Here is the monthly crop of the New York Times: a long magazine article about American Jews who stopped supporting Israel;
A documentary on the newspaper's website, in which former soldiers, including Dean Issacharoff from "Breaking the Silence," say that Baruch Marzel hands them pizza coupons if they shoot Palestinians in Hebron;
An article against American laws designed to protect Israel from BDS;
And an article accusing Israel of silencing Palestinian civil society because of the decision to declare some Palestinian organizations terrorist organizations.
All this in one month, November 2021, which was not even so dramatic in the history of the conflict.
In all that month, by the way, not a single article was published in support of Israel or its policies.
The article about teacher Rafat Alariri, which was published last month // Photo: From the "New York Times" website,
And there was one more article, perhaps the most disturbing of them all - a flattering profile article about Rafat Al-Arir, a literature teacher at the Islamic University in Gaza, published by newspaper correspondent Patrick Kingsley on November 16.
Elarir was honored because he teaches songs by Israeli poets, including Yehuda Amichai.
Only one short line mentions in the article that the teacher sharply attacks Israel on social media and presents it as a source of evil.
The New York Times contented itself with an article in one rather pale example of Alarir's attacks, but the "Fair Report" organization for media monitoring filled in the gaps.
It turns out that in the last two years alone, Elarir has compared Israel and the Israelis no less than 115 times to the Nazis and Adolf Hitler.
Ironically, in January 2021 he claimed that the New York Times itself supported "Nazi Israel."
In September 2020, he tweeted in his account that "Israeli leaders are peace-seekers like Hitler."
Israel, of course, is carrying out a "Holocaust."
"Zionism is scum," "Zionism is the worst filth," and "Zionism is a disease."
In August 2021, Al-Arir attacked Hamas because he was negotiating with "terrorists" and "Nazis" - that is, with Israel.
And on November 21 this year, on the day Eliyahu Kay was assassinated in the Old City, Al-Arir shared on his Twitter account a picture of the killer Fadi Abu Shahidam.
The responses read, "May God bless his soul," and below that, "Amen."
Patrick Kingsley, Head of the Jerusalem Desk at NY Times // Photo: GettyImages,
And that's not all.
An article in the New York Times, which was also translated and published in the Haaretz newspaper in Hebrew, claims that Al-Arir is an "avid fan" of Israeli poetry, and that despite the belief of many Israelis that the Palestinian education system is only inciting, his lessons in Gaza arouse empathy in his students in Gaza. For Israelis.
Here, too, it turns out, the reality is completely different. The Islamic University's YouTube channel features a lecture by Alarir described in the article, with the same song by Amichai. An examination by researcher Gilad Ini of the "Camera" organization for media monitoring revealed that instead of encouraging students to see a more complex picture of Israelis, in the filmed lecture - which was not delivered in the presence of a Western reporter - Elarir explains that Amichai's poem is "dangerous to the Palestinians" and that it is "colonial". , Which presents Israelis as innocent. "They are not innocent," Elarir clarifies to his students.
Elarir says in the lecture that he "hates" Amichai's song and calls it "terrible and awful."
He is particularly troubled by Amichai's equal treatment of Jews and Arabs: "The oppressor and the oppressed should never be treated in the same way," he says.
"It's brainwashing."
In conclusion, he explains that Amichai-type scores "are very dangerous. They do not oppose the occupation, they just want a cute occupation, which will kill the Palestinians not by bombs but by starvation, or at least not in front of the camera, so as not to look bad in the eyes of the West."
And this is the man who was featured in the New York Times as adding "nuances" to the conflict.
We made a mistake, and we will continue to do so
The article by Kingsley, head of the Jerusalem desk at the New York Times for about a year, provoked sharp criticism - and in a particularly unusual and embarrassing move, the newspaper published a clarification this week that appears at the beginning of the article on the website, confirming that the Gaza teacher's description was incorrect.
"The article did not accurately reflect Alarir's views on Israeli poetry," the statement said.
The newspaper added that if it had done a more comprehensive job, the article would have presented a more complete picture.
"What the audience wants."
Prof. Eitan Gilboa, Photo: Coco
The clarification actually dropped the ground beneath the main idea of the article about a Palestinian teacher who uses poetry to promote understanding and empathy between the two peoples.
