Coleman Hughes attacks comparisons between Palestine and the struggle of blacks for freedom in South Africa and America

Coleman Hughes has published this piece in two places: on his own Substack site, and at the Free Press. Since I first noticed it at the latter site, I’ll put the screenshot for the FP version below (click it to read), but you can also access it on his own site here (be sure to subscribe if you read regularly). Hughes, only 27, has already developed into an intellectual force to be reckoned with. (In light of his comparison with the struggles of blacks that’s the subject of his piece, I feel obliged to add that Coleman is black.)

His Wikipedia bio says this:

Coleman Cruz Hughes (born February 25, 1996) is an American writer and podcast host. He was a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a fellow and contributing editor at their City Journal, and he is the host of the podcast Conversations with Coleman

(I was on that podcast once, and found it very enjoyable. For a non-biologist (his undergraduate degree is in philosophy), Coleman knows a ton about evolutionary biology).

The podcast adds this:

Hughes began studying violin at age three. He is a hobbyist rapper—in 2021 and 2022, he released several rap singles on YouTube and Spotify, using the moniker COLDXMAN, including a music video for a track titled “Blasphemy”, which appeared in January 2022. Hughes also plays jazz trombone with a Charles Mingus tribute band that plays regularly at the Jazz Standard in New York City.

That’s what I’d call a polymath!

At any rate, in this piece Hughes discusses several ways in which people have compared the conflict between Israel and Palestine with the “struggle for black freedom”—not only the one right after the Civil War but the continual struggle for civil rights in America that flowered in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights act of 1964 and 1965. He adds in as well the ending of apartheid in South Africa (remember, Israel is often, and wrongly, called “an apartheid state”).

He makes one valid comparison between blacks and Jews, which is the desire to return to one’s ancestral homeland. In Jews it’s reflected in the continuing migration of Jews to Israel from all over the world after pogroms and other forms of persecution; in American blacks it was the “back to Africa movements”, which began after slavery ended and are most famous for Marcus Garvey’s campaign that brought thousands of American blacks to Liberia. But as far as the struggles of both African and American blacks for freedom, Coleman doesn’t buy the comparison to Israel.  But in general Coleman’s comparison is not of the blacks to Israelis Jews, but of the black struggle for freedom with the Palestinian struggle against Israel. And here he finds the common comparisons specious:

A key difference between the nature of the Israeli-Arab conflict and South African apartheid is that Israeli policies in the occupied West Bank—checkpoints, movement restrictions, and so forth—are rooted in legitimate security concerns rather than racism. Because the word security has been dulled through overuse, it is crucial to remember what it really means. Security means preventing what happened on October 7—which Hamas has promised to do over and over if given the chance. No function of the state could be more important.

Some critics of Israel will be quick to point out that defenders of South African apartheid also used “security” as a justification for the apartheid system. The difference is that in the case of South Africa, it was a false pretext. In apartheid South Africa, marriage (and even sex) between blacks and whites was punishable by prison time. South African officials would decide your race (and therefore your fate) by running a comb through your hair. If it ran all the way through without too much resistance, you were considered legally white.

These policies, which lie at the core of apartheid South Africa, were the result not of security concerns but of an ideological obsession with racial classification and a horror at the thought of “race-mixing.” Such policies would be unthinkable in Israel, where Arab Israelis are full citizens, enjoying the right to vote, serve in the Israeli parliament and the Knesset, and even sit on the Supreme Court.

Now it’s never been clear to me whether those who accuse Israel of being an “apartheid state” mean that treating Arab citizens of Israel as second class citizens, which is really the only valid way to say “Israel is an apartheid state”. Such a construal is simply wrong. Arab Israelis have all the rights of Jewish Israelis. They are on the Supreme Court, they sit in parliament (in about the proportion they exist in Israel, about 20%), and it’s forbidden to discriminate against them. In fact, Arab Israeli citizens have more rights than Jewish Israelis, in that they do not have to serve in the IDF unless they want to (all Jewish Israelis must serve at least two years).  One more difference: Arab Israelis get their religious holidays off work, while Jewish Israelis get their religious holidays off work.  Oh, and the Arab Israelis demanded their own school system, which they got, but they can of course send their kids to non-Arab schools (as Jews can send their kids to Arab schools). The former is more common, I hear, because the “Jewish schools” are perceived to be better. But there is no “apartheid” here: anybody can go to any school they want.

