There are so many horror stories, so many outrageous declarations coming out of the executive branch, that our heads are spinning. A lot of it is simply political theater, repression porn. And we make a mistake to let the barrage of bullshit blind us to fundamental realities. Every once in a while I am reminded to get back to some simple truths that might help us keep perspective on how to name the problem and where we will be going in the future. So here are a few:
Just sayin’ #1. The MAGA movement has pursued an anti-Black politics of white grievance (whining that white people are victims of reverse racism, parading fucking Boer racists as refugees) and sought to roll back seventy years of slow progress. And with so many distractions and manufactured crises, fighting the ongoing practice of racist police violence is off the agenda for most. The Trump judges and officials, along with local city councils (even Democratic Party ones), have beefed up police budgets and halted prosecutions of killer cops. In fact, the demand from 2020 to defund the police, while briefly powerful and seemingly on the agenda, was a project to redirect public funds to crisis intervention, mental health and addiction services, and restorative practices. The whole political establishment has turned away from this and violence against the Black community and other peoples of color has actually grown.
Just sayin’ #2. Tariffs are supposed to correct a problematic balance of trade — the US imports more than it exports. But the statistic “balance of trade” is just one arbitrary pairing of data in the constructed data game called economics. When the US was an industrial imperialist center, with raw materials shipped here, manufactured, and sent out — then the “balance of trade” meant that the US exported more than it imported. But it has been a conscious decision, since the 1980’s, to move production to the Third World, for cheap labor there and scant environmental laws. Now there are a thousand ships at sea bringing containers of products for Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, and the rest. That was not a mistake. That was a decision made by the capitalists as the US became more and more of a parasitic economy. Jobs here were in service and tech (deciding where all these products should be moved). It’s not a pretty picture but this is how the US economy functions. In reality Trump and his friends don’t have a master plan on the economy. They are simply trying to game the market to make tons of money for themselves. Oh, and the threat of tariffs only moves countries to trade more with each other instead of the U.S.
Just sayin’ #3. A lot of the push-back on Trump’s orgy of deportation raids argues that we won’t be able to get food on our shelves because it is the immigrant labor, undocumented and documented, that does the backbreaking work for low pay. We won’t have our blueberries! Hello? That is an opportunist argument. Progressives should not be celebrating backbreaking work for low pay. We need to demand more humane and safe working conditions and decent pay for those who do agricultural and food factory work. The ideal situation for the MAGA crowd, of course, is to expand the struggling lower class with more jobs taken by prisoners (slaves). This is part of fascism.
Just sayin’ #4. The anti-immigrant xenophobic cry to keep the country “American” is a call for white supremacy. This has a long history, going back to the beginning of the country and highlighted by the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Bracero deportations in the 1930’s. Both major parties are seriously anti-immigrant. But our perspective needs to go beyond “we are a nation of immigrants,” and “we should at least support those with refugee claims.” The truth is that people coming from south of the US border are largely, or in part, indigenous people, native to this land. They have the right to roam here and there, beyond the artificial construction of borders which is simply a structure for extraction of resources and labor. And, by the way, most immigrants don’t come because they are dying to be in the US. They are driven out because their homes are crushed by economic manipulation as well as wars caused by the US, what Juan Gonzalez calls the ”harvest of empire.” The immigrants I know from restaurant work are constantly homesick but working here in order to support their families.
Just sayin’ #5. I’m seeing a lot of excitement about the article by Israeli-American scholar Omer Bartov, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.” To me, this is pretty pathetic. Really, after almost two years of grizzly bombing and killing in Gaza, this guy has decided, “hey, I guess it is genocide!” And the Times, which supported the genocide in so many ways, is starting to see the light? It only took 70,000 — or is it 200,000? — deaths to make you see that. I’m sorry, but as for all these late-comers who decided something stinks here, I say, “fuck you!” And if you have supported the genocide up to now and now you would like to be remembered as “against all this” and “on the right side of history,” fuck you too. As my son Max pointed out, this is happening because we did not hold Nuremberg trials after the Vietnam War. See the book “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This” by Omar El Akkad.
Just sayin’ #6. As with refugee camps, we know that good-hearted people put a great deal of effort into supporting homeless (houseless) people. It is important and worthy work. But we should always keep in mind that the predicament these people are in is not normal and is not their fault. It is the inevitable result of massive income inequality, of trillions of dollars being hoarded by the one percent, and the practice of making houses commodities to be bought and sold on the marketplace. (The same is true, amazingly, with medicine.) Massive investment firms suck up thousands of houses and either hold them empty or jack up the prices. In cities like San Francisco, there are more housing units standing empty than there are homeless people. So yes, we should work on building shelters and other solutions for the homeless, but we should also critique the way the game is set up every day. Some will raise drug addiction as a confounding factor. But addiction is a disease and capitalism, not individual choices, are why we have the opium epidemic. In San Francisco, the reason people are rich and the reason people are shooting up on the sidewalk are the same.
