As we mark one year since Oct. 7, the worse massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, it might seem that equivalence was the order of the day at the New York Times. And to some extent it was. The newspaper’s feature “The War That Won’t End: How Oct. 7 Sparked a Year of Conflict,” published first thing this morning, works hard to create symmetry on this day of Israeli mourning.
Paragraph one introduces readers to an Israeli who fled his home one year ago, on Oct. 7. Paragraph two introduces a Palestinian who fled his on Oct. 12.
The Israeli death toll from Oct. 7 is immediately followed by the Palestinian death toll for the year.
Photos, too, were neatly paired: One of a body bag with an Israeli killed on Oct. 7 followed immediately by another of a Palestinian killed in December. A photo of the Israeli who fled alongside one of the Palestinian who fled. Benjamin Netanyahu on the left, Hamas arch-terrorist Yahya Sinwar on the right. A funeral in Israel, one in Gaza.
But even this careful balancing act, on the day of a one-sided slaughter, couldn’t undo the newspaper’s familiar skew.
Authors Patrick Kingsley, Ronen Bergman and Bilal Shbair write:
Inside a deeply traumatized Israel, that conflict has magnified long-running social schisms and set off bitter debate about whether to prioritize Hamas’s destruction or a deal to free the hostages. Outside Israel, it has spurred horror at the Israeli military response to Hamas’s atrocities, accusations of genocide and war crimes, and widespread protests in the United States and beyond.
The article refers to accusations of genocide — but not those decrying Hamas’s genocidal attack. Anti-Israel accusations are what excite the paper, so much so that it had refused to correct a misrepresentation of an International Court of Justice ruling even after the president of the court publicly called out media coverage that wrongly claimed the court found the genocide accusation plausible.
And so the authors mention the word “genocide” in association with “horror at the Israeli military response,” and link to a piece about charges against Israel levelled by South Africa’s pro-Hamas government.
The @nytimes is aware of its error.
It has not corrected. pic.twitter.com/t4L1m2E9h8
— Gilead Ini (@GileadIni) June 6, 2024
In the context of the paragraph, readers will also understand the reference to “war crimes” as describing Israeli actions, and not those of Hamas. It’s not that the authors lacked opportunity to report how Hamas’s violates international law. There were plenty. The piece mentions Hamas’s hostages, a war crime. It mentions Hamas’s leader hiding alongside hostages, another war crime. It mentions Hamas’s tunneling under homes, schools and UN facilities, a war crime. It mentions the execution of hostages, a war crime. The Oct. 7 attack as a whole was characterized by Hamas’s violations of the laws of war.
Credit to the authors for at least acknowledging these facts. But the same newspaper that at least once per month over the past half year has relayed the view that Israeli settlements violate international law did not describe any of these Hamas actions as war crimes.
Other bad habits recur in the piece. Per the authors:
Both sides appear to have decided that they will not go back to how things were before Oct. 7. Hamas’s leaders have said the prewar dynamic of endless Israeli occupation must be disrupted regardless of the human cost. Israel feels far more vulnerable after the deadliest day in its history and has decided it can no longer tolerate groups dedicated to its destruction on its borders.
Is it endless “occupation” that Hamas leaders are concerned with? No — certainly not in the way that readers and experts understand that word.
In an interview in which he explained that Hamas seeks to repeat the Oct. 7 attacks again and again, Hamas official Ghazi Hamad insisted Israel “has no place on our land,” and that the group “must remove that country.”
And while he later told his interviewer that “The occupation must come to an end,” that hardly vindicates the New York Times’s use of that word, as the continuation of that exchange makes clear:
News anchor: “Occupation where? In the Gaza Strip?”
Hamad: “No, I am talking about all the Palestinian lands.”
News anchor: “Does that mean the annihilation of Israel?”
Hamad: “Yes, of course.”
Of course. And of course, the New York Times went along with the terror group’s word games. We’re talking about the same paper, after all, that had falsely claimed Islamic Jihad was founded “to fight the Israeli occupation,” and falsely claimed that Hamas attacked Israel in a fight “against the Israeli occupation,” and falsely claimed that Hamas means the West Bank when it references “occupation.”