The New York Times came under fire Wednesday over a baffling passage that appeared in an article about an Israeli documentary — which said the Jewish state “still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7.”
The Sept. 14 article, penned by Jerusalem-based reporter Isabel Kershner, covers the controversy over the documentary film “NAZA,” which chronicles the killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and just won the Special Jury Prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival.
The article details the criticism about the 80-minute film lodged by some Israeli officials — who called it “based on blood libels” and “deliberate distortions of reality” — and even floated the idea of stripping its directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor of their Israeli citizenship for “betraying the state of Israel.”
Then it points to the upcoming three-year anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023 terror attacks and Israel’s national election, a pair of weighty, potentially fraught events which Kershner posits have “further fueled the backlash” against the film.
“Israelis are deeply divided over how to apportion blame for the policy, military and intelligence failures that preceded the attack and the war,” she writes.
“But Israelis still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7,” she continued, even citing the 1,200 civilian casualties slaughtered that day and the 250 taken hostage in what she called “the deadliest day in Israel’s history” in the very same paragraph.
The phrasing, and confusing juxtaposition, quickly sparked bitter outrage on social media.
“No words for this abomination,” CNN correspondent Scott Jennings wrote in a post on X sharing a screenshot with the offending passage highlighted, which has already garnered hundreds of angry responses and hundreds of thousands of views.
“If Israel wasn’t the Oct 7 victim, who does the NYTimes propose is? The mental gymnastics are at an Olympic level here,” wrote one of many confused commenters.
“I cancelled my subscription long ago. The NYT is just the propaganda arm of the DSA,” said another, implying the Gray Lady is doing heavy lifting for the Democratic Socialists of America.
“Yes, and equally curiously, Americans overwhelmingly still see themselves as the victim of 9/11. The nerve!” another commenter wrote, sarcastically.
Kershner quotes a statement from the left-leaning news outlet The Guardian, which co-produced the film, saying it was “disturbed to see the authoritarian response to ‘NAZA’ in Israel,” and vowing to “robustly defend” both the documentary and the team behind it “from any attacks or attempts at censorship.”
The film included interviews with 24 purported Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers who spoke under strict conditions of anonymity.
The New York Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the uproar, which is not the only recent instance of the outlet catching heat for its Israel reporting.
Israel is poised to slap the Newspaper of Record with a lawsuit over a recent article accusing Israeli soldiers and their dogs of raping Palestinian prisoners, which the country’s Foreign Ministry called “one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press.”
Just this week, a damning study published by Edieal Pinker of the Yale School of Management examining 1,559 of its articles published between Oct. 7, 2023 and June 7, 2024 revealed the paper displayed a clear bias against Israel by downplaying its casualties and minimizing Hamas’ role in the conflict.
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