From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

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In Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book “The Message,” he writes of a trip he took to Israel and the West Bank in May of 2023. The message is composed of four different essays. One is about a trip to Senegal. One is about a trip to a place where his book was banned. But it is the essay about Coates’s time in the West Bank the really anchors the collection.

Coates, by virtue of who he is, cannot write a book about Israel and the Palestinians without it becoming a major media and even ideological event. But his own project, as he tells it, was to go to this place that he had grown up hearing about. This place that he had been told was too complicated for him to understand and to figure out what he thought of it, to take seriously what he would see. And what he saw shocked him.

This book has been criticized for not being a whole picture, and it’s not a whole picture. There is much that is left out even on the Palestinian side that I think could be there, should be there. We talk about that. At the same time, when I went to the West Bank, what Coates saw is what I saw, too. Compared to other things you can read, think, Coates’s rendering of how Israel and Palestinians got here, I think it leaves a lot out. But his rendering of where here is, at least for Palestinians living in the places he visited, is a lot sharper and less clouded than most of what I’ve seen. As always, my email. ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me back, Ezra.

So a lot of the book here is about stories. So before you went to Israel, before you went to the West Bank, what was the story of the region, the conflict, the deals of people that you felt you knew?

I grew up in this activist tradition, this Black activist tradition, where things were kind of said, but the knowledge was not empirical, always footnoted. or It was the Israelis are doing something bad to the Palestinians. And the Palestinians are basically the Blacks in that situation. That’s a rough translation of it. It probably would have been a, they took the Palestinians’ land. It would have been like crude like that.

And you go out into the world and you see that politics in general are just more complicated, period. Right? You know what I mean? You see, things need to be cited, footnoted. And then I came into journalism— and this is the story I tell in the book. And I don’t think I’ll be able to say this anywhere else but here. But journalism, like, it solved — I was looking for something. I was looking for a way to pursue knowledge in the world. And I found this field where if you pick up the phone and you say, “I’m from here,” people actually answer your questions.

Isn’t it a miracle.

It is a miracle. I couldn’t believe it. When you get to a place like The Atlantic have resources behind you. You heard me? So all of these maybe academic papers that you wanted to read that you couldn’t get access too, suddenly you have access to them. You suddenly have time to read books. You know what I mean? In a way that you didn’t before because they’re paying you. At least in my case, they were paying me a decent rate.

And so this opening happened. But I think what also happened was the fact of the field at that period in time meant that generally the kind of person that was going to be in the kind of journalism that I wanted to practice was probably going to have a certain set of politics. Not just around Israel and Palestine, but in general. And I’m still — even though I published the book, I’m still working my way through this. So you’ll have to forgive me if I’m thinking even now.

But what I would say is I think there was kind of a default Zionism. A hum that was just kind of around me. It was not explicitly stated often. It’s not particularly profane. But when I went to write “The Case for Reparations,” and I wrote that section about using the state of Israel as an analog for Black America, nobody questioned it. Nobody.

And for people who haven’t read it, what you say is that there were reparations from Germany to the Jews.

Actually, to the state of Israel.

To the state of Israel. The Jews through the state of Israel.

Yes, it’s important to distinguish between that. Specifically to the state. That story comes out. It’s very, very well received. It’s probably the most well-received piece of journalism I’ve ever written. But there’s dissent. And the dissent was, you are using this as an example, but it actually undercuts the morality of reparations. And I thought about that for a really, really long time.

So what leads you to visit? Who invites you? When do you go? Who takes you around?

In 2016, the Palestine Festival of Literature invited me. I wanted to go then. Didn’t work. I think maybe I was working on “We Were Eight Years in Power” or whatever. I signed up to go like maybe two years later. Broke my toe, could not go. It was a lot of walking, so I’m glad I didn’t try to go.

Covid happens. Couldn’t go then. And then after Covid, I reached out to the people that run it. I said, I really think, I got to get here. I really think I have to get here. I got to get this figured out. It’s a scary thing to go. I was scared to go. I was very, very scared to go.

Physically or emotionally?

Emotionally. Emotionally. It wasn’t like, I think something’s going to happen to me. But I thought, I had a vague sense that there was a chance that I was going to see something that I would not be able to come back and act like I just didn’t see.

You’re there for 10 days.

I was there 10 days, so I was five days with Palestine Festival of Literature. And the last five I was mostly hosted by people who were in the orbit of Breaking the Silence. I broke off with them for a couple of things. Myself with people that I just met that I wanted to spend more time with.

For people don’t know, Breaking the Silence is?

A group of I.D.F. veterans who oppose the occupation. And they just took me around. They took me around. They took me to talk to a lot of Palestinians. They took me to South Hebron Hills. They took me to the settlement where there is effectively a shrine to Meir Kahane and the grave of Baruch Goldstein is there and it’s honored.

Baruch Goldstein, who’s a Jewish terrorist who murdered.

Unloaded automatic weapon and just shot a bunch of Muslim Palestinians while they were praying. Took me to the South, Hebron Hills. And while they’re doing this, they are narrating also their time in the I.D.F. — I served right there. I was in that house during the Second Intifada. This is what I did. This is how I interpreted it at the time.

Did you spend any time when you were there with people who I would classify politically as the Israeli right or the Israeli center? You went with Breaking the Silence, which is an anti-occupation group with a Palestinian Literary Festival. Did you go around with anybody who would say, no, we’re doing the right thing here. Or even we’re not doing enough here.

No.

Why?

There are things in this world that I see that I just don’t want to hear the justification for. I just don’t think can be justified. I don’t want to hear — I don’t know what I can glean from a justification for — and I’m talking about in an American context — segregation.

I don’t know what necessarily I can glean from a justification for enslavement by hearing somebody like interviewing somebody and say, tell me why this is legal. Some things come down to, for me, just a moral decision. And I actually think journalists do this all the time. I think we all draw a line somewhere about what we feel is out of bounds and what we feel is beyond.

For me, I was willing to entertain probably a debate from people who were anti-occupation, but maybe not necessarily anti-Zionist. Maybe it would be classified as liberal Zionists even. All the way over to people who thought Zionism was a terrible idea and the worst thing that had ever happened. The justification for settlements was outside of my frame.

But that does wipe out all of Israeli society almost, right?

I was concerned with what I don’t know. And what I haven’t heard. And for me, Palestinian voices have been pushed so far out of the frame. Like that is the thing that is hard to access. And I think this is open for critique. But I made a conscious decision, frankly, in the language, you know what I mean?

Actually, in how that essay is actually written and even in how I pursued my reporting to do it from a certain angle. I don’t perceive it as a complete survey of settlements, Israeli society, et cetera. But I was driving through one of the settlements, and I’ll never forget this — and I describe it in the book.

And we’re going through one of the settlements and we’re looking out and I see a guard dog, like really, really aggressively yapping. And then I look and I see that he’s actually restrained by a cord. And then as I look up, I see that there’s another cord. Then there’s a horizontal cord that is extending straight across. And I followed down that cord and maybe a few yards later I see another dog on a leash. And as we start driving, that dog starts barking. And then another one. And another one. And then, like I tell you, that’s the fence. The dogs are the fence. And it’s like — what can justify that?

