Over half of The Message is devoted to discussion of the ongoing conflict between Palestine and Israel, so some historical context is key to understanding the book and its initial reception. Narratives about this conflict are highly contested; what follows is a simplified overview of key moments that should be supplemented with reading of more extensive sources that represent multiple viewpoints.

In 1947, the United Nations created a partition plan that was supposed to establish two states in the Middle East, one for the existing Arab population in Palestine and another for Jewish immigrants who were coming to the area in increasing numbers after the Holocaust. When Israel declared independence in 1948, a league of Arab countries attacked; Israel won that conflict and expanded its territory. Palestinians refer to the subsequent displacement of the Arab population as the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” which Coates references twice in “The Gigantic Dream.” These mentions come during moments when Coates has epiphanies about what he takes to be “the perpetual process of ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians (217).

Another key moment in the conflict came in 1967 during the Six-Day War. Israel emerged victorious with new territory—the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, parts of Jerusalem, and other land.