While CBS’s Stephen Colbert’s colleague Tony Dokoupil was never explicitly mentioned, he loomed over Colbert’s Wednesday interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates as the duo discussed reaction to his anti-Israel book on The Late Show. Coates, for his part, was unrepentant as he defended the decision to leave out any mention of terrorism when discussing the current situation in the West Bank.
With the context of Dokoupil calling Coates a “radical,” Colbert asked, “You went yourself to go over there and you saw what you saw and you write it in this book, and it's quite harrowing and it's heartbreaking, at times enraging, but regardless of what someone's critique might be of your journalism, this is really a journal of what you experienced over there. Do you have any surprise about being perceived as writing something radical? Because the facts of what you are seeing are not in dispute, it's why didn't you balance it?”
Coates replied that he wasn’t radical: “the implicit thesis of that essay is that an entire group of people, that being Palestinians, have been pushed out of frame, that they don't exist as narrators of their own stories. If that is true, and if it's true of most major media, as I contend, then it makes sense that people in major media would not be happy about that. So no, I wasn't surprised.”
At that point, the Ed Sullivan Theater’s fire alarms should’ve gone off from the burning strawman. One of the critiques Dokoupil and others made is exactly the opposite, by omitting the fact that the Palestinians have said no to peace time and time again, instead choosing violence, Coates turns them into robots who have no control over their future.
Still, Colbert asked, “You talk about the power of writing, you talk about the importance of journalism and you also talk about how the mainstream media misuses that power in your opinion on how they tell this story. Why do you think that is being misused? Why do you think they don't tell the story that you saw?”
Coates responded by analogizing the West Bank to segregation, “I think it’s extremely, extremely, extremely difficult to orient yourself to two things. The first is that there is segregation there, and the second is that the group of people who are doing it are the descendants in collective of one of the greatest crimes ever committed in human history. We would like to believe that when people do harmful or hurtful things, they are just mean people doing harmful and hurtful things. It's much more disturbing to orient yourself around the idea that victims are actually victimizing. That's, I think, tough — that's a very generous — that's the most generous interpretation.”
Colbert then finally brought up the obvious, “You've been criticized because, for quote, ‘Not showing the whole picture,’ you don't talk about Hamas, you don't mention Hamas, you don’t talk about the massacre and the horrors of October 7th or the violence against Israelis or their fear about the existence of their own state. Why did you decide to write this book this way?”
Coates self-righteously replied that context doesn’t matter, “First of all, this is not—this is a 250-page book. It's not a history of Israel/Palestine. It is a writer seeking to answer a question, and that is how did he get it wrong, how were his views so different from what he actually saw, and so a large part of that… was because the very people who were communicating to me what the situation was there—I lost trust in them, and so when you lose trust in the media that actually trains you, you have to find your own way, you have to find your own method, and the thing that I was not seeing was the Palestinian perspective, and I made a very, very conscious choice to center that.”
He then tried to turn the tables on his critics, “We are always leaving something out. Some of the very people and outlets that criticize me, I would be very interested in how many Palestinian writers they've published and how many Palestinian journalists they've had on their air, whatever the media outlet is. It's not as if they are giving a complete picture either. No one can. We make choices. I can defend, you know, what mine were. I don't know that they can defend theirs.”
Coates probably doesn’t want to play that game because one of CBS’s producers was recently exposed for wondering if Jews are even humans. Coates can claim he isn’t writing a historical narrative, but wars and conflicts are informed by history, which didn’t start when Coates took his field trip to the West Bank, and it didn’t start in 1967 either.
Here is a transcript for the October 30-taped show:
CBS The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
10/31/2024
12:28 AM ET
STEPHEN COLBERT: Let's talk about the thing that's gotten the most attention here is that, you know, speaking of the stories that we tell ourselves, we in America, those of us who don't have a chance to go to Israel or the Palestinian areas around Israel, we don't know firsthand, we have stories told to us about what's happening there. Some stories are meaningful to us, some of them aren't, some stories are shocking and heartbreaking to us, some stories aren't.
You went yourself to go over there and you saw what you saw and you write it in this book, and it's quite harrowing and it's heartbreaking, at times enraging, but regardless of what someone's critique might be of your journalism, this is really a journal of what you experienced over there. Do you have any surprise about being perceived as writing something radical? Because the facts of what you are seeing are not in dispute, it's why didn't you balance it?
TA-NEHISI COATES: Right. No, I'm not surprised because the thesis, the implicit thesis of that essay is that an entire group of people, that being Palestinians, have been pushed out of frame, that they don't exist as narrators of their own stories. If that is true, and if it's true of most major media, as I contend, then it makes sense that people in major media would not be happy about that. So no, I wasn't surprised.
COLBERT: You talk about the power of writing, you talk about the importance of journalism and you also talk about how the mainstream media misuses that power in your opinion on how they tell this story. Why do you think that is being misused? Why do you think they don't tell the story that you saw?
COATES: Just to be clear about what I saw. What I saw was roads that were segregated, roads that, on the West Bank, were set aside on the west bank for Palestinians and others that were set aside for Israelis. I saw different color license plates, one color license plate for Palestinians, another color for Israelis. I saw settlements where water was plentiful and then I saw areas where Palestinians lived where they didn't know when they were getting water and they were not. This obviously as an African American, this struck me in a particular kind of way and the only word I had for it was segregation. I think it’s extremely, extremely, extremely difficult to orient yourself to two things. The first is that there is segregation there, and the second is that the group of people who are doing it are the descendants in collective of one of the greatest crimes ever committed in human history. We would like to believe that when people do harmful or hurtful things, they are just mean people doing harmful and hurtful things. It's much more disturbing to orient yourself around the idea that victims are actually victimizing. That's, I think, tough — that's a very generous — that's the most generous interpretation.
COLBERT: You start that chapter, you start this chapter with a powerful description with a visit to Yad Vashem, which is the Holocaust museum and memorial in Israel, but you've been criticized because, for quote, "Not showing the whole picture,” you don't talk about Hamas, you don't mention Hamas—
COATES: Right.
COLBERT: — you don’t talk about the massacre and the horrors of October 7th or the violence against Israelis or their fear about the existence of their own state. Why did you decide to write this book this way?
COATES: Well, I'll say two things. First of all, this is not — this is a 250 page book. It's not a history of Israel/Palestine. It is a writer seeking to answer a question, and that is how did he get it wrong, how were his views so different from what he actually saw, and so a large part of that–
COLBERT: The views you had before you went there personally?
COATES: The views I had before and in large part that was because the very people who were communicating to me what the situation was there — I lost trust in them, and so when you lose trust in the media that actually trains you, you have to find your own way, you have to find your own method, and the thing that I was not seeing was the Palestinian perspective, and I made a very, very conscious choice to center that.
We are always leaving something out. Some of the very people and outlets that criticize me, I would be very interested in how many Palestinian writers they've published and how many Palestinian journalists they've had on their air, whatever the media outlet is. It's not as if they are giving a complete picture either. No one can. We make choices. I can defend, you know, what mine were. I don't know that they can defend theirs.