I want to spend some time just in the trip. First day you step foot in the West Bank. What are your first visual impressions of the place? Like what if you went back and wrote in your diary that night, your journal before you’ve had time really to process, what is visible to your eye?

The signs.

Big red signs. The signs essentially saying Palestinians can go here or Israelis can go here and Palestinians cannot, or Palestinians can go here and Israelis cannot. I am obviously attuned to see stuff like that. I bring myself with me. The red roofs. Which I was then told what that was. And the fact that actually marked where the settlements were. I always get this mixed up. But basically I don’t think it was the cisterns, but the big water tanks on the roofs.

The water tanks are the most indelible sight for me.

Yeah.

Right? You can tell whether you’re going by a Palestinian or Jewish village, city by whether or not there are water tanks on the roof. Because the Palestinians get less water.

Right.

So that’s my first day on the West Bank. We’re driving to Hebron and then we arrive at Hebron. And there was so much poverty. There are things that I don’t even feel comfortable like talking about that I saw that. I just — I just can’t. I can’t say. But we get off the bus. And our guide is taking us through the old city of Hebron.

And the soldiers are there and they’re there with their guns and they are policing our movements, but not to the extent that they’re policing our guide’s movements. And not to the extent that they are policing the schoolchildren who I’m watching as the morning, trying to get where they’re going. And you can see it. You can see the schoolchildren are trying to go down the street and some guy would with a big gun telling some six, seven, eight-year-old, you got to go back this other way.

Being stopped when I’m trying to support a vendor there, and I’m asking me my religion, and it being clear that — and here’s what’s interesting about this — not that I am a Christian, not that I am a Christian, but either my mother or my grandmother was a Christian. That being the decision for whether I can pass.

And I say that to highlight at that point, that is not a question of whether I have accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior. That’s something deeper. That’s something else. That’s when you start getting closer to race. What was your mother? What was your grandmother?

You write about that, if this had happened in America, I would have told you that the soldier who stopped me was Black, and I guess he was here too. Tell me about that line.

I mean, to the extent that race is a thing, I guess what he was of African ancestry. But I have maintained in almost all of my writing that race is a social construct. And so what we think about as race here did not apply there in the same way. I’m not saying it didn’t apply at all, but it is something to see, quote unquote, “Black” through American eyes, quote unquote, “Black” I.D.F. soldiers lording it over literally blond and blue-eyed Palestinian children. I saw this. It really didn’t start the next day. It was the next day when I really began to say, OK, we went to East Jerusalem. And I was just like, oh. I know what this is.

Tell me about East Jerusalem.

We went to Al-Aqsa Mosque. We were trying to go to Al-Aqsa Mosque. And one thing that — and I should make this clear about, about PalFest. I’ve been asked before by other groups to go. But I told them no. And I told them no because usually, very often the request is, we are trying to organize writers to go see this. Write something and then do X, Y, and Z. And I was like, that just is a little too much for me. You can’t tell me I have to react X, Y, and Z before I’ve even seen anything.

So they were very good, despite having their obvious politics, about letting us just see. They said, OK, to we’re going to do it the way Palestinian Muslims would do it. We’re going to go and try to see this the way they would do it. And we were immediately stopped. And I’m watching people stream out, unmolested Americans, and they just leave us there to wait.

There’s no, we’re checking X, Y and Z out. There’s no, there’s a problem with this. It’s just we can do it. And that was immediately familiar. And then I came back a few days later and came as I would if I were an American tourist. And the process was totally seamless. Completely, completely, completely different.

Tell me about time there, and the way time is used as a tool of humiliation. Control.

Yeah.

Separation.

It’s not just that on the West Bank, there are separate roads. It’s that the roads that Palestinians have to take are longer or more circuitous or maybe where you actually have to go is a 30-minute walk. But the way the roads are designed, it turns it into something completely different.

And along those roads can be stopped at any moment for any reason at all. A checkpoint can appear out of nowhere, flying checkpoint suddenly, and you’re stopped for God knows how long. When I went to the airport, when I was leaving, although it was seamless to actually get out, my driver, my cab driver was a Palestinian — and I’m going to try to get this right— resident of Jerusalem. They stopped that cab. They stopped that cab, and they searched us, asked us for ID and everything.

Something that haunts me is towards the end of my trip, it was a dinner of these Breaking the Silence folks. And one of the guys talking about how he was manning a checkpoint and they stopped this Palestinian family. It was a father and a son and maybe somebody else. And they start just searching what he has. And the guy has a drum.

And they’re joking back and forth with the guy, and they tell him, hey, why don’t you play the drum for us. And the guy plays the drum and he said, “I thought I was joking with that guy. And it’s only years later, after I realized, he was probably terrified.” And I mean, I immediately thought, man, that dude was probably terrified.

When I was scheduling things out there, I’d have these days I was going around with Israeli Jews, I’d have these days I was going around with Palestinians. Sometimes it would be inside Green Line Israel, sometimes it would be in the West Bank. And one of the things that quickly became clear was that scheduling these two kinds of things was really different.

The Israeli Jews could get places roughly the way I can here. I mean, you might get caught in traffic. But you say, let’s meet up at 8 a.m. or something right there. They’re going to be there at 8 a.m. And the Palestinians, it was totally different. For no reason, like practically if they were coming to pick me up inside green line Israel, they could just be left there for four hours. There had to be this huge error bar. When we were going to meet people, we would go past places and you’d feel everybody tense up.

But the flying checkpoint or the particular checkpoint wasn’t up that day, or it wasn’t manned at that moment, but a week ago it had been manned. And then they were there for 97 minutes for no particular reason. And there was just the way time existed for the different people I was with was completely different. The way you could plan out your life.

I mean, I’d be talking to people who lived in Ramallah, but they had family — an elderly mother who lived in another city. And what it would take to plan to go visit their mother was monstrous. A lot of the worst stuff I knew when I went around —

When was the last time you had been there before this trip?

It had been it had been longer than I’d actually thought. It had been — I think I checked this and it was 2009.

Had things changed? Was this worse?

Dramatically.

Than 2009?

Worse. I mean a lot about it felt differently to me. And in many ways, Israeli society felt very different to me. But I don’t think I ever met anybody on either side who was not touched by true violence. It was always so close.

I was sitting with an Israeli Jew who owned a winery, and in this particular case, he was — this had gotten set up for me. This was just shown me like one slice of life. And he was really just trying to sell me on the wines. He was not a very political person, or at least did not want to be.

And we’re eating this cheese. And I’m like, this is a good cheese. And just he mentions basically offhandedly that the person who made it was killed in on Oct. 7. And the body was found weeks later. You would trip in to horror, right, all the time. But in some ways, like the horror gets reported. It was the banality — I mean, I knew about the checkpoints, but it was different driving around. I don’t think I realized how they just kind of appear and disappear.

Yeah.

