Ta-Nehisi Coates begins the Israeli-Palestinian section of his new book, The Message, with a visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. The excursion, taken on the last day of his 10-day junket to the Palestine Festival of Literature, isn’t meant to elicit sympathy for the Jewish people or offer context about the founding of Israel. Rather, it is a literary device used to accuse the Israelis of becoming the thing they most revile. You see the irony, of course. It’s like unfurling one of those Israeli flags with a swastika painted on it — but in swirling prose.

Indeed, The Message may well be the most beautifully crafted blood libel ever published. Each turn of phrase oozes with a loathing of the Jewish state. As with his previous work, history is a poetic truth in which white people are innately and inexorably evil — the Jew perhaps most of all.