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zionism
What Will a Second Trump Term Really Mean for Palestine?
Trump has two clear paths when he assumes power next January: continue to allow the U.S. to be led by the nose by the Christian evangelical right or stop Netanyahu’s war.
Nov 09, 2024
Conventional wisdom has it that Trump 2.0 will be a disaster for Palestinians, because Trump 1.0 all but buried the Palestinian national cause.
And it is indeed true that under Donald Trump’s first term as president, the U.S.. was wholly guided by the Zionist religious right - the real voice in his ear, either as donors or policymakers.
Under Trump and his son-in-law adviser, Jared Kushner, Washington became a policy playground for the settler movement, with which the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, was unashamedly aligned.
Whatever Trump does, the scale of Palestinian resistance during this war has demonstrated that the agency in the conflict does not lie with extremist leaders in Israel or Washington.
Consequently, in his first term, Trump upended decades of policy by recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the U.S. embassy there; he disenfranchised the Palestinian Authority by closing down the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) office in Washington; he allowed Israel to annex the Golan Heights; he pulled out of the nuclear accords with Iran; and he assassinated Qassem Soleimani, the most powerful Iranian general and diplomat in the region.
Even more damaging for the Palestinian struggle for freedom was Trump’s sponsorship of the Abraham Accords.
This was—and still is—a serious attempt to pour concrete over the grave of the Palestinian cause, constructing in its place a superhighway of trade and contracts from the Gulf that would make Israel not just a regional superpower, but a vital portal to the wealth of the Gulf.
On October 6, 2023, the day before the Hamas attack, the Palestinian cause was all but dead. The Palestinian struggle for self-determination felt like the baggage of an older generation of Arab leaders, which was being unceremoniously dumped by the new generation.
All the diplomatic talk was of Saudi Arabia’s impending decision to normalise relations with Israel, with the picture of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman shaking hands in public with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dangling as the prize lying just behind the next corner. One more push, and it would be in the bag.
If that charge sheet is not long enough, it could easily be argued that Trump’s second term will be even worse for Palestinians than his first was.
Wildest Impulses
This time around, and with the Republican party projected to have control over both houses of Congress, there will be no adults in the room to correct the president’s wildest impulses.
After all, did Friedman not just publish a book entitled One Jewish State: The Last, Best Hope to Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, in which he argues that the U.S. has a biblical duty to support Israel’s annexation of the West Bank?
“Palestinians, like Puerto Ricans, will not vote in national elections… Palestinians will be free to enact their own governing documents as long as they are not inconsistent with those of Israel,” Friedman writes.
In allowing Netanyahu to claim total victory, the U.S. administration under a first Trump presidency buried not just the prospect of a two-state solution, but along with it, the Zionist dream of a liberal, secular, democratic Jewish state.
So will Trump 2.0 not simply presage yet more territorial changes, such as the annexation of Area C of the occupied West Bank, the permanent division of Gaza, the return of Israeli settlements to northern Gaza, and the clearing of the border area in southern Lebanon?
All of this could, and no doubt will, come to pass under a second Trump term, with no brakes.
I do not for one second underplay or underestimate the sacrifice in blood that Palestinians have paid so far—the death toll in Gaza could easily be three times higher than the current official figure—or could yet pay for all that is about to come.
But in this column, I will argue that the settler movement, backed by a second Trump term, is in the process of burying any chance that Israel will prevail as an apartheid Jewish minority state in control of all the land from the river to the sea.
Irreversible Consequences
Let me make two points about the situation that existed on October 6, before I go on to deal with the irreversible consequences of everything that has happened since. And make no mistake—they are irreversible.
The first is that in allowing Netanyahu to claim total victory, the U.S. administration under a first Trump presidency buried not just the prospect of a two-state solution, but along with it, the Zionist dream of a liberal, secular, democratic Jewish state.
The liberal version of this state had been the main vehicle of Israeli expansion, with its salami slices making ever-deeper inroads into historic Palestine. By killing it, the liberal fig leaf dropped from the Zionist project, and the religious Zionist forces who were once regarded as fringe and even as terrorists, such as far-right politician Itamar Ben Gvir and the Kahanists, became mainstream.