Right? It was the trash, right? The trash on some roads and not others. It was those things. And at times I could tell it was almost annoying some of the people I was with, because I was getting obsessed by these banal questions of public service provision. And they wanted, like, they wanted to tell me about these true horrors, and which I mean the point was not that I wasn’t listening, but it was like, that gets out there. It was what it’s like to move around that I think if most people went there is what they would not be able to morally drop afterwards.

Yeah, I mean for me, I think about the water. I think I mean, we kind of touched on it.

The water is the most.

South Hebron Hills. We were in Susya and Tuba, two small — I don’t even know what to call them. I mean, they’re not quite towns, but basically this was a group of people who had lived in caves. And I hesitate to use that language because of what it conjures, and what it looks like is not what it actually conjures. These caves are quite improved. You know what I mean? Like they have —

They’ve remodeled these caves. I went here too.

So you know what I mean. Like you say cave and you think people, you know what I mean? And it’s not that. But this is in area C and what they said was they can’t get hooked up to the main water network. And that just mean.

When I drive to a settlement and there’s swimming pools like right here, and over here, these people can’t really access water. That’s all very — like that brings up things that are very, very familiar.

When I would talk to people about things like that moment, right. We are trying to get hooked up to the water and we can’t. Or I was talking to a city administrator in one of the larger Palestinian cities, and he — I mean, this was the kind of person — he had lived in America for a long time. He had a civil engineering degree. I think he had been educated in the North Carolina university system.

When people talk about Palestinian leadership that is just trying to make things better — this guy was just trying to get a garbage dump sited. They needed a place to put trash. And you would just hear these genuinely Kafkaesque stories of interfacing with Israeli bureaucratic process. And there would be versions of it that were really sinister.

If you wanted to report violence from Israeli settlers, you would have to go to an Israeli settlement and go report that in a police station where the police were Israeli settlers. And then maybe go up the line in the legal system of more and more Israeli settlers. I mean, that’s who’s running —

The judges.

The judges. And you would end up spending months, years of your life with this. There could be reprisal, only to eventually usually your claim would be denied. But this also happened in all kinds of ways that were more just — we want to get the garbage dump sited. We want to get hooked up to the water. We want a permit to expand our houses in area C.

That’s a huge one.

And you’d end up in these endless appeal processes which you’re in a process that’s legitimate. Somebody’s listening to you.

This costs money too, by the way.

This costs a lot of money.

This costs money. Actually, all of this costs money.

So I’m curious because you’ve done a lot of studying of this. It made me think a lot about things I’d read of the American South. The sort of — I’m curious what you thought about this domination by bureaucracy.

Obviously, the thing that I would immediately allude to weirdly is “Case for Reparations,” which on its face is based on a system that does not look racist. G.I. Bill, home loans. This instinct during the New Deal to build this gigantic middle class, which does not look, in fact, none of the laws, on their face say anything about race at all. But through bureaucracy, by delegating power to certain people who you, in fact, know are racist, you can effect the same thing.

Here it was obviously much more labyrinthine and complicated. But the impulse is the same, which is to say, how do I activate the appearance of process, law, in some cases democracy, and still achieve the same result? I just had this feeling when I would listen to people talk, and maybe this was me pulling it all together at that point was, this all feels like — you take the bureaucracy, take the violence, take the water. You take, for instance, building a fence in such a way so that you can no longer access your olive grove.

It just sounds like somebody saying to you, we kind of really don’t want you here. It would really be better if you just kind of left. And making it as difficult as possible, sometimes in ways that are horrific, sometimes in ways that are byzantine and a little bit more subtle, that we just would really, really like you to leave.

I saw this in East Jerusalem what I mean?

People who had been there for generations. And maybe you have a grandchild, and you want to have another bedroom for that child. Well, I can’t get the permit. There’s a permit process that I have to go through. My permit is denied. And meanwhile, there are settlers in East Jerusalem who have no problem expanding at all. Like you’re seeing it right in front of you.

Let me texture that out just a little bit, because I think there’s something worth saying about that, which is so there are different kinds of IDs you can have as a Palestinian. But one thing you’ll hear from Israeli Jews is that this is the thing that makes Israel different than some of the places it’s compared to apartheid South Africa, that there are Palestinian Israelis, that they can vote. They have protection under many Israeli laws. So I’m curious how the kind of situation and the laws around Palestinian Israelis read to you.

They’re still second class citizens. They are not the equivalent of Jewish Israelis. And you can see that very, very specifically in the law. I mean, this is one of the things we were just talking about. If you’re a Jewish Israeli, and you fall in love with somebody else, no matter where they’re from, it’s pretty easy for them to become a citizen and live with you in Tel Aviv.

God forbid you be a Palestinian Israeli in Tel Aviv and fall in love with somebody that lives in the West Bank.

And then you say, why is that? And this, to me actually like the really, really core problem. How do you define a Jewish state? And if you define it as an overwhelming majority, say 80-20, which is what I’ve seen, you end up activating controls to make that so.

And so you actually really — it’s actually quite dangerous to have Palestinian Israelis on the same level of citizenship as Jewish Israelis, if you define a Jewish state by demography. The laws have to do certain things to maintain that. And so it’s like there’s a motive, an incentive, I mean, maybe even a mandate to have second-tier citizenship.

That, to me, I just — is indefensible. And it’s especially indefensible with a country that has, a quote unquote, special relationship, as we always say, with the United States of America, where some of the most violent and most significant battles have been fought over people even having no citizenship at all or a second class citizenship.

When I would speak to Palestinians who are caught in that particular web, for instance, around East Jerusalem, because it’s crowded and because there is a resistance to letting Palestinians build, they have made it possible to build these weird, very lightly regulated, very close together, huge apartment buildings for Palestinians like right outside the green line. But you can keep your citizenship. So they’re pushing them further out.

And the belief among many Palestinians is that one day they’re just going to revoke that citizenship. And sort of at every level of Palestinian life I would talk to people, the feeling was something that you reflected a couple of minutes ago. I’d say, well, what do you think all this policy is about? What do you think they want? And say, they want me to leave. What they are trying to do is get me, if I live in East Jerusalem, to move outside the wall.

If I live outside the wall, because of the way that is un-policed and sort of ungoverned, move further out such that I don’t have that citizenship anymore. And if I live further out, what they really want is for me to go to Jordan. And universally among every Palestinian I spoke to— and this seemed consonant with policy to me — that’s what the Israelis Jews truly wanted. Right? That was the point of policy to the extent practicable.

Certainly seems correct to me. That’s what I seem to observe. And one of the great sticky, difficult things to process was in the case of Jim Crow, you really have a group of people who are just trying to dominate. That’s it. They don’t have any sort of — there’s no past trauma. All human beings have some trauma. There certainly is no collective trauma like you would find among Jewish Israelis.

