The New York Times’s distortions about Israel

October 8, 2023 • 11:36 am

As the Elder of Ziyon site states, dissecting one of the claims made by an author of the NYT pieces below, “Raja Abdulrahim has become an expert on how to write slanderous, one-sided articles about Israel while carefully adhering to the journalistic standards that supposedly ensure “fairness” of the New York Times.” And the paper’s given her plenty of space to splash her distortions all over their pages.

Below are two articles that Abdulrahim either wrote herself or co-authored; both appeared yesterday and both involve apologetics for Hamas. The first piece implies that things in Gaza have been made so bad by Israel that resistance was justified (it blames Israel for everything bad in Gaza), and the second talks in detail about the deaths in Gaza that resulted when Israel defended itself by bombing non-civilian targets. In neither case is there a mention of qualifying facts: Gazans and the Palestinian Authority have themselves made Gaza much worse off than it could be. Further, Abdulrahim and Ameera Harouda don’t utter a a word about the Israeli civilians killed (so far twice as numerous as dead Palestinians: a disproportionality!).

Before I show the distortions in Abdulrahim’s first piece, let me add that Palestinians themselves have rejected two-state offers at least five times (1937, 1947, 2000, 2006, and 2020), some having quite generous terms. Further, Israel voluntarily gave up Gaza in 2005 and evicted Israelis there, all in the interest of making a gesture of peace and trying to create an enclave for Palestinians that would promote peace. (Does anybody remember Israeli’s voluntary relinquishing of Gaza?) The point is that, as Abba Eban supposedly said, the P.L.O. (Palestinian Liberation Organiation) “has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”  If Palestinians claim their situation is due to Israeli’s behavior, well, they didn’t have to be in that situation in the first place. They could have had their own state.

But onto the first misleading article, whose title tells the tale. You can click on the screenshot to see it, or go here.

Let’s have a look at Abdulrahim’s claims (paragraphs of the piece are indented, bolding in NYT pieces is mine).

For some Gazans, Saturday morning’s surprise Palestinian attack into southern Israel seemed a justified response to a 16-year Israeli blockade. Others worried that the coordinated attack would only add to Gaza’s misery as the tiny enclave braced for a large-scale response from Israel.

The Palestinian territory of Gaza has been under a suffocating Israeli blockade, backed by Egypt, since Hamas seized control of the coastal strip in 2007. The blockade restricts the import of goods, including electronic and computer equipment, that could be used to make weapons and prevents most people from leaving the territory.

This blockade was indeed imposed by Israel and Egypt to curb the influx of material that could be used to foster terrorism. But the blockade does not “prevent most people from leaving the territory.” People can apply for permits to leave through Israel (though I think you can’t return for at least a year), and they can also exit through Egypt. Most applications of exits of people through Egypt are approved (this is from a UN article giving data for just April of 2023):

Movement of people to Egypt

  • In April, the Egyptian authorities allowed 8,572 exits of people from Gaza (some travelers may have exited multiple times). This is 33 per cent below the number of exits in March, and 29 per cent below the monthly average in 2022.
  • A total of 324 people were denied entry to Egypt, compared with 132 denials in March 2023. The grounds for denial are typically not provided, but according to the local Palestinian authorities, Egyptian authorities have often cited security concerns or specific limits that often apply to men aged 18-40.

The claim that most applicants are prevented is a lie.

The same site has information about exits from Gaza to Israel; most of these involve Gazans who work in Israel and go back and forth. Further, Israel generally approves applications from Gazans seeking medical attention in Israel (generally, the only Gazans denied such applications are terrorists, and even the children of terrorists can go to Israel for medical treatment so long as they’re accompanied by non-terrorist relatives).

Movement of people to Israel and the West Bank.