Just sayin’ #7. The US empire is falling and well it should. We certainly hoped it would happen in a peaceful or even beautiful way — with revolutionary internationalism ascending, dismantling structures of oppression, paying reparations, becoming simply a nation among nations. But, as it happens, declining empires often turn to xenophobia, racism, violence. And that is what we have now. Trump is overseeing the decline of the empire in the most clumsy and cruel way. But decline it must. Let’s not say things like, “we need to go back to the world order that has been predominant in the years since World War II” — that’s the one of US intervention, wars, and propping up dictators. We don’t need to say, “save our democracy” — who had democracy? We don’t want to go back to that. Instead we should be picking up the pieces from this mess, supporting all those who have been brutalized by it. Let’s envision something much better, much more democratic and peaceful. We can do it.
A friend texted me, “what are we going to do??” OK just a thought here. Disagree if you like. The crisis we are facing is deeper than that Clown DT, and it goes back further. The Republicans and Democrats have been rushing us towards this crisis for decades. Certainly Reagan. But the whole campaign for “globalization” and de-industrialization, for NAFTA, for mass incarceration, for neo-liberal market-based logic to everything, that was all the Democrats. The Dems and Repubs are pretty much on the same team. The bigger movement is the end of the US empire which cannot really be turned around. Both parties are trying to aggressively pick fights with their two adversaries. Is it because they love Ukrainians so much? They love Taiwanese? No, these hot spots far from our shores are hot because the US is desperate to hold on to and extend its imperial grasp. It’s not going to happen. Do I love the Chinese leadership? The Russian leadership? Nope. But I don’t think we should salute our own oligarchs as they push us into these desperate wars. Trump is a clown and a fool but he’s the front man for very determined capitalists who are plotting last-gasp ventures to save the empire. They will fail. We can only fight them so their failure won’t cost too many lives. Yes we must resist DT. But let’s not pretend that this is some unique or worse threat, let’s not feed nostalgia for Biden and his genocidal wars. Everyone seems to be in shock now. Once we get our bearings and the lines are drawn, I trust that people will know what to do.
January 31, 2024
Another random thought: The fight for ethnic studies has been long and hard. It appears that it is now under attack by the “anti-woke” crowd. Let’s remember that the implementation of Black Studies, Chicano Studies, Asian American Studies, really all of ethnic studies was initiated through a long, hard strike at SF State. The establishment has over the years tried to make ethnic studies a non-threatening simple exploration, to domesticate it. But at its core, ethnic studies is a revolutionary rethinking of education and really of what is knowledge, what matters. Now even the mild versions are under attack and it is disgusting. What to do. In the long run, of course, we have to win it back and win it in its true, transformative reality. But for this year and the foreseeable future, I think we need to simply pursue this knowledge outside of the schools. Tucson school district cannot ban a Freedom School which meets a few evenings or on a weekend to delve into Mexican American history and culture. Those who ban books in the schools cannot arrest us for handing out and reading these books outside of school. If the schools won’t educate our kids, we need to do it ourselves. There is a long history of this kind of counter-cultural institutions, like the Freedom Schools in Mississippi in 1964 and after. They were still fighting to change the public schools but they held their own classes too. We can’t just wait around for the idiot politicians to “allow” us to teach and learn. And, think about it, these classes will be allowed to pursue their more radical core ideas once out of the surveillance of the school districts.
February 2, 2025
Reflecting on some parallels between the war in Palestine and our history: remembering the resistance to the American War in Vietnam:
· At first we called for a cease fire, stop the bombing. We were a little naïve perhaps but sincere.
· The US killed Vietnamese in wholesale slaughter, claiming that the evil resistance fighters were using “human shields” and that whole populations were part of a “free fire zone” because they supported the resistance. Three million Vietnamese were killed.
· In time we realized that the Americans were set on a genocidal course.
· Powerful institutions (schools, universities, employers, legislatures) condemned us and enacted draconian measures of repression.
· We conducted research and learned how deeply complicit these institutions were with the genocide.
· Then we worked for the defeat of the American war aims.
· Some asked, “But aren’t you a patriot? Don’t you love America?” We realized that the whole American project was corrupt. No, we were not patriotic.
· Vietnamese General Võ Nguyên Giáp explained openly that war is fought in four ways: violent destruction was one, but the others were moral, psychological, and political. The US was winning on the violence front but steadily losing on the other three. US generals could not understand what he was saying. “The Tet Offensive was a disaster for the Viet Cong, we killed so many!” the generals declared. They couldn’t see what a huge defeat it was, in the US population and in the eyes of the world. Even after the US had to scramble out in defeat, they were shouting, “But we won! The cowardly politicians and radical kids sold us out!”
· The Zionists have exacted devastating terror on the Palestinians, but Israel is forever delegitimized. Eventually, a single secular state with democratic rights (voting) for everyone is the future.
It has been evident to many of us since the genocide in Gaza began Oct. 7 that Israel risked asking too much of those inclined to take its side. The Zionist state would ask what many people cannot give: It would ask them to surrender their consciences, their idea of moral order, altogether their native decency as it murders, starves and disperses a population of 2.3 million while making their land uninhabitable.