And so on some level I would feel this kind of sympathy, just understanding for this idea that only among our own, only in the state that we absolutely control can we ultimately feel safe. And yet I would see this thing come out of it that was also familiar at the same time. I’m still kind of grappling with that. I’m still really, really, really kind of grappling with that, because I have the feeling for understanding. In fact, I shouldn’t even say I have the feeling. I’ve grown up around that. I’ve known people who felt like that. That’s a thing that kind of latently exists in a lot of African-American minds. It’s never been possible. We’re very American. So that there isn’t a huge movement around state building. But the dream of a Wakanda, for instance. Like that. One day we’re going to go somewhere and we’re not going to have to deal with any of this.

But to see that dream effectively meant there was one tier of citizenship for half the population, and the other half, we’re always something less. How can we ever fulfill this part about being democratic, about being fair when the mandate is have to have an overwhelming majority of a certain group of people? That just feels like it automatically cedes the ground.

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One of the struggles I had with your book is I went to many of the same places you went, and almost everywhere you went, I had almost the exact same reaction. There are very few words in the travel log here that I would disagree with.

It’s the places you didn’t go and the people you didn’t want to bring in who also kind of echo in my head. And to bring some of them in, I think one of the things you didn’t reckon with here, you reckon a lot with Israeli Jewish violence towards Palestinians and not with Palestinian violence towards Israelis or Jews, going all the way back.

You’re attentive to massacres that happened around the formation of the State of Israel when they went from Jews to Palestinians. But the other way around goes unmentioned.

But I think when you’re asking that question, you can’t understand how Israel got to the answer it got to without reckoning with that. Because there were people who came to a different answer. They wanted separation. They believed in a two-state solution. They fought for it. Some of them died for it. Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated.

And what destroyed their political movement was suicide bombings. One of the things that I do not find Israeli Jews unclear about is that they are oppressors right now. I do not find that they hide from that fact. Now many of them say, well, what would you have me do? I was part of the peace movement. I was out there in the streets in ‘98, ‘99, 2000, 2001, 2002. I don’t always have a good answer, but that is their self-conception. That they understood this had become something that was lurching in a monstrous direction. They had built political power to try to change it.

And what they feel lost them that chance was not just failures on their own side, although I think many of them will admit to many of their own political failures, but agency on the other side, deals met with violence, with blowing up buses and children dying. I mean, you know some of this story. I know you’ve read a bunch of these books. How do you think about that?

I can’t accept it.

Which part can’t you accept?

I can’t accept that your interest in a true democracy was destroyed by violence from your partner. I just can’t accept that. First of all, I think even in this rendering that we have here, I suspect that there are reasons for why that suicide bombing even happened. I suspect there’s a context for that. But let’s put that aside for a moment.

1830, I think, is the year. Nat Turner is enslaved. And he decides that he’s going to lead a rebellion. In the course of that rebellion he kills — and the people that follow him — men, women, children in their crib, just like axe-handles swung, slaughter babies in their crib. Horrific, horrific violence.

I’ve thought about that a lot, because in a lot of circles in Nat Turner is a kind of hero. And we can never know who he would be. But I have to believe they were enslaved people who saw it and said, I just — I can’t be a part of this. I can’t do this.

Nat Turner’s violence, though, whatever it was, and however unjust, did not make slavery therefore justifiable. It did not destroy — and there was a blowback, by the way. There were like, there were people who will sit here and will argue to you with some evidence that, in fact, Virginia was on the road to emancipation. And this was the thing that blew it up. After Nat Turner, you see this complete backlash.

But enslavement is unjust. Apartheid is unjust. And what I saw over there, and not even what I saw, but what I read coming back afterwards, the reports I read, which I’m sure you’ve read from Amnesty International, from — with B’Tselem. From B’Tselem. From Human Rights Watch. Hearing Benny Morris, you know him, whose policies are probably not mine, say yes,

in fact, on the West Bank, it really, really is apartheid. Reading about — we’re going to talk about this later with books — but reading about the history of Israel’s cooperation with South Africa and the back and forth, which goes way, way, way back. I just I can’t accept that the violence committed by the people who have less power somehow relieves you of the burden of forming a just society.

I have had a long and really contentious relationship with the idea of nonviolence among African Americans. OK? We have endured so much violence from this country. Just so much. I mean, kids shot down. The Civil Rights movement is just a catalog of violent acts committed against Black people.

We never had the luxury of saying that the violence of white racism and the violence of white supremacy somehow destroyed our movement. It’s just not an option. And so I question your commitment to justice, to democracy, if it can’t endure this.

And lastly, as the last thing I’ll say is, probably one of the most affecting conversations I had after Oct. 7 with some of the folks in Breaking the Silence who lost people on Oct. 7. And have to somehow figure out a way. They didn’t say, hey, I’m done with this. My principles are out the door. They have to find some sort of way, even amidst that violence, to adhere to their ideals and their beliefs.

I think I agree with half of this. And the half I agree with is that if your commitment to democracy, to human rights, cannot withstand these kinds of moments, this kind of violence, then yeah, were not committed to democracy or not committed to human rights.

I don’t think Israel is committed to democracy. I found nothing more strange then being there and having person after person tell me that Israel was on the horizon of losing its status as a liberal democracy.

And I would say to them every time, Israel is not a liberal democracy. It is a sovereign over millions of people who cannot vote. It is not a liberal democracy. And in my view, it probably never will be. Right?

Wait, wait, wait, hold up. And what was the answer you got?

I would not say I got good answers. But I do think here you’re moving a little bit between the question of the morality of a position, the commitment of a position, and the politics of a position. You say early in the book that all your writing is politics. And I think that is true for mine.

So I do think there’s a sort of difficulty. Go back to the Nat Turner moment. As you say, that probably did or at least plausibly did push Virginia off of a path it otherwise on. And Nat Turner was not the leadership of what would be the sovereign government in the bordering state.

I mean, your book does not engage with Hamas, doesn’t engage with Palestinian Authority. One thing that I think was a bit absent is agency among Palestinians, too, and Palestinian political players. Or even forget agency right. Aspiration. Because if you want to say that where Israel is now is an immoral state, I think you’re right. I don’t have a problem saying that.

But in terms of what will change any of that, or what will change the actual lived situation in the West Bank or lived situation in Gaza, it has to be a political settlement that runs somehow through a deal with Israel. But what people call the vaunted complexity of the conflict. Which you’re, I think correctly, often frustrated by, is if this is impossible to understand when it’s not. I don’t think it’s the history. It’s the irreconcilability of interests and needs and stories.

I never felt when I was there or when I read about it that what I’m reading is complex in the sense that it is hard to understand. It is complex in that it is hard to see how you get out of it with people being who they are. I’ll say this other piece, which maybe makes this a little bit more concrete.

The Israeli founding father, so to speak, you spend the most time on, is Jabotinsky. People don’t know Jabotinsky. He’s the leader of the revisionist Zionists. Very, very violent guy. And among early Israelis, he is one who I think says clearly there will just be war here. And we will have to crush the people who live here in order to live here.

Now, he’s, in that period of Israel, a controversial figure. He’s not initially allowed to be buried in Israel, but I think it’s fair to say we live in Jabotinsky’s Israel. Netanyahu’s father was his Secretary. But he leads to Menachem Begin is his protege that leads to Likud. Likud is Netanyahu’s party. But what destroys all the people who made him a marginal figure, I mean, what destroys Labor as a functional force in Israel, is that violence.