This fundamentally altered the whole project to establish Israel as the dominant state between the river and sea. It suddenly became the only state, and one that was governed by religious fanatics; by people wishing to level the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque.
It became a state governed by the religious dogmas of Jerusalem not by the European Ashkenazi internet geeks and sophisticates of Tel Aviv. Under the first Trump presidency, the rift between these two camps became irreconcilable and fundamentally destabilising.
The second change that the first Trump presidency brought about, or rather completed, took place in Palestinian minds.
A whole generation of Palestinians born after the Oslo Accords came to the conclusion that all political and nonviolent ways of seeking an end to the occupation were blocked; that there was no longer any meaning in recognising Israel, let alone trying to find anyone in it to talk with.
Talking to Israel became a meaningless exercise. The political route was blocked not only inside Palestine, but outside it.
To their eternal shame and discredit, U.S. President Joe Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, kept all the “achievements” of the first Trump presidency in place—first and foremost the Abraham Accords.
Biden's Humiliation
Trump’s big boast during his first term of office was that he made all these changes to the status quo of the Palestinian conflict, and the sky did not fall in.
But the sky did fall in on October 7, and everything that Trump and Biden had done before that contributed to the Hamas attack, which provided the same shock to Israel that 9/11 provided to the US.
After the Hamas attack, it was impossible to ignore the Palestinian cause. It moved from the periphery of global human rights causes to the very center.
It’s not a scorecard of total humiliation for Biden, but when the history of this period is written, Biden will emerge as a weak leader.
But Biden didn’t get it. An instinctive Zionist, he allowed Netanyahu to humiliate him. His first reaction to the Hamas attack was to give Israel everything it wanted, thwarting all international moves at the United Nations for a cease-fire. His second reaction was to draw red lines, which Netanyahu proceeded to ignore.
Biden told Netanyahu not to reoccupy Rafah and the Philadelphi Corridor. Netanyahu did it anyway. Biden told Netanyahu to allow aid trucks into Gaza, and Netanyahu mostly ignored him. Biden told Netanyahu not to invade Lebanon; Netanyahu did it. Biden told Netanyahu not to attack Iranian nuclear and oil facilities, and Netanyahu listened to him—for now at least.
It’s not a scorecard of total humiliation for Biden, but when the history of this period is written, Biden will emerge as a weak leader.
He also emerges as a leader who facilitated genocide. The amount of heavy bombs that the U.S. supplied, and that Israel used against overwhelmingly civilian targets in Gaza and Lebanon, over the past year far outweighs the U.S.’ own use of such bombs during the entire Iraq war.
If the Israeli state has fundamentally changed after October 7, so too has the Palestinian mindset.
The scale of the killing—the official Palestinian death toll from the war has exceeded 43,000, and the real count could be several times higher, with the degree of destruction rendering most of the Gaza Strip uninhabitable—has crossed all red lines for Palestinians, wherever they live.
No Room for Negotiations
From now on, there is no talking or negotiating with a state that does this to your people. The only two votes in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, that secured unanimity among Jewish Israeli MKs included legislation to veto a Palestinian state, and a law banning UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees.
These two votes alone told Palestinians that they would be deluded to think that a post-Netanyahu government would bring any relief from occupation. In a deeply divided Israel, the only thing that all Jews could agree on were two measures that fundamentally made life impossible for Palestinians, the majority of the population.
In such extreme conditions, there are only two alternatives: to do nothing and die, or to resist and die. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, believe in the latter.
Palestinians are not raising the white flag. They are staying, and fighting, and dying where they live.
Consequently, Hamas is at the height of its popularity in areas where the Muslim Brotherhood was on October 6 at its weakest: in the occupied West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt.
Walk around Nablus’s old city and ask people who they support. The answer will not be the defunct Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. By a substantial margin, it will be Hamas, a group that is proscribed in the U.K. and other countries as a terrorist organization.
In Jordan, Hamas is praised by the whole population, East Bankers and Palestinians alike, because Israel’s assault on the occupied West Bank is seen as an existential threat to the kingdom.