The Israelis took this risk and they have lost. We are now able to watch videos of Israeli soldiers celebrating as they murder Palestinian mothers and children, as they dance and sing while detonating entire neighborhoods, as they mock Palestinians in a carnival of racist depravity one would have thought beyond what is worst in humanity—and certainly beyond what any Jew would do to another human being. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports, as American media do not, that the Israel Defense Forces covertly sponsor a social media channel disseminating this degenerate material in the cause of maintaining maximum hatred.
It is a psychologically diseased nation that boasts as it inflicts this suffering on The Other that obsesses it. The world is invited—the ultimate in perversity, this—to partake of Israel’s sickness and said, in a Hague courtroom two weeks ago, “No.”
Post–Gaza, apartheid Israel is unlikely ever to recover what place it enjoyed, merited or otherwise, in the community of nations. It stands among the pariahs now. The Biden regime took this risk, too, and it has also lost. Its support for the Israelis’ daily brutalities comes at great political cost, at home and abroad, and is tearing America apart—its universities, its courts, its legislatures, its communities—and I would say what pride it still manages to take in itself. When the history of America’s decline as a hegemonic power is written, the Gaza crisis is certain to figure in it as a significant marker in the nation’s descent into a morass of immorality that has already contributed to a collapse of its credibility.
We come to U.S. media — mainstream media, corporate media, legacy media. However you wish to name them, they have gambled and lost, too. Their coverage of the Gaza crisis has been so egregiously and incautiously unbalanced in Israel’s behalf that we might count their derelictions as unprecedented. When the surveys are conducted and the returns are in, their unscrupulous distortions, their countless omissions, and—the worst offense, in my view—their dehumanization of the Palestinians of Gaza will have further damaged their already collapsing credibility.
We come, finally, to The New York Times. No medium in America has had further to fall in consequence of its reporting on Israel and Gaza since last October. And the once-but-no-longer newspaper of record, fairly suffocating amid its well-known hubris, falls as we speak. It has erupted, by numerous accounts including implicitly its own, in an internal uproar over reportage from Israel and Gaza so shabby—so transparently negligent—that it, like Israel, may never fully restore its reputation.
Max Blumenthal, editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, described the crisis on Eighth Avenue better than anyone in the Jan. 30 segment ofThe Hill’s daily webcast, Rising. “We’re looking at one of the biggest media scandals of our time,” he told Briahna Joy Gray and Robby Soave. Indeed. This well captures the gravity of The Times’s willful corruptions in its profligate use of Israeli propaganda, and Blumenthal deserves the microphone to say so. Since late last year The Grayzone has exhaustively investigated The Times’s “investigations” of Hamas’s supposed savagery and Israel’s supposed innocence.
This is more than “inside baseball,” as the saying goes. We now have a usefully intricate anatomy of an undeservedly influential newspaper as it abjectly surrenders to power the sovereignty it is its duty to claim and assert in every day’s editions. It would be hard to overstate the implications, for all of us, of what The Grayzone has just brought to light. This is independent journalism at its best reporting on corporate journalism at its worst.
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What we find as we read The Times’s daily report from Israel, and from Gaza when its correspondents unwisely accept invitations to embed with the IDF, is a newspaper unwilling to question either its longstanding fidelity to Israel or its service to American power. These two ideological proclivities—well more than what its reporters see and hear—have defined the paper’s coverage of this crisis. This is bad journalism straight off the top.
It was inevitable, then, that The Timeswould serve as Israel’s apologist as soon as the IDF began its murder spree last October. This was not a rampage worthy of the Visigoths, as plentiful video footage carried on social media and in independent publications revealed it to be: It was dignified as “a war,” a war waged not against Palestinians but “against Hamas,” and Israel fought it in “self-defense.” Hamas is “a terrorist organization,” so there is no complexity or dimensionality to it, and therefore no need to understand anything about it.
It has been a question of minimizing and maximizing in the pages of The Times. Israel’s genocidal intent is indecipherable to anyone relying on its coverage. The physical destruction of Gaza is never described as systematic. The IDF does not target noncombatants. The newspaper has reported the shocking statements of Israeli officials, some openly favoring genocide, ethnic-cleansing, and the like, only when these have been so prominently reported elsewhere that The Times could no longer pretend such things were never said.
The taker of the cake in this line is a January 22 piece by David Leonhardt, who seems to be one of those desk reporters in New York who write whatever they are told to write. Under the headline, “The Decline of Deaths in Gaza,” we read that Palestinian fatalities declined “by almost half since early December.” Setting aside the fact that the record since does not seem to bear this out, inviting Times readers to celebrate a daily death toll of 150 instead of 300 lies somewhere between poor judgment and poor taste. But anything, it seems, to soften the look of things in Gaza.