So, I mean can say, I think, that that’s immoral of Israelis to allow the violence to knock them off course in the way it did. But nevertheless, it did. And so, I mean, I think that’s where my mind hitches. You have to account for it somehow if you’re trying to think about, well, what does anybody do here?

I’ve been sitting here thinking about the question you asked, because it doesn’t sit with me. It’s not your question that doesn’t sit well with me. It’s actually my answer. And what you asked, well, why didn’t I talk to — why didn’t I see some of the — I guess what would we call more a hard right-wingers.

Would say the hard right.

Just somebody that thinks this is a good idea, maybe.

Not even there are people who think it’s a good idea. And there are people who don’t have a — I would say the center of Israeli society now has just given up. It’s resignation. Mixed post Oct. 7 with fury. And then there’s a right wing, which I think in the resignation, in the inability of the center to come up with a different politics, the right wing took control. And their project is expansionistic. And I think expulsion, ultimately. So that’s my view of Israel.

That’s what you would say is I have not engaged that portion of the society. Right?

Yes.

OK, all right. I think that’s actually fair. I felt lied to. I felt lied to by my craft. I felt lied to by the major media organizations. By media organizations, I mean, like producers of books, films, et cetera. Like the whole corpus of storytelling, which is what this book is obsessed with.

I wanted to know how that happened. I wanted to know why there was so much difference between what you saw and what I saw. And what I felt like I understood back here in America and with most people I knew understood back here in America. That immediately forced me to privilege — and this was just a decision I made. OK, who am I not hearing from? Who have I not heard from?

And so that necessarily means marginalizing a portion of it. But what I felt was largely like, the narratives that I’ve heard have been discredited. For me. It doesn’t mean that there’s nothing true or you know what I mean. Anything to be learned in it. But in terms of my question, how did I get this so wrong? I probably was not compelled to have a conversation with people who I feel even now it was in their interest for me to get it wrong.

But how about on the Palestinian side? I said earlier, there’s no member of the P.A. in this book. No member of Hamas. I’ve heard you say elsewhere that that’s because Hamas is in Gaza. But there’s a lot of Hamas in the West Bank. They control villages, right. They’re there. They’re suppressed by PA and Israeli Security Cooperation.

One thing that I think we all tend to miss in this is the role of religion on both sides. I think that when you are covering this as an American, and I’ve said this on the show before, I worry that we have just enough access to really get this wrong. Because I mean, tons of Israelis speak English. Enough Palestinians do. But the ones who do on both sides tend to be much more secular, much more educated.

I think compared to most outlets, I’ve had a fairly wide range of opinion on Israel on the show and on — I’ve had everyone from right wing Israeli commentators to actual Hamas apologists. And still I believe that maybe with one exception of people I’ve had on that if you got all the people I’ve had on in a room, they would solve it. And that’s because it’s not really representative.

Ezra, Ezra, why? Why is one group right wing advocates or what you just said and the other group Hamas apologists?

What do you mean?

Like, why are they not right wing apologists?

They are right wing apologists.

That’s just not what you just said. Like you called the Hamas folks. And I’m not saying they’re not apologists.

I have a —

compared to — when I say I’ve had right wing Israelis on, I mean people who support Netanyahu, not people who support Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. I do not put — I mean, Hamas is a complicated organization. I’ve tried to treat it on the show as a complicated organization.

I know you have.

It did spend many, many years specifically targeting killing civilians. I take that as different.

You take that different than Netanyahu?

I take that as different than Netanyahu. Yeah.

Hm.

Certainly the military wing there. Do you not? Like what did you think of Oct. 7?

I thought it was horrific. It was absolutely horrific. I mean, one of the things I just said in the earlier question was I’ve spent a long time sort of grappling with the idea of nonviolence. And the other part of that is the place of violence in struggles that I sympathize with, that I associate with.

And I’ve pretty much to come out of it, feeling like the violence is corrupting, and it’s corrupting amongst even the folks who declare their aims that the first thing that you end up doing is folks end up killing each other.

There just is no part of my politics at this point in my life that allows me to see 1,000 people massacred and say, I don’t know, whatever the excuses are. I don’t have that. And I’m not saying that, I really want to drill down on this. I feel like if you lose sight of the value of individual human life you have lost something.

Now, that might be a little naive, because people have the rule states and they have to go to war and they have to do — people make these calculations besides Hamas. But as a writer, here’s the thing. I think you’ve lost something. I think that’s my belief. And I’m not Palestinian. I’m not here speaking for Palestinians. I’m here speaking for Ta-Nehisi Coates and his politics. Those are my politics. So I was horrified.

One of the reasons I ask about this side of the politics is to me, one of the ways I understand what is both true and to me impossible there is I understand the right of both societies in symbiotic relationship to each other. They get Smotrich, the finance minister, who said once that the Palestinian Authority is a liability and Hamas is an asset. And Hamas has, I think, repeatedly done things to make the Israeli right more powerful. I mean.

I just can’t accept that.

Tell me why.

I don’t know, man. When you start like dropping bombs, when you wipe out 2 percent the population of people that are caged in, I don’t care what their leadership did. I’m actually — I mean, this actually goes back to the Oct. 7 question. Because you have lost sight of completely of individual life. And I guess I actually don’t know how you’re different. I was actually sitting here thinking about it, because I want to take what you’re saying seriously.

And maybe a week from now, I will have some other answer. But as I’m sitting here right now, I don’t care if you have the bureaucracy of government. I don’t know, the appearance of democracy, Army, whatever. First of all, people like Ben-Gvir are in your cabinet. You can’t act like they sit over here, and you’re not with them. And you can countenance wiping out that many people with such impunity?

I also have a lot of trouble here, because I think Hamas knew what it was about to do to its own people.

I mean.

I won’t accept that.

You don’t think they did?

I mean, if you’re formulation, they knew what was about to happen as a result of them doing this. Yes, but I don’t want to accept that the people who are dropping the bombs had to drop the bombs. And when I hear the formulation, what they were about to do to their own people, I just feel like it removes somebody in the power of somebody to do something different.

I don’t disagree with that.

And so I guess I’m disagreeing with the formulation of it. That’s what I’m saying.

Without getting caught on the formulation, because I was one of a lot of people who my first essay after Oct. 7 was, do not give into this.

I know, I listened to it. A lot of people send it to me.

Don’t do exactly what you’re about to do. Which then Israel did. I guess my question for you, rather than us getting caught up on at what exact circle of moral illegitimacy different factions are here. Where does it leave you? One of the things that I was asking people there, is look, from the American perspective, a lot of the Palestinians I know want single state solutions.

I found no one there at any level of power who wanted that. No one who wasn’t the kind of person I might meet at a conference seemed to be interested. That was something I would hear here. Hear here, and not there. And this is what I mean about the politics. It’s the interests are often different than what I thought they were going to be.

