The creepy thought experiments of Ta-Nehisi Coates

So now we know what it would take for Ta-Nehisi Coates to kill some Jews. I should say that this is not a question I had been pondering. I was not lying awake at night wondering what might push America’s most celebrated man of letters over the cliff edge of savagery. And yet we have the answer nonetheless. If he was a little younger, and had been born in Gaza, and had experienced ‘the oppression and the poverty’ of that tiny, benighted strip of land, then it’s possible, he says, that he would have thrown himself into 7 October. That he would have joined the pogrom. That he would have killed Israelis.

This sick, strange thought experiment was carried out on Trevor Noah’s podcast, What Now?. ‘I haven’t said this out loud but I think about it a lot’, Coates said. You think a lot about what might have compelled you to join the largest act of anti-Jewish violence since the Holocaust? That’s not normal, sir. It’s important to note that he acknowledges the ‘great horror’ of 7 October. But he goes on to say that if he was 20 years old and living in the ‘giant open-air jail’ of Gaza, and had seen his mum, dad and siblings be pushed this way and that by what he views as Israel’s siege, then, yes, he might have signed up to Hamas’s violent rush over the border. ‘The wall comes down’, he pictures. ‘Am I… strong enough, or even constructed in such a way, where I say, “This is too far”?’ His answer: ‘I don’t know that I am.’

Can we take a minute to clock how messed up this is? The man who spent the past decade writing pained tomes about the evils of racist violence now wonders out loud what might make him engage in racist violence. The man who wrote about America living in the shadow of the lynching now outlines the conditions in which he himself might do some lynching. Something worse than lynching, in fact. The savagery Hamas visited on the Jews of southern Israel – torture, rape, immolation, beheading – outdid even the inhumanity of the noose-wielders of the KKK. The man who obsessed for years over racism’s desecration of the ‘black body’ now entertains the possibility that he would do unspeakable things to the Israeli body, in certain circumstances.

Part of the problem here is the rank failure of woke influencers to see 7 October for what it was. To some of these people it was a scream of rage, possibly a revolt, if a dreadful one. So on that What Now? pod, Trevor Noah seemed to liken Hamas’s actions to the American Revolution. The Americans ‘who fought against the British’ were also seen as ‘terrorists’, he said, to murmurs of agreement from Coates. ‘The Boston Tea Party – that’s “terrorism” if you remove the context’, Noah continued. It’s clumsily put, but the implication seems clear: we need to contextualise what Hamas did. We need to remember all that ‘oppression and poverty’ in Gaza, as Coates described it, from whence those killers came.

Is this why Coates thinks it’s cool to wonder if there could ever be a situation in which he would join a violent surge like 7 October? Because he sees 7 October as a ‘great horror’, yes, but also as the brutish wail of a wretched people? Because he sees that day as belonging to the long history of violent uprisings by the oppressed? Whereas to many of us it had more in common with Kristallnacht than the Boston Tea Party, with the Night of Broken Glass rather than the night of smashed tea chests. The smart set’s failure to see 7 October as a pogrom, as hateful mass murder by religious hysterics devoted to destroying the world’s only Jewish state, is one of their greatest moral failings. It has led to the truly unseemly sight, unimaginable five years ago, of an esteemed public intellectual musing on when and why he might join the mass slaughter of women and children.

I cannot believe this needs to be said in 2024, but there is no context in which killing innocent Jews becomes understandable. Everywhere one looks these days, people are ‘contextualising’ pogroms. Among the cranky online right there is a creepy new trend of excuse-making for the Nazis’ extermination of Europe’s Jews. And among the woke left, there’s a rush to provide context for Hamas’s butchery of 7 October. Gaza is hellish, they say. Its people are oppressed, they insist. As if any of that explains the rape of Jewish women or the hurling of hand grenades into Jewish children’s faces. No political grievance, not one, makes sense of Jew murder.

The most striking thing about Coates’s latest artless intervention into the discussion of Israel-Gaza is how he puts himself slap bang in the middle of it. Many of today’s moral relativists who masquerade as progressive thinkers have said, or at least implied, that 7 October was a prison-break by the persecuted, a revolt of the downtrodden. But Coates goes a step further. He wonders what he would do. He puts himself in the shoes of the pogromists. I’m all for empathy. But trying to get into the hearts and minds of the men who raped Jewish women and then shot them? Yeah, that’s where my empathy dries up.

Coates’s thought experiment speaks not only to the moral disarray of contemporary ‘progressive’ thought, but to its narcissism, too. As with his new book, The Message, which includes a long section on a trip he took to Israel and Palestine, Coates seems hell-bent on centring his own emotions and hang-ups. The entire wartorn Middle East is reduced to a therapist’s couch for a moneyed American trying to make sense of his own life experiences. His interest in the region seems little more than an extension of his own ceaseless self-reflection as the literary establishment’s anointed truth-teller on race.

So in The Message he likens Israel to ‘the Jim Crow South’ – a spectacularly historically illiterate claim that could only make sense to a man for whom America is the centre of the universe and whose own story is the only story that counts. He writes about ‘the glare of racism’ he felt in Israel. He describes one incident where he and his party were made to wait 45 minutes at a checkpoint outside Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. That’s it? How quickly his empathy evaporates when it comes to Israelis. How striking that the man who understands why a 20-year-old Gazan might join a fascistic pogrom seems incapable of understanding why a Jewish nation surrounded by hostile armies of anti-Semites might politely ask you to wait 45 poxy minutes before accessing a religious site.

Coates’s bending of the sorrows of the Middle East to his own petty agenda of grievance-mongering sums up what ‘Palestine’ has become for the 21st-century progressive. It has become a tool of vicarious victimhood, a means for the rich of the West to metaphorically mingle with the wretched of Gaza in the hope that some of their glow of suffering might rub off and add a little depth to these people’s identitarian complaining. When Coates says he felt the ‘glare of racism’ in Israel, and wonders what he would do if he were a downtrodden Gazan, he exposes the coveting of suffering that motors so-called Palestine solidarity. There’s an ironically neo-colonial vibe here, where a foreign nation is mined not for its resources or territory, but for that other most prized asset in the era of woke: the feeling of victimhood.

As to his confession that, in another life, he might not have been ‘strong enough’ to resist joining the rampage of 7 October – you couldn’t ask for better proof that pity for Palestine is a gateway drug to unhinged hatred for the Jewish nation. And that the modern politics of grievance teeters always on the brink of a politics of vengeance. Listen, if the end result of your ideology is wondering out loud about the circumstances under which you’d possibly join a pogrom, you need a new ideology.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy