On the sudden epiphanies of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Greta Thunberg: the other reason it's crucial to understand what's really happening in Israel-Palestine

Which public figures are really challenging the establishment and which are functionaries of it?

In a previous post, originally published in October 2023, I argued that what is happening in Israel-Palestine is not what it seems. In particular, I suggested that the 7th of October 2023 was the start of a realignment in which, ultimately, the United States is going to reduce its support for Israeli occupation and apartheid - in order to facilitate an expansion of its alliances in the region (with countries like Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, UAE and Pakistan). Israel was once an asset but is now, especially under Netanyahu, more of a liability to the United States.

Understanding this is not just important for understanding the, sometimes complex, geopolitical dynamics playing out but also the trustworthiness and credibility of particular individuals and even media outlets. Historically, many global - especially Western - media outlets have downplayed apartheid in Israel and other, well-documented human rights violations it commits. While this still continues, there has actually been a massive change since 7 October 2023.

There is now widespread reporting of the number of deaths of Palestinians, the details of the carnage, the numbers of children killed, attacks on hospitals and other war crimes. Contrast it with Ukraine, for instance, where despite hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians killed, the Western media - being squarely on the side of Ukraine to the point of largely just publishing pure propaganda - gives far more coverage to Palestinian deaths than Ukrainian deaths. [The basic reason for this is that reporting the extent of Ukrainian casualties would likely destroy support for continuing the war]. This is also true on other platforms: compare the one-sided material produced when you search ‘Ukraine Russia’ on YouTube versus the relatively balanced and accurate material that ‘Israel Palestine’ now produces. On Twitter/X pro-Palestine content (at least from certain sources) is not only being widely circulated but seemingly even amplified.¹

This is all even more strange when you consider that it follows the most deadly attack on Israelis and Israeli citizens in decades. Isn’t it strange that the generally pro-Israel Western media is giving more coverage to Palestinians after that attack than it did when Israel killed thousands in contexts where it was not even retaliating? This frontpage from The Independent in the UK, for instance, is simply unprecedented in that context:

Of course, the frontpage merely reports facts, but the whole point is that in the past such facts were often buried in favour of pro-Israel narratives. In 2022 many media outlets, in South Africa and internationally, simply ignored or downplayed an Amnesty International report concluding Israel was guilt of practising apartheid. And there are hundreds of other examples over many decades.

Establishment proxies in new radical clothes

Let us move on from the media to particular individuals. The key point I want to draw attention to here is this: if the hypothesis about US strategic realignment is correct, that means that some/many of those who have become loudly vocal on Palestine - and are being given the largest platforms to do so - are not in fact standing up to the proverbial ‘establishment’ but are actually functionaries of it.

This is not very important for the immediate moment, since the arguments these individuals are making are often (and very obviously) correct. But it will be crucial for subsequent moments, when the move towards a permanent settlement in Palestine begins and in other contexts when the United States decides to invade another country illegally and these individuals justify it, or when the USA interferes in a democracy and some of these individuals actively facilitate or endorse that.

There are examples of such individuals in South Africa whose conduct in the media or on social media evinces this kind of dynamic. Some high profile examples in South Africa include Redi Tlhabi, Thuli Madonsela and Qaanitah Hunter (News24). In the bigger scheme of things there is enough evidence of these individuals’ actual geopolitical leanings for this not to matter a great deal. Some examples from the UK include James Schneider², Owen Jones³ and Barnaby Raine⁴. Other examples from the US are Trevor Noah and Mehdi Hasan, along with ‘former Pentagon officials’ like .

Perhaps the two most blatant examples are the most recent. The first is Greta Thunberg, who I have suggested elsewhere exposed her geopolitical biases by keeping completely silent on the Nordstream pipeline attacks which created what is estimated to be the biggest single methane gas release in human history. If there was ever a moment for global warming hero Thunberg to have expressed a strong opinion on a war, that was it. Why did she stay silent? Initial media propaganda implausibly blamed Russia, but a later report from one of the most credible living journalists in US (Seymour Hersh) history pointed, more plausibly, a finger at the United States. Only then did reports start emerging in the US press bizarrely attempting to place the blame for that highly sophisticated attack on a private, drunken Ukrainian operation. More evidence keeps trickling out that suggests Hersh’s version is correct, such as recent confirmation from a Danish witness that ‘dark ships’ near the explosion site shortly before it occurred were actually US navy ships.

Thunberg’s silence is consistent with that of a person who knew at the very outset that criticising the event would ultimately mean criticising the United States and found that undesirable. Now, suddenly, she becomes a pro-Palestine activist and is given massive global media platforms when other high profile activists for the same cause for decades remain entirely marginalised. I suggest that this is not incidental but the consequence of something systematic.