There is also the question of humanization and dehumanization. We have read very numerous and intimately detailed Times stories of Israelis attacked last Oct. 7—individuation being essential to shaping this kind of coverage—while Palestinians are an indistinct blur so far as Times correspondents report on them. The Times has fully indulged the pretense that history began on Oct. 7, erasing the previous 76 years or the previous century, depending on how one counts—the history, this is to say, wherein the Palestinian story is told. There is no Palestinian story in pages of The New York Times, as a walk through the archives of the last four months will make clear. The Timeshas recently taken to publishing exceptions to these patterns in its coverage, and I will come to them in due course.
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There is one feature of The Times’s coverage that must be singled out, as it is very key to the whole of it. This concerns the question of evidence. Almost all of the reportage coming out of Israel, and on rare occasions Gaza, relies on evidence Times correspondents have obtained from the Israeli military, Israeli government officials, the Israeli police, or those representing some other part of the Israeli power structure. On some occasions, Times reporters will take a cue or a theme from Israeli information managers and then do their own reporting—Blumenthal calls this “alleged reporting”—to dress up the piece subsequently published as an independent piece of work. There are two things to say about this.
One, the Israelis have been intent from the first to manipulate the imagery of the Gaza crisis—what it looks like—and keeping very tight control of evidence, including a great deal of conjured “evidence,” has been essential to getting this done. For the Israelis to make themselves a correspondent’s primary source—or the only source much or most of the time—and for correspondents to accept this arrangement implies a certain kind of relationship. It is evident that this relationship has been routinized over the past four months.
Two, Times correspondents—and again, their colleagues at other Western newspapers and broadcasters, too—never raise questions of quality, veracity, provenance, or chain of custody when relying on evidence or “evidence” supplied by Israeli authorities. In pro forma fashion, they will occasionally note that this or that account of events “cannot be independently verified.” But the procedure—Israelis supply evidence, correspondents turn it into reportage—is kept entirely from view. “According to Israeli officials,” “Israeli military sources said,” etc. is all readers get. On goes the report from there, in which evidence or “evidence” the Israelis have supplied is presented at face value.
In every case I know of, I should add, stories of this kind are one-source stories—even if they feature multiple voices saying the same thing in different language. This is a tired old trick at The Times and among other mainstream media: 5 and 2 are 7, 4 and 3 are also 7, so are 6 and 1, and so on. I have just termed the relationship implied here as routinized. Now I will call it a highly objectionable relationship: At its core is a symbiosis wherein The Times abandons its sovereignty and, corollary point, The Times obscures this abandonment from its readers.
The Times’s unprofessional handling of evidence and “evidence,” to state what may by now be obvious, has made it an instrument of official propaganda as Israel’s crimes in Gaza have proliferated these past months. This is open-and-shut the case, as the record shows. It is not an unusual circumstance for The Times: It is inevitable that a paper wherein ideologies determine what is published will assume this role, elsewhere as in Israel.
But propaganda, as noted elsewhere, is crudely made in most cases. The propagandist much prefers simplicity and impact to sophistication or, God knows, nuance. The Israelis are not exceptions to this rule. The correspondent trafficking in propaganda must consequently be very careful to avoid reproducing what is patently cheap goods. This is especially so when working within the sort of relationship The Times has with the Israeli propaganda machine, whose output since they began their assault on Gaza has often been primitive and obviously overdone. If you are not careful you can get left holding the bag.
Jeffrey Gettleman seems to have been other than careful in his reporting after he transited from Ukraine to Israel immediately after the events of Oct. 7. He did not, in fairness, do anything other than what Times correspondents routinely do when reporting “the Jewish state.” He opened wide and swallowed what the Israeli authorities fed him—the goose and the foie gras farmer. But when he began a grand investigation to expose the Hamas militias’ heinous use of sexual violence as a weapon of terror on Oct. 7, he does not seem to have recognized wildly implausible horror stories when the Israelis told them. Neither could Gettleman see, apparently, the immense implications of his piece once subjected to a scrutiny he may not have anticipated.
Incautious Jeffrey Gettleman is now holding the bag—scrambling, so far as one can make out, to salvage reportage that looks to me too faulty to save. His newspaper is now in an uproar. This is not just about Gettleman’s piece: At issue is The Times’s coverage of the Gaza crisis altogether. The routinized relationship between The Times and the Israeli authorities is now exposed to more light than was ever supposed to shine on it. Ditto the slack, sloppy, unprofessional mediocrities mainstream media altogether have made of themselves.
The Israelis began alleging that Hamas militias were guilty of rape and sexual violence during their Oct. 7 incursion into southern Israel more or less immediately after the events of that day. They claimed to be developing “considerable evidence”—Gettleman’s phrase in his initial report, on Dec. 4—from witnesses, photographs, and emergency medical teams. In the same piece, Gettleman quoted a police official saying that women and men numbering in the dozens had been raped on Oct. 7. Women’s rights advocates convening at the U.N. at this time introduced the thought that the alleged sexual abuses were part of a pattern: They were systematic, weapons of terror.
