Why did pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University chant “N.Y.P.D.22win, K.K.K.” and the Movement for Black Lives demand “an immediate end to Israel’s lethal settler-colonial project”? And how did the tables turn so quickly on Israel — even before its military retaliation — after Hamas attacked it on Oct. 7?
If the answers to these questions elude you, it’s worth reading two short new books.
You’ve probably heard about one of them, “The Message” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which came out this month and is already a best seller. Coates, the prizewinning author of “Between the World and Me,” is a writer who, fittingly for someone who has written numerous Black Panther comics, has achieved superhero status on the left.
The other book, “On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice,” by the poet and critic Adam Kirsch, has received far less fanfare. While Coates’s book captures the moral conviction behind the pro-Palestinian movement, Kirsch’s explains how its underlying ideology took root in elite circles over two decades only to explode into the public sphere on Oct. 7.
“For many academics and activists, describing Israel as a settler-colonial state was a sufficient justification for the Hamas attack,” Kirsch writes, “because for them the term encapsulates a whole series of ideological convictions — about Israel and Palestine, but also about history and many social and political issues, from the environment to gender to capitalism. Indeed, it’s impossible to understand progressive politics today without grasping the idea of settler colonialism and the worldview that derives from it.”
Insofar as college students read at all these days, “The Message” is likely to reach many. But if schools were to assign one book this academic year, I’d recommend Kirsch’s — even if only for context.
Context is precisely what critics of “The Message” have found lacking. The book consists of four essays, including ones about trips to Senegal and to a school district in South Carolina where “Between the World and Me” has been banned. But its longest section, on Israel and Palestine, has attracted the most negative attention, in particular because it leaves out any mention of the suicide bombings of the second intifada, Hamas or Oct. 7.
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