The Message

Over half of The Message is devoted to discussion of the ongoing conflict between Palestine and Israel, so some historical context is key to understanding the book and its initial reception. Narratives about this conflict are highly contested; what follows is a simplified overview of key moments that should be supplemented with reading of more extensive sources that represent multiple viewpoints.

In 1947, the United Nations created a partition plan that was supposed to establish two states in the Middle East, one for the existing Arab population in Palestine and another for Jewish immigrants who were coming to the area in increasing numbers after the Holocaust. When Israel declared independence in 1948, a league of Arab countries attacked; Israel won that conflict and expanded its territory. Palestinians refer to the subsequent displacement of the Arab population as the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” which Coates references twice in “The Gigantic Dream.” These mentions come during moments when Coates has epiphanies about what he takes to be “the perpetual process of ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians (217).

Another key moment in the conflict came in 1967 during the Six-Day War. Israel emerged victorious with new territory—the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, parts of Jerusalem, and other land. This land is the source of ongoing conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. Many of the sites that Coates tours in the first part of his stay in the Middle East fall within this contested territory, where the bulk of the Palestinian population lives under highly restrictive conditions that remind Coates of the Jim Crow South.

Throughout the 1980s and early 2000s, conflict escalated during the intifadas—Palestinian uprisings in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Alongside efforts at nonviolent resistance rose groups such as Hamas, which is committed to the use of violence to achieve Palestinian independence; Israel increased its policing of all Palestinians because of the actions of militant groups.

The Message was published in October 2024, close to the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on border communities in Israel, in which Hamas militants killed over 1,200 people and took others hostage. Israel’s response was a military operation in Gaza that has killed tens of thousands (per Palestinian officials) and destroyed much of the infrastructure. Coates doesn’t address these events, particularly October 7, in his book, which has contributed to critiques of the work as a one-sided, pro-Palestinian account. In both the book and interviews, Coates makes clear that he has chosen to focus on pro-Palestinian views over a more pro-Israel view because “there is no shortage of that perspective [pro-Israeli] in American media” (“Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Power of Stories, New Book, The Message.” YouTube, uploaded by CBS Mornings, 30 Sept. 2024).