  • In April, the Israeli authorities allowed 43,043 exits of people from Gaza (in most cases, travelers exited multiple times). This is 16 per cent lower than in March, but 22 per cent higher than the monthly average in 2022. However, it is 91 per cent lower than the monthly average in 2000, before the imposition of category-based restrictions by the Israeli authorities.
  • Up to 90 per cent of the exits were by Palestinians allowed out for work-related purposes, most of whom are employed as day labourers in Israel. The Israeli authorities increased the number of exit permits for such purposes from 21,306 in March to 21,835 in April.
  • Five per cent of the exits were by patients referred for medical treatment in the West Bank or Israel and their companions. Some 1,211 exit-permit applications were submitted to the Israeli authorities for medical appointments scheduled for April. Of these, 22 per cent were not approved on time, compared with 18 per cent in March. Click here for more information.

More from the NYT:

More than two million Palestinians live in Gaza. The tiny, crowded coastal enclave has a nearly 50 percent unemployment rate, and Gaza’s living conditions, health system and infrastructure have all deteriorated under the blockade.

The decline in infrastructure is due to Palestine, mainly the Palestinian Authority, who will not pay for medicines or to support the health system, and have taken money aimed at infrastructure use (some from the US) to support terrorism instead. It is not Israel’s responsibility to provide a health system or medical care for Gaza or Palestinians, but nevertheless the provision of Israeli health care to people from the Palestinian territories is ubiquitous.

Israel says the blockade is necessary to stop the flow of arms into the territory, but Palestinians and aid groups say it is collective punishment and exacerbates dire economic and social conditions.

I am not sure what Abdulrahim means by “collective punishment”, but Gaza has in its own hands the power to alleviate its situation, simply by stopping terrorist attacks on Israel, including the firing of rockets. They get plenty of donated money, including from the UN, other Middle Eastern countries, and even the US, to improve their lot, but insist on diverting much of that money for terrorism. Remember, Hamas’s charter has vowed to eliminate the state of Israel, and this aim, not mentioned by the author, has caused much of the woes in Gaza.

Diplomats say that Hamas had repeatedly indicated in recent months that it did not want a major military escalation in Gaza, in part to avoid worsening the humanitarian situation so soon after the devastation of a war in 2021.

The statement by Hamas was true, but in view of the months of preparation that the attack by Hamas required, it was clearly a lie.

The Gazan authorities are still repairing buildings damaged or destroyed by Israeli airstrikes during previous rounds of fighting, including five days of war in May between Israel’s military and Islamic Jihad, the second-largest armed group in Gaza. And some Gazans are worried about losing access to Israeli work permits, a major lifeline for the enclave’s limping economy.

Note that Israel, the “apartheid state”, allows thousands of Gazans to work in Israel.  If Hamas continues to attack Israel, yes, Gazans should worry about their work permits. If they want to alleviate their worries, they should get rid of Hamas.

Gaza’s hospitals regularly suffer from equipment and medicine shortages because of the blockade, and Palestinians in Gaza must apply for permits to leave the enclave to seek treatment either in the West Bank or inside Israel.

The equipment and medicine shortages are due to the Palestinian Authority’s unwillingness to pay for medical equipment and medicine. These items are NOT blockaded; only material that could be used to make weapons or support terrorism are blockaded.  Permits are almost always approved for Gazans seeking medical help in Israel. Israel doesn’t have to do that, of course, and any Israeli seeking help in a Palestinian hospital would probably be killed before getting there, or tossed in the gutter.

In the past, Gaza’s sole power plant has at times been forced to shut down for lack of fuel when Israel has closed the border crossings for goods.

This happened once, when the Palestinians were attacking the border crossing and fuel could not be sent across. At other times, Palestine has simply refused to pay Israel for fuel, which it has to do (it’s not Israel’s responsibility to provide free power to Gaza). Israel has not punished Gaza by repeatedly denying it electrical power.

Civilians, especially children, in Gaza have paid a high price. In 2021, at least 67 children were killed in Gaza during 11 days of fighting between Israel and Hamas.

