humanity, and frequently returns to it. In the section on Palestine he reminds himself he has the right to set his brackets as he would and “shove bullshit — no matter how politely articulated, no matter how elegantly crafted — out of the frame.” I could now feel myself doing the same.

I grabbed 15-year-old me by his shoulders and assured him: No, it’s not complicated. You don’t have to answer to others who say it is. And you’re not alone.

What, then, of those beyond the brackets? What of the co-workers who had not checked in a single time about what’s been happening this past year? Lifelong friends who, after noticing they were not raising these issues with me, not checking to see how I was doing, I reached out to myself to highlight the inhumanity being shown toward a people I identify with. Lifelong friends who had nothing to say in response. What of someone fully aware of a 6-year-old-girl shot up with 335 rounds of tank fire, of hospital patients burned alive, of second-class citizens displaced to safe zones only to be fired on and killed? What of the fact that these actions were not carried out by a terrorist group but an internationally recognized nation-state, with the weaponry funded by American taxpayers, “justified” by the assertion that terrorists were in the same areas? What of someone blind to the dehumanization that made such a lopsided loss of life possible? What of the contortionist’s body I might need to occupy to reach them?

In the days following the 2024 election, I found myself on the receiving end of conversations initiated by all kinds of friends and co-workers. Some of them exist alongside me within the brackets but many are outside. They are devastated by Trump’s victory and fearful of what it foreshadows for our democracy. They are sensitized to the scale of the pain and suffering this could inflict upon marginalized communities. Initially, I did not have much to say in response, particularly to those who have spent the past year in silence on Gaza and Lebanon. What was the point, I wondered, of trying to engage on the way I felt personally dehumanized by the Democratic party, ignored and discarded just to feel the indignity of being a complete fool who prayed like hell that Kamala Harris would win. Besides, hadn’t I already tried before? But I thought about 15-year-old me and my new sense of camaraderie with others who share a human-centric perspective. This time, the election was bringing the conversation to me. So I decided to take a chance on a new commitment to the pretzel-twisting resistance. If these were people I loved or respected, there was no sense in omitting and contorting around these issues anymore. If what I said made them less interested in maintaining our relationship, then I was ready to accept that. So I replied to one devastated friend to explain the nuance of my own devastation. I told her how it felt to spend a year trying to support the person who would allegedly save our democracy and protect the marginalized while also seeing that person play an integral role in the murder of over 40,000 dehumanized people I share a culture with. And I told a co-worker who brought up turnout and minority votes that Gaza mattered to people, and that I don’t fault any Democrat who chose to express this by not voting for Harris, no matter what swing state they live in. I finally mustered the courage to tell a group chat of close friends that I would start sharing my feelings on these matters more explicitly moving forward.

When confronted with these opinions, there are some who were uncomfortable and unresponsive, delivering silence and swift changes in subject as replies. I now have no desire to twist and turn in a fashion that may allow me to reach them again. But many more showed a surprising empathy for my heartbreak and dehumanization, and an openness to keeping the conversation going.

My brackets had expanded a little bit further.

At the very end of the interview, Noah is just starting to formulate a heartfelt opinion before Coates suddenly cuts him off. He presses a finger authoritatively to the table and calmly interjects: “This is my Black podcast right here.” The group bursts into communal laughter as Coates goes on to explain that although “he’s been running around talking to people for like three days,” he has “needed to do this.” 

His Black podcast. My people. There’s something beautiful about the idea that Coates would not have been able to do all those interviews if it wasn’t for conversations like this one. I don’t know if he’d agree but I feel like his camaraderie with those who hold this same simple commitment to humanity — whether it be Palestinians in Chicago or Noah and Mbakwe — has got to be part of what allows him to buck the practice of pretzel-twisting with such seeming ease. And if that’s the case for him, maybe it could be the same for me. 

Last November, I celebrated my birthday with a group of friends. One of them, a particularly close one who surprised me by coming from Washington, D.C., connected with another who had been kind enough to check in about the situation in Gaza days before. He asked my friend for his thoughts, to which he replied: “I agree with whatever Amr told you. He and I are the same. The only difference is that he grew up Muslim and I grew up Jewish.”

As the first piece of the night was making its way around the table, I took a look around my writers’ group. I know we all value all human life, that no one is at risk of being described as a terrorist for pointing out that there’s no justification for the extermination of 2% of the civilian population in Gaza, so many of them children, or blowing up an entire residential building in Beirut, home to tens of civilians, just because there may be a terrorist in it. I know how hard this past year has been for all of us. I know. We know that a human-centric lens is the only way forward; we know there’s nothing complicated about that. We still see Muhammad al-Durrah.

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Amr Kotb
Amr Kotb is an actor and writer based in New York City