And then when you got to the more religious people, fairly few of them who I knew and talked to — and that’s a huge gap in the way I present this — it gets much more messianic. People believe in outcomes that are non-political. That’s true among the Israeli messianic right, true among the Palestinian messianic figures.

My point of this is not criticism. As I said, in the places you went, I have the same view. It’s like forcing these other things into the conversation and trying to think about how you think about them.

So I want to go back to just this idea of purpose.

I just want to submit, while leaving you free to have your interpretation that you have as a reader, because I really do believe in that, that you have to understand that, what I was really, really occupied with was why I am in America and I am seeing this so differently than what both you and I saw. Let me ask you like this. Do you feel like what you saw in the West Bank particularly, do you feel like that is well rendered or do you feel like Americans have an understanding of what’s happening there?

I don’t want to speak for Americans, because the understanding.

I’m asking that because I feel like you, maybe you had, because you were informed, you read, and you knew. But can you get out of that a little bit? In other words, can you imagine yourself outside of the kind of expertise you’d had, the fact that you had been there before. Can you imagine, like, maybe how other people perceived it?

I’ve talked about part of this. When I came to Washington, the heyday of the Marty Peretz “New Republic.” I felt that the conversation about Israel and the things we are talking about in Israel was one of the most censored conversations in American politics. There’s a famed book by Mearsheimer and Walt called “The Israel Lobby.” You would have these huge fights over whether or not you could even really talk about that book.

And back then. I think that the reality of it was suppressed. And you can go read a editorial by Peretz calling me a Jewish charlatan. In a recent burst of press about me, people brought back up this idea of the juice box mafia. Me and Matt Yglesias, that was Eli Lake and Jamie Kirchick’s name for me, Matt and Spencer Ackerman, in part because we were insufficiently pro-Israel.

And I think that broke.

About when?

My view is it broke during the Obama administration or began to. And one reason I think you see what you saw there and see it as clearly as you did is I also think Israel just became different over time. I think the reason this looks different to you, and I think the way it looks to you is at least in terms of the West Bank, correct. I argue with none of that. Is that there isn’t really a possible other interpretation of the current reality.

One of the things I tell Israelis, Jews when I speak to them about this is that, I can have some sympathy for how you maybe ended up here, but there is no sympathy for where here is. And allowing this now to be not just reality, but a reality that is, there’s no — nobody’s even trying to change anymore, is once people take it as it is, and I think to me, the political importance of your book is you’re somebody who walked in, opened your eyes and this is what you see.

I think one reason that it looks simpler to you now than it does to a lot of people who have been doing this for decades isn’t because they’re all lying. It’s because it wasn’t as simple two decades ago. It wasn’t as straightforward. There were people trying to do something different, and it seemed like they might succeed. And it is the closing of the horizon of hope that has actually changed us, which I mostly blame Benjamin Netanyahu for. Not only, Israeli society deserves a fair amount of credit there, too, and so do some on the Palestinian side. But I think it’s different now.

I just think the claim that it was democracy was always, like, I think that was always a lie.

I agree.

I think that was — and that was like — in my mind, and I remember trying to figure this out, like can Palestinians vote? But like only democracy in the Middle East was the thing that was repeatedly said over and over and over again to the point that what I say it was, like Nike, “Just Do It.” You know what I mean? It was that, and that has power. That for people who do not know and don’t have the kind of details and haven’t seen what you’ve seen, these sorts of words, this sort of branding, it sticks in the back of their head.

What year would you say America became a democracy, if in your view, it ever did?

In my view?

Yeah.

‘65.

Right.

Something like that.

And imperfect then too, right. It’s not like in ‘67 this was all working out great.

Yes, yes.

Much better than me.

Yes.

I think that’s the way to understand how the writers you’re talking about understood the path Israel was on.

I agree with you. I agree with you. And that itself is another lie that I feel like it causes great problems, actually. It causes huge, huge problems, because Americans understand themselves as this ancient democracy. And then that affects how they see the rest of the world. That affects how they interact with the rest of the world. That erases whole populations as though their narrative doesn’t matter. Because Black people say, well, what about my mother or my grandmother? Like she just — like, I know the person that just got the right to vote. And so suddenly they’re not part of the narrative? I agree, it’s the same way, but it’s just as problematic. That’s what I was saying. And I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that at all.

I don’t know how you’re taking some of what I’m saying, but I think it’s possible that you think what I’m saying is that if you had talked to more Israeli Jews, you would have more sympathy for where they are. I am not saying that. You might have a lot less, but I think they’re part of appreciating where this is now.

How many major media organizations have a Palestinian Bureau Chief in Jerusalem? How often do I cut on the TV, and I look at who’s covering whatever conflict is going on over there at the moment and do I see a Palestinian?

And I just have this feeling that there is a part of — this is not equal in terms of who’s getting to tell their story.

And so I guess the question I have for you ultimately is, and I’m working my way to it, is with my quest to understand why I had one understanding — and if you can just go with me here — why I believe a lot of Americans have one understanding and it differs from what I saw over there, like trying to understand why. Do you think that quest would have been improved by talking to the people you would have liked me to talk to? Do you think I would have came to a better understanding about that?

I’d say two things. I don’t know about your personal quest, right. I think that there is subtlety.

That’s the essay, though. [LAUGHS]

But as you said —

You’re right. You’re right.

I thought you really wanted to leave space for the reader to have their own relationship with the book here, man. [LAUGHS]

[LAUGHS] I do. You’re right. Go ahead. Go ahead. Good, I’m going to shut up. I’m going to shut up. Go ahead.

I do think so. But this is in a very different way my critique not of anybody’s book, but of Joe Biden and the Biden administration. One thing I’ve said to a lot of people who are mad at college protesters over the past year is that the college protesters in many ways understand modern Israel better than the 70-year-old American or 80-year-old American politicians, because the only Israel they ever knew is Netanyahu’s Israel.

Whereas I think there are a lot of people in American politics still trying to negotiate with the Israel of 18 years ago. I’m not here telling you for your own journey who to talk to and not talk to. Or frankly, telling you at all. For the work I do, I have to think about all these other players in it, and figures.

Of course.

But also for what I believe your book is going to be doing in the world, no matter what.

So you think, despite my intention, it’s going to be a thing that’s going to happen —

Your book is an artifact. You don’t control it anymore. You know that much better than me. And your book is going to be this year the biggest selling version of the Palestinian narrative. And there’s a certain number of people who need to be convinced by it who the absence of grappling with what Hamas is will make it easier for them to dismiss it.

I would say two things. You just said something and I’m not going to dispute the truth of it. How can it be that my book is going to be the biggest bestselling whatever of the Palestinian narrative? That, to me, is the essence of the tragedy right there.

Well, that’s fair. But also, man, your book is probably going to be the biggest selling thing on this on either side this year.

Yeah.

It’s worth accepting who you are.

