[News] Ta-Nehisi Coates sings of Zionism

[Anti-Imperialist News]

  Ta-Nehisi Coates sings of Zionism

Rania Khalek <https://electronicintifada.net/people/rania-khalek> 23 
February 2016
*https://electronicintifada.net/content/ta-nehisi-coates-sings-zionism/15776*

In 2014, Ta-Nehisi Coates published a compelling case for reparations 
<http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/> 
owed to Black Americans for racial injuries, particularly with respect 
to discriminatory housing policies, that continue to affect millions today.

Published at /The Atlantic/, his award-winning piece sparked an 
important national debate. It also helped propel him into the national 
spotlight as a MacArthur Foundation “genius 
<http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/09/2015-macarthur-genius-grants-announced/407758/>” 
and a best-selling author read, among others, by President Barack Obama 
<http://www.theroot.com/articles/news/2015/08/president_barack_obama_ta_nehisi_coates_memoir_on_his_2015_summer_reading.html>.

Unfortunately, there is a major flaw in his argument that exposes one of 
his most glaring political lapses. Coates presents German reparations to 
Israel as a successful and moral model, ignoring the horrors Israel 
inflicted and still inflicts on Palestinians and other people of the 
region using those funds.

To make matters worse, shortly after the publication of his piece, 
Coates promoted reparations at a live event with his /Atlantic/ 
colleague Jeffrey Goldberg 
<http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2014/06/the-atlantic-presents-ta-nehisi-coates-the-case-for-reparations-jeffrey-goldberg-to-interview-coates-at-sixth-i-on-june-12/371975/>, 
the former Israeli prison guard and Obama favorite 
<http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/05/obama-interview-iran-isis-israel/393782/>.

If the objective is to demonstrate the feasibility of reparations, then 
emphasizing German compensation to Holocaust victims would be completely 
appropriate.

But Coates focuses on the totally separate issue of German 
“compensation” to the settler-colonial state of Israel, portraying it as 
a positive development that contributed to Israel’s civilian 
infrastructure and economic growth.

“Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. 
But they did launch Germany’s reckoning with itself, and perhaps 
provided a roadmap for how a great civilization might make itself worthy 
of the name,” Coates writes.

There are some gaping holes in this narrative.

First, it relies on a total conflation of Israel and Zionism, on the one 
hand, with Jews, on the other. And it accepts uncritically the 
ahistorical claim 
<http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/05/2013521184814703958.html> 
that Israel and Zionism were the victims of the Nazis, and therefore 
Israel was the appropriate address for “reparations,” the delivery of 
which could offer Germans absolution.

It also completely ignores the fact that while other Jews were resisting 
the Nazis, Zionists infamously made a deal with them, the notorious 
Transfer Agreement of 1933, to facilitate the transport of German Jews 
and their property to Palestine and which, as Joseph Massad points out 
<http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/03/201331884943284526.html>, 
broke the international Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany started by 
American Jews.

But even if we set these fundamental questions aside, as a practical 
matter, from the standpoint of Israel’s victims, German reparations were 
not used to repair but to destroy. The billions Germany gave Israel were 
an enormous contribution to Israel’s military capacity, enabling its 
colonial expansion, land theft, military invasions and occupations and 
further ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Despite people pointing out such concerns to Coates on social media and 
in person (I tried engaging him on the issue at one of his speaking 
events, to no avail), he continues to invoke Israel as a model.

Appearing on /Democracy Now!/ earlier this month to discuss reparations, 
Coates again cited Israel, telling 
<http://www.democracynow.org/2016/2/10/ta_nehisi_coates_is_voting_for> 
host Amy Goodman that reparations from Germany were “invested in Israel. 
They basically sold them goods that Israel then used to build themselves 
up.”

This is a shameful whitewash of Palestinian suffering that needs to be 
corrected.


    “Indirect victims of the Holocaust”

Contrary to the fabrications 
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/why-benjamin-netanyahu-trying-whitewash-hitler> 
of Israeli leaders, Palestinians played no role in the Holocaust. Yet 
they have been made to pay for it with their land and their lives in the 
name of Western atonement.

Germany has been sacrificing Palestinians to atone for its genocide of 
millions of European Jews since at least 1952, the year Israel’s first 
prime minister, David Ben Gurion 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/david-ben-gurion>, and West German 
Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signed a reparations agreement.

As the first postwar chancellor, Adenauer saw publicly compensating 
Israel as the most effective way to rehabilitate Germany’s image. He 
also spoke 
<http://hub.jhu.edu/magazine/2015/summer/germany-japan-reconciliation> 
about payments to Israel as easing the way to a “spiritual settlement” 
for Germany’s “moral and material” debts.

