The Message and Israel's one state reality
A reading list on Israel's occupation for those who want to go deeper
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message has been a certifiable — and justiable — event in the national public discourse. The latest book by the author of “The Case for Reparations” includes four breathtakingly well-written essays about the purpose of his writing, his engagement with the world beyond the United States and his evolving mission as a writer. In memorable opening essays Coates recounts his conflicted emotions on his first trip to Senegal and his struggles with the complexities of race and memory, and recounts a memorable trip to South Carolina after the banning of one of his books from the public schools. His reflections on the limitations of his own previous work and on the integrity demanded of a writer are profound and compelling. But what everyone cares about, of course, is the final culminating essay about his ten day trip to Israel and the West Bank during which what he saw forced him to confront the unmistakeable parallels between Israel’s occupation and the Jim Crow American South.
Ezra Klein had a great conversation with Coates about the book on his podcast this week if you want to catch up quickly; you won’t have any trouble finding a remarkably unedifying explosion of predictable complaints from the usual suspects, if you’re into that sort of thing, along with some frankly racist criticism of Coates himself. The ferocity of the response is, as with so many other signs, indicative of the erosion of the hegemony of the Israeli narrative as its defenders lash out furiously trying to sustain it (the same dynamic, of course, as in the absurdly over the top repression of Gaza protests on college campuses).
It isn’t that Coates is saying anything new, of course, as he readily acknowledges — the realities on the ground are well known to anyone who looks, and quite thoroughly documented by scholars, journalists, NGOs and activists. Pretty much anyone who has ever visited the West Bank or East Jerusalem has had a similar experience, and it’s all quite familiar to those who have spent years on the ground. What has made this into such a spectacle is one of our leading Black authors analogizing not only the systems of segregation of Jim Crow and the Israeli occupation but the racialization and dehumanization of Palestinians, and his doing so in such a common-sense way from the pinnacle of the media ecosystem in the midst of the global spotlight on Israel’s indefensible genocidal destruction of Gaza and its people. Coates draws the connection with powerful purity: “when you live as we have, among a people whose humanity is ever in doubt, even the small and particular — especially the small and particular — becomes political.”
There is no serious debate about whether Coates’s descriptions of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in Jerusalem are accurate. Of course they are, even if his critics search for some minor details to obsess over in order to discredit the larger narrative. There is simply no empirical question about the reality of the systems of Israeli control over the occupied territories, the checkpoints separating and dividing and regulating Palestinian lives, the roads dividing settlers from Palestinians, the laws governing building permits, the settler swimming pools alongside Palestinian communities parched of clean water, the relentless expansion of the settlements and land confiscations in Jerusalem, the violence. It’s all thoroughly documented and obvious to everyone outside of editorial pages.
The question is not about whether these descriptions are accurate, but only over whether it’s permissible to speak about them and over whether the reality of these systems of domination are justified, by the weight of history, by current political realities, by security demands, by the exigencies of maintaining a Jewish state, or by some unspoken racism by which Palestinians are in some way less than human. The same, of course, is true of Gaza, where there is no serious debate about the extent of the unthinkable human and physical destruction which we can all see with our own eyes but only over whether such realities may be spoken about whether the extremity of the killing and destruction is somehow justified. What makes Coates’s intervention so powerful is simply that by pointing back to the defenses once mounted for slavery or the segregation of the American south, he cuts through the bullshit and simply points out what he saw with his own eyes and demands that we confront the implications of that reality.
One of the totally non-racist criticisms of Coates has been that he fails to appreciate the wider context and that he should “read some books.” Ta-Nehisi Coates doesn’t need my help in responding to public criticism, or reading books, and he writes a damn sight better than I do. But here at the MENA Academy, reading some books is what we’re about. Unfortunately for his critics, reading books is more likely to reinforce Coates’s message than it is to undermine it — because the Jim Crow comparison (and the increasingly common Apartheid analogy, and designation as such under international law) has long since been obvious to anyone who visits the land, who looks honestly at Israel’s structures of domination and creeping annexation of the West Bank and Jerusalem, or who reads the history. There’s quite a bit of scholarship on the topic, as you might expect. Here’s just a few books worth reading, mostly recent books but with a few classics thrown in:
The One State Reality: What is Israel/Palestine? edited by Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami is a good place to start. Published less than six months before the October 7 attack, this collection set out to explore the reality of an Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Jersualem and Gaza which had extended more than fifty years. We followed this up with a widely debates Foreign Affairs article, “Israel’s One State Reality,” in which we observed: “The fact of a one-state reality has long been obvious to those who live in Israel and the territories it controls and to anyone who has paid attention to the inexorable shifts on the ground. But in the past few years, something has changed. Until recently, the one-state reality was rarely acknowledged by important actors, and those who spoke the truth out loud were ignored or punished for doing so. With remarkable speed, however, the unsayable has become close to conventional wisdom.” The contributors to The One State Reality include some of the most experienced scholars and policy practitioners working on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (a number of their books are discussed below). We do not advocate for a one state solution in the book or the article, we simply demand that observers recognize reality for what it is — just as Coates has done.
Mark Tessler, History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. There are countless histories of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict you can read (Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years War on Palestine has deservedly been on the bestseller list for the last year, for instance). If you just want the facts, you won’t find a more dispassionate, detailed, and objective treatment of the full sweep of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than Mark Tessler’s. This wasn’t written for the best-seller lists, or to advance one side’s narrative over the other’s. It’s a model of careful pedagogy through the relentless marshalling of facts. If you weren’t assigned it in your college course on Israel/Palestine, it’s probably because the professor was keeping it for her own lectures.
