Leadership and Agency: Palestinians and Black Americans
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest work, The Message, has prompted a firestorm of responses, especially regarding the fourth chapter, “The Gigantic Dream,” about his ten-day trip to the West Bank. I haven’t read that section, but I have listened to enough conversations with Coates and opining about Tony Dokoupil’s tough CBS Mornings interview of Coates on, of all days, the anniversary of the October 7th terrorist attack by Hamas against Israel and Israelis to venture my own take on one aspect of Coates’ perspective.
I may have more to say about The Message once I complete it. For now, I’ll confront a premise of Coates’ position that’s clear from the interviews and commentaries I’ve heard: the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank is akin to apartheid and the Jim Crow treatment of Afro-Americans by racialized whites in a racist society. There are many distinctions between South African apartheid and the occupied territories in the West Bank, but my intent here is not to litigate that case. Here and now, I’ll pursue the Jim Crow analogy more closely.
If the devil is in the details, let’s give the devil his due. A case can be made that oppression is oppression; case closed. Wrong is wrong, and right is right. However, such black-and-white reasoning is more understandable in the pre-tragic state of children not yet aware of the complexity of history and the truly tragic underpinnings of the human condition. My point is not to justify injustice, yet when we investigate the origins of nation-states, bloodshed and land disputes are the norm. My point is to take a sober look at the other side of Coates’ analogy. If he and others correlate the Jim Crow oppression of Negro Americans and the way occupied Palestinians are treated, then we can also look at distinctions. What about the responses by the leadership of both groups? The answer points to human agency despite oppression, a theme illuminated by Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning.
In the memoir I’m currently writing, The Making of an Omni-American: My Journey from Race to Culture to Cosmos, I detail my journey through belief systems and ideologies to understand better myself and the struggles of my own ethnocultural tribe, from born-again Christianity, black economic nationalism, Afrocentric spirituality to postmodernism and Integral theory, a blues-idiom wisdom tradition, and an Omni-American stance both rooted and cosmopolitan. My sojourn demonstrates a range of responses to my predicaments and that of “my people.”
In my 61 years, I’ve seen no panaceas or cure-alls for the human condition, including the blues of injustice. Yet I also now comprehend that some responses are wiser, better, and more generative than others. The most successful responses by Americans of African descent to their tragicomic and often absurd predicament combined sacred and secular strategies attuned to the highest values of America as a social and political experiment. By contrast, the strategies of the leadership of those representing the Palestinian people, from Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, are much different.
Key Leadership Distinctions in the Palestinian and Black American Struggles
Mahmoud Abbas, the Prime Minister of the PA since 2003, authored a book based on his dissertation titled The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism, which argued that Zionist Jews were equally responsible for the Holocaust. Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, clearly stated in their original charter in 1988 that they were fighting against Jews and advocated for the obliteration of Israel as a state. Although they ostensibly deleted the explicitly antisemitic language of the original charter in 2017, their actions on October 7, 2023, under the orders of Yahya Sinwar, spoke louder than those reformatory words.
The Muslim Brotherhood, formed in 1928, advocates for political Islam, a society governed by Islam and its morals. The Black American struggle doesn’t advocate for the religious domination of Christianity or any other religion over society. Afro-Americans have desired inclusion in the modern United States with liberal democratic principles and an egalitarian, pluralistic ethic at the core. As Ralph Ellison wrote in 1958, amid fervent decolonization efforts in Africa and elsewhere:
. . . the most dramatic fight for American ideals is being sparked by black Americans. Significantly, we are the only black people who are not fighting for separation from the ‘whites,’ but for a fuller participation in the society which we share with ‘whites.’ And it is of further significance that we pursue our goals precisely in terms of American constitutionalism. . . we really believe that all men are created equal and that they should be given a chance to achieve their highest potentialities, regardless of race, creed, color or past condition of servitude.
The violent examples of John Brown and Nat Turner notwithstanding, the struggle of my people as seen in the tradition extending from Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Alain Locke, Jean Toomer, Ida B. Wells, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, Mary McLeod Bethune, Ralph Bunche, Dizzy Gillespie, Mary Lou Williams, to Ralph Ellison, Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Murray, Charles Johnson, and Danielle Allen establishes cultural excellence and visionary thought leadership in a country that has so often rejected the Afro-American cornerstone of our nation’s identity and destiny.
Agency is the ability to think, choose, and act. By turning down the two-state partition plan by Great Britain to the United Nations in 1947, the Arab League and other Arab leaders exercised agency. The same is true when they decided to go to war with the young nation of Israel soon thereafter. The Palestinian Liberation Organization exercised agency when it signed the Oslo Accords in 1993. Hamas exercised agency when it signaled possible changes to its charter in 2017, though its actions hence displayed its true intent. Then PLO chairman Yasser Arafat could have said yes to the proposals of Bill Clinton and Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David in 2000 but chose not to. That decision led to the choice by Palestinian terrorists to engage in the Second Intifada, with suicide bombings a primary tactic.
Hamas has controlled Gaza since 2007. Their leader, Yahya Sinwar, studied Hebrew and read Israeli publications assiduously while in prison to understand his enemy better, not to live in accord with Israelis. Sinwar and Hamas did not choose to abjure violence against Israel, declare a desire for a state that would live in peaceful co-existence with Israel, nor express a desire to build a thriving civil society that could be a crown jewel in the Middle East. Instead, for military and political reasons, they built an underground network of 400 miles of tunnels at the estimated cost of $1 billion.
If we compare the Palestinian and Black American struggles, let’s have the analytical integrity and moral maturity not to paint the comparison with a simplistic and inaccurate narrative of “white” Israeli oppressors vs. oppressed Palestinian people of color, as Coates does in this quote from The Message: “I remember watching World News Tonight with my father, and deriving from him a dull sense that the Israelis were ‘white’ and the Palestinians were ‘Black,’ which is to say the former were the oppressors and the latter were the oppressed.” Arabs comprise twenty percent of Israeli society, have been represented in government, served on the Supreme Court, and hold high positions in health care and other sectors. There are so-called people of color in Jewish communities worldwide, not only in Israel. Painting Jews with the brush of whiteness displays the vacuity and imprecision of the horrific process of racialization.
Bootlegging the struggle of Black Americans in the Israeli-Palestinian situation without clarifying the distinctions and discontinuities is disingenuous.