This appears to be true, but occurred during fierce fighting after Hamas fired rockets into Israel. Children were not deliberately targeted, of course, but were casualties of attempts to stop terrorism. In fact, the true number may be higher; as one site reports for 2021:

Israeli forces killed 76 Palestinian children, including 61 Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip and 15 Palestinian children in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Armed Israeli civilians killed two Palestinian children in the West Bank. Seven Palestinian children were killed by rockets misfired by Palestinian armed groups in the Gaza Strip, and one Palestinian child was killed by an unexploded ordinance, the origins of which could not be determined, according to documentation gathered by Defense for Children International – Palestine.

Note that some children were killed by Hamas itself via misfired rockets. This is never noted in stories by Abdulrahim. Of course all these children are to be mourned, as they never got to grow up, but the fact is that if Hamas keeps attacking Israel, there is going to be a response, and in those responses some children will die.

In May, at least 12 civilians were killed by Israeli strikes during the fighting in May this year.

This statement is analyzed in an Elder of Ziyon dissection of an earlier NYT article by Abdulrahim article (one she cites in the piece above) the  article, and all I can do is give you their response:

It says that there were 9-12 civilians killed – but doesn’t mention that they were killed in the course of targeting and killing over 20 terrorists. This makes the ratio of innocent victims killed one of the lowest in the history of airstrikes.

Here’s that article, and a bit of the EoZ’s analysis of how Abdulrahim adheres to the distortions mentioned by Bari Weiss in this morning’s article. Click to read.

and the EoZ’s analysis:

. . . . This is some of the bias in the article’s contents.  But that is only a small part of how this article is lying in effect.
The main way that this article gives an entirely wrong message while adhering to a narrow set of facts is by omitting a huge amount of context – context that a fair reporter would seek out.
It doesn’t mention that under international law,  the existence of civilians around a military target does not make that target immune from attack. In other words, Israeli airstrikes on major Islamic Jihad leaders are perfectly legal under international law of armed conflict. Instead, Abdulrahim quotes an Amnesty report claiming (falsely) that Israel violated international law in previous conflicts in Gaza.
It doesn’t mention that the ratio of civilians killed compared to militants is perhaps the lowest in any airstrikes on urban areas where the targets live among the people in history.
It doesn’t mention the huge amount of time and money, not to mention the number of legal checks, that Israel uses before choosing a target.
It makes it sound like Israel could have somehow killed only Islamic Jihad targets without hurting any civilians – but does not say exactly how.
It does not interview any military experts. It does not interview any international law experts.
The entire article is meant to give an impression on readers that Israel is acting wantonly, that it is violating international law, that it either doesn’t care about or deliberately chooses to target civilians, without saying those things explicitly and without giving any easy-to-find facts that would undermine that entire narrative.

Below is the  second article published yesterday by Abdulrahim and a coauthor. It’s even more misleading in that it completely neglects the Israeli dead and wounded (about which there’s no similar article I can find in the NYT).  The last two sentences, which I’ll reproduce below, are doozies.

Click to read:

The article is headed by a disturbing photo (caption below):
(from NYT): Two Palestinian women in Gaza on Saturday after one of their sons was killed.Credit…Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times

Of course it’s heart-rending to see this, but is there a similar photo (much less an article) on the losses of Israeli mothers? If there is, I haven’t seen it. This, then, appears to be biased reporting; these are not op-ed pieces but news pieces.

From Abdulrahim and Haroudfa’s piece:

The streets of Gaza City were mostly empty throughout Saturday as Israeli airstrikes hit the blockaded Gaza Strip, sending huge plumes of gray-and-black smoke into the sky.

But hospitals and morgues were packed by relatives seeking news of their loved ones.

The tiny strip has witnessed many wars, but its inhabitants were terrified of what could come after Gaza’s armed groups [JAC: note the deliberate omission of the word “Hamas”] launched a coordinated and unprecedented attack into southern Israel on Saturday morning.

The bodies of Palestinian fighters returned to Gaza from Israel filled the morgue at the Shifa Hospital, where by afternoon there was no space left inside the refrigerators and corpses were laid out on the floor. But more bodies and injured fighters continued to arrive, as did families of the dead.

The Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza said that 198 Palestinians had been killed and 1,610 wounded. Yousef Abu al-Rish, the top Palestinian health official in Gaza, said that most of the casualties resulted from clashes inside Israel.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said Israel had struck a hospital in northern Gaza, killing one worker, and struck an ambulance in front of another hospital in the southern Gazan town of Khan Younis, wounding several hospital workers and civilians.

There’s no mention that more than 600 Israelis are dead compared to 370 Gazans. If that were reversed, there would be a statement about “disproportionate killing”. Further, some Arabs are referring to the Israeli women hostages as “sex slaves”. Can you imagine what would happen if the situation were reversed and Palestinian women prisoners were called sex slaves. Of course, this isn’t the situation because Israel has taken no hostages, male, female, or Hamas. Here’s the tweet mentioning “sex slaves”. Its Google translation is this:

Palestine Gaza:

A Muslim terrorist photographs all the women he has kidnapped and calls them “slaves” – a specific term used in Islamic jurisprudence for infidel women who are sex slaves in the hands of Muslims.

I can’t vouch for its veracity, of course, but neither do I think it’s fake. The article goes on to discuss the Muslim practice of allowing captured women to be used for sex. I do fear that all the hostages are in big trouble, as I don’t think Israel will empty its prisons of terrorists in a giant prisoner swap. The alternative is trying to secure the hostages via a land invasion, and Israel would be very reluctant to do that, both because of the death of Israeli soldiers involved in such an incursion as well as the likelihood of the hostages being killed in a rescue attempt.

The rest of the article mentions how traumatized the children are by being subject to the sound of Israeli bombs, but there’s no mention of how there would be no Israeli bombs if Hamas stopped firing rockets from Gaza. 

Here are the doozies: the last two sentences of the article:

Along the northern border of Gaza, some Palestinians gathered to watch scenes unimaginable just hours earlier. They cheered as fighters returned, some of them with terrified Israeli hostages or the bodies of killed Israeli soldiers.

Do the authors not sense any irony in that? To even write that shows a fundamental deficiency in the authors’ moral sense.

Now the NYT does have bits about the deaths and wounding of Israelis, but they’re embedded in larger pieces. I find no standalone pieces, equivalent to the two written above by Abdulrahim, highlighting the horrors experienced by Israelis.  That’s no surprise, for the NYT is biased against Israel.  If you don’t know that, you don’t know how to read. But the paper should at least be fact-checking Abdulrahim’s pieces. Giving her this kind of journalistic largesse shows, more than anything else, that the NYT is on the side of Palestine in this conflict, and shows it by deciding which stories are worth publishing.

 

h/t: Malgorzata

20 thoughts on “The New York Times’s distortions about Israel”

  1. That’s horrible journalism. But at least the NYT calls it a “blockade”. Here in Canada the CBC has told its journalists to continue to refer to the blockade (by both Egypt and Israel) as an “occupation” that did not end in 2005. My understanding is the BBC is even worse but maybe UK commenters will know better.

  2. Who, I wonder, are the NYT chief editors? Don’t they have degrees from Harvard or Yale or someplace where they could obtain a firm notion of fairness and truth? Wouldn’t they see the bias here? Or are top news organizations actually run by the latest batch of woke writers from Oberlin?

    1. Rick….holding degrees from Harvard or Yale are signs that if they did see bias, they would ignore it. This is what “moral clarity” is.

  3. I link to the front page of the NYTimes as it is right now. Note the “surge from Gaza” from the quote unquote newspaper of record.

    The mainstream media can not be trusted on Israel or anything touching on identity issues:

    https://www.nytimes.com/

  4. Dear Sir,
    I am sorry but I believe you accidently wrote “Israeli women” two times in succession where you wanted to make a comparison (context “called sex slaves”).