However, the newspaper has not yet addressed the severe incitement to Alarir's violence exposed on social media, and the everyday nicknames he hurls at Israelis.
In this case, the saa was indeed highlighted, and the newspaper had no choice but to admit its mistake. But the question remains: what could have led a major and leading newspaper in the United States and the world to present a sympathetic portrait of a man who expresses constant and prolonged support for violence and terrorism, a temple of murder and death, and regularly calls Jews and Israelis "Nazis"? Times ", which considers itself an advanced and liberal newspaper? Is it possible to imagine a parallel portrait article about an Israeli teacher, if there is one, who tweets in favor of harming Arabs, even if he teaches Mahmoud Darwish or Naguib Mahfouz?
The New York Times' anti-Israel obsession is not a one-time affair.
During Operation Walls against Hamas, the newspaper published on its front page pictures of Palestinian children killed during the war.
The concern for the lives of children is indeed touching, but the opinion is that if that was the case, then when it comes to the much larger numbers of dead children, and others who were killed by the US military, the newspaper would surely have had to do the same.
IDF shelling in the direction of Gaza during Operation Walls "// Photo: AFP,
But it turns out not.
Tens of thousands of children have died in the war in Afghanistan over the past 20 years, and in Iraq it is estimated that thousands of children have been killed by the US military.
Children have also been killed in U.S. attacks in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere.
Still, no issue of the newspaper featured pictures of dead children with their names on the front page.
This concern is reserved only for children killed by Israel.
Gate of the New Times after the Wall Guard,
Until a decade or two ago, it could still be argued that the New York Times only opposed Israel's policy in Judea and Samaria, but today the newspaper often presents an even more radical position, which often undermines the very existence of the State of Israel.
Between Herzl and Oaks
If there is one word that sums up the New York Times' attitude toward Israel, it is disgust.
Israel can never "come out well" on the pages of the New York Times.
To understand the process of extremism that took place in one of the most important newspapers in the world, one has to go back to the beginning, since the New York Times and the Zionist project did not really get along from the first moment.
They were born a few months apart: Theodor Herzl published The State of the Jews in Vienna in February 1896, while overseas, in New York City, in August of that year Adolf Oaks purchased a failed newspaper on the verge of bankruptcy, turning it into a global media empire.
Since then, the paper has been under the control of the Ox-Salzberger family, and it is the spirit that lives and throbs in it.
Ox and Herzl were both Jews educated on the knees of German culture, but it is difficult to think of a greater gap between the two, at least in relation to a phenomenon then known as the "Jewish problem."
Herzl believed that anti-Semitism was an incurable global disease, and that no matter where Jews tried to flee, it would pursue them.
He saw Judaism as a nation and not just a religion, and believed that Jews all over the world were members of one nation.
Because of this, the only way to ensure the lives and well-being of the Jews was, in Herzl's opinion, to establish a Jewish state, in which they would enjoy all the rights and be masters of their own destiny.
Oaks' position, however, was quite the opposite.
"The Israeli Problem".
Publisher Arthur J. Salzberger Photo: GettyImages,
Oaks was a clear example of an American success story, and of a man who built himself with his ten fingers.
The son of a Jewish immigrant from Bavaria, who began working in the press at the age of 11, first as a floor cleaner in a printing machine room in his hometown of Tennessee, and then as a reporter for a small local newspaper in Kentucky.
He gradually advanced in the American press industry, until at the age of 38 he recognized a successful business opportunity, and acquired the New York Times for $ 75,000.
An innocent article about Jaffa drew an apology.
Barry Weiss Photo: From Twitter,
The opacity of Tolstoy
Within four years, Oaks had quadrupled the newspaper's circulation, and within 20 years - 15 times that.
Oaks was a clear representative of Reform Jewry in the United States, a Jewish sect originating in 19th-century Germany. the state in which they live. the rise of Zionism, therefore, was seen by reformers as a genuine threat: from what they were trying to escape - that is, identifying with their explicit Jewish - Zionist claim that simply can not escape.
from the first moment struggled New York Times " And the publisher Oaks in Zionism, and was seen as an enemy in heart and soul.
The newspaper systematically dwarfed Herzl and the beginning of the crystallization of Zionism.
The newspaper wrote that the establishment of a Jewish state is not possible at all, or that such a state will be small and weak, and will not be able to endure.
"The establishment of a Jewish state will cause unprecedented damage," the newspaper wrote following the first Zionist Congress in Basel.
Isaac Meyer Wise, one of the leaders of the Reform movement and Oaks' father-in-law, called Herzl and his supporters "jealous."
"You can't skip over two thousand years of history and start over from the same place," Wise wrote in the paper.
As Zionism grew stronger in Europe, so did the New York Times' onslaught.
Zionism was called a "poisoned fruit" that would only fuel the persecution of the Jews.
The establishment of a Jewish state would be a "disaster for Jews in Western countries," it was argued.
In 1902 the paper warned that the notion that Jews could prosper only in their own country was in the hands of the Jews' enemies.
Zionism, therefore, causes Jews "more harm than Christian anti-Semitism."
In 1906, none other than the writer Lev Tolstoy enlisted to write a scathing anti-Zionist article over the pages of the newspaper. In Zionism he saw an expression of imperialism and a desire for rule. The true expression of Judaism is not territorial, but spiritual, explained the Russian count who lived a considerable part of his life on a 16,000-acre estate. The greatest moment in the history of Judaism, he said, was the establishment of the Jewish center in Yavne after the destruction of the Second Temple - a moment that, at least in the eyes of the Jews themselves, symbolized evil in its minority, and the possibility of saving what was given. For Tolstoy, in Yavne, "peace-loving Jews who were not zealous for their national independence could study Torah." Zionism for him was nothing less than "sacrilege."
All this was written by the Russian writer while outside his estate millions of Jews groaned under the murderous anti-Semitism of the Tsarist Empire.
It will be more than a century before the same Yavneh model is miraculously raised again - this time by Peter Bainert, the new priest of the Jewish left in the United States, and a columnist for the New York Times.
5 Poles and 700,000 Jews
These examples, which appear in Gerold Auerbach's book Print to Fit, well document the significant anti-Zionist ideological bias of Oaks and his subsequent publisher, son-in-law Arthur Hayes Salzberger.
Undoubtedly, the moment of the newspaper's journalistic slump was the coverage of the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe during World War II.
From the beginning of the war to its end, for six years, the paper treated the extermination of European Jews as a secondary story in its importance.
The Holocaust did not receive continuous coverage or a central place in the newspaper, as befits an unprecedented attempt to exterminate an entire people on earth.
War on terror or oppression?
The separation fence near Jerusalem // Photo: Oren Ben Hakon,
Laurel Leff, author of the book "Buried by the Times," found that news reports of deportation or murder of Jews appeared on the front page of the paper only 26 times during the entire war, and only six of them identified Jews as the main victims - an average of once a year. Not even once was the Holocaust mentioned in the headline of the newspaper, not even when the concentration camps were liberated at the end of the war.
In reports that did appear on the front page, the Jewish identities of the victims were erased, and they were instead presented as refugees.
Even in the opinion columns, the Holocaust was rarely mentioned.
The problem was not a lack of information, which flowed abundantly to the Allies, Jewish organizations and other aid organizations.
For example, the newspaper's first report on the Nazi extermination, from June 1942, referred to the "greatest mass murder in history" and mentioned reports of 700,000 Jews murdered, but appeared only on page 5, below a long line of other reports, including five Poles and 114 'Im killed by the Germans in punitive campaigns.
The truth was known, but the newspaper consciously buried it in the back pages.
Over the years, the Reform movement gradually softened its stance toward Israel, and no longer saw it as an enemy.
There have also been changes in the Salzberger family: due to intermarriage, the publishers of today are no longer Jews.
But the newspaper's "Israeli problem" is not over.
