My Conversation with Coleman (Hughes)

A chat with one of our great public intellectuals about Israel and Palestine, India and Pakistan, and a lot more

Those of you who know of Coleman Hughes know he’s a Renaissance man: author and educator, he’s also a Juilliard-trained musician who’s a demon on the trombone, the piano, and his very own pipes. In his spare time he dropped a rap album (as one does) called Amor Fati – namely the Stoic principle of lovingly accepting one’s fate (did I mention he has a philosophy degree from Columbia). And all this from a guy who just turned 30.¹

Still, he’s best known as a podcaster – all the more so over the last year since his “Conversations with Coleman” joined The Free Press. And it was my honor and pleasure to join him and his legions of loyal Colemaniacs for a wide-ranging discussion.

The episode is titled “What Everyone Gets Wrong About Israel-Palestine,” and over our hour together we cover a lot of ground.

We talk about my book Palestine 1936 and why I chose to wade into the Mideast morass. We talk about terrorism and whether it’s true – as Dave Smith recently insisted on Coleman’s show – that the Jews started it. We talk about when and how Palestinian identity emerged, and whether proponents of a one-state solution secretly wish Israel looked more like Lebanon (that is, a sectarian Hobbesian jungle). And we talk about the word “Zionist” and whether it’s outlived its relevance (spoiler: we both think it has, many decades ago).

I proceed to go way beyond my area of expertise by comparing the origins of Israel and Palestine to that other “I-P conflict”: India and Pakistan. I note that much like Pakistan (bear with me), Israel was born of a decision – in the selfsame year of 1947 – to partition a former possession of the British Empire based on religious and linguistic lines.

India’s partition was in fact vastly more disruptive and bloodier, causing the displacement of at least 14 million people and costing the lives of hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions. And partitioning the subcontinent was arguably far less necessary: Indian Hindus and Muslims speak essentially the same language (Urdu is basically Hindi in Arabic characters), and the giant of India’s anticolonial struggle – Gandhi – bitterly opposed division (see my Substack on the Mahatma and the partitions of both India and Palestine).

Despite the fashionable ire now trending among progressives against states founded on religious identity, the entire raison d’etre of Pakistan, both West and East (the latter now known as Bangladesh) was religious. Pakistan’s official name is the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (a descriptor it shares only with the Iranian theocracy and the modern slave state of Mauritania).² Unlike Israel, it is a country with an official state religion, and a capital called Islamabad: “city of Islam.” The word Pakistan was itself coined four decades after “Zionism” (and three millennia after “Israel,” but I digress).

As I told Coleman: “It’s either that the circumstances in which Israel was born are so nefarious that it alone among the nations needs to be undone, or there’s something else going on that to me is quite suspect.”

I even managed to slip in a dig at the chief executive of the city where Coleman lives. In refusing to recognize Israel’s Jewish character, Zohran Mamdani (himself the son of a Muslim, Indian-born anticolonial scholar) has insisted he’s unwilling to support any state with a “hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else.”

“I suspect Mayor Mamdani doesn’t stay up bemoaning the existence of Pakistan,” I said, because I struggle with impulse control. I could have said the same about his wife Rama Duwaji’s self-identified homeland, whose official name – the Syrian Arab Republic – inherently elevates the ethno-linguistic group known as Arabs.

But again, I digress.

For those wishing to admire my kitchen sink for an hour, the YouTube link is above. For those who’d rather listen while washing dishes in their own kitchen sinks, here are links to Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As always, thanks for watching, for listening, and for reading.

1. As it happens, the day we taped was Coleman’s 30th birthday. I began by wishing him a hearty mazal tov but Coleman’s people edited it out. He’s as unassuming as he is gifted.

2. Afghanistan, wedged between the Islamic Republics of Pakistan and Iran, was officially also an Islamic republic until 2021. It now goes by The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.