Ta-Nehisi Coates describes life in the West Bank. CBS host implies he's a terrorist or anti-Semite

Maybe both! Then secondary outlet Breaking Points joins the fray. It's media bias gone wild

Image source: FAIR.org

Last year, at the beginning of my journey of learning about the Palestine-Israel conflict, I came across Roadmap to Apartheid. A documentary, it very clearly laid out the case that what is going on in the Occupied Territories is segregation, and a quite stringent form at that. 

One of the strongest pieces of evidence is that of separate traveling system, where Israelis can drive their cars along what’s known as “sterile roads,” while Palestinians must walk or drive on outdated, crumbling roads, often blocked by boulders at the end of their neighborhood to keep them from accessing these “sterile” roads. I saw that and thought to myself, “This is like segregation here in the States. This is Jim Crow.”

During roughly the same time, Ta-Nehisi Coates, acclaimed author and scholar of race in America, sat for an interview with Democracy Now! He wasn’t promoting a book or any recent project of his; instead, he spoke of his recent travel to the West Bank and how what he saw there reminded him of what he knew of racism here in the U.S. 

I quote him at length.

“Probably the best example I can think of is the second day, when we went to Hebron, and the reality of the occupation became clear. We were driving out of East Jerusalem. I was with Palfest, and we were driving out of East Jerusalem into the West Bank. And you could see the settlements, and they would point out the settlements. And it suddenly dawned on me that I was in a region of the world where some people could vote and some people could not. And that was obviously very, very familiar to me.

“I got to Hebron, and we got out as a group of writers, and we were given a tour by a Palestinian guide. And we got to a certain street, and he said to us, ‘I can’t walk down this street. If you want to continue, you have to continue without me.’ And that was shocking to me.

“We walked down the street, and we came back, and there was a market area. Hebron is very, very poor. It wasn’t always very poor, but it’s very, very poor. Its market area has been shut down. But there are a few vendors there that I wanted to support. And I was walking to try to get to the vendor, and I was stopped at a checkpoint. Checkpoints all through the city—checkpoints obviously all through the West Bank. Your mobility is completely inhibited, and the mobility of the Palestinians is totally inhibited.

“And I was walking to the checkpoint, and an Israeli guard stepped out, probably about the age of my son, and he said to me, ‘What’s your religion, bro?’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t, you know, I’m not really religious.’ And he said, ‘Come on. Stop messing around. What is your religion?’ I said, ‘I’m not playing. I’m not really religious.’ And it became clear to me that unless I professed my religion—and the right religion—I wasn’t going to be allowed to walk forward.

“So he said, ‘Okay, so what was your parents’ religion?’ I said, ‘Well, they weren’t that religious, either.’ He says, ‘What were your grandparents’ religion?’ I said, ‘My grandmother was a Christian.’ And then he allowed me to pass.

“And it became very, very clear to me what was going on in there. And I have to say, it was quite familiar. Again, I was in a territory 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 sounded extremely, extremely familiar to me.

“And so the most shocking thing about my time over there was how uncomplicated it actually is. Now, I’m not saying the details of it are not complicated. History is always complicated. Present events are always complicated. But the way this is reported in the Western media is 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 we treasure most, the franchise, the right to vote, and then declaring that state a democracy. It’s actually not that hard to understand. It’s actually quite familiar to those of us with a familiarity to African-American history.”

At the time, Coates apologized for being late to the struggle, but said that he was standing up for Palestinian rights from this point on. Host Amy Goodman asked him about how he felt about that, and he admitted that, as a writer, he was fearful of how his view would be received. But he made clear that his conscience mandated that he speak about what he saw.

“I wasn’t just nervous; I was afraid. You know, I hear people talk all the time about the — how fearlessness is a necessary quality, and I have never had that. [chuckling] I’ve never had that in my life, and I certainly have never had that in my career.

“I spent five days with Palfest, when I was over there, and then I spent another five days with a group of Israeli Jews. And I knew that whatever I was going to see —like, I had a sentiment. I couldn’t express it like I just expressed it right now for you, because obviously I hadn’t been there. But I had a sentiment that what I was going to see was not going to be great. And I know that (a) because of my upbringing, and I know that (b) because of my vocation as a journalist, you can’t behold evil and then return and not speak on it. And segregation is evil. There’s just no way for me as an African-American to come back and stand before you, to witness segregation and not say anything about it.”

This year, after a period of delving into fiction and the medium of comics, Coates returned to the political front, releasing his new offering The Message. Here he writes of three locations he visited: Senegal, South Carolina, and the West Bank. He traces a throughline with three interwoven essays, criticizing certain systems, offering along the way thoughts on the craft and the meaning of writing.