Walk into a Palestinian home for dinner on Friday, and everyone will tell you that this death toll, and the deaths under a second Trump term, are the price to be paid for liberation from occupation.
This generation of Palestinians has shown a degree of fortitude that no previous generation showed. They are not cutting and running, like former President Yasser Arafat’s PLO did when surrounded by Israeli forces in Beirut in 1982.
No one in Gaza is fleeing to Tunisia, and few to Egypt, which is just across the border—and far fewer than Netanyahu intended. Palestinians are not raising the white flag. They are staying, and fighting, and dying where they live.
'Time for Complete Victory'
This is the answer to those who argue that looking at the long term is all very well, when the short-term duty is simply to survive. There is no short term for Palestinians any more. It’s over. There is nothing left.
The short term means returning to your tent. It means going back to your home in the occupied West Bank, knowing that tomorrow you could be burned out by settlers armed by Ben Gvir. There is no going back. Palestinians have all lost too many family members for surrender to be considered an option.
Viewed from the perspective of a Palestinian farmer clinging to his stony ground in the face of repeated settler attacks in the hills of South Hebron, it’s a toss-up as to whether Kamala Harris as U.S. president would have made any difference. If anything, she could well have been an even weaker influence on Netanyahu than Biden was.
Letting Netanyahu think he can achieve “total victory” only means feeding the forest fires of a regional war.
So we have ended up with Trump once again.
The settler right are popping bottles of champagne in celebration. Speaking in the Knesset, Ben Gvir welcomed Trump’s election victory, saying that “this is the time for sovereignty, this is the time for complete victory”.
Netanyahu is also using this period to clear out the stables in his government by sacking his defence minister, Yoav Gallant.
Trump thus has two clear paths when he assumes power next January, assuming that Biden continues to fail to secure a cease-fire in Gaza. He can either carry on where he left off, and continue to allow the U.S. to be led by the nose by the Christian evangelical right, or he can do what he strongly hinted he would do to the Muslim leaders he met in Michigan—which is to stop Netanyahu’s war.
Either path is littered with elephant traps.
Fires of Regional War
Letting Netanyahu and his alliance with Ben Gvir achieve “total victory” would mean, in reality, the ethnic cleansing of two-thirds of the occupied West Bank, with a huge refugee influx ending up in Jordan—an act that would be seen in Jordan as a cause for war.
It would mean the expulsion of Palestinians from northern Gaza and the permanent destruction of southern Lebanon, with the assumed right of Israel to continue bombing Lebanon and Syria.
Each of these actions would lead to more war, which Trump has pledged to stop. Remember that one of the last things Gallant said before he was sacked was that a war in Syria to cut Iran’s supply lines was inevitable.
Stopping the war would present Netanyahu with his biggest political peril, as doing so before a return of the hostages would be tantamount to a Hamas and Hezbollah victory.
Letting Netanyahu think he can achieve “total victory” only means feeding the forest fires of a regional war.
Nor would getting Saudi Arabia to recognise Israel, putting the cherry on top of the cake of the Abraham Accords, make any difference—although I strongly doubt whether Mohammed bin Salman would be stupid enough to do this anymore.
The reality is that such deals have no meaning while Palestine does not have its own state, and while each Arab leader feels the anger of their own population on Palestine.
But forcing Netanyahu to stop the war, in the way a strong Republican president like Ronald Reagan forced Israel stop the bombing of Beirut four decades ago, would also have seismic consequences.
It would stop the religious Zionist project in its tracks. It would feed the growing dissatisfaction within the Israeli army’s high command, who have already signalled they have achieved all they can in Gaza and Lebanon, and are suffering from war fatigue.
Stopping the war would present Netanyahu with his biggest political peril, as doing so before a return of the hostages would be tantamount to a Hamas and Hezbollah victory.
Hope for the future
One year on, there is still no credible project to install a government in Gaza that would allow the withdrawal of Israeli troops. The moment they do, Hamas reemerges. The only government of post-war Gaza that could succeed would be a technocratic government that is agreed with Hamas—and that in itself would represent a huge humiliation for Netanyahu and the army’s vow to crush the resistance movement.
