The New York Times Crusade Against Israel

The New York Times should consider adopting the Jerusalem cross as its new logo to represent its crusade against Israel and the Jewish people. With a steady stream of slanted reporting and a roster of columnists united by their hostility to Israel (with the lone exception of columnist Bret Stephens), the Times has transformed itself from a paper of record into a platform for moral inversion.

Here’s the journalistic trick for looking credible while advancing a political agenda: Choose sources that support your point of view. It is particularly effective when those sources are anonymous, making it impossible to know their agenda. Times reporters do this routinely, typically quoting U.S. State Department Arabists who they know share their anti-Israel views. Sometimes, they quote sympathetic “experts” to give their bias a veneer of authority.

The op-ed page is worse. It runs on the adage that “man bites dog” is news, which in this case translates into prioritizing Jewish critics of Israel. These “As a Jew” pieces—by academics or activists who use their identity to launder moral attacks—are a staple. A recent example: Brown University professor Omer Bartov, who accused Israel of “genocide” while virtually ignoring the massacre that triggered the war.

Bartov is supposed to be taken seriously because he teaches Holocaust and genocide studies. Because it has not been the site of encampments and public confrontations like Columbia, Brown’s tolerance of anti-Israel and antisemitic students and faculty has gone largely unnoticed. Bartov has been railing against the Israeli government for years and signed the antisemitic Elephant in the Room screed, making him an obvious choice for the op-ed page.

As with most media coverage of the Gaza war, logic is missing from his article. He did not mention the word terrorism even once. His only references to Oct. 7—the day Hamas butchered more than 1,200 Israelis, took 251 hostages, and hid behind civilians in mosques, schools and hospitals—were cursory. Remarkably, he declared within a month of the terrorist attacks that Israel had committed war crimes, as though Hamas’s atrocities demanded no meaningful accounting.

His core claim of genocide hinges on intent. But the quotes he offers from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu do not call for the destruction of a people; they call for the destruction of a terrorist army. Netanyahu said that Hamas would pay a “huge price,” that the Israel Defense Forces would turn Hamas-infested areas “into rubble” and urged “residents of Gaza” to evacuate. If anything, those are statements of intent to protect civilians, not to eliminate them.

Bartov fails to mention that it is the Hamas charter that calls for the genocide of the Jews. Had Hamas not committed a massacre on Oct. 7, not a single Palestinian civilian would have lost their life in Gaza.

Like other detractors, Bartov has inverted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was a reaction to the Nazi crimes against the Jews, to blame the victims. The convention defines genocide as an “intention to destroy, wholly or partially, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, per se.”

Israel has never had any interest in the destruction of the Palestinian people. How else can you explain the growth of the population of Palestinians from 1.3 million during the British Mandate to roughly 4.6 million in the disputed territories? And in Israel, the population of Israeli Arabs has grown from 156,000 in 1948 to more than 2 million today—one-fifth of the population.

Consider also that Israel saved the mastermind of Oct. 7, Yahya Sinwar, by performing brain surgery on him when he was in an Israeli prison. Ismail Haniyeh, another Hamas official responsible for the massacre, approved of his daughter, granddaughters, brother-in-law and mother-in-law receiving medical treatment in Israel.

If Israel were engaged in genocide, it has been a dismal failure.

That is also true of Gaza.

If Hamas had surrendered and released all the hostages it is holding at any point, no civilians would be in danger.

Astoundingly, Bartov mentions the hostages only once in the context of the Jan. 19 ceasefire. He blames Israel for breaking the truce, without saying it was a result of Hamas’s refusal to release more hostages. If Hamas had surrendered and released all the hostages it is holding at any point, no civilians would be in danger. It is the genocidaire who starts the war, not the victim, and who is responsible for the casualties.

Like much of the media, Bartov parrots Hamas casualty numbers, referring vaguely to “Gazan health authorities.” He absurdly implies that Israel has failed to kill a single terrorist. Israel estimates that more than 20,000 of the 54,000 claimed dead were militants. That would leave approximately 34,000 civilian casualties, tragic, but consistent with modern urban warfare, primarily when the enemy uses human shields.

Even if we accept the inflated numbers, the implied genocide falls apart under scrutiny. A 1% casualty rate, while horrible, hardly supports an allegation of systematic extermination. Compare this to real genocides: the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge’s slaughter of 25% of Cambodians, Stalin’s famine-engineered deaths in Ukraine or the Rwandan genocide, which claimed 800,000 lives in just 100 days.

Genocide is not committed by countries that warn civilians to evacuate, allow humanitarian aid through enemy lines, or treat enemy combatants and their families in their hospitals.

Genocide is not committed by countries that warn civilians to evacuate, allow humanitarian aid through enemy lines, or treat enemy combatants and their families in their hospitals.

Furthermore, if Israelis wanted to eradicate the Palestinians, why did they agree to coexist beside a Palestinian entity on at least 10 separate occasions from 1937 to the present? Opportunities that the Palestinians consistently rejected.

Look at any Palestinian map or the logos of the political organizations, and you can see that it is the Palestinians who wish to erase the Jews’ presence. If given the chance, as both Hezbollah and Hamas officials have repeatedly said, the terrorists would commit the Oct. 7 massacres repeatedly, from north to south. And don’t be misled: The “moderates” in the West Bank that some would like to run postwar Gaza include Palestinian Arabs who cheered and participated in the massacre, and who share the same bloodthirsty objective.

The only force standing between the Jewish people and those who openly seek their destruction is the IDF. This fundamental truth is what Bartov, The New York Times and other detractors refuse to confront, opting instead for a willful inversion of moral responsibility and historical facts.

Exposing the distortions in columns like Bartov’s is part of the endless, Sisyphean task of challenging the Times’ relentless crusade against Israel—an effort made even more urgent by the platform’s reach and influence.

This op-ed originally appeared in JNS.