African-American writer and public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates has said he doesn't "give a fuck" if he is sidelined in the media for calling Israel's war on Gaza a genocide.
In an exclusive and wide-ranging interview with Middle East Eye's Real Talk series, the award-winning author discussed his new book, The Message, his evolving views on Israel and Palestine and the 2024 US election, amongst other issues.
For several years, Coates - who established a wide readership at The Atlantic, where he wrote about racism against African Americans - considered himself a liberal Zionist. In 2008, he even published an essay praising Israel called "The Negro Sings of Zionism".
But after receiving criticism for his 2014 essay "The Case for Reparations", which called for America to pay reparations for slavery and racial discrimination, drawing an analogy with Germany paying Israel reparations for the Holocaust, Coates said that he started to read more about the issue and begun re-evaluating his views on Zionism.
"I was just dumbstruck," he told MEE when describing his May 2023 visit to the occupied West Bank. "I couldn’t believe what I was seeing."
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Coates said that he was shocked by seeing enforced segregation and hearing testimonies from Israeli soldiers about the violence they perpetrated against Palestinians.
He recalled that he was even stopped by a soldier who demanded to know if he was Muslim.
But the 49-year-old said that what shocked him the most was the tomb of Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli settler who gunned down between 30 and 54 Muslim worshippers in Hebron in 1994.
Coates said that he was stunned to see that Israelis visit the tomb "and they honour him for murdering Palestinians while they prayed."
"This is not somewhere out in the wilderness," he stressed. "This is in a settlement that enjoys subsidies from the Israeli state."
He quickly concluded that Israel is not a democracy. "That was just immediately obvious," he told MEE. "You tell me you've got one set of laws for one part of the population and everyone else abides by a varying set of laws?"
It was also, he thought, a deeply violent society. "The amount of guns - there was something about the air that felt like this situation doesn't go well," he said.
'The conclusions of colonialism'
In the interview, Coates also said that he had completely reevaluated his views on Zionism. "There are people who will tell you that the Zionist project at its core had a fundamental goodness to it, and it got corrupted when certain people got their hands on it, and now we're at this point.
"But to me, [the situation in Gaza] follows the conclusions of colonialism. It follows the notion that certain people's lives are worth less."
He said that after he visited the occupied territories, Coates felt ashamed of his previous position on Israel.
"I fucked up," he said. "I don't know how I fucked up.
"I'm a writer and so it's one of these things that can't really be corrected by going to a march, or releasing a statement or signing an open letter. It has to be corrected in writing."
This helps explain the content of the author's new book, The Message, which is about writing. Part of the book - the section which has garnered the most interest and criticism in the American press - details his 10 days spent in occupied Palestine.
A month ago, CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil suggested the book promoted "extremist" views in an interview that quickly went viral on social media, triggering widespread outrage.
CBS News executives found a week later that the interview did not meet the network's editorial standards.
'I wish Kamala did better'
Since Coates is one of America's most celebrated essayists, his book has attracted significant attention in the run-up to the election on 5 November.
Coates weighed in on the issue of people preferring to vote for third-party candidates instead of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, because of the Biden administration's unequivocal support for Israel's war on Gaza.
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