Author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates is speaking out about his 10-day visit to the West Bank amidst 28 days of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
Israel began bombing the Palestinian territory after thousands of armed Hamas militants attacked Israel and murdered at least 1,400 people on Oct. 7, including women and children, ABC News reports. Coates appeared on “Democracy Now!” on Nov. 2 and shared his thoughts after spending 10 days visiting the West Bank. He compared it to the segregation of Black Americans during the Jim Crow Era.
Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks out against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza during an appearance on “Democracy Now!” on Nov. 2, 2023. (Photo: “Democracy Now” screenshot / YouTube)
“I spent 10 days in Palestine in occupied territories and in Israel proper,” he said. “I think what shocked me the most was in any sort of, uh, opinion piece or reported piece or whatever you wanna call it that I’ve read about Israel and about the conflict with the Palestinians, there’s a word that comes up all the time and it is complexity. That and its closely related adjective, complicated.”
Coates went on to say that he expected that it would be hard to discern right and wrong due to the complexity of the conflict. However, he said while visiting Hebron on his second day, the reality of the occupation hit him when he learned that some people could vote and others could not. He also said he was shocked when his Palestinian guide wasn’t allowed to walk down certain streets. While at a checkpoint, an Israeli guard asked Coates what his religion was.
When he answered that he wasn’t religious, he was asked about his parents’ and grandparents’ religion. Once he said his grandmother was Christian, he was allowed through the checkpoint. Coates went on to say that the area was segregated by race and religion, and it reminded of segregation in the United States.
“It became very very clear to me what was going on there,” he continued. “And I have to say it was quite familiar. Again, I was in a territory area where your mobility is inhibited. Where your voting rights are inhibited. Where your right to the water is inhibited, where your right to housing is inhibited, and it’s all inhibited based on ethnicity. And that seemed extremely, extremely familiar to me.”
Coates added that the Western media reports the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “as though one needs a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern studies to understand the basic morality of holding a people in a situation in which they don’t have basic rights,” including the right to vote, and then “declaring that state a democracy,” adding that it was similar to African-American history and Jim Crow.
“Martin Luther King dedicated his life to the fight against segregation. His was a segregated society. The Occupied Territories are segregated,” he continued. “There are different signs for where different people can go. There are different license plates forbidding different people from going to different places. Now, what the authorities will tell you is that this is a security measure. But if you go back to the history of Jim Crow in this country, they would tell you the exact same thing. People always have good reasons, besides, you know, ‘I hate you, and I don’t like you,’ to justify their right for imposing an oppressive regime on other people.”
“There’s no way for me, as an African-American, to come back and stand before you, to witness segregation and not say anything about it.”
“Dropping bombs on children, in dropping bombs on refugee camps, no matter who’s there, it would give me trouble sleeping at night,” he said. “And I worry for the souls of people who can do this and can sleep at night.”
According to The Associated Press, more than 9,000 Palestinian men, women and children have died since Israel began bombing the Gaza Strip, and more than 1 million Palestinians have been displaced.
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