It appears to be an ambitious book, and it has garnered some praise. Ryan Grim of Drop Site News, speaking of book tour, noted that on Amazon — where items are ranked by category — The Message was #1 in Books. 

So it was that Coates was set to sit down on September 30th with CBS Mornings to discuss his new work, as authors do. Such interviews are an industry standard. There’s a format to which people adhere so as to allow the author to describe what the book is about and why people should consider giving it a read. Certainly for a morning show, one would expect the style of interview to be cordial, if not warm — and permissive, giving the floor to the author to expound on key themes.

That’s not what one of the hosts of CBS Mornings had in mind.

Ambush

Tony Dokoupil, in his first question to Coates and throughout the interview, set about an attack. Dokoupil grilled Coates about the chapter on the West Bank and Israeli relations to the region, in a line of questioning some have likened to an interrogation.¹

Dokoupil: I want to dive into the Israel-Palestine section of the book. It’s the longest section of the book. And I have to say: when I read the book, I imagine that if I took your name out of it — took away the awards and the acclaim, took the cover off the book, the publishing house goes away — the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist. 

And so I found myself wondering, why does Ta-Nehisi Coates — who I’ve known for a long time, read his work for a long time, very talented, smart guy — leave out so much? Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the First and the Second Intifada, the café bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits? And is it because you just don’t believe that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?

Coates: Well, I would say the perspective that you just outlined, there is no shortage of that perspective in American media. That’s the first thing I would say. I am most concerned, always, with those who don’t have a voice, with those who don’t have the ability to talk. I have asked repeatedly in my interviews whether there is a single network mainstream organization in America with a Palestinian-American bureau chief or correspondent who actually has a voice to articulate that part of the world. 

I’ve been a reporter for twenty years. The reporters of those who believe more sympathetically about Israel and its right to exist don’t have a problem getting their voice out. But what I saw in Palestine, what I saw on the West Bank, what I saw in Haifa in Israel, what I saw in the south Hebron hills — those were the stories I had not heard. And those were the stories that I was most occupied with.

I wrote a 260-page book. It is not a treatise on the entirety of the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis.

Dokoupil: But if you were to read this book, you would be left wondering, why does any of Israel exist? What a horrific place, committing horrific acts on a daily basis. So I think the question is central and key, if Israel has a right to exist. And if your answer is ‘no’, then I guess the question becomes, why do the Palestinians have a right to exist?² Why do twenty different Muslim countries have a right to exist?

Coates: My answer is that no country in this world establishes its ability to exist through rights. Countries establish their ability to exist through force, as America did. So I think this question of “right to” — Israel does exist. It’s a fact. This question of its right is not a question that I would be faced with with any other country.

Dokoupil: But you write a book that delegitimizes the pillars of Israel — it seems like an effort to topple the whole building of it. So I come back to the question, and it’s one I struggled with throughout this book: What is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state, that is a Jewish safe place, and not any of the other states out there?³

Coates: There’s nothing that offends me about a Jewish state. I am offended by the idea of states built on ethnocracy, no matter where they are.

Dokoupil: Muslim included?

Coates: I would not want a state where any group of people laid down their citizenship rights based on ethnicity. The country of Israel is a state in which half the population exists on one-tier citizenship, and everybody else who’s ruled by Israelis exist on another tier — including Palestinian Israeli citizens. The only people that exist on that first tier are Israeli Jews. Why do we support that? Why is that okay? 

I’m the child of Jim Crow. I’m the child of people that were born into a country where that was exactly the case, of an American apartheid. I walk over there, and I walk through the Occupied Territories, and I walk down the street in Hebron. And a guy says to me, I can’t walk down the street unless I profess my religion. I’m with another Pal —

[Gayle King attempts to interrupt.]

No, no, no, no, no, this is very important, extremely important.

Dokoupil: It is. Lay it down.

Coates: I’m working with the person that is guiding me. He’s a Palestinian whose father, whose grandfather and grandmother was born in this town, and I have more freedom to walk than he does. He can’t ride on certain roads. He can’t get water in the same way that Israeli citizens who live less than a mile away from him can.

Dokoupil [interjecting]: Why is that?

Coates:  Why is that okay?

Dokoupil: Why is that? Why — why is there no agency in this book for the Palestinians? They exist in your narrative merely as victims of the Israelis, as though they were not offered peace at any juncture, as though they don’t have a stake in this as well. What is their role in the lack of a Palestinian state?⁴

Coates: I have a very, very, very, very moral — compass about this. And, again, perhaps it’s because of my ancestry. Either apartheid is right or it’s wrong. It’s really, really simple. Either what I saw is right or it’s wrong.