Noura Erekat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, which provides the epigraph for Coates’s chapter, is an essential analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of international legal approaches to the question of Palestine. Erekat traces the parallel tracks of diplomacy, law, and violence to offer a sophisticated (and often frustrating) dissection of the opportunities and limits of appeals to the law. For those impressed by the South African case alleging Israeli apartheid at the International Court of Justice, Erekat offers essential context and perspective on what can and can’t be achieved through these forms of political action.
Ian Lustick, Paradigm Lost: From a Two State Solution to a One State Reality. Lustick has been one of the most consistently prescient scholars working on Israel and Palestine for many decades. He was one of the first scholars to turn a careful eye on Jewish fundamentalist movements and their changing place within Israeli politics and one of the first to write systematically about Arabs inside of Israel. His book Unsettled States, Disputed Lands, comparing Israel and the occupied territories with France/Algeria and Britain/Ireland, deeply influenced me with its Gramscian theory of how fundamental political change happens, the shift from unthinkable to inevitable. Paradigm Lost brings together his lifetime of scholarship into a searing evisceration of the diplomatic illusions surrounding the two state solution and a sharp reading of recent discursive and political changes.
Amahl A. Bishara, Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression. My review: “a supremely relevant contribution to our understanding of the Palestinian experience of Israeli domination, both within Israel proper and in the occupied territories. Her ethnographic observations and critical analysis of the lived experience of Israeli restrictions on mobility and the fragmentation imposed by different regimes of control within a single de facto Israeli sovereignty move beyond abstraction to render clearly the political horizons and potential connectivities of the forcibly divided Palestinian nation.”
Diana Greenwald, Mayors in the Middle: Indirect Rule and Local Government in Occupied Palestine, examines the evolution of Israeli approaches to the governance of the occupied West Bank. As I put it in my review: “Greenwald details a succession of Israeli efforts to construct mechanisms of indirect rule, and the variety of ways in which Palestinian political actors attempted to pursue their interests within the constraints. While fully attentive to the particularities of the Palestinian experience and the Israeli occupation, Greenwald refuses to exceptionalize it in ways that place it outside comparative analysis: her comparisons to British India (to which there are a lot of direct connections given the nature of the British empire) and Apartheid South Africa really help to illuminate what is and isn’t unique about the Palestinian-Israeli experience. She shows clearly and powerfully how the Palestinian Authority — particularly its reconstructed form following the second Intidada — devolved into a security subcontractor for Israel, divorced from any political horizon or negotiations aimed at building a Palestinian state. Mayors in the Middle should be required reading for anyone contemplating the current plans being mooted for a postwar Gaza such as promoting the role of clans or non-Hamas alternative elites; it’s all been tried before, and it hasn’t gone well.”
Yael Berda, Living Emergency: Israel’s Permit Regime in the Occupied West Bank. Berda, a human rights lawyer and academic, offers one of the clearest and most thorough analyses available of the complex, overlapping permit regimes which govern the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank. She shows how population management lies at the heart of Israeli systems of control, and how seemingly neutral or bland bureaucratic and administrative language serves deeper and highly political ends. Coates mentions some of these permit issues in his book chapter; here’s where to go if you want to go deeper.
Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine. A decade before we published The One State Reality, Azoulay and Ophir systematically documented the reality we aimed to describe: “Looking closely at the history and contemporary formation of the ruling apparatus—the technologies and operations of the Israeli army, the General Security Services, and the legal system imposed in the Occupied Territories—Azoulay and Ophir outline the one-state condition of Israel/Palestine: the grounding principle of Israeli governance is the perpetuation of differential rule over populations of differing status.” Indeed.
Gershon Shafir, A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World's Most Intractable Conflict. One of the great sociologists of Israel and Palestine (his book with Yoav Peled, Being Israeli, is a classic), Shafir brings long experience and deep empirical knowledge to this study of the Israeli occupation. Shafir excels at honing in on the paradoxes and inconsistencies, spoken and unspoken, which enable the perpetuation of the occupation — and at showing how that occupation has fundamentally reshaped Israeli politics and society.
Anne Irfan, Refuge and Resistance, reviewed earlier in the MENA Academy, presents the history of UNRWA and the long running controversies over its role in sustaining Palestinian life in exile. Irfan shows how Palestinian refugees stood outside the post-World War II international regimes governing refugees and how they actively negotiated the conditions in the camps over the span of more than half a century. Her account, based on unprecedented access to UNRWA archives in Amman, gives insight both into Palestinian lives in exile and into the complex politics inside the United Nations around all such issues. It also helps to make clear exactly how Israeli attacks on UNRWA and American defunding of the organization profoundly affects the wellbeing and even survival of countless Palestinians.
Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948 and Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Land. Benvenisti and Shehadeh each, in his own way, provides an intimate and troubling look into the transformation of the land of what was once the Palestine mandate. Benvenisti’s 2002 book presented a careful, remorseless look at the remaking of Palestinian villages and towns into Israeli ones — through renaming, physical transformation and depopulation — which pushes beyond abstractions to show powerfully how Israel was made and naturalized, and the costs to Palestinians of that transformation. Shehadeh’s account is not academic, but powerfully conveys the changing realities of the physical landscape under occupation in a similarly intimate way.
The MENA Academy will return later this week with a roundup of recent journal articles — there are a lot of them! Thank you for following.