Whatever Trump does, the scale of Palestinian resistance during this war has demonstrated that the agency in the conflict does not lie with extremist leaders in Israel or Washington. It lies with the peoples of Palestine and across the Middle East.
And that is the biggest hope for the future. Never before in U.S. electoral history has Palestine been a factor in turning the youth vote away from the Democratic Party. Henceforth, no Democratic leader wishing to rebuild their coalition can ignore the Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim vote.
It may be that as Biden departs, we have seen the party’s last Zionist leader. That in itself is of immense significance for Israel.
The irrational, quixotic, transactional occupant of the White House—the president who insists that his advisers reduce all their analysis to one sheet of A4, which they are lucky he actually reads—will only accelerate the destruction of the status quo in the Middle East that he started in his first term.
With much help from Netanyahu, Trump has already killed the dream of Zionist liberal democracy that lasted for 76 years.
This is some achievement in itself. In a second term, he will only hasten the day the occupation ends.
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Zionist Vigilante Groups Won’t Make Jewish Students Safe
Persecutory tactics long used by Zionists to curb anti-colonial resistance in Palestine and elsewhere are now being imported into North American university campuses, putting all students at risk.
Oct 20, 2024
Last academic year saw university students across North American campuses form Gaza solidarity encampments to protest Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians and their universities’ financial complicity in the carnage. The sit-ins received widespread media coverage and helped carry Israel’s crimes against Palestinians to the top of the Western news agenda.
Although these campus protests were overwhelmingly peaceful and included many anti-Zionist Jewish students and faculty, Israel’s supporters in media, politics, and academia itself responded to the demonstrations by accusing protesters of peddling antisemitism and intimidating Jewish students. Toward the end of the academic year, police dismantled most of these campus protests, arresting hundreds of students in the process and charging them with crimes ranging from third-degree trespass to felony burglary.
Now, as a new academic year starts and Zionist genocidal aggression continues in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon students are once again mobilizing in protest. These student protesters are already facing further intimidation from university administrations, threats from political leaders, abuse from the police, and unsubstantiated accusations of antisemitism from mainstream media. Moreover, campuses this academic year are facing a new threat: intimidation from so-called Zionist “self-defense” groups with far-right links.
Zionist vigilante groups like the JDL employ the same “self-defense” rhetoric and methodologies used in Palestine since 1948 to justify offensive aggression and colonization while appropriating Jewish victimhood and conflating it with Zionist criminality.
At the University of Toronto, Magen Herut Canada (Defender of Freedom Canada), a volunteer-based Zionist vigilante group affiliated with Herut Canada—an organization tied to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right, revisionist Likud Party, which advocates for the “Greater Israel” settler-colonial vision—was mobilized to ostensibly “defend” Jewish students from what they claim to be protesters’ antisemitism.
Magen Herut plans to expand its “volunteer safety patrols” across Canada and into the United States. Membership requires ideological alignment with Zionism and experience in policing, security, or the military. With more than 50 members, Magen Herut coordinates through WhatsApp groups to patrol up to 15 zones, including university campuses, and to appear at Gaza solidarity protests, where they intimidate attendees. They go on patrol in sizeable groups, wearing black T-shirts that identify them as members of the Magen Herut “Surveillance team.” The group’s leader, Aaron Hadida, a security expert, teaches “Jewish self-defense,” including the use of firearms. Magen Herut works closely with J-Force, a private security firm that provides “protest security” for Israel supporters. J-Force deploys volunteers to pro-Palestine events in tactical gear. Both groups are expected to remain active on campus throughout the academic year.
Zionist activists with the Jewish Defense League (JDL), a Southern Poverty Law Center designated hate group whose stated goal is to “protect Jews from antisemitism by any means necessary,” have also been spotted at pro-Palestinian events at the university. The group, which was largely inactive prior to October 7, was deemed a “right-wing terrorist group” by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 2001,
Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that several “counter-protesters” waved flags with the JDL or the Kahane Chai symbol on them at a small pro-Palestine march at the University of Toronto on September 6. Kahane Chai is a fascistic Israeli group tied to JDL, which advocates for the forced expulsion of Arabs from Israel. Other participants in the Zionist action, the newspaper said, were seen wearing Kahane Chai caps and shouting chants calling for violence against Muslims and Palestinians, including “Let’s turn Gaza into a parking lot.”