The editors demanded an officer
The person who has been following the American media closely for many decades is Prof. Eitan Gilboa, an expert in the United States, founder and head of the School of Communication and the Center for International Communication at Bar-Ilan University. Once upon a time, "the newspaper is extreme in its attitude toward Israel," he says, "even in relation to other newspapers identified with the left in the United States, such as the Washington Post or the Boston Globe. Their hostile attitude toward Israel stands on its own. Today, New York The Times sees itself as a flag bearer of anti-Israelism and anti-Zionism, and even has anti-Semitic tendencies. "
The New York Times gives a very broad platform for anti-Zionist positions and the denial of the right to exist of the State of Israel as a Jewish state - an approach that is considered anti-Semitic according to the "International Alliance for the Preservation of Holocaust Remembrance" (IHRA).
One of the explanations for this phenomenon, according to Gilboa, is the process of internal extremism in American politics.
"As far as the American media is concerned, Israel has never been a matter of foreign policy. The amount of Israel's journalistic coverage has always been like the coverage of internal issues," he says.
Ashley Rindsberg, Photo: Moshe Shai
Therefore, as American society becomes increasingly divided on domestic issues, such as abortion or state health insurance, Israel also becomes a contentious issue, with the left and right competing with each other over who will take a more extreme stance toward Israel - for positive and negative. "The Democratic Party has gone to the left in recent years. This has been reflected in a group of congressmen, such as Alexandra Oxio-Cortez, who have become very vocal in their hostility to Israel. "Hostility to Israel has become one of the flags that members of this camp wave, including in the New York Times," says Gilboa.
He believes that anti-Israel bias has always existed in the New York newspaper, but that today it has become more significant.
"More words have been written about the Sabra and Shatila massacre than about the landing of man on the moon. So their bias lasts a very long time."
Another reason that Gilboa points out is the feeling in the newspaper that this is the approach that the readership is interested in.
"It is common to think that the media sets the agenda," he says, "but many times, the media sets the agenda according to what it thinks its audience wants to hear."
Sometimes the reporters also adapt their writing to the editors' demand: Gilboa says that a reporter from a newspaper published in Israel told him a few years ago that his personal positions were different, but he was forced to adopt an anti-Israel stance because that was the demand from the editors.
Mike Pence intervened
A clear example of anti-Semitism, Prof. Gilboa describes, is a cartoon that appeared in a newspaper in April 2019, in which Trump is seen as a blind man led by a guide dog whose face is Netanyahu's.
The dog is seen wearing a collar with a Star of David on it, and Trump is seen wearing a skullcap on his head.
After vigorous protests, including criticism from U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, the paper was forced to apologize and explicitly admit that it was antisemitic advertising. In general, Gilboa says, "the paper denies that there is anti-Semitism on the left side of the map.
For them, anti-Semitism can only come from the right. "
Another affair that resonated was the resignation of Jewish journalist Barry Weiss in July 2020. Weiss was quoted a few years earlier from the New York Times' main rival, the Wall Street Journal, which is considered a conservative newspaper affiliated with the center-right. In the U.S. The stated goal was to balance the opinion pages in the paper and bring to them even voices that are not identified with the radical left.
But something very strange happened along the way. Weiss became the target of severe aggression by her newspaper colleagues. In her public resignation letter to publisher Salzberger, Weiss described a hostile and violent work environment: Her newspaper colleagues called her "Nazi" and racist in internal forums, and criticized her for "writing about Jews again." ) Of an ax, and the paper's editors and reporters called her a liar on social media.The attitude towards her was more reminiscent of Mao's Cultural Revolution in China and less of the free media stronghold of the world's important democracy.
An atmosphere of intolerance for anyone who does not hold extreme leftist views is also reflected in everything related to Israel.
For example, while working for the newspaper, Weiss published an innocent-looking tourism article about Jaffa, but then the newspaper apologized for not mentioning "Jaffa's history" - a hint at the city's Arab past.
But an interview with writer Alice Walker, author of The Color Crimson, who expressed explicit antisemitic views, still appears on the paper's website, without any apology.
It turns out that there are things that should be apologized for, and there are some that should not.
"Readers Must Be Evil"
Beyond the newspaper's anti-Zionist ideological sources, and in addition to the changing political map in the United States, there is also an economic component that explains the New York Times' hostility to Israel - at least according to Ashley Rindsberg, who published a book about the newspaper last year. "The Gray Lady Winked" (published by Midnight Oil).
