Hasnain says:

I’m a simple man. TNC writes something, I read it. Powerful.

“That it was complicated, he now understood, was “horseshit.” “Complicated” was how people had described slavery and then segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”

How could he have been so wrong before? The fault lay partly with the profession he loved. In journalism, he had found his voice, his platform, his purpose in life. And yet, as he sees it, it was journalistic institutions that had not only failed to tell the truth about Israel and Palestine but had worked to conceal it. As a result, a fog had settled over the region, over its history and present, obscuring what anyone at closer range could apprehend easily with their own two eyes.

…

But for Coates, one wrong cannot justify another. “All states at their core have a reason for existing — a moral story to tell,” he told me. “We certainly do. Does industrialized genocide entitle one to a state? No.” Especially, he said, at the expense of people who had no hand in the genocide.

What matters to Coates is not what will happen to his career now — to the script sales, invitations from the White House, his relationships with his former colleagues at The Atlantic and elsewhere. “I’m not worried,” he told me, shrugging his shoulders. “I have to do what I have to do. I’m sad, but I was so enraged. If I went over there and saw what I saw and didn’t write it, I am fucking worthless.””

Posted on 2024-09-23T15:51:55+0000