Paul: Here Is the Missing Context in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Message”
2024/10/25 Leave a comment
Of note:
…Herein lies the most dispiriting aspect of settler colonialist theory in practice. Activists and institutions can voice ever louder and longer land acknowledgments, but no one is seriously proposing returning the United States to Native Americans. Similarly, if “From the river to the sea” is taken literally, where does that leave Israeli Jews, many of whom were exiled not only from Europe and Russia, but also from surrounding Muslim states? The ideology of settler colonialism offers little beyond a hopeless impasse, that “history is evil and deserves to be repealed” or what Kirsch calls a “longing for redemptive destruction.”
In their mutual resistance to an end game, an ironic parallel emerges between the “free Palestine” movement and Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which has declined to offer a viable plan for how the current conflict ends. It may be that neither side can find a realistic solution that can claim pure justice. What remains, in its absence, are vengeance and despair.
Source: Paul: Here Is the Missing Context in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Message”
