January 9, 2025, 2:31pm
Yesterday, UNICEF reported that at least 74 Palestinian children were killed by Israel in the first week of 2025.
Also yesterday, Haaretz reported that Israel blocked a UN probe into sexual crimes alleged to have been carried out by Hamas on October 7 on the grounds that it would necessitate a similar inquiry into the sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners by IDF soldiers in Israeli detention facilities.
For some reason, neither of these stories merited coverage by the New York Times today. Perhaps Joe Kahn’s crew have something in the hopper for the evening readers; we’ll wait and see. At the time of writing, however, the Gray Lady has precisely one Gaza-related piece on its homepage: an op-ed by former Book Review editor Pamela Paul decrying the American Historical Society’s vote to condemn the ongoing scholasticide (defined as the intentional destruction of an educational system) in the decimated strip.
Paul’s piece contains the usual shut-up-and-dribble bloviating about nonpolitical actors staying out of politics lest other organizations be emboldened to “pick a side” in this intractable quagmire of a conflict where over 95 percent of the dead are Palestinian and over 70 percent of the Palestinian dead are women and children, but her argument largely hinges on one paragraph which I honestly can’t believe made it to print:
First, the resolution runs counter to the historian’s defining commitment to ground arguments in evidence. It says Israel has “effectively obliterated Gaza’s education system” without noting that, according to Israel, Hamas—which goes unmentioned—shelters its fighters in schools.
As Siddhartha Manhanta pointed out earlier today, the New York Times Middle East desk has never been able to prove this accusation (though not for lack of trying), but somehow Paul feels confident in repeating it as a (frankly grotesque) justification for a fifteen-month bombardment which has destroyed every single university in Gaza, killed over 100 college professors and academics, and denied 90,000 third-level students their education.
Now, let’s say, for the sake of argument, that every one of those universities was sat atop a Hamas tunnel bulging with arms and ammunition. Let’s say that underneath their tweed elbow patches and lab coats, each of those 100 slain professors and academics wore the uniform of a dead-eyed Hamas operative. Would it negate a charge for which there is overwhelming evidence? Here’s a year-old video of the IDF destroying the captured Israa University in Gaza City in a controlled demolition. Do acts like this not meet the intentional destruction requirement for scholasticide?
Op-eds are just op-eds, and there’s little point in shaking your fist at the Times building every time the paper publishes another reckless or wildly dehumanizing screed by Thomas Friedman or Bret Stephens or Ross Douthat. Life’s too short and these pieces drop too frequently.
For there to be a day, however, during an ongoing U.S.-sponsored genocide that has claimed the lives of at least 17,000 children (most of them school-aged, Pam), where the homepage of the country’s most prestigious news outlet has zero coverage of said genocide outside of a bad faith article by a reactionary Opinion columnist, is, I would argue, a problem.
Alas, this is not an isolated case, or even a particularly remarkable one. We’ve had fifteen months Gaza-related journalistic malpractice from the New York Times, which has several IDF- and AIPAC-affiliated staff reporters covering the Israel-Palestine conflict, but zero Palestinians (too susceptible to bias, you see). “Screams Without Words,” perhaps the most damaging piece of laundered Israeli propaganda ever committed to print, was published in December 2023. This article, the headline for which is built around statements likely extracted through torture, was published just two days ago. (For the sake of space, I would ask you to take my word for the fact that there are dozens of further examples since October 7, none of which have merited so much as a “my bad” from Kahn et al).
The powers that be at the New York Times have nailed their colors pretty firmly to the mast on this issue, and that’s a damn shame, because we really do need our country’s paper of record to do better.
