Missing narrative in a political hit story
It is obvious that the U.S. paper of record is not a cheerleading squad for Team Netanyahu. Still, one hopes that minimal standards of fairness exist.
By David E. Weisberg
JNS
Jul 20, 2025
The New York Times Sunday Magazine contains a long article on July 11 written by three staff members based in Israel, titled “How Netanyahu Prolonged the War in Gaza to Stay in Power.” It is prefaced with the comforting assurance that the authors “spoke to more than 110 officials in Israel, the United States and the Arab world and reviewed scores of documents[.]” Notwithstanding all that speaking and reviewing, the end result is an exemplar of anti-Netanyahu, anti-Israel bias.
The first paragraph reveals that in April of 2024, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted a deal that would have paused the war for six weeks and might have fostered a permanent truce. But his approval was not enough; a majority of the cabinet would also need to vote affirmatively.
The article asserts that a right-wing member of the cabinet—Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—had heard rumors that the prime minister was going to present such a deal to the cabinet for a vote. Smotrich heads a group of religious Zionist parties that control enough Knesset seats to collapse the government if they abandon Netanyahu’s coalition, and Smotrich was adamantly opposed to any deal.
At the April 2024 cabinet meeting, Smotrich openly announced before Netanyahu had presented any deal that if one to halt the war were even presented, “[t]he government is finished,” because Smotrich’s parties would bolt the coalition. The article zeroes in on this explicit challenge to Netanyahu and states:
“At that moment, the prime minister was forced to choose between the chance of a truce and his political survival—and Netanyahu opted for survival. There was no ceasefire plan, he promised Smotrich. “No, no, there’s no such thing,” he said. And … the cabinet discussion moved on.”
The only problem here is that the narrative does not demonstrate that Netanyahu had to choose between presenting a pause deal or ensuring his own political survival. There is another perfectly reasonable possibility that has been missed entirely.
The other possibility is that once Smotrich had openly told the entire cabinet that he would bring down the government if a deal was even considered, Netanyahu calculated that any deal would be voted down by the cabinet. That is, he might very reasonably have concluded that a majority of the cabinet would try to pacify Smotrich by voting against a deal, hoping that that rejection would cause Smotrich to rethink abandoning the coalition. Because there never was a vote, no one (including staff at the Times) can know what the result would have been.
Even people who abhor Netanyahu freely concede his mastery of political strategy. If Netanyahu indeed believed that after Smotrich’s challenge, a deal would be rejected by the cabinet, then the Times’ thesis is flatly refuted. In Netanyahu’s mind, the choice confronting him might have been either (a) to present the plan, then see it be rejected by the cabinet, and then perhaps see the government fall; or (b) not to present the plan at all. This is a very different choice from the one the newspaper says Netanyahu faced.
The story of the April 2024 cabinet meeting begins the article, presumably because it’s the most telling evidence that Netanyahu has prolonged the war to stay in power. I submit it’s no evidence at all, because there is zero consideration of the possibility that Netanyahu might reasonably have concluded that a pause would not have been approved if it had been voted on.
Here’s one more specimen of the Times’ prejudiced approach. The authors say their reporting supports several “unavoidable conclusions,” including “in the months before [the Gaza] war, Netanyahu’s push to undermine Israel’s judiciary widened already-deep rifts within Israeli society and weakened its military, making Israel appear vulnerable and encouraging Hamas to ready its attack.” This inverts reality.
Long before the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, there was enormous controversy over the government’s desire to pass laws altering the powers of the Supreme Court and the method of choosing its judges. The article states that by July of 2023, “[a]t least 10,000 military reservists, including scores of reserve pilots who formed the backbone of Israel’s flying corps, had threatened to stop serving if Netanyahu went ahead with a vote in Parliament … .”
Although senior military and intelligence officials warned that the country was at a “point of crisis,” Netanyahu insisted on a Knesset vote, and the legislation passed.
The article says that two things followed. First, reservists began to make good on their resignation threats. Secondly, the leaders of Hamas, in their own words, decided: “The condition of the occupation government and its domestic arena compels us to move forward with a strategic battle.” And this is the course of events the article refers to when it asserts that the Supreme Court controversy was “making Israel appear vulnerable and encouraging Hamas to ready its attack.”
So, we are invited to blame Netanyahu because the resignations of reservists who opposed Netanyahu’s legislation encouraged Hamas to attack Israel. Think about that for a second, or a minute, or forever. The prime minister’s opponents announce they will not serve in the reserves; those announcements encourage Hamas to attack Israel, which it then does; and The New York Times blames Netanyahu. It does not blame the reservists who announced that they would not serve, as well as those who applauded those announcements. Instead, it blames Netanyahu. And black is white, up is down, and truth is falsity.
We know that the U.S. paper of record is not a cheerleading squad for Team Netanyahu. Still, one hopes that there are certain minimal standards of coherence and fairness below which no entity that purports to report the news would sink.
With regard to the Times, one hopes in vain.
No comments:
Post a Comment