Ta-Nehisi Coates begins the Israeli-Palestinian section of his new book, The Message, with a visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. The excursion, taken on the last day of his 10-day junket to the Palestine Festival of Literature, isn’t meant to elicit sympathy for the Jewish people or offer context about the founding of Israel. Rather, it is a literary device used to accuse the Israelis of becoming the thing they most revile. You see the irony, of course. It’s like unfurling one of those Israeli flags with a swastika painted on it — but in swirling prose.
Indeed, The Message may well be the most beautifully crafted blood libel ever published. Each turn of phrase oozes with a loathing of the Jewish
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