Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author of a controversial new book largely focused on Israel, is facing widespread criticism for admitting that he may have participated in the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks if he had been born in Gaza.

“I grow up under that oppression and that poverty and the wall comes down, am I also strong enough or even constructed in such a way where I say this is too far? I don’t know that I am,” he said in an interview with Trevor Noah released on Thursday.

Coates, 49, said he had not “said this out loud” but that he had thought “about it a lot.”

“ls there room in the world, and I don’t think there is right now, I actually don’t think there is, to have genuine, genuine horror at what happened on Oct. 7, to feel like there really isn’t a world in which, or reason, that I can apprehend — I’m not Palestinian, I’m Ta-Nehisi Coates — that I can apprehend for justifying anything like that,” he told Noah. “And yet, understanding at the same time that things have histories, that they happen in the course of events.”

He cited what he framed as a historical parallel to elaborate on his point. “The example I think about all the time is like Nat Turner,” he said, referring to the Virginia slave who launched his rebellion in 1830. “This man slaughters babies in their cribs. You know what I mean? And I’ve done this thought experiment for myself over and over.”

“Does the degradation and dehumanization of slavery make it so that you can look past something like that?” Coates continued. “And I try to imagine, and I think I can accurately imagine as much as possible, that there were enslaved people, no matter how dehumanized, that said, ‘This is too far. I can’t do that.’”

The “flip side of that,” he said, is the situation in Gaza, which he compared Gaza to a “giant open-air jail” where Palestinians are at constant risk of being “shot” by Israelis.

“I just wish we had room to work through that,” he said, “and to think about that and to talk about that. And I think that is not unique to Israel, that is not unique to Palestine, that is not unique to Zionism. That is human history, that is human beings.”

Coates’ comments have faced backlash from numerous commentators, who have accused the author of seeking to normalize Hamas’ atrocities.  

“This is the heart of it all, not a call for freedom but the creation of a cultural space in the West to accept never-ending war and brutality until the Jews are gone,” said Haviv Rettig Gur, a political analyst based in Jerusalem.   

“What you’re witnessing in real time is an elite attempt to justify and mainstream violence as a legitimate response to discontent,” added the former New York Times journalist Adam Rubenstein.  

Noah, a former Daily Show host who has previously faced criticism for past antisemitic tweets, is also drawing scrutiny for comments in the interview, where he suggested that American revolutionaries could be seen as “terrorists” absent historical context.  

“You can call it ‘the Boston Tea Party.’ That’s terrorism,” he said. “If you remove the context, everything has no context,” he added, claiming people “remove all context when speaking about Israel-Palestine.”

Coates’ new book, The Message, which includes a sprawling essay on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, likens the experience of Palestinians under Israeli occupation to Black Americans during the Jim Crow era.

But that framing has also drawn pushback from Middle East experts who argue that Coates is inaccurately projecting an American racial lens onto a foreign conflict with its own unique history.

The journalist Matti Friedman, who has written about such issues, argued that Coates’ approach is misguided. “A good reporter looks at a place or goes into an interview or approaches a story with a willingness to understand the story on its own terms, and a bad reporter comes to a story and sees a mirror,” he said in a podcast interview.

“The attempt to kind of map America onto other parts of the world has led Americans into grave errors of judgment,” Friedman added.

In his book, Coates writes that his father, Paul Coates, the publisher of Black Classic Press, was an early influence in informing his view of the conflict. “I remember watching World News Tonight with my father, and deriving from him a dull sense that the Israelis were ‘white’ and the Palestinians were ‘Black,’ which is to say that the former were the oppressors and the latter the oppressed,” Coates recalls. 

“And once — back when I dreamed of being a poet — my father had handed me a book by the Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad titled Born Palestinian, Born Black, and this combination felt natural to me, though I could not have articulated then why,” he adds. 

Paul Coates, whose company has long been dedicated to unearthing “obscure and significant works by and about people of African descent,” has also been a subject of controversy in recent weeks over his decision to republish an antisemitic screed called The Jewish Onslaught — which seeks to uphold a widely discredited conspiracy theory alleging Jewish domination of the Atlantic slave trade.

But the book — first published in 1993 by Tony Martin — is no longer available on the Black Classic Press website, and appears to have been removed after Jewish Insider highlighted its inclusion in the company’s catalog in late September.

Black Classic Press did not respond to requests for comment about why the book had been removed.