After these initial assertions the Israeli police authorities seem to have subtly but swiftly softened. No, there were no autopsies, witnesses were hard to locate, people at the scene of alleged incidents did not collect evidence, no, they had nothing to say about interviewing victims of alleged rapes. Gettleman’s Dec. 4 file was, at least relative to what was to come, suitably cautious—a what-we-know, what-we-don’t piece. But the drift was clear. “Extensive witness testimony and documentary evidence of killings, including videos posted by Hamas fighters themselves,” Gettleman wrote, “support the allegations.”
If I read Gettleman’s clipping file correctly, it was with that sentence that he began his walk into trouble. As it has turned out, the witness testimony he cited has proven spongy and less than extensive, the documentary evidence proves little, and the videos, unless there are videos we do not know of, prove nothing at all. The phrase “witness testimony and documentary evidence” includes a link to a lengthy piece on Hamas’s post–Oct. 7 political deliberations that makes no mention of rape or sexual violence and has nothing whatever to do with the topic of Gettleman’s piece.
Gettleman’s byline did not appear again in The Times until Dec. 28, when his sprawling investigative takeout appeared under the headline, “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct.7.” It took as its central figure “the woman in the black dress.” This refers to a corpse found and videoed on the side of a road on Oct. 8. “In a grainy video,” Gettleman writes, “you can see her, lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed. Her face is burned beyond recognition and her right hand covers her eyes.”
Gettleman reports this woman’s identity as Gal Abdush, a 34–year-old mother of two who was partying with her husband along the Gaza border in the early hours of Oct. 7 and was later murdered, as was her husband. Within seven paragraphs of his lead, it appears perfectly clear Gettleman has taken the “evidence” bait as proffered by Israeli officials:
Based largely on the video evidence—which was verified by The New York Times—Israeli police officials said they believed that Ms. Abdush was raped, and she has become a symbol of the horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls during the Oct. 7 attacks.
Let us study this passage briefly. Are you interested in what Israeli police say they believe? I’m not. I’m never interested in what officials in such positions believe or feel or, a lot of the time, think: I am interested in what they know, and they did not tell Gettleman that they knew anything. Do you see the air these officials put between the rape theme and their reputations? Equally, The Times “verified” the video, did it? In what way this? What did it verify, exactly? That the video existed? Is Gettleman suggesting that The Times verified from the video that Abdush was raped? No video of a dead body could verify this.
This video has a strange story, to stay with it briefly. Gettleman wrote that it “went viral,” but it is nowhere to be found on the internet, and nobody recalls referring to Abdush as “the woman in the black dress.” There is also a chronology question attaching to this video, as a Jan. 3 report in Mondoweiss analyzes. Gettleman recounts the last text message, with time-stamp, Gal Abdush sent to her family. During this time Abdush’s husband, Nagy, was with her and sent his own texts to the family, also time-stamped. Four minutes elapsed between Gal Abdush’s last message and the time Nagy Abdush messaged the family to report his wife’s death—a message Gettleman did not mention. Nagy Abdush made no reference to rape. He sent his own final message 44 minutes later – a message Gettleman’s report does mention.
Did one or more Hamas militiaman rape a woman in the presence of her husband, then, in one or another sequence, murder her and burn her, then murder the husband—all not in 44 minutes, as the Gettleman piece implies, but in four? Since Gettleman published, Abdush’s family, evidently irate, has accused him of distorting the evidence and manipulating them in the course of his reporting. “She was not raped,” Mira Alter, Gal Abdush’s sister, wrote on social media a few days after Gettleman published. “There was no proof that there was rape. It was only a video.”
This is how it is for the 3,700 words Gettleman gave his investigation, which also carries the bylines of Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella. There are witnesses who change their stories once, twice, or several times. There is a witness proven to have lied in similar circumstances. There is the testimony of a rescue organization with a compromised relationship with the Israeli military and an extensive record of corruption widely reported in Israeli media. There is a witness who told Gettleman he saw two teenage girls lying naked and alone on the floor of a house, one of them with semen all over her back, while it was later proven they were burned so badly they were hard to identify and they were found not alone but in the embrace of their also-burned mother.
And so on. You have descriptions of all kinds of unimaginable, B–movie perversities—militiamen playing with severed breasts, militiamen walking around with armfuls of severed heads—that rest upon “witnesses” whose testimonies, given how often they shift or do not line up with what was eventually determined, simply cannot be counted as stable.
And then there are the official statements. Among the most categoric of these is one from the Israeli police, issued after The Times published “‘Screams Without Words’” Dec. 28 and asserting that they have found no eyewitnesses to rapes on Oct. 7 and see nothing in media reports such as The Times’s constituting evidence of systematic sexual violence.
I rarely urge readers of this column to read The New York Times—some, indeed, write to thank me for reading it so they don’t have to do so. On this occasion I think reading the Gettleman pieces is a good idea—but only back-to-back with The Grayzone’s work. Mondoweiss, a U.S. publication that reports on Israel and Palestine, has also done work worth reading. It is a chance to see what sclerosis looks like when placed next to vitality.
