In May 2023, renowned Black American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates spent ten days in the West Bank and Israel, where he spent half his time with Breaking the Silence, a group of former Israeli soldiers who now oppose the occupation.
Going to Palestine was “a huge shock to me”, he told the New York Times. Coming back, he felt, as he told US journalist Peter Beinart, “a responsibility to yell” about what he’d seen – which he describes as apartheid and compares to the segregated Jim Crow South in the United States.