I am, for instance, against the death penalty. What the person did to get the death penalty, it really doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care if they were selling a nickel-bag of marijuana or if they were a serial killer. I am against the death penalty.

I am against a state that discriminates against people on the basis of ethnicity. I’m against that. There is nothing the Palestinians could do that would make that okay for me. My book is not based on the hyper-morality of the Palestinian people.

The hostility inherent in the questioning did not go unnoticed. Many people took to Twitter / X to remark upon the highly unusual exchange, criticizing Dokoupil for his conduct. While he utilized a conversant tone, his entire line of inquiry was unorthodox, to the point where people noted that they had never seen an interview for a book tour conducted in such a fashion. 

Some of those critics noted that, were the topic any topic other than Palestine-Israel, the host would have been reprimanded, demoted, given forced time off. Any number of sanctions would have been leveled at Dokoupil. But, like Jake Tapper and Dana Bash just a week earlier with their smear campaign against Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Dokoupil stands to benefit from his harsh treatment of Coates.⁵

Having caused such a controversy, the CBS Mornings segment became the focus of secondary content. In print, it’s instructive to compare how the Washington Post treated the story (placing it in its Style section, of all places) with a column in The New Republic. Just miles and away. Contrasting the two, it’s clear that the former had entirely the wrong take, utilizing a focus (“The cozy world of morning television was stirred up Monday”) that obfuscated the actual issues at hand. TNR’s Meridith Shiner, on the other hand, incisively got to the meat of the matter:

We have witnessed antisemitism get stripped of its meaning and used as a tool to silence legitimate criticism of these very structures and their failure to stop the killing. We are told consistently that there is no right way to speak out against a clear wrong because systematically every method of protest, from campus demonstrations to essays to books to social media posts to peaceful marches on the streets, is framed as an amorphous attack on Jews everywhere as opposed to focused critiques of a specific wrong being perpetrated by a few powerful individuals. ✂

I am not afraid of Ta-Nahisi Coates chronicling Palestinian life. I am not afraid of Rashida Tlaib asserting that the state should not be prosecuting protesters. I am not afraid of the discomfort that will inevitably come when we allow Palestinians to be seen and grapple with our complicity in dehumanizing them. Instead, I am afraid that those who have championed Israel at all costs will soon get to live at home in the kind of theocracy they covet abroad.

Two video segments also demonstrate a contrast. One of the first places I heard about this controversy was via The Majority Report with Sam Seder. The crew was appalled at Coates’s treatment, but Seder was the one who broke certain elements down for his listeners, noting clear points of bias in Dokoupil’s line of questioning. “This is not consistent with the rules of engagement that we see on a morning show with such a prestigious author. And I would suggest that on any other topic, and any other author, Dokoupil, if he asked a question in this way, would be yanked.”

Seder went further.

“I mean, are you kidding me? ‘In the backpack of an extremist’? Let’s just sort of break down what he’s saying here. … Just even the use of ‘backpack’. What is he saying there? A backpack, like an extremist would write these and put it in his backpack? Or, an extremist who carries around a backpack? Like, what are we talking about here? He’s talking about a terrorist. He’s talking about a terrorist who would blow up things. That’s what’s in a backpack! What was in the backpack in Boston at that bombing? What was in — you know, ‘backpack’, an extremist with a backpack, that’s what he’s signaling.”

“The idea that you would open up your question this way to anyone else under any other circumstances is — I’ve never seen anything like that.”

To be honest, I had expected a similar array of commentators weighing in on the CBS Mornings controversy, but aside from The Majority Report and The Rational National, few did. After a few days, I came across a segment by Breaking Points, which features Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball, both of whom broke away from The Hill’s Rising to begin their own independent show. Enjeti is pitched as ‘center-right’ while Ball is acknowledged as having views in the left column; but, as Enjeti revealed in this segment, his views are not near the center.

Demonization

What Enjeti did right away, after Ball played the clip of CBS Mornings, was declare his disgust for Coates as a writer and for Coates’s perspective on race in America. Enjeti notes that he was not speaking on The Message, nor on what Coates said in the interview; what he griped about was Coates’s essay in the Atlantic from 2014, “The Case for Reparations.” Enjeti basically blamed Coates for all racial woes besetting the nation.