Blumenthal and Aaron Maté, his colleague at The Grayzone, began scrutinizing The Times’s reports on alleged sexual violence immediately after Gettleman’s first piece appeared Dec. 4. Two days later, The Grayzone published a detailed account of ZAKA, the discredited rescue organization that featured prominently among Gettleman’s sources. Three days after “‘Screams Without Words’” appeared Dec. 28, Blumenthal and Maté aired a 42–minute podcast exposing the long list of inconsistencies in it they had by then identified. Two weeks later, on Jan. 10, The Grayzone published a lengthy letter it sent to The Times urging it to address the many defects and ethical breaches in Gettleman’s pieces. “The Times report,” the letter began, “is marred by sensationalism, wild leaps of logic, and an absence of concrete evidence to support its sweeping conclusion.” The Times has since been silent—publicly, if not internally.
The Times could hardly have worked itself into a more awkward corner over the “‘Screams Without Words’” disaster had it tried. It seems to have been some while building and to have exploded as follows into the mess now before us.
Unease as to The Times’s coverage of Israel, inside and outside the Times building, is a long story. Times correspondents whose children serve in the IDF, correspondents with apparently improper relations with lobbies such as the Anti–Defamation League: These kinds of things have over the years prompted critics to question of the paper’s proximity, where it puts itself in relation to the Israel story, the balance of its coverage. Nearer to the present, there had been sustained criticism of the paper’s Gaza coverage emanating from the newsroom well before Gettleman’s piece appeared. A Jan. 26 piece in The Intercept, citing newsroom sources, described “a rolling fight that is revived on a near-daily basis over the tenor of Times coverage of the war in Gaza.”
This seems to have reached high-decibels acrimony as The Daily, The Times’s premier podcast, became involved. The Daily is where the paper showcases what are supposed to be its better enterprise pieces, as those with lots of original reporting are called, and it scheduled a segment based on “‘Screams Without Words’” for release on Jan. 9. Joe Kahn, The Times’s executive editor, had already touted the the piece in an internal memorandum as among several “signature pieces of enterprise on the Israel–Hamas war” and described it as executed “in a sensitive and detailed way.” Kahn may have leapt before he looked. The Daily’s producers soon pulled the segment as the defects began to accumulate in the piece Gettleman and his colleagues filed. They subsequently wrote a revised script addressing some of the problems—inserting qualifiers, The Intercept reported, and altogether leaving ample room to question, if not doubt, the factual certainty Gettleman wrote into his prose.
The revised segment is now “paused,” whatever that turns out to mean. This leaves the paper effectively stuck with a Hobson’s choice that makes me marvel: It can run the original segment, pretending discredited work remains valid, or it can run the rewritten segment, so discrediting the Gettleman report by itself.
Max Blumenthal thinks the crisis inside The Times reflects a deep divide between the newsroom, where there seems to be a surviving cohort of conscientious journalists, and the upper reaches of management, where the paper’s ideological high priests reside. I have not been inside the Times building in well more than a decade, but there is a history to support this thesis. It goes at least as far back as the 1950s, when Aurthur Hays Sulzberger, as publisher, signed a secrecy agreement with the Central Intelligence Agency and gave tacit approval to correspondents who wanted to work for the agency.
But we have to look beyond the tall glass building on Eighth Avenue to grasp the magnitude of the crisis Jeffery Gettleman has precipitated. His careless work, to put the point mildly, has exposed a process that is prevalent across the mainstream. CNN, The Guardian, MSNBC, PBS, various others: They all followed the same procedure as they reproduced the “systematic sexual abuse” story as the Israelis gave it to them. We are face to face now with the destructive power of corporate media as they dedicate themselves to serving the interests of the policy cliques who run the imperium and its appendages. Face to face, too, with the responsibilities that fall to independent publications in consequence of so basic a corruption as this.
“These are lies that kill,” Blumenthal remarked on that segment of Rising noted earlier, “because these lies, fabrications, distortions, half-truths, and exaggerations of facts are intended to generate political consent for Israel’s genocidal assault in Gaza. They need to be called out.”
Is there a truer way to make the point?
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Credit when due.
The Times has published a handful of pieces over the past couple of weeks that are exceptional, at least relatively so, for their balanced treatment of the Israel–Palestine crisis in all its fullness. Suddenly there is a history to it that extends back more than four months. Suddenly Palestinians have voices that have things to say. Suddenly they are living, breathing human beings. How rare is this in the pages of The Times?
I was alerted to this spate of pieces—they cannot be read as a purposeful series—on the last day of January, when Roger Cohen published a long report from the West Bank under the headline “‘We Are Not Very Far From an Explosion,’” in which the paper’s Paris bureau chief, long sympathetic to Israeli perspectives, describes the vicious ugliness of fanatical Israeli settlers and IDF soldiers incessantly attacking West Bank townspeople simply trying to hold on to what they have. It is a moving piece of work.
