Ta-Nehisi Coates dangerous vision of an Israel without Jews

One sentence is all it takes to understand writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’ views on Israel.“On the last day of my trip to Palestine, I visited Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center,” Coates writes as the lead to the final section of his new book, “The Message.”Israel, Coates apparently believes, does not exist — and probably has no right to exist.

How else to explain his situating a memorial to the destruction of European Jewry in some mythical place called “Palestine” — a country that has never existed, rather than in the very real state of Israel and its equally real capital, Jerusalem. Heralded as Coates’ grand return to letters after a decade, “The Message” arrives on the eve of the first anniversary of Hamas’ invasion of Israel and its subsequent war in Gaza.Divided into three parts — the first playing out in South Carolina, the second in Senegal, the third in Israel and Palestine — the book is an extension of Coates’ canon of reexamining racism and racial myth-making.  And it’s in this third and largest portion that Coates delivers his most trenchant — and aggrieved —  indictments of the West and whiteness. Back during the Obama years, Coates became wealthy and influential as the nation’s foremost chronicler of “Black doom,” as I described in a review of his 2015 book, “Between the World and Me.”In one notorious passage, heavy with manipulative guilt-making, Coates speaks of a visit to Paris’s Luxembourg Gardens — which he brands a “public garden.” Marveling in their splendor, Coates laments that he — supposedly victimized by American disenfranchisement — had “never sat in a public garden before, had not even known it to be something that I’d want to do.

And all around me there were people who did this regularly.” Huh? We have “public gardens” in every city in America, brother Coates  — have you never been to Central Park? With his new book, Coates has found limitless source ...