Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Challenging the Cognitive Dissonance of Pro-Israel Liberalism

The clip went viral and CBS News leadership mildly sanctioned Dokoupil for breaking the network’s interview standards. This led Shari Redstone, the majority owner of Paramount, the parent company of CBS, to take the unprecedented step of defending Dokoupil and chiding CBS News management. What followed was weeks of bad-faith criticism from pro-Israel media outlets targeting Coates as misinformed, antisemitic, simplistic and even being pro-Hamas. The spectrum ran from outright racism to head-patting paternalism that assured Coates he simply Didn’t Understand the Complexity of the Situation.

The fear is understandable. Liberal movements for social justice take on a life of their own and can quickly become prevailing cultural and political orthodoxy among those in good standing within the Democratic Party coalition. The 2014 Black Lives Matter and 2020 George Floyd movements brought meaningful police reform into the realm of conventional wisdom among white liberals with varying degrees of acceptable radicalism. The 2017 #MeToo movement quickly shifted popular understanding of sex crimes and sexism more broadly. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, combined with years of low-level election meddling on behalf of Trump, quickly made combating Russia on all fronts a top cause for white liberals. Again, many of these causes were eventually watered down, or distorted, or Democrats simply lost interest. But they became mainstream liberal opinion –  – specifically white liberal opinion –  – if only for a few years. They captured the prevailing moral mood and brought causes into popular ascendancy that would be defended online, in the workplace and at the Thanksgiving dinner table. 

What many in the pro-Israel media set were likely expecting in the weeks after the October 7 Hamas-led attack that killed 1,200 Israelis was something similar — the Ukraine treatment of sorts: immediate, uniform liberal sympathy followed by an unquestioning backing of Israel’s ​“war on Hamas.” And, in elite political and media circles, this is largely what they got. The problem is that this simplistic Good vs. Evil framing, this liberal cause célèbre, never caught on with the Democratic grassroots. The scrappy underdog narrative so apparent in Ukraine wasn’t so obvious in the news coming out of Gaza in the weeks after the attack and subsequent carpet bombing campaign by Israel, even being filtered through the normal racist narratives on liberal cable news. Israel’s hashtag liberal solidarity moment never came. Rather, the opposite began to happen: It became more common for liberals – –especially younger liberals that drive social media sentiment –  – to sympathize with Palestinians. 

While polls show voters of color have long been more sympathetic to Palestinians, increasingly liberals, more broadly, are overwhelmingly opposed to Israel’s siege and bombing of Gaza. From November 2023 to March 2024, according to Gallup, the percentage of Democrats who supported Israel’s assault went from 36 to 18 percent. Nor does the standard sectarian framing of Jewish Americans being uniformly pro-Israel hold much water these days. Even in 2021, the Jewish Electorate Institute found that 38 percent of American Jewish voters under the age of 40 viewed Israel as an apartheid state, compared with 47 percent who said it’s not. In November 2023, another JEI poll found that 49 percent of American Jewish voters ages 18 to 35 opposed additional military aid to Israel. 

Israel is losing the narrative wars, even by liberal Zionist groups’ own admission, as more and more liberal and Jewish Americans question the tenets of its traditional, simplistic romanticized moral framework when the country’s government is overseeing what many experts and international organizations deem a genocide in Gaza. 

This is what makes Coates’ latest book tour so threatening. Coates is not just challenging the central pillars of liberal Zionist conventional wisdom, but framing his attacks in terms white liberals can easily internalize. By analogizing the Palestinian cause to categorically racist periods such as American Jim Crow and apartheid South Africa, he is turning Palestine into something simple, memeable and morally obvious. He is, in other words, making it a distinctly middle-class, white, liberal cause.

Coates — by his own admission — is not the first intellectual to draw these comparisons. But he’s the most prominent, and the one with the most influence over the specific and decisive demographic of white liberals post-October 7. He is taking these criticisms of Israeli occupation and apartheid, which have long been obvious to anyone who has spent more than 10 minutes in the West Bank (but nevertheless kept at the fringes of civil society) and bringing them into the ​“mainstream” — into the retiree book clubs, the farmers market chit chats, the get-out-the-vote meet-ups. He is making them socially acceptable, bordering on necessary. 

Coates’ influence shouldn’t be overstated. It can be difficult to separate riding a political current versus super charging it. But clearly those tasked with keeping Zionism squarely in the liberal mainstream are having an all-hands-on-deck moment fighting back at Coates, attempting to discredit him, and — at the friendly end of the spectrum — attempting to dismiss him as a well-meaning, but ultimately confused naif. 

The most prominent defenders of liberal Zionist ideology, namely the Anti-Defamation League, haven’t done themselves any favors by becoming increasingly petty, overtly racist and transparent in their conflation of a nation state with an ethno-religious group. ADL has long been a thinly veiled lobbying front for Israel, and its CEO Jonathan Greenblatt has a history of sleazy anti-Black media campaigns, but the organization’s troubled history mostly flew under the radar as it integrated itself seamlessly with anti-racist nonprofit world. Over the past year, however, the ADL’s increasingly cynical attacks on anti-genocide protestors and defense of overt antisemites like Elon Musk have severely undermined its credibility in liberal circles. In May, even the organization’s own staff erupted in revolt over what they viewed as the ADL’s shameless shilling for the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In June, Wikipedia moderators dropped the ADL as a reliable source. 

Whether Coates is becoming a primary player in the cultural liberal shift away from lockstep support for Zionism, or simply evidence of a broader movement, is unclear. But the basic mythos around liberal Zionism and its attendant cliches — ​“Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East;” ​“bulwark against Islamic terror;” ​“scrappy democracy surrounded by enemies,” ring more hollow than ever. As the images of a horrific, nihilistic campaign of mass death continue to flood social media timelines, and the everyday, baked-in apartheid in the West Bank becomes further codified in both law and geography, it’s not certain what a liberal vision of Israel would even look like. Supposedly it exists, somewhere under the surface, simply waiting for a ​“two state solution” — always just around the corner, of course — to allow it to blossom. But, one year into a genocide that remains popular among the Israeli public and even the country’s left-wing parties, it’s unclear what it even means to be a liberal Zionist today. 

Coates, who self-identifies as a liberal and a defender of liberal ideals, is refusing to stomach the cognitive dissonance. Pointing out the obvious contradictions and racist double standards has become a subversive act as the American liberal establishment drifts further away from its base, clinging to the increasingly tenuous idea that an ethno-supremacist, apartheid garrison state can double as a vehicle for feminism, anti-racism and social progress. 

At some point the contradictions have to be reconciled — as will the reality of permanent apartheid that’s simply been branded an indefinite ​“peace process.” Hopefully a popular intellectual with approachable and lyrical moral prose, with unique sway over a powerful demographic in American politics, can help expedite this inevitable reckoning before countless more Palestinians have to die to maintain the polite fiction.