And Ben-Gurion, facing an ailing economy, was desperate for the 
resources to preserve and expand Israel’s Jewish demographic majority 
following the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians by Zionist 
militias from 1947 into the early 1950s, an event known to Palestinians 
as the Nakba <https://electronicintifada.net/tags/nakba>.

So against the backdrop of fierce Israeli protests, an Israeli 
delegation, which included no Holocaust survivors 
<http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3302786,00.html>, negotiated 
a reparations deal despite knowledge that the West German government 
included many Nazis and Nazi collaborators whose pasts Adenauer was 
working hard to conceal 
<http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-holocaust-in-the-dock-west-germany-s-efforts-to-influence-the-eichmann-trial-a-756915.html>.

Adenauer’s chief advisor, for instance, was Hans Globke, a man who 
helped draft 
<http://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206301.pdf> and 
enforce many pieces of anti-Jewish legislation, including the infamous 
Nuremberg Laws, during the Nazi regime.

Since then, Germany has paid some $60 billion 
<http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.655332> in reparations to 
Israel.

“This cash flow from Germany went directly to the Israeli occupation 
machine that has made the Palestinians indirect victims of the 
Holocaust,” observes 
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/germany-made-palestinians-indirect-victims-holocaust-says-author-max-blumenthal/14030> 
author and journalist Max Blumenthal 
<https://electronicintifada.net/people/max-blumenthal>. “The current 
bloodshed is a result of this policy.”

Indeed, according to the independent Jewish magazine /Moment/ 
<http://www.momentmag.com/inside-germanyisrael-relationship/>, “As early 
as 1954, German reparation funds were secretly being used to buy patrol 
boats, tanks and arms.”

Germany itself directly supplied Israel with weapons through various 
channels.

The magazine cites a US Congressional Research Service report 
<https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33808.pdf> from 2007 that concluded 
that German-supplied arms “played a considerable role in Israeli 
military victories in 1967, 1973 and 1982.”

In other words, Germany played a key role in enabling Israeli violence, 
including the ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and 
Israel’s devastating invasion of Lebanon, including the massacres at the 
Sabra and Shatila 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/sabra-and-shatila-massacre> refugee 
camps.

Germany’s military support for Israel may have gone beyond conventional 
weaponry. Last year, Germany’s /Welt/ reported 
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/11535629/West-Germany-secretly-funded-Israels-nuclear-bomb-despite-Israel-denials.html> 
that Adenauer’s government financed Israel’s secret nuclear weapons 
program in the 1960s to the tune of $500 million, disguised as a 
development loan – an allegation Israel, which refuses to confirm it has 
nuclear weapons at all, has denied.


    Aiding atrocities

In the early years of the state, before 1967, the Israeli army’s 
priority was to keep Palestinian refugees from returning to their land 
while subduing the Palestinians who remained 
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-israel-tried-recast-palestinians-strangers-their-own-land/13368> 
with military rule.

In 1957, Germany forged a secret agreement for military and scientific 
cooperation <http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.576629> with 
Israel rooted <http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.655332> in 
the belief that Germany was obligated by its Nazi past to guarantee 
Israel’s security as a Jewish state.

Israel regularly exploited this sentiment.

In early 1964, after Germany began funneling tanks, submarines, 
artillery, mobile cannons and missile boats to Israel, details of the 
secret program were leaked to the media, generating public opposition 
across Germany. The government was pressured into halting the arms flow 
and it pledged not to send any more weapons into conflict zones.

Israel’s deputy defense minister Shimon Peres issued a cable 
<http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.576629> to the Israeli 
diplomatic delegation in West Germany, shamelessly capitalizing on 
Holocaust guilt.

Israel “doesn’t see itself as being located in a conflict region or as 
involved in an armed struggle,” wrote Peres, but “as part of the Jewish 
people, which is under constant threat of annihilation from the 
dictatorial government in Egypt.”

“If the Germans want to pass a law [against selling arms to conflict 
zones], they must commit themselves to correcting historical injustices 
toward the Jewish people and not make life easier for their simplistic 
policy at our expense,” he added.

Germany responded by resurrecting the arms program and establishing an 
open military relationship that was instrumental to Israel’s future 
conquests.

This dynamic remains so profitable to Israel that an Israeli diplomat 
told journalists <http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.662962> 
last year that “it was an Israeli interest to maintain German guilt 
feelings” about the Holocaust. Without German guilt, “we’d be just 
another country as far as they’re concerned,” the diplomat reportedly said.

While the US has replaced Germany as the main guarantor of Israel’s 
military dominance, German money continues to fuel Israel’s military might.

As part of its perceived moral obligation to Israel, Germany has 
delivered five Dolphin-class submarines 
<http://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-newest-sub-leaves-germany-bound-for-haifa/> 
that are capable of carrying nuclear warheads.


