But Please, Don’t Forget to Find the Human in Your Enemy

I’ve had a few conversations recently about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book The Message. Coates is, of course, massively popular due to books like Between the World and Me, among others. He was a correspondent with The Atlantic and has garnered a large audience due to his writings on social and political issues, specifically on matters of racial injustice and white supremacy.

I have not read any of Coates’ books. I’ve listened to a few interviews with him and about him, and my general impression has been that he trades a little too easily in false binaries and moral certainty. I also tend to (half-heartedly and inconsistently) avoid anyone that Oprah recommends. This probably makes me a terrible person, I know, but what can I say? A sinner in need of grace, I have ever been and remain.

The Message is generating attention mainly, as far as I can tell, because Coates has turned his attention from the African American experience to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, a conflict which has obviously exploded over the last year. He took a ten-day trip to the West Bank and saw a great deal of human misery and suffering and injustice. He has emerged, it seems, with a rather predictable narrative of unambiguous oppressors and victims. At least this is what I have gleaned from the reviews I’ve read and the portions of interviews I’ve listened to.

I say “portions” because I recently stopped listening to an interview rather abruptly. He was being interviewed by Ezra Klein (a progressive Jew) and Klein asked him, entirely reasonably, how many Israelis he had talked to on his ten-day trip. The answer was zero. When pressed about why this was the case, Coates simply doubled down on the moral certainty. Some things and some people are just so obviously wrong, some situations just characterized by such clear Manichean categories of good and evil, that you don’t have to dig any deeper. Some people have views that simply aren’t worth countenancing.

I turned off the podcast at this point.

There are many things that could be said about Coates’ response to Klein in the interview. I will only point to two. First, it is inconceivable to me that in a conflict as intractable as the one that has dominated the Middle East for the better part of a century, someone as obviously intelligent as Coates couldn’t see any value in at least hearing an argument or perspective from the other side. He is obviously a morally sensitive man. His heart is rightly broken by the suffering of the Palestinian people and all that they have endured. What might have happened, I wonder, if he had spent some time listening to the stories of an Israeli parent whose teenage daughter had been raped and mutilated at a music festival? Even if it didn’t change his “position” on the issue, might it not blur a few categories? Humanize a group of people that are easy to demonize? Complexify an issue that does not and has never reduced to easy moral categories?

And speaking of complexity. I cannot help but note, again, that Coates wrote this book after spending ten days in the West Bank, travelling exclusively with left-leaning progressive folks. I’ve done similar tours. Twice, actually. I’ve spent twenty days listening to Palestinians sharing about the grinding oppression they must endure, watching as they are herded out of public buses to be interrogated by belligerent teenage soldiers with automatic weapons, standing with them for hours in cattle-chute like checkpoints just to get to work. I, too, heard almost nothing of the Israeli experience while I was there. Having been to the region, having heard tiny snippets of a few stories, having stuck my toe in the shallow end of the history of the region, having wrestled with the appalling cruelty that (all) people are capable of and of the deep religious hostilities and existential anxieties that animate the politics of the region, having spent the year since October 7 grappling with the many and varied ways in which this has blown apart assumed moral categories (or should have), I cannot even fathom having the audacity—as someone who doesn’t live there and doesn’t have to endure any of its realities—to write a book about it.

Both times I was in the West Bank, we visited the wall separating it from Israel. It’s a grotesque, imposing slab of concrete that snakes along for over seven hundred kilometres. It’s covered with graffiti of all kinds, obviously, and makes for fascinating and at times heartbreaking viewing. The last time we were there, I took the picture above. But please don’t forget to find the human in your enemy. It was obviously taken on the Palestinian side of the wall. I wonder if Coates saw it while he was there. I wonder what he made of it.

This image has served as the desktop wallpaper on my laptop ever since. I am forced to look at it whenever I am writing, whether it’s a sermon or an article or a blog post or whatever. It is a reminder that I need more often than I would care to admit. But it is one that I must not ignore if I am to do anything more than pay lip service to the One who said, “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”