A day later The Times published “The Road to 1948,” which consists of a many-sided debate moderated by Emily Bazelon, who lectures in law at Yale. The people talking to one another in this lengthy presentation—and Bazelon manages the exchange with a light, unintrusive hand—take the Israel–Palestine question back to the British Mandate in 1920. There are many perspectives here, not all worthy of endorsement. The piece is good, certainly, in explaining how the British favored Zionist organizations as precursors of a state while giving no such status to Palestinians. But the simplifying thought that “this is a national conflict with religious elements,” or that arriving Zionist settlers and Palestinians have something like equivalent claims, seems to me an insidious gloss. Still, The Times has taken readers back a century.
The next day came a news piece, “In the West Bank, Palestinians Struggle to Adjust to a New Reality.” In it, Yara Bayoumy and Rami Nazzal describe onerous new restrictions the Israelis have placed on the movements of West Bank residents since Oct. 7. Last Sunday The paper published “Portraits of Gazans,” photographs by Samar Abu Elouf with text by Declan Walsh and Abu Elouf. These pictures seem to me a little sanitized, as if they are meant to disturb liberal American sensibilities but not enough to disgust them or get them into the streets with placards. Good enough, but too tame next to the images that land the horror in one’s gut as one finds easily enough on social media and in independent publications.
On Tuesday morning, something interesting. “What Israeli Soldiers’ Videos Reveal: Cheering Destruction and Mocking Gazans,” featuring a small parade of bylines, has The Times finally getting around to publishing some of the astoundingly crude video IDF soldiers make of themselves as they rampage through the Gaza Strip. Why now? There is no avoiding this question, given how assiduously The Times has indeed avoided this kind of material until this week. Why this string of pieces somewhat or more out of character for a newspaper that has so long stood among American media as Israel’s most influential apologist?
It is a good question, and I do not have a certain answer. Looking at this phenomenon narrowly, these rapid-fire pieces might reflect the pandemonium and ire abroad in the newsroom. Have those reporters and editors disgusted by the Gaza coverage and riled by the Gettleman piece prompted an editorial change of heart? Maybe. Possible. Did the paper rush these pieces into print as a form of post–Gettlman damage control? Very possibly. Maybe The Times has at last decided Israel has asked too much of it. A little far-fetched, but let’s keep it on the list.
We should recall The Times’s coverage after the al–Aqsa Mosque crisis in the spring of 2021. Just as it is doing now, it published a lot of pieces sympathetic to the Palestinians and sharply critical of the conduct of Israelis. But over time it became clear this was merely a temporary shift, a back-foot defense the moment required. Three years later The Times gives us Jeffrey Gettleman. Plus ça change.
My mind goes back to the Vietnam war in search of an explanation for these pieces. Some readers may recall that The Times—a much different newspaper then—began in the late 1960s to publish highly critical work by correspondents who were soon noted for it: David Halberstam, Malcolm Browne, Neil Sheehan. In the trade and in the reading public these people were awarded badges of courage for their integrity, and fair enough, although they opposed the war less out of principle than a shared judgment the U.S. could not win it.
I have long thought the tenor of The Times’s Vietnam coverage changed because, by the time the above-mentioned correspondents and others like them were filing stories with Saigon datelines, a deep divide had appeared among the policy cliques in Washington and its was permissible to write against the Pentagon’s Southeast Asia folly.
Is The Times responding similarly now? The mood has changed in Washington, or is changing. There is a divide on Capitol Hill that grows gradually more evident. Think of all these open letters U.S. officials, some senior, are signing and circulating to express their objections to the Biden regime’s reckless support for a reckless nation’s crimes. Has The Times, in its typically indirect way, written and sent a letter of its own by way of the pieces that match not at all the Israel Jeffrey Gettleman offers Times readers?
Patrick Lawrence
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored without explanation.
I do not believe that anything I say about what is happening in Gaza will affect Israeli or American policy in that conflict. But I want to be on record so that when historians look back on this moral calamity, they will see that some Americans were on the right side of history.
What Israel is doing in Gaza to the Palestinian civilian population – with the support of the Biden administration – is a crime against humanity that serves no meaningful military purpose. As J-Street, an important organization in the Israel lobby, puts it, “The scope of the unfolding humanitarian disaster and civilian casualties is nearly unfathomable.”[1]
Let me elaborate.
First, Israel is purposely massacring huge number of civilians, roughly 70 percent of whom are children and women. The claim that Israel is going to great lengths to minimize civilian casualties is belied by statements from high level Israeli officials. For example, the IDF spokesman said on 10 October 2023 that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.” That same day, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced: “I have lowered all the restraints – we will kill everyone we fight against; we will use every means.”[2]
Moreover, it is clear from the results of the bombing campaign that Israel is indiscriminately killing civilians. Two detailed studies of the IDF’s bombing campaign – both published in Israeli outlets – explain in detail how Israel is murdering huge numbers of civilians. It is worth quoting the titles of the two pieces, which succinctly capture what each has to say:
“‘A Mass Assassination Factory’: Inside Israel’s Calculated Bombing of Gaza”[3]
“The Israeli Army Has Dropped the Restraint in Gaza, and the Data Shows Unprecedented Killing.”[4]
Similarly, the New York Times published an article in late November 2023 titled: “Gaza Civilians, Under Israeli Barrage, Are Being Killed at Historic Pace.”[5] Thus, it is hardly surprising that the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, said that “We are witnessing a killing of civilians that is unparalleled and unprecedented in any conflict since” his appointment in January 2017.[6]
Second, Israel is purposely starving the desperate Palestinian population by greatly limiting the amount of food, fuel, cooking gas, medicine, and water that can be brought into Gaza. Moreover, medical care is extremely hard to come by for a population that now includes approximately 50,000 wounded civilians. Not only has Israel greatly limited the supply of fuel into Gaza, which hospitals need to function, but it has targeted hospitals, ambulances, and first aid stations.