    Destitute Holocaust survivors

If German reparations were intended first and foremost to support 
victims of Nazi atrocities, then by the most direct measures, the tens 
of billions of dollars in payments appear largely to have failed.

According to <http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4646867,00.html> 
a 2015 report by the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims in 
Israel, 45,000 survivors in Israel live in poverty – 30 percent of all 
Holocaust survivors in the country.

German reparations appear to have been just as unsuccessful at 
alleviating the suffering of survivors of its atrocities now living in 
the US. In the New York region, more than half of Holocaust survivors 
who are supposed to benefit from such funds – approximately 40,000 
people – lived on very low incomes defined as below 150 percent of the 
federal poverty threshold <https://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty-guidelines>, 
according to 
<http://forward.com/news/200803/more-than-half-of-nyc-holocaust-survivors-living-i/> 
the UJA-Federation Jewish Community Study of New York for 2011.

In recent years, hundreds of Israeli Holocaust survivors have sued 
Israel and the Jewish Agency for appropriating the funds gained from 
Germany, ostensibly in compensation for their suffering, while they 
struggled with trauma and destitution.

“The money was officially given to help resettle what were termed 
‘Holocaust refugees,’ but instead Israel spent the money on general 
public use instead of giving it to Holocaust survivors,” Gad Weissfeld, 
the lawyer for hundreds of survivors, said in 2011 
<http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-News/Holocaust-survivors-sue-state-over-unpaid-reparations>.

“A great many people benefitted from the money, but not the Holocaust 
survivors. They came here as ‘human dust,’ with absolutely nothing, and 
needed it for basic things like housing and education,” Weissfeld added.

After years of litigation, Israel’s high court ruled against two groups 
of survivors, in 2014 
<http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.570320> and again this 
month 
<http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Supreme-Court-closes-door-on-Children-of-Tehran-Holocaust-survivors-444254>.

On the same day the Israeli government won its legal battle to deny 
compensation to the survivors in 2014, the Tel Aviv newspaper /Haaretz/ 
noted <http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.570320>, Israel’s 
parliament “approved funding to fly some 70 Knesset members to Auschwitz 
on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.”


    Invisible Palestinians

It would be unfair to demand that Coates delve into the history of 
Palestine in an article about reparations for Black Americans had he not 
devoted an entire section and more than a thousand words to lauding 
Germany’s bankrolling of a racist, settler-colonial state as a model.

By doing so, he ignores the Nakba, erases Palestinian suffering and 
gives Germany a free pass for making Palestinians into secondary victims 
of its European genocide.

Acknowledging these shortcomings would require at the very least 
recognizing the existence of Palestinians, something Coates has 
struggled with in the past.

But Coates apparently has no problem recognizing – and maybe even 
identifying with – the oppressors of the Palestinians.

In an article headlined “The Negro sings of Zionism,” he once likened 
<http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2008/05/the-negro-sings-of-zionism/5201/> 
Black liberation leaders Malcolm X and Huey Newton to Zionists, while 
making no reference to Palestinians or to the fact that Newton’s 
avowedly internationalist Black Panther Party rejected 
<http://psreview.org/content/view/7/68/> Zionism, equating it with 
“chauvinism and ethnocentrism.”

On another occasion, Coates wrote about Jewish immigration to Palestine 
<http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/who-are-we-humans-jews-or-zionists/280691/>, 
likening the Black struggle against American racism to the Zionist 
colonization of Palestine.

“Should German Jews continue the fight against anti-Semitism in Europe 
or should they separate and give up trying to convince people who have 
long hated them?” Coates asks, observing that “the dilemma is familiar 
to some of us.”

Nowhere do the Palestinians figure in Coates’ moral or political 
calculations.

To his credit, Coates later tweeted an apology for writing “as though 
the Palestinian people do not exist.”

    @veganforareason <https://twitter.com/veganforareason> @NYCJulieNYC
    <https://twitter.com/NYCJulieNYC> @ZaidJilani
    <https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani> Yes it is. Penned as though the
    Palestinian people do not exist. Deeply wrong.

    — Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) August 18, 2014
    <https://twitter.com/tanehisicoates/status/501191486185435136>

    @ZaidJilani <https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani> @veganforareason
    <https://twitter.com/veganforareason> @NYCJulieNYC
    <https://twitter.com/NYCJulieNYC> Apologies for pontificating on an
    actual struggle, as though it were a pet science project.

    — Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) August 18, 2014
    <https://twitter.com/tanehisicoates/status/501191794974294016>

Yet here we are in 2016, and one of America’s most celebrated public 
intellectuals is still speaking as if Palestinians, and the violence 
Israel inflicts on them daily, are invisible.

/Rania Khalek is an associate editor of The Electronic Intifada./

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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