This post originally had a second half, which I’ve now restored since I got a “hard yes” from my final witness who agreed to join the conversation (anonymously)…
Ta-Nehisi Coates opened this Q&A by denouncing what he regards as cant about the complexity of the conflict between Israelis and Arabs. His argument had force. How can Americans — particularly those who identify with black people’s struggles for civil rights — support a country that’s waging war to sustain a status quo founded on “segregation”? There’s something fine and (small d) democratic in Coates’ determination to dump the idea that only PhDs in Middle Eastern Studies have the wit to comment on the horrors Over There. His will to keep it simple seemed admirable. Yet there was an odd avoidant turn in Coates’ testimony when he addressed Martin Luther King’s legacy. Coates noted that King’s ethic of non-violence had never really spoken to him until he went to the West Bank this past summer. (Coates has explained in the past why he was more of a Malcolm man. Having come up hard in West Baltimore, he once wrote that he could never bring himself to affirm the “glories of being beaten on camera.”) Coates mused, without losing his sense of urgency (“this is really personal to me”), that he had finally grasped why King believed violence “corrupts the soul.” I’ll allow I expected Coates’ movement of mind would lead him to take in the soullessness of Hamas’s sadistic soldiers. But he (somehow) slipped any mention of October 7th. For him, moral strictures implicit in King’s ethic applied to the IDF, Bibi, Biden et al., but…not to Hamas?
I don’t mean to imply Coates is acting in bad faith. I’m sure when he sees smashed kids pulled out of Gaza’s rubble, the King that comes through to him is the one who dared to protest against bombing Hanoi. But I worry he’s conflating moral clarity with a quick and dirty play for purity.
Barack Obama seemed to be talking back to Coates in his comments on the Pod Save American broadcast last week: “If there’s any chance for us to be able to act — to do something constructively — it will require an admission of complexity.”
Obama began with a double-truth — what Hamas did was beyond “horrific”; what Palestinians have been living through for years is “unbearable” — and he kept doubling down on undeniables. Then he went back to addressing Coates (and his kind) directly:
You can pretend to speak the truth. You can speak one side of the truth and you can try to maintain your moral innocence by just grabbing that slice of the truth. But that won’t solve the problem. To solve the problem, you have to take in the whole truth.
It wouldn’t be the first time these two organic intellectuals of the black nation have disagreed about big things. May America’s discourse be enhanced by their differences.
Our public square, though, keeps getting squeezed. Take Congress’s choice last week to censure Rachida Tlaib. A politics of purified identity is always bad news in America since democracy depends on (what Dewey termed) conjoint communication. It’s important for American citizens — pro-Israel ones most of all? — to hear from Rep. Tlaib. We need her help to bring us near Palestinians like her grandmother (whose life is at risk now) or those preemies in Al-Shifa Hospital. Nobody’s “disposable” as Tlaib insisted in her defense against her censorious colleagues.
Let me close with testimony from one more witness who’s been muted. Last month I went back and forth with an American Jewish artist who has been cautioned (by her gallery) to restrain her impulse to speak up on behalf of Gaza. I’m sure she sees Rachida Tlaib as her sister in the struggle for a free Palestine. For a generation, she too has watched…
mothers watch their sons shot in the streets, mothers forced to give birth at checkpoints, mothers forced to make way and comfort their children when the IDF barges into their houses in the middle of the night to set up a base for no one knows how long.
And now she’s locked on…
Gazans who are receiving that “revenge” that people want so badly. I look and I look. It’s my duty. To witness. The cruelty. The insanity. The unspeakable levels of depravity at the press of a button miles away. People exploded, heads smashed by slabs of roofs, torsos in the street, babies babies babies.
Yet her own acts of witness are without borders…
I need to make something very clear. I have watched the carnage that was brought down on the Israeli civilians. I forced myself to watch from the Hamas go pro cameras, they filmed themselves individually, and they also brought a reporter! they live-streamed it all. I’ve watched it from the security cameras. dash cams of cars driven by sudden corpses rolling on the road then off the road then bumping to a halt against a gate or another car or a bush, i watched it from the social media accounts of Israeli victims whose deaths were live streamed to all their loved ones around the world by their own murderers, I’ve listened to the first person accounts of the survivors some robotic and stunned and some wailing, and watched the funerals of the dead. I’ve seen the corpses. The ashes, some of which used to be women, men, kids. I feel it is my duty to look, to feel it, to mourn the dead. Witness. And I let it rattle my bones with rage and sadness. I’ve cried harder than my body can take for two weeks now. The name Tomer is burned into my heart, and I watched him be forced to knock…
Plenty of would-be allies of Palestinians have looked away. (Consider the guest on a leftist podcast who told listeners that Hamas fighters “interacted” with Israeli settlers.) My artist-friend who still hears Tomer’s knock won’t stand for anyone…
questioning the claim that human beings were indiscriminately slaughtered for HOURS on October 7th, FUCK YOU, YOU STUPID FUCKING IDIOT!
Does the fact that these people were slaughtered take away the tragedy of the thousands of Palestinians being indiscriminately slaughtered? If it does to you, if you need everything to be clean and clear, a perfect binary, then shut up and let people with brains comment on the war…
If you need Israel to be all bad, and Palestine, even Hamas to be all good, all pure to care about them, then you probably only care about Palestine for clout.
My friend isn’t in this to score debater’s points. She won’t rein in her drive to take in inhumanity from within. She feels Israelis’ post-October 7th rage:
What I saw on my computer from the GoPros made me thirsty for blood and revenge. Absolutely blood thirsty. The people who committed … who did this, with their hands of flesh and blood. I wished and still wish I could turn into death itself and engulf these men and tear them to shreds.
But she knows history requires empathetic 180s (from the sea to the river?). She dares to break down Hamas’s brutalism…
It’s appalling…But. This is what you get when humans are born into violent repressive circumstances where they will live out their whole lives and have babies and die and their babies grow up and live out their lives and have babies and die and their babies grow up… e t fucking c.
I can talk about that too without condoning Oct 7th.
Last word for today.