Ta-Nehisi Coates's Dangerous 10/7 Thought Experiment

Why is the liberal darling so threatening to supporters of Israel?

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in the throes of a book tour that had already lit up the Israel-Palestine discourse and forced him to fend off a morning show ambush, stopped by Trevor Noah’s podcast last week and conducted a dangerous thought experiment:

If he had been subjected to the degradation and dehumanization of chattel slavery or life in Gaza, he wondered, would he be among those who committed gratuitous acts of violence during a revolt against his oppressors?

Here’s the full quote, cleaned up for readability:

Nat Turner launched his [slave] rebellion in 1830. This man slaughtered babies in their cribs. And I've done this thought experiment for myself over and over. Does the degradation and dehumanization of slavery make it so that you can look past something like that? I try to imagine that there were enslaved people, no matter how dehumanized, that said, “This is too far. I can't do that.” 

Now, here's the flip side of it. And I haven't said this out loud, but I think about it a lot. If I were 20 years old, born into Gaza, a giant open-air jail …  if my father is a fisherman and he goes too far out into the sea, he might get shot by somebody inside of Israeli boats … if my mother picks the olive trees and she gets too close to the wall, she might be shot … if my little sister has cancer and she needs treatment because there are no facilities to do that in Gaza and I don't get the right permit, she might die … if I grow up under that oppression, and that poverty … [when] the wall comes down [on October 7], am I also strong enough, or even constructed in such a way where I say: “This is too far”? 

I don't know that I am. I don't know that I am. I don't know that I am. I just wish we had room to work through that, you know what I mean? And to think about that and to talk about that.

The response confirmed his fear: We do not have room to think about that.

Columbia University professor.

Newsweek editor.

The great irony in these responses is the long history of Israeli leaders, unburdened by the dictates of Western diplomacy, admitting they would join “terror groups” if they were Palestinian.

But something interesting is happening here. Coates’s critics do not challenge his characterization of life in Gaza. They accept the premise before skipping the thought experiment altogether and jumping straight to a moralizing conclusion. Sort of defeats the whole purpose of a thought experiment—and who can blame them? No one can honestly ask Coates’s question ("What would I do in a scenario worse than any I’ve ever lived through?") without arriving at the same humble conclusion ("I don't know"). If you’re afraid of the answer, it’s better not to ask the question at all.

The episode revealed exactly what has made Coates’s intervention in the Israel-Palestine discourse so potent: his willingness to educate himself about the conflict, interrogate his own beliefs, and ask himself difficult questions—all in the language of Liberal America, where he’s considered a voice of conscience. To the guardians of Zionism, Coates’s modest gambit was too grave a threat to let pass.

It’s not hard to see why: This approach causes the moral ground that Israel stands on to crumble. I witnessed this erosion of certainty with my own mother, who was raised by traumatized parents who'd seen whole branches of their family trees incinerated during the Holocaust. Her initial reaction to the Hamas attack was one of pure shock and horror, coupled with a reflexive aversion to contextualizing it beyond the existential threat of lethal antisemitism she'd grown up with. But as the bodies began to pile up in Gaza, she committed to reading about the conflict from a broader range of sources that my siblings and I would send her. I saved a text message from her from November 2023 that marked a pivotal shift in her understanding of the issue, a sentiment virtually identical to Coates’s:

I keep thinking, if I was the mother of three children in Gaza or even the West Bank, and everything was closed off to me—for a seriously ill child I'd need permission, which I might not get, to go to a specialized care hospital in Israel—if I knew peaceful protest would be met with violence, what would I do? What could I do to try to obtain a life for my children outside of an open-air prison or occupied land where I could be thrown off on someone else's whim? Nothing they've done peacefully has changed their lives. What would I do to save my child????

Critics of Coates’s new book, The Message, have accused him of anointing himself the authority on Israel-Palestine after a mere ten-day trip and presenting an incomplete picture—a criticism that swiftly leads to the classic inculpatory question: “But why target the Jewish state of all the places in the world? 🤔🤔🤔”. The answer, which his critics can find within the covers of this very manageable 232-page book, is that this is the state he felt he’d been misinformed about.

He writes that he decided to set his sights on history’s most intractable conflict partly due to criticism he received in response to "The Case for Reparations." In that landmark essay from a decade ago, Coates cited Germany's reparations to Israel as a model without reckoning with the project they funded. He takes responsibility for failing to devote more time to studying Israel-Palestine while also placing blame on the media for its distorted coverage, something he wished to rectify in plain view of his readers. The final and longest chapter chronicles Coates's (re)education during a trip to the West Bank, where he concludes—as most who see the occupation up close do—that Israel is an apartheid state.¹

Coates found that the Jim Crow South provided the most fitting comparison for what he saw in the West Bank, allowing him to explain the occupation using the framework familiar to his loyal readers. This approach—which had catapulted him to rare public intellectual superstardom—made his clear-eyed critique all the more perilous for those locked in his sights.

I’d previously gone down my own rabbit hole of trying to understand October 7 through the lens of racist oppression and its cascading effects. Here is Princeton University Professor of African American Studies Eddie Glaude Jr., days after October 7, sharing a quote by Coates’s greatest influence:

It’s worth watching the haunting video of Baldwin saying this:

Glaude’s tweet, like Coates's comment, was met with hundreds of responses accusing him of justifying terrorism.

There is something particularly rich about a white woman in 2023 shaming James Baldwin for “justifying terrorism” from the grave.

Here is James Baldwin in Notes of a Native Son:

And there is, I should think, no Negro living in America who has not felt, briefly or for long periods, with anguish sharp or dull, in varying degrees and to varying effect, simple, naked and unanswerable hatred; who has not wanted to smash any white face he may encounter in a day, to violate, out of motives of the cruelest vengeance, their women, to break the bodies of all white people and bring them low, as low as that dust into which he himself has been and is being trampled.