I do. I do. I do. But nevertheless, man, this is like something I grapple with. It is like the — I felt responsible over there. I felt responsible. You know what I mean?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

You say that you feel that the American conversation has lied to you. And I think my fear and the thing that I’ve come to over the past year is, to me, worse. Which is that I wouldn’t use the word lying exactly, but the illusions. We believe the illusions. It would be easier. It’s always easier if it’s actually cynical. Because then you can rip the cynicism back. And at some point, somebody’s got the true outlook on the situation and is just executing a strategy. I don’t think that’s what’s going on. And we have illusions about the Israelis. I think we have illusions about the Palestinians. We have illusions about ourselves too.

When I just did this episode with David Remnick, and one of the things I said, which I’ve said before, is like, I always try to just like move this conversation over two-state solutions and one-state solutions off. And I saw a bunch of people say no, that’s a dodge. Like, that’s a luxury.

And I don’t mean it that way, or I don’t agree with that interpretation of it. I don’t think a solution right now is possible. And I think debating them allows us to put ourselves in this slightly heroic role that makes it so by imagining some future radically, radically different situation, we don’t have to apprehend the one we’re in right now.

And I think people, and this is my favorite part of your book, I think people have to spend some time, particularly in America and in the American policy conversation, not grappling with where they want this to go, but where it actually is. And I think a lot of mistakes come from working backwards rather than working forwards.

And now it’s my time to push you.

Yeah.

I actually think political imagination is really, really important. And maybe that is because I am coming from a tradition where, for most of our history, there really was no recognized political leadership. And by recognized, I mean, the ability to be a Congressman, a governor, or some sort of — I mean, Jesus, if you think about it, it was past us, right? All of that’s imagination. You’re pulling out a Bible to say what X, Y and Z, what the world should be, that’s your interpretive text.

And so I don’t know. I understand what you’re saying. And I guess what I feel like — and you can correct me if I’m wrong. What I’m hearing from you is there is a kind out of touch liberal fantasizing —

Yes.

— that you really want to avoid. And be skeptical of.

I don’t — the first step when you talk about the Black preachers and that horizon of imagination.

No one was more in touch with the reality than they were. So I will listen to these arguments from people who I feel there are deeply rooted in the reality. There’s a line in this book, “The Necessity of Exile” by Shaul Magid. And I think it’s a quotation of just someone who’s not named, but he talks about the two state solution as existing now to make liberal American Jews feel better about themselves.

I’m not sure I go all the way there. I believe nothing as much as I believe things change. The horizon today is not going to be the horizon in five years or 10 years. The politics today will not be the politics in 10 years or 15 years or 20 years. Everybody, they always underestimate how much things change in a decade politically.

So my point is not that no solution, no — nothing different is ever possible. It’s simply that I have an allergy to it as a kind of a dodge, as a way of not dealing with where we are. Like, what is the next step? Not the last step. The next step. And I find that people sometimes debate the last step instead.

Right. I can understand that. I can understand that. It feels to me like you are trying to answer the question of how do we get out of this. Like, what is an actual workable way and maybe even moral, if I may impose upon you, workable and moral way out. Is that correct?

Yeah, or just how do we see it without illusion right now. You describe something in the book that I felt too. There’s a hyper vividness to being there. I’ve done a lot of reporting trips in my life, been to a lot of places. This one has some quality to it. I mean, the fact that it’s biblical land felt real to me there.

Yeah.

You up and down, you go up to the northern border, which is now totally different situation. When I was there it was on fire and now there’s more act of war happening even than there was then. You drive down the coast, right there. You go to — I was at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. I was at the Western Wall. There is something there that’s almost hallucinatory in its vividness.

Yeah.

I don’t really know how to explain it or understand it, but you understand why it captures people.

I totally got it. Look, man, I was there day five. I was like, when can I leave? When can I leave? And then I left on day 10 and two days after I got back here, I was like, when am I going back? It was fatiguing, horrific, harrowing. Some of the best food I’ve ever had in my life. And I don’t say that to be trivial. I say that to, again, recognize this idea that they were actually people there, living there, creating a culture, doing the things that human beings do.

Some of the most hospitable people, as we talked about, that I’ve ever met in my life. Some of the most open signs of violence.

Like things I would see, and I couldn’t have just saw that. That is not some sort of computerized A.I. machine gun that fires non-lethal rounds. I didn’t just see that. Things I had to take pictures to remember, no, Ta-Nehisi, you really did see that.

I think part of it for me is that I work even here, and I had to confront this. Like I work with, OK, here is how history is doing its work right now, even though these people are long gone. Here is how they’re doing their work right now. Here’s how history continues to haunt. And there it was just there.

There are parts of the trip I haven’t talked about at all that have actually made it easier for me to understand things going on here. So one of the things I did when I was there was I spent some time with Yoram Hazony, who political obsessives here will know as a Israeli philosopher who wrote a book called “The Virtue of Nationalism.”

“The Virtue of Nationalism.” That’s interesting.

And it became a huge book on the Trumpian right. He then founded something called the National Conservatism Conferences. Fourth year was this year, JD Vance spoke. JD Vance is sort of a NatCon, very, very influential movement here. And I understood that movement a lot better when I was there, because when you are there, or at least in Israel, nationalism is the most physical I have ever felt it to be.

And I mean, we’re talking here in a country at war and post Oct. 7, but still every square inch that can have Israeli flags does. Right? That America has nationalism. But this movement that has been imported here from there, and is influential here from there. It has made it much easier for me to understand what JD Vance and Donald Trump are actually talking about.

Because when you’re there, nationalism is physical and constant and everywhere in a way that comparatively here it’s ephemeral and subtle and wispy. The existence of the nation as an organism that has an immune system and defenders and right? That people will die for at any minute, in all directions,

it’s there in a way that here it’s abstracted, and there it is right in front of you. It is the people holding guns. It is the people who, when I was walking through a Palestinian refugee camp and just talking to some people in a coffee shop, and they just pull up their shirt to show me the healed over bullet holes, from being at a protest and being shot. It takes things that are abstract here and makes them literal.

Can I take you back to something I’ve kind of been thinking about that you raised earlier in this conversation? Can we go back to this idea of Palestinian agency and systems just for a moment? How do you feel about the conversation around the analogy toward apartheid, which is one that I believe in. Do you find that appropriate?

I do find it appropriate. The analogy I’ve used since coming back, because it’s the one I know, is the American South.

Yeah, right.

I sometimes feel things like apartheid, like, shut some people’s minds down. You get into this like technical, well, in South Africa, and I don’t know enough to have that argument with people. But I have read enough, including you, on the American South and the Jim Crow era, that the first day I was in the West Bank, I said the first thing, almost, that I thought was this is what it must have felt like.

Got it. So how do you — like, and this is the difficult thing for me, how does Palestinian agency or agency of any group of people, I would say, in a system like that work? I’m going to give a very crude version of this. So please don’t think I’m ascribing this to you. I guess what I want to ask is, how do you avoid the danger of saying the awful politics of your leadership has put you in this position where we have imposed apartheid on you, or some version of that?

When you talk about agency, it’s like a lot of things in this where I think in the year 2000, the year 2005, 2008, there was a bunch of space open. And since then it has been the policy of Israel to foreclose Palestinian political agency. Right? To arrest people who could become leaders, to keep the West Bank and Gaza divided.