  5. There is not military option to secure the hostages. This requires an element of surprise which cannot exist in this situation. However, a massive military operation, involving ground troops is inevitable. The situation since Saturday is unprecedented with very heavy losses. The Israeli public is outraged and the government will have to show heavy damages to the terrorists in Gaza. As the leaders of Hamas are taking shelter among civilians, the only way to get to them is on the ground.
    A major war between Hamas and Israel has already started. The question is whether it will expand to more fronts, especially to the Lebanese border with Hizbullah, and what the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Arab population in Israel will do.

  6. Even now, CNN has “Israel Declares War” at the top. And I say, hold on a minute, who started this? Why is it not “Hamas declares war”?

    1. Because that was basically yesterday’s headline. Israel’s formal declaration of war paves the way for a heavy-handed response, and that’s important enough to report. (As far as I’m concerned, I will not shed a tear for any Hamas member or affiliate who bites the dust in the next weeks. “Live by the sword, die by the sword” and all that.)

  7. Read the comments on Bari Weiss’s article. So many conspiracy theories, outright fabrications and MAGA cultists. She has ‘interesting’ followers.

    1. As I always say, don’t judge an article or tweet by the comments. Otherwise you’d never look at Dawkins, Stephen Fry, etc., etc.

      Or are yuo trying to make a point about Bari Weiss?

      1. I’m not making any point about Weiss, her articles seemed reasonable. As a general rule I try to avoid reading comments especially Twitter and Youtube comments, I find them disheartening and terrifying, especially MAGA comments. Unfortunately it’s like driving by an accident, I don’t want to look but sometimes I can’t help myself and I almost always regret it. Especially when I realize there is really nothing I could write that would change their minds.

        Some places are pretty good, here as an example. First time at that site so I looked at the comments. I’m sorry I did.

  8. Under the laws of war, civilians are to be considered off-limits only if their leaders do not militarize them. If an armed unit of state-controlled Hamas fighters holes up in a hospital or a mosque, even over the objections of the landlords, the IDF is permitted to bomb it as a legitimate military target. Hamas cannot hide amongst civilians and expect the IDF not to come after them for fear of civilian casualties. The manner in which Hamas embeds itself in the civilian population, even if the civilians resented them (instead of supporting them cheerfully and participating in the killing as they seem to do), guarantees that many Palestinian civilians will die as Hamas fighters and leaders are rooted out and killed. Choices have consequences.

    Those who support Israel’s right to exist must accept with equanimity that there will, in the current circumstances, likely be a civilian bloodbath in Gaza unless the civilians have the good sense to flee. This is what Mao meant by draining the sea to drown the fish. This is your test. If you’re behind Israel you must not cavil at what they do there.

  9. As with the conversation the other day regarding how political figures take advantage of the failure of the public to appreciate (or be aware of) subtle distinctions (sex vs. gender, for example), these sleazy journalists do the same. A frequent distortion is to refer to the so-called Israeli “occupation” when talking about Gaza—even though that occupation ended in 2005. A second distortion is to throw around the phrase “Apartheid State” in reference to the conflict in Gaza, despite the fact that Gaza is a self-governing entity. Any apartheid in Gaza is its own responsibility.

    We need to pay close attention in order not to be taken in by journalists with less-than-honorable intentions.

    I *do* remember when Israel pulled out of Gaza, uprooting thousands of Israelis from their homes in an overture to bring peace. Hamas is the “peace” that resulted.

  10. For Hamas this will be a victory of martyrs and is a true display of hate from what we have become accustomed to being pronounced by the sensitive western individual.
    Beyond ideology, fueled by it, it is senseless, just as religion proves once again its preverse and perverted nature.

  11. When Israel blockades the importation of war materials into Gaza more stringently. we can expect Medea Benjamin, Cynthia McKinney, & Co. to organize a flotilla to bring in peaceful recreation supplies, such as hang-gliders, motor-bikes, and pickup trucks.

  12. To add to your comments about unfortunate civilian deaths in Gaza, it’s also good to note that Hamas is known to use human shields, either by actually having civilians act as shields for militants, or by positioning military infrastructure next to or inside of civilian buildings. For example, there’s pictures of children standing next to mortars while they’re in use, and mosques harboring weapons, HQ, etc.

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