The JDL has a long history of racist violence and terrorism. Its members bombed Arab and Soviet properties in the U.S. and assassinated those it labelled “enemies of the Jewish people,” focusing on Arab American activists. They were linked to several 1985 bombings, one of which killed West Coast Regional Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee Alex Odeh; the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre when 29 worshipers were fatally shot in a Hebron mosque during Ramadan; and a 2001 plot targeting U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) in his San Clemente, California district office and the King Fahad Mosque in Culver City, California.
The presence of uniformed far-right Zionist “patrol teams” and JDL flags at the University of Toronto is alarming. It means that persecutory tactics long used by Zionists to curb anti-colonial resistance in Palestine and elsewhere are now being imported into North American university campuses, which in the past year became epicenters of anti-Zionist resistance and solidarity between anti-colonial movements in the West.
The aim of these Zionist groups is twofold: fracture, weaken, and defame intersectional resistance to white supremacy, which of course includes Zionism, and provide support for U.S.-led Western imperial expansionism and genocide, spearheaded by Israel.
To divert attention away from their far-right ties, fascist roots, and blatant aggression against anti-genocide student protesters, the Zionist vigilantes active at the University of Toronto duplicitously frame themselves as Jewish “self-defense” forces.
The concept of “self-defense” has vastly different meanings for the colonized and the colonizer. For the colonized, “self” is tied to cultural identity, ancestral land, and vital resources. Whereas for the colonizer, it is grounded in a constructed identity, land theft, and the protection of stolen resources along with shifting blame for resistance to colonization onto the colonized victims. Indeed, the leading Zionist militia from 1920 through the 1940s, the precursor of the “Israel Defense Force,” was named Haganah, meaning “defense” in Hebrew, and was a major force in appropriating Palestinian land and ridding it of its native population.
Zionist vigilante groups like the JDL employ the same “ self-defense” rhetoric and methodologies used in Palestine since 1948 to justify offensive aggression and colonization while appropriating Jewish victimhood and conflating it with Zionist criminality. They invoke fear in order to produce subservience and support for their eliminatory agenda. These groups rely on the concepts of deterrence and dehumanisation of Palestinians to justify extreme measures, framing their actions as defensive, thus obfuscating the potential illegality that comes with offensive aggression whilst responding to perceived threats with lethal force.
Zionist vigilante groups on Northern American university campuses target anti-genocide protesters under the guise of “Jewish defense” as a means of defending white supremacy in its Zionist and American forms and fracturing anti-colonial resistance led by Palestinian, Black, brown, Indigenous, immigrant, and Jewish anti-Zionists.
In contrast, the anti-colonial alliance, both in North America and globally, is built on a shared understanding that white supremacist oppression is entrenched in systemic racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and imperialism. By presenting a united front against all forms of racism and capitalism, it challenges the colonial and neocolonial establishments. As part of this resistance, it rejects Zionism as a white supremacist, European-driven project, drawing parallels to other manifest destiny ideologies that have fuelled Western settler-colonial ventures, including in the U.S.
Regardless of the outcome of the upcoming U.S. elections, white supremacy, Islamophobia, and antisemitism continue to rise across North America. Additionally, the election discourse risks diverting attention from the threats posed by the increasing presence of Zionist groups with direct ties to far-right violence. To challenge it, people, including Jews, must stand against all forms of ethnocentrism and exclusion. The Jewish community’s long history of trauma and persecution should inspire a unified pursuit of justice, freedom, and equality for everyone, rejecting Zionist vigilante terrorism.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates Freed Himself From Zionist Propaganda—Will the Country Follow?
Given his influence on the white liberal establishment, can Coates be marginalized like any other American who dares speak the truth about Israel, let alone at this particular moment in history?
Oct 20, 2024
The United States is the single most powerful supporter of the Israeli settler colony.
