Ta-Nehisi Coates developed his reputation as a progressive darling through his wordy essays in The Atlantic, filled with his trademark saccharine prose that centred on race in America. These essays proved to be hugely influential on the discourse around Black Lives Matter and the 1619 Project, earning him a rather awkward anointment as the heir to James Baldwin by Toni Morrison. Over the past year, after a period in self-imposed exile writing comic books and a novel, he has found his new “obsession”: Palestine.

“I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” Coates divulged to New York magazine during a profile of him for his forthcoming book, The Message. In it, he relayed his experience of travelling to the occupied West Bank last year as the typical ignorant yet curious American writer, only to be horrified at the fact that the Palestinian Arabs under Israel’s dominion in the West Bank are treated as “unpeople” with no rights. Immediately, these scenes brought to his mind images of the Jim Crow South, with imposing IDF soldiers echoing the belligerent racist sheriffs of Georgia.

The origins of Coates’s advocacy for Palestine lie in his infamous essay “The Case for Reparations”, in which he used the reparations Germany awarded to Israel in the aftermath of the Holocaust as a positive precedent for a potential reparations programme for black Americans. He recalled how he was challenged by an activist at a public discussion for using this example, because it erased the tragedy of the Palestinians whose dispossession and partial expulsion during the 1948 war necessarily facilitated the creation of Israel.

Coates is open that his newfound affinity with the Palestinians stems from a “warmth of solidarity of ‘conquered peoples’” that is connected “across the chasm of oceans and experience”. The irony is that before the Seventies, black American writers, activists & intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Bayard Rustin and Paul Robeson would have said the same thing, but about the Zionist cause. Many black nationalists, from Edward Wilmot Blyden to Marcus Garvey, made analogies between the Zionist project to “return” the Jews to Zion and their own “back to Africa” schemes.

They, too, felt a deep and authentic affinity with the Zionist cause, out of a warm solidarity between conquered peoples. Ever since, Western Leftists and black radicals have had a guilty conscience for not initially “seeing” the Palestinian struggle. This is the guilt that is fuelling Coates, which also fuels the smug presumption that Israel’s iniquities in the occupied territories are “covered up” and he is the one who will enlighten the ignorant American public on the apartheid that their taxes are sponsoring.

While Coates repeatedly insists that the moral dimensions of the Israel-Palestine conflict are rather simple, contrary to the frequent invocation of its “complexity”, he isn’t vulgar enough to skirt over the Jewish tragedy that helps give Israel its moral legitimacy, as his visit to Yad Vashem demonstrates. His chief concern, nevertheless, is with how the Jews became the conqueror, or as he put it, how “the Jewish people had taken its place among The Strong”. In other words, through Israel, the Jews are no longer part of the fraternity of the subalterns but assimilated into white Western power.

Those who have long had some knowledge of this conflict know that progress isn’t waiting on a pronouncement from Coates. His plea for respect for Palestinian rights may be a revelation to the elite American liberal audiences — but to the rest of us, he is stomping on familiar ground.

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Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.

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