Ejenti: As I literally said, I don’t like Ta-Nehisi Coates. I genuinely — I think he might be the godfather of a lot of the race problems that we have today. That’s not an exaggeration, in terms of his — That essay, “The Case for Reparations,” single-handedly radicalized every White girl on a campus who eventually ended up working at the New York Times, the behest of the BLM movement, of all this other nonsense that we have today. So, I again — I really do find him a villain in American politics. That said, I don’t even like him and I would not open [an interview] with a question like that, because that’s wild. It would be an interrogation of the book itself.

Folks in the comment section of Breaking Point’s YouTube channel took Enjeti to task for his palpable disdain for and dismissal of Coates, which read a certain way for the majority of commenters.

Enjeti’s attack was notable in a couple of ways. First, in terms of his comportment, I noticed that he was reading off of his laptop when he was giving his critique of Coates, so it appears that he had a written response prepared. To me, that makes his remarks even more egregious — he had time to think about them, write them down and, ostensibly, edit them.

Beyond that, whenever he would make an oblique remark, instead of speaking directly to Ball, his co-host who was sitting right next to him, Enjeti kept looking stage left, clearly making eye contact with someone off-camera. To me, that hints that Enjeti had perhaps coordinated this slagging of Coates with someone on his crew, or at least may have given that someone a heads-up as to the general direction of his prepared remarks. (The glance was one of knowing, a shared understanding. I don’t need to know with whom he was sharing those looks to know that such looks were taking place. While the glances might be a red herring, I view them as a red flag.)

The tenor of Enjeti’s response, in its own way, mirrored that of Dokoupil on CBS. Both hosts turned attention away from Coates’s point — that the West Bank labors under a system of apartheid — and made the conversation about Coates himself.

Dokupil intimated that Coates was anti-Semitic (“What is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state?”); Enjeti flat-out called Coates a “race hustler” — that the Black person bringing up racism is the real racist. These are clear ad hominem attacks meant to distract the audience from the point at hand.

Ball chastised her co-host, but the damage had been done — the subject had shifted from Dokoupil’s treatment of Coates on CBS Mornings to Enjeti’s feelings about Coates as a person.

Coates has given several interviews since the CBS Mornings spot, which ran about a week ago. It’s clear that he feels he needs to clarify his stance before he is prematurely misinterpreted. Take his semi-defensive responses to Michel Martin of Amanpour & Company, for instance. From the register of his remarks, he’s once bitten, twice shy. Some of that reticence also came through in his exchanges with Chris Hayes of MSNBC as well as Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, though those interviewers held far more sympathy toward Coates as a human being than Dokoupil demonstrated. Yet, even in front of friendlier audiences, Coates was shadow-boxing. He’s been stung.

I take heart, however, in the fact that I’ve encountered comments by ordinary people thanking Coates for opening this space in the national conversation, saying this is just the discussion we need to be having at this moment. After a year of disastrous foreign policy where bucking the status quo could get a person demoted, fired, expelled, even deported, Americans needed just this foothold — a place of purchase, rocky though it may be — to begin viewing the situation in Palestine-Israel with clearer vision and a more open mind.

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View Roadmap to Apartheid here.

1. For their part, the other hosts, Gayle King and Nate Burleson, more or less sat mutely, allowing Dokoupil to drive the conversation. King at one point did try to steer the conversation back onto safe ground, but that was rather late in the interview. Burleson, having begun the segment with an open-ended question, retreated into the background. One critic on X castigated CBS for making King and Burleson act as visual human shields for Dokoupil’s ambush.

2. Note that Dokoupil asks why Palestinians — individual human beings — have a right to exist, as contrasted to a nation-state, an abstract concept.

3. Ironically, this question inverts one major element of what’s known as the “new anti-Semitism.” Under that rubric, it is considered anti-semitic to single out Israel for criticism when said criticism is also extended to other countries. Here, Dokoupil is forcing other countries into the conversation and is himself singling out Israel, thus importing this aspect of the “new anti-Semitism” explicitly so as to underline more clearly his intimation that Coates must be guilty of bigotry. (As it happens, this insinuation is disingenuous. Coates does compare Israel to another country: that of the United States, in the mid-20th century.)

4. This recalls Hillary Clinton’s recent remark that Palestinians have declined a state repeatedly, as though this statement, even if taken at face value, justifies the treatment that the Palestinians have suffered (as far as Clinton’s remark was concerned) since October 7th. Here Dokoupil implies either that Palestinians should have thrown off their chains — against Hamas, of course, not Israel itself — or that the guy in Hebron should have pulled himself up by his bootstraps and gotten himself some water just like the Israelis did.

5. This, despite Dokoupil not disclosing that he has a standing bias: his children currently reside in Israel. Journalistic practices demand Dokoupil share this information with the audience; but he breezes by all of that in his zeal to attempt to flay Coates on national television.