Ta-Nehisi Coates on Israel: 'I Felt Lied To.'
About this episode
Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses 'The Message' and his May 2023 trip to Israel and the West Bank, where, traveling with the Palestine Festival of Literature and Breaking the Silence, he was shocked by segregated roads, checkpoints, water disparities, and a bureaucracy he compares to the Jim Crow South. He says he felt 'lied to' by American media framing that sidelined Palestinian voices. Klein, who largely shares Coates's read of the West Bank, presses him on what the book omits: Palestinian violence, Hamas, and how suicide bombings destroyed Israel's peace movement. Coates answers with a Nat Turner analogy — the violence of the oppressed does not make oppression just — and defends centering excluded Palestinian perspectives. They debate whether political imagination or unsparing realism should guide the conversation, converging on the apartheid analogy while disagreeing about how change becomes possible.