Rindsberg documented ten past affair in which the newspaper's coverage was falsely, erroneously or ideologically biased.
One was the second intifada, which he said "was a turning point in the history of the newspaper's coverage of the conflict. So the New York Times stopped talking in terms of a 'circle of violence' between Israel and the Palestinians, and began to place all the blame on Israel."
Rindsberg recounts how the newspaper blamed Ariel Sharon for the outbreak of the intifada.
"For them, nothing changed this narrative, not even what the Palestinians themselves said. They also completely adopted the Palestinian narrative in the case of the boy Muhammad al-Dura, who was allegedly shot by IDF soldiers.
"They have moved into the realm of creating myths in the style of the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' of Jews who intentionally kill children."
The most prominent visual expression from that period of the narrative that the newspaper tried to promote was a picture published at the beginning of the intifada, September 30, 2000. The picture shows an Israeli border policeman holding his hand, shouting at a young man with a lot of blood. Below the picture is written: "Israeli and Palestinian policeman on the Temple Mount", and the visual message was that of Goliath the Israeli in front of the Palestinian David.
The picture was indeed dramatic, but there were some problems: the guy was not Palestinian but a Jew, the picture was not taken on the Temple Mount but in one of the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, and the policeman did not threaten the guy if he saved his life, after Palestinians pulled him out of a street taxi. And stabbed him.
The reality was quite the opposite of the course of events described by the paper, but it took the New York Times long days to print a correction that was at most hesitant and unequivocal.
Rindsberg explains that in the last two decades, the New York Times has moved from an economic model based on revenue from both ads and subscribers, to a model based solely on subscribers. The entry of the internet into the picture has greatly reduced the cake of advertising in the traditional media, and the newspapers have experienced a dramatic drop in revenue. This means that now the newspaper needs to persuade more people to regularly pay a subscription fee to the newspaper. "It used to be customary for someone who lived in a certain city to read the municipal newspaper," Rindsberg tells Israel This Week, "simply because that's what it was. In New York you could choose between two or three newspapers. But the Internet has completely changed the picture."
The need to persuade potential readers to regularly pay newspaper subscriptions led to the radicalization of positions, and the transformation of the newspaper from a professional journalism platform into a show of political activity. The purpose of the newspaper is no longer to inform the public of what is happening, but to excite the passions. "No one will pay for newspaper subscription presents a complex picture, with no black and white, or who are clearly responsible on the one hand and the victims clearly on the other hand," he says,
"people do pay a subscription to explain to them in simple words that one side is wicked, and we, the newspaper you He reads, fights for the other side, for the good side. "
He says, "Every American journalist today thinks he's a Batman-style superhero, and if you're a Batman, you need a Joker-style superhero to fight him. And the joker that the New York Times is fighting against now is the State of Israel. Anti-Zionism, which has always been in the newspaper's DNA, is used by the newspaper to portray the Jews as villains, who exploit and enslave the Palestinians. This is now appropriate for what the newspaper needs - someone to fight against. "That Israel set it up to oppress the Palestinians. The assumption that Israel is the villain in the story precedes any other logical explanation."
***
The conclusion that emerges from looking at the New York Times' treatment of Israel is that for the newspaper, there are two types of Jews: "good" Jews, who play the traditional role that Jews have played in Western society in recent decades, especially in the cultural and intellectual field - Woody Allen and Philip Roth , To scientists and Nobel laureates. These Jews may be geniuses, but they lack power or political power. They do not threaten anyone, or in Rindsberg's words, "as long as it's Yiddish theater performances or soup recipes with kneadlech, the New York Times has no problem."
In front of them are the "bad" Jews, a target for aggression and an obsessive attack, the embodiment of which today is in the State of Israel.
These Jews see Judaism not only as a religion but also as a nation.
They decided to take their fate into their own hands, and to that end they gained power and established a state of their own.
They use force to manage their lives, defend themselves and build their country.
Against these Jews the newspaper comes out in a frothy froth.
Jews with power, it seems, are simply not a phenomenon the New York Times can tolerate.
And until that changes, if at all, the paper will continue to attack Israel incessantly, publishing articles praising Gazan teachers, even if they do not deserve it in the slightest.
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