Today, most liberal Americans can grasp this concept—thanks in part to Ta-Nehisi Coates—and dismissing systemic racism as a root cause of violence is considered a deeply conservative stance. Yet, when Coates applied this logic to the Israel-Palestine conflict, many of the same liberal voices led the smear campaign against him. Perhaps they were confident enough in the enduring power of whiteness to embrace Coates’s race critique, but accepting that Jews—a newer and more tenuous power, to be sure, as he illustrates by opening the chapter at the Holocaust memorial—had gone from oppressed to oppressor was a bridge too far.

By Thursday, the Coates discourse had given way to the next one: the reactions to the news of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s death, the reactions to those reactions—in particular, the outrage over celebrations of Sinwar as a hero—and the reactions to the reactions to the reactions, ad infinitum. Again, we can look to race in America to help explain. Here is Henry Louis Gates Jr. in a 1995 essay in The New Yorker about the racialized reaction to the O.J. Simpson verdict:

I was teaching a literature seminar at Harvard from twelve to two, and watched the verdict with the class on a television set in the seminar room. That’s where I first saw the sort of racialized response that itself would fill television screens for the next few days: the white students looked aghast, and the black students cheered. “Maybe you should remind the students that this is a case about two people who were brutally slain, and not an occasion to celebrate,” my teaching assistant, a white woman, whispered to me.

But the students were not celebrating murder. Gates wrote that the singular experience of Black Americans shaped how they viewed the trial. Some, driven by distrust in authorities, sincerely believed in Simpson’s innocence (“The boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble,” Coates would write decades later in Between the World and Me). Others thought he was guilty but saw karmic justice at play: “The Simpson verdict was ‘the ultimate in affirmative action,’ Amiri Baraka said. ‘I know the son of a bitch did it.’”

Gates described the country slipping into a discursive death spiral: “The focus of attention swiftly displaced from the verdict to the reaction to the verdict, and then to the reaction to the reaction to the verdict, and, finally, to the reaction to the reaction to the reaction to the verdict—which is to say, black indignation at white anger at black jubilation at Simpson’s acquittal.”

To be clear, the events themselves are incomparable: There is obviously no parallel between Sinwar and Simpson, or the October 7 attack and the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. But in both cases, a specific incident became symbolic of a broader struggle across an identity-based line, creating a shifting focal point of the public discourse that unleashed a cycle of misreading and misdirection. In the case of O.J., a Black man beating the racist criminal justice system was reason itself to celebrate. But to white spectators, layers and layers of psychological defenses prevented them from recognizing this self-incriminating perspective. (Here is Baldwin on what can get lost in translation: "The [black man] does not so much hate white men as simply want them out of his way, and, more than that, out of his children's way.") Regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict, many still fail to grasp how profoundly significant it was for the long-oppressed Gazans when they broke out of their cage and landed a severe blow on their jailers. Without this understanding, expressions of support for Palestinian resistance are conflated with endorsements of specific atrocities—some real, some fabricated—enabling critics to avoid grappling with what is being resisted.

That’s the thing: When you're part of the dominant group, confronting the harshest truths about the world you've created can be deeply unsettling—especially as you face the consequences of the inevitable violent backlash from those it was built upon. The frenzied reaction to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book reflects how threatening this kind of scrutiny is to Liberal Zionism, an ideology that depends on systematically avoiding such critical examination. For over 75 years, this corrosive defense mechanism—fueled by historical trauma and propaganda—has clouded perceptions of the realities on the ground, enabling a racist, distorted narrative to calcify. It’s what maintains the myth of “A land without a people for a people without a land” and upholds the orthodoxy that Israel’s illiberalism begins and ends with Netanyahu and the far-right. It’s what sparks outrage in people when a hostage poster is ripped down but permits callous indifference to the fact of thousands of Palestinians being held in Israeli black site prisons on no charge, where they are tortured, raped, starved, and sometimes murdered. It’s what obscures Israel’s role as the principal aggressor and manufactures consent for its relentless hostility, always in the name of ‘defense.’ And it’s what allows people to dismiss out of hand the Palestinians’ right to fight back against decades of violent oppression while so easily asking, "What was Israel supposed to do after an attack like that?" (All that said, no amount of cognitive dissonance can explain continued support for Israel’s butchery in Gaza.)

There has been legitimate criticism of The Message for its omission of Palestinian violence toward Israelis, and it’s actually my own belief that including this context would have strengthened Coates’s argument about the roots of the conflict. But this is neither here nor there. Are any of Coates’s ostensibly liberal detractors genuinely convinced of his supposed antisemitism or inhumanity? Doubtful, considering how many of them recently hailed him as the emancipatory voice of a generation precisely because of his razor-sharp moral clarity on systems of oppression. And that only makes him more dangerous, and undermining him more urgent. When Ta-Nehisi Coates suggests looking at something more closely, people tend to listen—the attacks on him are desperate attempts to shore up an increasingly fragile construct that cannot bear the weight of what we might see.

1. Reading Coates's account of being shocked at what he saw was an uncanny experience for me. I had documented my own similar reaction in my first piece from the West Bank, You Don’t Understand How Bad It Is Here.

Here is Parul Sehgal on The Message in The New Yorker, critiquing this predictable and perhaps naive narrative: “That epiphany is a mainstay of Western writing about Palestine—‘apparent blindness followed by staggering realization’—as the British Palestinian novelist Isabella Hammad points out in her new book, ‘Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative,’ noting that ‘the pressure is again on Palestinians to tell the human story that will educate and enlighten others and so allow for the conversion of the repentant Westerner, who might then descend onto the stage if not as a hero then perhaps as some kind of deus ex machina.’”