Defense Minister Gallant’s comment on 9 October captures Israeli policy: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”[7] Israel has been forced to allow minimal supplies into Gaza, but the amounts are so small that a senior UN official reports that “half of Gaza’s population is starving.” He goes on to report that, “Nine out of 10 families in some areas are spending ‘a full day and night without any food at all’.”[8]
Third, Israeli leaders talk about Palestinians and what they would like to do in Gaza in shocking terms, especially when you consider that some of these leaders also talk incessantly about the horrors of the Holocaust. Indeed, their rhetoric has led Omar Bartov, a prominent Israeli-born scholar of the Holocaust, to conclude that Israel has “genocidal intent.”[9] Other scholars in Holocaust and genocide studies have offered a similar warning.[10]
To be more specific, it is commonplace for Israeli leaders to refer to Palestinians as “human animals, ”human beasts,” and “horrible inhuman animals.”[11] And as Israeli President Isaac Herzog makes clear, those leaders are referring to all Palestinians, not just Hamas: In his words, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.”[12] Unsurprisingly, as the New York Times reports, it is part of normal Israeli discourse to call for Gaza to be “flattened,” “erased,” or “destroyed.”[13] One retired IDF general, who proclaimed that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” also makes the case that “severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer.”[14] Going even further, a minister in the Israeli government suggested dropping a nuclear weapon on Gaza.[15] These statements are not being made by isolated extremists, but by senior members of Israel’s government.
Of course, there is also much talk of ethnically cleansing Gaza (and the West Bank), in effect, producing another Nakba.[16] To quote Israel’s Agriculture Minister, “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.”[17]Perhaps the most shocking evidence of the depths to which Israeli society has sunk is a video of very young children singing a blood-curdling song celebrating Israel’s destruction of Gaza: “Within a year we will annihilate everyone, and then we will return to plow our fields.”[18]
Fourth, Israel is not just killing, wounding, and starving huge numbers of Palestinians, it is also systematically destroying their homes as well as critical infrastructure – to include mosques, schools, heritage sites, libraries, key government buildings, and hospitals.[19] As of 1 December 2023, the IDF had damaged or destroyed almost 100,000 buildings, including entire neighborhoods that have been reduced to rubble.[20] Consequently, a stunning 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes.[21] Moreover, Israel is making a concerted effort to destroy Gaza’s cultural heritage; as NPR reports, “more than 100 Gaza heritage sites have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli attacks.”[22]
Fifth, Israel is not just terrorizing and killing Palestinians, it is also publicly humiliating many of their men who have been rounded up by the IDF in routine searches. Israeli soldiers strip them down to their underwear, blindfold them, and display them in a public way in their neighborhoods – sitting them down in large groups in the middle of the street, for example, or parading them through the streets – before taking them away in trucks to detention camps. In most cases, the detainees are then released as they are not Hamas fighters.[23]
Sixth, although the Israelis are doing the slaughtering, they could not do it without the Biden administration’s support. Not only was the United States the only country to vote against a recent UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, but it has also been providing Israel with the weaponry necessary to wage this massacre.[24] As one Israeli general (Yitzhak Brick) recently made clear: “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability.… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”[25] Remarkably, the Biden administration has sought to expedite sending Israel additional ammunition, by-passing the normal procedures of the Arms Export Control Act.[26]
Seventh, while most of the focus is now on Gaza, it is important not to lose sight of what is simultaneously going on in the West Bank. Israeli settlers, working closely with the IDF, continue to kill innocent Palestinians and steal their land. In an excellent article in the New York Review of Books describing these horrors, David Shulman relates a conversation he had with a settler, which clearly reflects the moral dimension of Israeli behavior toward the Palestinians. “What we are doing to these people is actually inhuman,” the settler freely admits, “But if you think about it clearly, it all follows inevitably from the fact that God promised this land to the Jews, and only to them.”[27] Along with its assault on Gaza, the Israel government has markedly increased the number of arbitrary arrests in the West Bank. According to Amnesty International, there is considerable evidence that these prisoners have been tortured and subjected to degrading treatment.[28]
As I watch this catastrophe for the Palestinians unfold, I am left with one simple question for Israel’s leaders, their American defenders, and the Biden administration: have you no decency?
Posted by billayers 
Bill Ayers 