So, I mean, this is one of these places where I have this frustration again, where you talk to Israelis and they tell you about things from 20 years ago, and some of those arguments are reasonable. And then you’re here. And where here is, is a place where there’s been a long running, explicit political project to make sure Palestinians cannot develop political power.

And so this question of agency to me has changed over time. And it’s the thing I said to you earlier, that I spent a lot of time trying to understand how Israel got to where it is now. And I do that without, for me, that changing the fact that where it is now is immoral. And also for me, without, I think, having illusions that it has an obvious way back. That’s a place where I found that I had the single largest gulf between people I otherwise agree with and feel very politically aligned with there.

That they kept telling me something was provisional that clearly was not provisional. And this is why I emphasize the politics of both violence and religion. The thing that I don’t know, I can’t even imagine how to solve for, is that kind of violent veto. Because I don’t know a polity, like anywhere, that is going to keep making deals if people keep dying in large enough numbers.

I don’t have any answers, man, and I don’t pretend to.

I’m trying to see it as it is.

Yeah. Like I feel, and let’s just go with your metaphor of Jim Crow. Like I feel Jim Crow is — I mean, as you — obviously, it’s wrong. And so your answer to this would be no, you’re not going to see anything that will make you feel like it’s not wrong. You don’t want to see anything that’s going to make you say it’s justified. But you might see something that says, this is how you got here. Is that — am I interpreting that correct? This is part of the story of how you got here. I don’t want to say.

The question is, how do you get out.

And part of the question of how?

Let me say another thing from the West Bank, which is where we both spent a lot of time. So the canonical theory of the two state solution is Israel pulls back. It pulls back behind the green line. The West Bank is governed by Palestinian leadership of some kind or another. And for a very long time, and I still think this is true, actually in the American conversation, the Israeli settlers were sort of spoken of as like a radical extremist, aberrant class.

Yes. Yes.

You go there.

I know exactly what you mean.

You go there now, I don’t want to get the number wrong off the top of my head. I think it’s in the range of 5 to 600,000 in the West Bank now. I think there’s 700,000 total. But there’s some complexity in all this. A lot of these settlements are just at this point ex-urbs. Right? Or suburbs. These garrison states are huge cities.

And when I then would go into the garrison state settlements, the way they all spoke about themselves was as sentrys. If we ever pull back, if we do what we did in Gaza, and allow this to be self-governed, an army will be raised, and what happened on 10/7 will be a small preview of what will be coming for us eventually.

That doesn’t make anything happening in the West Bank right. It doesn’t have any effect on the morality of it whatsoever. But it is the politics of Israel that somebody is going to have to deal with at some point or not. And then we’re just here. I’m not here to tell you I’ve come up with some answer. It’s just one of the things that has to sit in the pot.

Yeah, I don’t disagree with that at all. I don’t disagree with that at all. Again, I just felt like —

and I guess my one critique of you, the one, the place where I really, really one of the places we probably disagree quite a lot in this conversation. But the one area I think you approach this conversation with a deeper knowledge than a lot of other people do. I tell you, man, I came back and I told people about that trip, and they said, what? I was sending pictures when I was like, they were like, what?

I think a settlement is a great example. I thought settlements were people who kind of were outside of the Israeli state. I did not realize there were subsidies. I did not realize they were actually part of the state. I didn’t understand that at all.

And I guess maybe I’m giving myself too much credit here. But I guess I feel like as a curious person, relatively somewhat intellectual person, that I did not know that. I think that is real, right. I mean, I grew up in American Jewish Zionist culture. I’m not here to tell you that other people don’t take it. Like I believe Joe Biden takes all this as real, as I was saying earlier. So I hope I’m not trying to say that everybody is my views about Israeli democracy, because that’s not true.

I guess one thing I’d ask you is, you’ve been really clear that the purpose of the essay was to shift your understanding. It’s not a policy paper, but you’ve sort of pushed me both here and at other times we’ve spoken about a sort of absence of political imagination. What’s yours? What do you imagine here? You’re not going to like my answer.

But I want to hear it.

OK. I imagine hearing from way more Palestinians. There is at the end of this piece a stat from — and I’m sorry, I don’t have a book in front of me, but by this academic Maha Nassar, who talks about the numbers that actually New Republic is in there. New Republic, Washington Post, New York Times. The amount of time Palestinians are written about versus when they do — and the numbers are like in the single digits.

What I am saying is, I think that actually circumscribes our political imagination. But it actually is rooted in my understanding of the Black political tradition. So you have a group of people that are forbidden by slavery from learning how to read and write. And yet seizing that is one of the most important things to — the tradition of having Black newspapers. The tradition of like Frederick Douglass actually becoming a writer. Tradition of Ida B. Wells. Like being able to go back and forth and have a political space. And I guess to some extent, certainly it is true in America that people did not want to hear from Black people, but nothing like this, I don’t think.

I think your answer is true. I think what you’re saying is right. And the tilt in American media is real. But I’m still asking you what you imagine here. As you have sat and thought about this and read everything and dreamed about it and written about it. I mean, is it just an event horizon for you?

I feel like I don’t have that right. It just feels like I am —

I just. It just doesn’t feel right. I try to imagine, like somebody trying to talk or figure out in the 1960s, how are we going to get out of segregation. How are we going to desegregate? And said, we’re not going to hear from any Black people. It’s absurd.

It’s one of the reasons why I’m uncomfortable with, I guess, not even just this conversation, but maybe everything I’m doing with the trip. Because it’s like, dude, I talked to so many people who have a deeper sense and a sharper sense than I do of this. You know what I mean? There are people who have lived this. You know what I mean? And not just lived this, can do the scholarship of it. They can talk about it, and can think about it, and have a kind of fluency in it that I just don’t. And I just feel like that is a question that I would like to see more Palestinians asked.

I think that’s a place to end. So always our final question. What are three books you would recommend to the audience?

The first book I would recommend is “Justice for Some” by Noura Erakat. “Justice for Some” is supposed to be an analysis, and it is this, of the legal work, as she calls it, that undergirds Israel and Israeli rule of Palestinians. But actually, it’s kind of a beautiful narrative history, which I just thought was remarkable.

Amy Kaplan, man. “Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance.” This gets to something that we talk quite a bit about. This was a pop culture book. It was about how images of Israel have formed in the American mind and why, looking at films, books, television speeches, et cetera. There are no politicians in it. It’s not that. It’s about how have the creative arts interacted in America to create whatever image, and where does that relationship stem through. She actually goes all the way back to the Puritans. It’s quite remarkable.

And then this one hit me hard. “The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with South Africa” by Sasha Polakow-Suransky. Boy, that was a tough book. It is an outlining of Israel’s relationship with South Africa, which is a really singular relationship. The extent to which South Africa actually depended on Israel and vice versa as it happened at the end. And that was really, really mind blowing.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, thank you very much.

Thanks, Ezra. [MUSIC PLAYING]

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Efim Shapiro and Isaac Jones with Aman Sahota. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. We have original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.