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After its late 2024 publication, The Message received praise from reviewers as well as readers, achieving near-highest rankings on multiple reader-review sites (which is not easy to do in the age of review bombing). However, most of the coverage of the book centered on author Ta-Nehisi Coates’s comments in it that unambiguously equate the treatment of the Palestinians by Israel to apartheid, the system in place from 1948 to 1994 under which Black South Africans were subjected to highly discriminatory practices by the white minority South African government. Although it did not receive as much attention, Coates also directly compared the treatment of Palestinians and Black South Africans under apartheid to the treatment of Black Americans during the Jim Crow era of the late 19th and 20th centuries, and he discussed how all oppressors tend to seek to justify their actions with fallacious claims.
 
Coates’s teacherly advice to writers and journalists, especially Black writers and writers from other marginalized populations—which is also arguably the main message of The Message—was also given less consideration than his comments about Israel in many discussions of the book. However, based on how politically charged discussions of Israel and the Palestinians generally are and based on the reaction to others who had essentially made the same comparison in the 20 or so years prior to them appearing in The Message, this probably shouldn’t be all that surprising.
 
Jimmy Carter, who as president had won praise for brokering the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, and who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for those efforts and for promoting human rights, was roundly criticized by supporters of Israel (in the US as well as Israel) when he said essentially the same thing Coates would later say about Israel and apartheid in his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2006). If anything, the reaction that Carter received was far more vitriolic and personal than those Coates would later get. By 2022—16 years after Carter’s book and just two years before Coates’s—Amnesty International published a lengthy report that also tied Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to apartheid, and they too were roundly criticized by supporters of Israel. Coates’s book does not reference either Carter’s book or the Amnesty International report, as he instead framed his argument around his personal experiences and observations. However, he does have a page on his website for the book that references the Amnesty International report and other publications and works regarding the Palestinians.

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