The only other way to construe Israel as an “apartheid” state is the claim that it oppresses and dominates Palestine: an inter-territory form of apartheid. This of course is open to vigorous dispute. One argument, for example, is that Palestinians in the West Bank can’t vote in Israeli elections. However all Palestinians in areas A, B (the two wholly Palestinian areas) and C (mixed Arab and Jew), can vote in Palestinian elections.  (Palestine outside of Gaza consists solely of area A and B of the West Bank.) Moreover, a Palestinian Israeli citizen retains their Israeli citizenship forever (as do their kids) if they move to any of the three areas of the West Bank. (Jews are not allowed in areas A and B).

There are other arguments for “apartheid” of course, including the claims that Israel oppresses Gaza or the Palestinian territories, but I don’t want to deal with those right now, except to point out that you could apply similar arguments to other places, like North and South Korea, or Russia and Crimea; but those arguments are never applied.”Apartheid state” is reserved for one country, and one country only.

But I digress. Back to Coleman, who I was glad to see agrees with me that the real apartheid state in this conflict is Palestine. Within the territory they do not allow Jews to settle, much less vote, and they oppress women, gays, apostates, and infidels. Hamas differentially treats its own members compared to Gazan citizens. And if you’re talking between territories, it is Palestine who continually commits terrorism against the citizens of Israel, not the other way around.  Further, it is Palestine which inundates its children with hatred of Israel and Jews, while this simply doesn’t happen in Israeli schools. That hasn’t escaped Hughes’s notice:

As with every society on Earth, there is racism in Israel. But the truth is that if you’re looking for the closest analogue to the racist propaganda experienced by blacks in European-offshoot societies, you will find it not on the Israeli side but on the Palestinian side. Consider the ghoulish, antisemitic TV programs that indoctrinate Palestinian children. There is no Israeli equivalent.

There is yet another inconvenient fact for those who want to reduce the Israeli-Arab conflict to a competition between European settlers and people of color: the majority of Israeli Jews are not European. They are Mizrahi Jews—hailing from the Middle East and North Africa. What’s more, it is not the European Jews but the Mizrahi Jews—who are difficult to visually distinguish from Palestinians—that form most of the voting base of the right-wing parties that Israel’s critics consider to be the truly racist ones.

This difference between Israel and Palestine in the degree and nature of intra-country oppression as well as in the kind of brainwashing and hatred poured into Palestinian but not Israeli children is so striking that those who make accusations of Israel as the world’s only “apartheid state” are sliding towards antisemitism—if they aren’t that way already. Those accusations, as unfounded as they are, are touchstones of either active or latent antisemitism—similar to those who shout the genocidal “From the river to the sea. . ” chant.

As for the American struggle for black freedom, Hughes also rejects comparisons with Palestine and Israel:

When ideologues co-opt the African American freedom struggle and compare it to the Palestinian national movement, they do black Americans a grave disservice. Black Americans (aside from a fringe) did not seek to dominate and destroy white society, as Martin Luther King Jr. emphasized frequently in his speeches. African Americans pursued equality before the law and better economic circumstances. In black history, you can find the occasional Nat Turner, the slave who led a rebellion and advocated killing all whites. But compared to the leaders of the struggle—giants like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King—radicals like Turner amount to a footnote in the black American struggle for equality.

Even early Malcolm X, the most prominent mouthpiece for black radicalism, was not interested in a violent takeover whereby blacks would run all of America and render whites second-class citizens. When he expressed black nationalism as more than a metaphor, he made clear that he was interested in a partitioning of black and white states inside America or a black ethnostate somewhere outside of America entirely.

Palestinian leaders, by contrast, seek dominion over all the land existing between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

. . . .As for tactics, there is nothing in the history of mainstream African American political activism analogous to Hamas’s use of its own people as human shields; their use of a civilian hospital as a torture chamber; their denial of resources to their own people despite billions of dollars in international aid; their system of cash rewards to incentivize suicide bombings against civilian targets; their indiscriminate rocket fire on civilians; their practice of taking children and the elderly as hostages; and the combination of millenarianism and genocidal bloodlust evoked in their founding charter.

If you’d like to defend Hamas, then go ahead. But do not take the easy way out by making farcical comparisons between the black freedom struggle and Palestinian nationalism or between European colonialism and Zionism.

If you disagree, you’re free to do so here, even though most of these words are Coleman’s. However, I happen to agree with them.

The degree of historical ignorance—probably willful ignorance—of sloganeering in this war is appalling. We have not only the “apartheid state” trope, but also the “from the river to the sea” mantra, and, finally, the “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” claim. I’ve already discussed the last one, explained why it’s wrong, and discussed why there’s no coherent interpretation of antizionism that isn’t at bottom antisemitism. But I’ll leave that one for now.