Your suggestion is that someone that “understood Israel” would find the Israel’s actions acceptable.>
That’s not what I said. I criticized them for expressing a perspective about Israel’s motives that are simply wrong. And this is a common attitude about Israel I hear all the time: “The Holocaust doesn’t give Israelis the right to treat Palestinians this way.” That’s simply not how Israelis think.
Dokoupil started his attack on Coates right out of the gate. Dokoupil left no room for thoughtful arguments with his strawman accusations.>
I’ll admit I haven’t read the book myself because I’m not going to give Coates my money, but I have now heard three different interviews about it. One of those interviews was about an hour long on the Ezra Klein podcast. So my impression is based on listening to him discuss Israel in these three different contexts.
He witnessed Israeli apartheid firsthand and was sharing that experience>
Wrong. He witnessed things that he *interpreted *as apartheid based on his own frame of reference and preconceived notions about Israel. The point is, he doesn’t have the knowledge of the history and the details - he literally describes seeing things and thinking, “That reminds me of apartheid.” For example, he describes having an IDF soldier approach him and ask him questions about his background and how that just feels wrong. Well, those soldiers are trained to do what they do for security purposes because the country has dealt with terrorism for decades.
I totally disagree that Dokoupil came across as “unhinged.” No doubt he was trying very hard to suppress his emotions about the book, but he did not get angry or aggressive or anything. I will give Coates credit, however. He does present himself very well. He comes across as very calm and thoughtful.
There is literally nothing analogous about Israel and the colonization of the Americas, but for the sake of argument let me ask you this:
Do you think First Nations people (as we call them in Canada) would be justified in carrying out an endless campaign of terrorist violence against Canadian and American citizens in the futile hope that we would all decide to pack up and leave? If several hundred of them decided to maraud through towns in rural US or Canada, butchering entire families, burning people alive, sexually violating women, and then took a couple hundred people hostage, would your attitude be, “Meh, we did take their land.”