The U.S. government heavily arms and gives political cover to Israel, and considers the people at the mercy of its aggression as America's enemies. And president after president, Republican and Democrat, has enabled Israel to commit war crimes, crimes against humanity, and even genocide with total impunity.
The current genocide Israel is committing in Palestine is legally and morally placed at the doorstep of the U.S.
Therefore, what happens in the U.S.—especially when the political mainstream begins to wake up and see Zionism for the apocalyptic genocidal fanaticism that it is—matters for world peace.
For generations, liberal Zionists have infiltrated the ranks of American liberal imperialists with terror visited upon the world. West and Mishra saw through Coates clearly; now, so has he.
Zionists—whether Israeli or American, Christian or Jewish—do not like the prospects of that awakening.
As the racist and colonial nature of Israel's regime became more widely recognized, the experiences between Palestinians and the African American community also became more prominently linked, especially in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Over the last year, several outlets—from The New York Times to Politico, Vox, and others—published articles examining the history of Black and Palestinian solidarity.
Indeed, these discussions emerged in full force after 7 October 2023 as several leading African American public figures and intellectuals made clear their stance on Israel—even making headlines on "how Gaza has shaken Black politics."
When U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield raises her hand and vetoes one Security Council resolution after another to stop the Israeli murderous machinery; when we see U.S. Secretary of Defence Lloyd J Austin III in the news pledging his mighty military will protect Israel against attempts to stop its rampage; when the irredeemably corrupt New York City Mayor Eric Adams delivers nauseating "stand with Israel" speeches, something deep in the history of African American experience cries foul.
And when Congresswoman Cori Bush of Missouri avows: "Aipac [American Israel Public Affairs Committee], I'm coming to tear your kingdom down!" she invokes an entirely different legacy of solidarity with Palestinians in African American history, as Israel systematically unleashes its savageries against Palestinians and other Arab nations like Lebanon.
Towering figures like Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, and Cornel West have been bold, precise, and hard-hitting when it comes to condemningthe criminal atrocities of the U.S. and Israel in cahoots together.
Reenter Ta-Nehisi Coates
It was not too long ago when the heat on Ta-Nehisi Coates, a prominent African-American literary and critical voice, got so bad he ran out of the kitchen.
Back in 2017, he deleted his Twitter account with millions of followers and went into occultation following a scathing critique levelled against him by the unflinching moral conscience of Cornel West, a distinguished scholar and activist who called him "the neoliberal face of the Black freedom struggle."
Coates soon left his main outlet, The Atlantic, a major Zionist operation run by former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg, that was grooming him as a feather in their Israeli hat. For years, he would oblige.
Coates published his 2008 hymn for Israel, " The Negro Sings of Zionism," which he followed with "The Case for Reparations" in 2014. The essay, which sparked criticism among Palestine advocates, made him a darling of American Zionists.
Coates presented Israel as the model for reparations and thought African Americans ought to do the same as the Israeli state did with Germans.
For a decade now, that bit of Zionist newspeak he embraced under the condition he now calls " default Zionism" has haunted his conscience. Rightly so: Today, when he appears for public interviews, he repeatedly says: "I am ashamed!"
He should be.
Had he not heard of Edward Said when he was entrapped in that "default Zionism"? Any answer he might give to that simple question would be even more incriminating.
The most damning assessment of Coates, however, was not by West, who said in 2017 that Coates "reaps the benefits of the neoliberal establishment that rewards silences on issues such as Wall Street greed or Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and people."
In his characteristically patient and precise prose, the eminent Indian public intellectual Pankaj Mishra published a major review of Coates' 2017 book on the Obama era, We Were Eight Years in Power, in the London Review of Books.
Mishra detailed and dissected Coates' deeply white-identified career, which banked on his Black identity to drive guilt-ridden white America to celebrate him—just as Barack and Michelle Obama had done. This was a fact that West had also intuited and laid bare to him.
