Israel/Palestine is About Race
The Third-Worldist Narrative
In a recent interview Ta-Nahesi Coates got into an intense but cordial exchange with the interviewer Tony Dokoupil. Dokoupil challenged Coates on his harsh criticism of Israel. Coates compared Israeli life to Jim Crow.
Coates said that he was “offended by the idea of states built on ethnocracy.” He said he does not want there to be any states which “lay down their citizenship rights on the basis of ethnicity.”
Needless to say, Coates does not actually believe the things he is pretending to believe. Ta-Nahesi Coates has never condemned the Ghanaian government’s policy of granting citizenship to any black person who comes from anywhere on Earth. He has never condemned the Azerbaijani government’s 2023 ethnic cleansing of 100,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh where they had lived for millennia. Coates has never and will never condemn the South African government’s policy of disarming the Boers and cheering as the Boers are systematically attacked by rival tribes.
There’s a reason why Coates has special criticism for Israel but most people don’t want to say it: Coates sympathizes with the Palestinians because the Palestinians are “brown” and the Israelis are white-ish. Coates says himself that his critical views on Israel are “perhaps because of my ancestry.”
Coates is not the only black public figure to come out in support of the Palestinian side. Briahna Joy Gray and Candace Owens (both of whom are much more serious thinkers than Coates) both recently lost their jobs at The Hill and the Daily Wire respectively over the same issue.
Gray and Owens had a conversation on Owens’ podcast in which Owens said that when she watched the Israel/Palestine conflict, the dead Palestinian children she saw looked like her daughter. “After October 7th, I was very due to give birth, looking on Twitter and seeing these children - these children happened to have the same complexion as my daughter because I have a mixed child - being blown up and then having people tell me that I shouldn’t care about that.”
You can say that Owens should base her opinion on the historical facts, not which side reminds her of her children. You can say that that way of thinking is wrong and irrational - but it’s the most natural thing in the world. Most people are not abstract philosophers. You will never succeed in totally eradicating the special sympathy that people feel for people who look like themselves.
Race is a big part of the reason why opposition to Israel is so entrenched in the Middle East. Hafez al Assad and Abdul Nasser weren’t Islamists, they were Pan-Arabists. They saw Israelis as a foreign tribe who conquered a foothold in their lands.
Mainstream commenters are simply in denial about the fact that the pro-Hamas protests in America are a result of the influx of Middle-Easterners into the country. Look at the protests. Middle Easterners are strongly overrepresented. Whites and East Asians are underrepresented. Moderate outlets like The Free Press want you to believe that the college students have been duped by Qatari money or by Chinese propaganda on TikTok. These are convenient explanations that accuse a comfortable, far-away villain. But the truth is far simpler. The students of Middle-Eastern ancestry who form these protests sympathize with the Palestinians because Palestinians are their fellow Middle-Easterners. They may not be Muslim; they may no longer believe in the faith of their parents, but they perceive Israel’s actions as an attack on their race, an attack on their tribe.
72% of white Americans want America to publicly support Israel while just 51% of non-white Americans say the same. This racial disparity is part of why younger voters (only half of Gen Z is white) are more likely to sympathize with the Palestinians rather than the Israelis. According to Pew Research, American adults aged 18-29 are more than twice as likely to say they sympathize more with the Palestinian people (33%) than the Israeli people (14%). 60% of adults under 30 say they have a favorable view of the Palestinian people while just 46% have a favorable view of the Israeli people (some have a favorable opinion of neither or both).
Critics of Coates say that he is projecting America’s unique racial situation onto the totally different situation of another country, but Coates is not the only person to see things the way he does. In 2020 during the Floyd riots, Palestinians painted murals of George Floyd on walls in the West Bank. Frantz Fanon, a communist philosopher who influenced Barack Obama, promoted Third World Intercontinentalism - the idea that the Third World should unite against the First. Contra Coates’ critics, the oppressor/oppressed racial grievance narrative is not unique to America. It has been the motivating ideology for dozens of national leaders all across the world. As the non-white population of the West increases, that ideology will become more and more powerful.
Candace Owens’ myopic “my mixed child would look like a Palestinian” line seems to echo through black intellectual history. Like when W.E.B. Du Bois told the Chinese to stop resisting Japan bc the real enemy was global whiteness.
I don't have a problem with Israel being a Jewish ethnostate - all the more power to them. My problem is with the influence their lobby has over US politics and culture and the foreign aid they extract from us, at the cost of our legitimate national and international interests. American taxpayers shouldn't have to fund their very existence, and American citizens shouldn't be threatened with the label of "antisemitism" for privately opposing Israel. If Israel wants to be an ethnostate, they can go it alone.