donshafi911@IAmTheFaceOfTruth🔻

 

The New York Times commitment to Zionism begins with its own staff

contact@ifamericansknew.org July 27, 2025

To imagine a free Palestine within our lifetimes, it helps to imagine a world without The New York Times. (Writers Against the War on Gaza)

The New York Times has helped to enable and sustain Israel’s ongoing genocide. A new dossier reveals the close ties of 20 top editors, executives, and journalists at the Times who have covered Gaza and their connection to Israel and Zionism.

by Writers Against the War on Gaza, reposted from Mondoweiss

We are putting The New York Times on notice. Since the Zionist genocide in Gaza began over 20 months ago, the “paper of record” has run cover for Israel’s war crimes. We have witnessed the Zionist entity drop 2,000 pound bombs on displaced Palestinians forced to survive in tents, massacre starving Palestinians at aid sites, arrest and torture Palestinians accused of fighting back or administering care, destroy Gaza’s entire healthcare system, obliterate almost every one of its schools and universities, damage over 90 percent of residential buildings, and block food and supplies from entering the besieged strip.

But New York Times journalists have chosen to ignore, whitewash, distort, or justify each one of these crimes. As much as any weapons manufacturer, The New York Times is a part of the machinery of war — producing, in the realm of public opinion, the impunity that enables and sustains Israel’s ongoing genocide.

When we first occupied the lobby of The New York Times in November 2023, we called out the Times’ refusal to historicize the Al Aqsa Flood within the context of Israel’s over seven-decade-long occupation of Palestine and its choice to frame the Israeli military’s bombardment of Gaza as a targeted war against Hamas. We demanded that the Times tell the truth. We printed our own paper, The New York War Crimes, which contained the names of Palestinian martyrs recorded at that time. It took us over an hour just to read the names of martyrs under the age of one. We called on our audiences to boycott the Times; to divest their time, trust, and attention from the paper; and to unsubscribe from its news, games, and recipes. 

We are not the first to point out the Times’ commitment to Zionism. The dossier we released this month was built on the investigative work of outlets and organizations including The Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss, The Intercept, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and Palestinian writers who have exposed the fraudulence of the “paper of record” for decades. Since October 7th, such critiques have accrued both new audiences and new urgency.

Data tracking word choices across the newsroom as well as leaks of the Times’ editorial directives evince anti-Palestinian bias. Times headline corrections have become a favorite discursive tool of the Palestine solidarity movement — to reveal the revisionism, to set the record straight, to tell the truth. Our dossier adds to this body of knowledge: It exposes 20 high-ranking editors, executives, and journalists who cover the war on Gaza and have ties to the Zionist state, further undermining the Times’ unearned prestige.

Natan Odenheimer served in the Maglan special forces commando unit of the Israeli occupation forces. Now that he is a Jerusalem correspondent for the Times, he writes about — and embeds with — his former brothers in arms. How can we ever expect someone to report on the occupation correctly when he wore the occupier’s uniform for four years? Isabel Kershner is the mother of two former IOF soldiers and the wife of another. After his tour, Kershner’s husband went on to direct an Israeli think tank’s Program on Information Strategy, a department tasked with shaping a positive image of Israel in the media.

We don’t have to ask how this relationship shapes her coverage: Kershner has cited her husband’s think tank over 100 times since she started writing for the Times in 2007. Our dossier, which lays bare the material connections and historical allegiances of editors, executives, and influential writers to Zionism, clearly demonstrates that the Times is compromised. The entire institution is systematically organized to protect Israel from international accountability.

The Times’ support of Zionism and the settler state’s colonial mission across the region is deeply embedded in the paper’s history. A. M. Rosenthal, head of the Times’ newsroom for nearly two decades, was praised at his funeral for showing that it was possible to love Israel “every bit as much as to love our own country.” Max Frankel, executive editor of the Times for over ten years, admitted he wrote “from a pro-Israel perspective” and said he was expected to stand up for Israel “whether they’re right or wrong.” 

The Times has condemned our research as “a vile campaign” in the press, but refuses to accept that Israel’s killing of over 200 Palestinian journalists has been targeted. We regret ever calling the martyr Hossam Shabat the “colleague” of elite journalists who write their propaganda from stolen homes in occupied Jerusalem. Those who serve in the IOF, who get paid by the Israel lobby to spew hasbara are not the colleagues of Palestine’s bravest: They are their enemies. 

The paper’s response to our dossier deploys the same tortured logic present in its coverage — how can our research be both “public knowledge” and “inaccurate”? We know why the Times has been silent on the killing of media workers: Palestinian journalists expose the same truth the paper seeks to obscure. They are constantly charged with being biased and unable to report objectively because they are Palestinian. Their identity is the ultimate accusation. In the Times, fairness evades the Palestinians, and their struggle to live free is unrighteous, unjust and worthy of condemnation.

 “The New York Times doesn’t recognize Palestine,” an editor at the Times once told the Palestinian intellectual Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. Abu-Lughod responded, “Well, Palestine doesn’t recognize The New York Times either.” His refusal to acknowledge the Times 37 years ago is an invitation to undercut its prestige. Everyone should heed his call and boycott, divest, and unsubscribe from the “paper of record.” To imagine a free Palestine within our lifetimes, it helps to imagine a world without The New York Times.