Mishra picked up on Coates' own sense of wonder in himself, "Why do white people like what I write?" and analysed with surgical precision:
[Coates] also visibly struggles with the question, "Why do white people like what I write?'' This is a fraught issue for the very few writers from formerly colonized countries or historically disadvantaged minorities in the West who are embraced by "legacy" periodicals, and then tasked with representing their people—or country, religion, race, and even continent (as in The New York Times's praise for Salman Rushdie: "A continent finding its voice"). Relations between the anointed "representative" writer and those who are denied this privilege by white gatekeepers are notoriously prickly. Coates, a self-made writer, is particularly vulnerable to the charge that he is popular among white liberals since he assuages their guilt about racism.
This was published in February 2018, just a few months after West had, with the stroke of a few bold and brilliant paragraphs, forced Coates into early withdrawal from the public to lick his wounds.
It did him good and well.
His new book, The Message, is his deliverance from error, as it were, his version of al-Ghazali's classic al-Munkidh min al-Dalal/Deliverance from Darkness, published nearly 1,000 years ago.
Imagine that! A young African American writer publishes a book that reminds me, a Muslim, of the autobiographical masterpiece of a towering Muslim philosopher mystic. This should mean more to him than any Pulitzer or Booker.
But Coates' visit to Palestine for just 10 days is reminiscent of another even closer Muslim to his home and habitat when Malcolm X visited Gaza in September 1964.
On this occasion, he wrote: "The ever-scheming European imperialists wisely placed Israel where she could geographically divide the Arab world, infiltrate and sow the seed of dissension among African leaders, and also divide the Africans against the Asians."
Bearing witness to Palestinian suffering and Zionist thuggeries, Coates has a giant pair of shoes to fill if he continues on this path.
The long essay Coates wrote on his visit to Palestine, which is included in his book, marks his deliverance from Zionist prose.
For generations, liberal Zionists have infiltrated the ranks of American liberal imperialists with terror visited upon the world. West and Mishra saw through Coates clearly; now, so has he.
Deliverance from Zionism
Immediately after the publication of Coates' latest book, the pro-Israel hasbara machinery, of course, went berserk and unleashed its furies, the racist nature of which managed to surprise even Coates himself.
Other liberal Zionists like Ezra Klein of The New York Times tried to undermine his arguments by asking him why he did not consult with rabid Zionists in Israel when he was there, and of course, setting the usual propaganda trap, "What about Hamas?"
As defined and determined by well-endowed and ideologically committed outlets like the Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic, the U.S. media is a well-oiled propaganda machinery of hasbara-informed pro-Israel newspeak.
The gap between the liberating truth Coates now sees and speaks and the ugly propaganda Zionists continue to keep dominant in American political culture is now widening apace.
Previously, when others like Coates suddenly found a conscience, the mainstream press just turned a deaf ear and pretended it did not happen. Perhaps one recent example is New York Congressman
Jamaal Bowman, whose changed position on Israel not only cost him his reelection campaign but has largely relegated him to obscurity.
Given his influence on the white liberal establishment and their understanding of race and diversity in this country, can Coates be marginalized like any other American who dares speak the truth about Israel, let alone at this particular moment in history?
The gap between the liberating truth Coates now sees and speaks and the ugly propaganda Zionists continue to keep dominant in American political culture is now widening apace.
More than half a century after the Civil Rights movement—when the world thought racism had been dealt with—Americans gave Donald Trump to the world right after Obama lent his Black identity to career opportunist liberal imperialism of the worst kind.
The stockpile of bombs the Israelis are dropping on Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Yemenis, and others remains Obama's legacy in the Middle East.
As I write, Americans are almost evenly split on the upcoming presidential election, poised to vote for either a Mussolini wannabe rank charlatan fascist or a Genocide Joe replacement who, like a parrot or a broken record, can only repeat AIPAC talking points.
Between a genocidal administration with the blood of tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese on its hands and a fascist wannabe, the future of the U.S. and all its global warmongering, particularly its Israeli garrison state, is now being determined.
The significance of what Coates has written weighs far less for Palestinians who have equally if not more eloquent voices to speak on their behalf.
But for Americans, Coates' corrective message may both inspire and signal a broader cultural shift in which this country may be liberated from the curse of Zionism.
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