The New York Times and the Art of Distorting Facts in Israel's Service

Every now and then, The New York Times publishes some uncomfortable truths about Israel, a key U.S. partner and recipient of billions of dollars in American aid and weapons. But the fact that the newspaper publishes these facts does not necessarily mean that it is presenting them directly.

In 2014, the New York Times reported on an Israeli missile strike that killed four boys playing soccer on a Gaza beach. While the text clearly conveyed the truth, the headline was ironically ambiguous: “Boys Drawn to Gaza Beach, Caught in Middle East Conflict.”

Now, with Gaza not just the “heart of the Middle East conflict” but the scene of an apparent genocide, the paper is once again creatively twisting the news, as seen in Tuesday’s headline: “Israel was less flexible in recent Gaza ceasefire talks, documents show.”

The real translation of this title is: Israel is obstructing efforts to cease fire in a war that has killed 1% of Gaza's population since last January.

Officially, some 40,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, although a study published by The Lancet suggests the true death toll may be higher than 186,000. In contrast, the Joe Biden administration recently approved an additional $20 billion in arms transfers to Israel, even as the United States claims to be working toward a ceasefire.

The New York Times asserts in a convoluted way that while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has consistently denied trying to prevent a deal in Gaza, and has blamed Hamas for the stalemate, unpublished documents seen by the newspaper “make clear that Netanyahu’s secret maneuvers were extensive.

In July, Israel conveyed a “list of new conditions” to the American, Egyptian and Qatari mediators in the ceasefire talks, which included “less flexible terms” than the “set of principles” it had previously presented.

Among these new conditions, instead of Israel withdrawing its military forces from the Gaza Strip in the event of a ceasefire, it will remain in control of Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. But how can the Palestinians accept the continuation of this military occupation!

Israel has also revived its insistence on setting up checkpoints where Israeli soldiers will conduct weapons searches on displaced Palestinians returning to their homes in northern Gaza, a condition that is particularly ugly given that the party imposing it is the one currently committing genocide using all manner of weapons.

It’s a simple strategy to move the goalposts. Every time a ceasefire deal gets closer to being achieved, Netanyahu adds a new set of demands that even members of his own security establishment consider excessive.

In addition to courting the Israeli far right, which views any halt to the mass killing as unacceptable, Netanyahu has other motives for stalling the negotiations. If the war stops, he will have to deal with corruption charges and internal opposition, in addition to facing the International Criminal Court, whose prosecutor has filed a request for an arrest warrant for Netanyahu on charges of war crimes in the Gaza Strip.

Ultimately, Israel has never been interested in peace; the entire Israeli project is based on continued war and killing. One need look no further than Israel’s long history of sabotaging not only ceasefire deals but the so-called “peace process” in general, all the while, of course, blaming the Palestinians for every failure to reach a solution.

In the year before the official Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, which ostensibly ended Israel’s occupation of the territory, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s top adviser, Dov Weisglass, gave Haaretz a summary of the deal. “The significance of the disengagement plan,” Weisglass told Haaretz, “is in freezing the peace process.”

He continued: "When you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent discussion of the issue of refugees, borders and Jerusalem."

Thus: “In effect, this entire package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda… all with American presidential blessing and the approval of both houses of Congress.”

Of course, you could also remove the entire Palestinian statehood package from the agenda simply by eliminating everyone. And with mass atrocities continuing as a new round of negotiations approaches, the New York Times’ suggestion that “a deal may be elusive” is already an understatement.

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