The second blatant example, who is the real focus of this article, is Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Solving the mystery of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ newfound radicalism

If you believe social media and major US media outlets, Ta-Nehisi Coates is to apartheid in Israel almost what Nelson Mandela was to apartheid in South Africa. I hope that to most readers, even only barely familiar with Coates, this is evidently absurd. If you know a little more about Coates’ background, you will know that he previously equivocated on the Israel-Palestine issue as captured in the memorable headline that “Ta-Nehisi Coates sings of Zionism”.

Back then Coates was positioning himself as a radical within the United States, seemingly at the forefront of the intellectual case for reparations to African Americans. In reality the role he played was effectively to defang the cause for reparations, just as his sponsor Barack Obama had put himself forward as a radical politician to change America for the better but ultimately, very deliberately, protected the status quo and agencies guilty of horrible human rights abuses. I see this strategy - of positioning an establishment functionary as the face of a particular, strong radical argument in order to ultimately defeat it - being used repeatedly across countries and across a range of issues.

Coates’ new book, The Message, was launched by the the gushing headline, ‘The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates’. Since then it’s been a dizzying set of headlines and interviews on the most prestigious media platforms in the United States. Among just a small selection of articles and commentary that have received millions, even tens of millions of views, have included the following remarks: ‘using his standing in the liberal mainstream…to speak out on behalf of Palestinians…is incredible’, ‘he is our truest successor to James Baldwin’, ‘he has…permanently raised the bar for successful mainstream writers’, ‘he has taken a quantum leap with his new book’, ‘his redemption arc after being an Obama toadie…genuinely inspiring and deserves respect’, ‘brave’, ‘courageous’ and so forth. All this for acknowledging that Israel is practising apartheid and ‘apartheid is bad’.

The publicity from the gushing New York Magazine headline was followed by publicity generated from a supposed attack on Coates in a widely-viewed CBS News interview. This ‘attack’ was actually quite mild compared to what many other pro-Palestine commentators have received often without even being given a platform to respond. Moreover, when Coates receives criticism it is usually followed by powerful protection for him. In the case of the first highly-publicised (6min) interview, the anchor who attacked Coates was forced to apologise within days. Without pausing, Coates then appeared on platforms facilitated in promotional interviews by various other high-profile establishment functionaries like Mehdi Hasan, Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah. A few days ago he received praise in Foreign Policy, an outlet that reliably promotes the merits of ‘Western’ hegemony.

The recent canonisation of Coates as the ‘moral voice of America’ on Israel-Palestine is an example so extreme that, to an objective party, it looks like a caricature. Except it is very serious. The man who not long ago would not speak ill of the extensively documented heinous actions of the Israeli state has suddenly had an epiphany: ‘apartheid is bad’! For this, he is lauded and canonised across the biggest platforms in American media. Of course, there are pro-Israel extremists who attack him for saying the obvious and this is then used as evidence for his supposed bravery and radicalism. In truth, Coates is the same establishment functionary he always was and his sudden radical rhetoric dovetails perfectly with the hypothesis I began this article with: US strategic realignment in the Middle East.

Aside from the fact that listening to Coates gives the impression of someone who is not at all intellectually profound, he is not the brave, anti-establishment radical that he is now being portrayed to be: he is the pseudo-intellectual advance guard of a coordinated change of US geopolitical strategy in the Middle East. He is the most high-profile example, but there are many others playing a similar game. And it is important to understand this because otherwise you might be suckered into thinking that such people are really progressive individuals standing up for truth against power - an error that could send you down many bad roads in the future.

1. This goes against the public image of what Elon Musk is using Twitter/X for, which I will address in a separate article. In short: the public image is wrong, which is not surprising since it is largely a fact-free construct that operates on the basis of very crude logic.

2. Schneider has been building a lengthy CV of progressive-looking credentials including most notable having been part of Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for prime minister in the UK. But when you put his secret origins as a right-wing conservative together with some especially dubious connections, things look very different.

3. Jones positioned himself as a left-wing progressive for most of his career, but at crucial moments participated in the baseless smearing of Jeremy Corbyn as anti-semitic or autocratic. That behaviour is a typical example of the crucial strategic role that fake progressive play in undermining processes that could be bring substantive improvements in society.

4. Raine is the son of one of the executives of the infamous ‘payday loans’ companies in the UK, Henry Raine, whose exploitative lending practices ultimately led to them being shutdown. Raine Jr has never convincingly explained how and why his political views departed so dramatically from those of his family (also ‘committed Zionists’) and personal background. (This happens but it is unusual and most false backstories can be detected with enough patience and attention to detail). It is no surprise that Raine has been extensively promoted by Novara Media which is itself increasingly suspected of being a front for other interests. (If you are a good judge of character, I would suggest you only need to pay attention to the face of one of its hosts Aaron Bastani to see why).