In the news quite a bit last week was Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book The Message and its predictable chapter about the evils of Israel, gleaned from a ten-day visit to the West Bank. The book, in which the author proudly advertises his lack of intellectual curiosity about its subject matter, probably doesn’t deserve attention at all, let alone two excellent reviews. (If you simply want an enumeration of the facts Coates got wrong, see here.) Barton Swaim rejects the notion, oft stated by Coates’s critics, that he is a brilliant writer with bad ideas; rather, argues Swaim, he is a bad writer with bad ideas. I’ll spare you from having to read the quotation dissected here:

The latter sentence includes seven instances of the plural third-person pronouns “them” and “their,” four of which refer to the singular “reader,” two of which refer to “words,” and one to “people.” All for the purpose of conveying the commonplace thought that words should “haunt.” Also, who, other than a person experiencing psychosis, grabs “random people on the street” to ask if they’ve read some essay or book?

As for the argument about the West Bank, Coates

came to Israel with the intention of portraying it as the Jim Crow South, and he wasn’t going to let any countervailing facts get in his way. . . . The scandal of the book—and the reason Tony Dokoupil of CBS wasn’t simply justified in challenging Coates in a recent interview but had a duty to challenge him—is that Coates never mentions Palestinian terrorism.

Helen Andrews, meanwhile, looks for the reasons that Coates hates the Jewish state so passionately, and finds them in his discussion of Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican-American activist who wanted to create a new Black national homeland in Africa:

The problem with Israel is that it shames him. How can it be that the Jews carved their Israel out of the desert, and yet no place in Africa, least of all Liberia, remotely resembles Wakanda?

Wakanda is the fictional autarkic African paradise—created by two Jewish cartoonists—about which Coates has authored several comic books. Compelling as this argument is, it may be Swaim who has Coates’s number:

Coates is a savvy self-marketer; he was smart enough to see that his primary audience of guilt-laden white liberals has moved on from the anti-police hysteria that gripped them from 2012 (Trayvon Martin) to 2020 (George Floyd). . . . Better, for the moment, to fixate on the evils of, let’s say, some foreign source of turmoil. Israel works nicely.

Considering the current state of Israel-Arab relations, Ghaith al-Omari writes

First and foremost, no ceasefire will be possible without the release of Israeli hostages and commitments to disarm Hamas and remove it from power. The final say on these matters rests with Hamas commanders on the ground in Gaza, who have been largely impervious to foreign pressure so far. At minimum, however, the United States should insist that Qatari and Egyptian mediators push Hamas’s external leadership to accept these conditions publicly, which could increase pressure on the group’s Gaza leadership.

Washington should also demand a clear, public position from key Arab states regarding disarmament. The Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas endorsed this position in a June letter to Saudi Arabia and France, giving Arab states Palestinian cover for endorsing it themselves.

Some Arab states have already indicated a willingness to play a significant role, but they will have little incentive to commit resources and personnel to Gaza unless Israel (1) provides guarantees that it will not occupy the Strip indefinitely, and (2) removes its veto on a PA role in Gaza’s future, even if only symbolic at first. Arab officials are also seeking assurances that any role they play in Gaza will be in the context of a wider effort to reach a two-state solution.

On the other hand, Washington must remain mindful that current conditions between Israel and the Palestinians are not remotely conducive to . . . implementing a two-state solution.