As part of the New York Times‘ regular ongoing series of Sunday opinion section logorrheic attacks on Israel, Nicholas Kristof recently weighed in with a super-long article that added precisely nothing to what everyone already knew about the events in the Middle East and Kristof’s view of them.

To fill out an article as long as Kristof’s without any original thought required a lot of reporting, and Kristof was determined to demonstrate that he did that, padding the piece with quotations from an endless parade of people who he described as experts.

Yet many the people Kristof quoted were longtime critics of Israel and its elected government, or just people who agreed with Kristof.

Kristof quoted US Sen. Chris Van Hollen, identifying him only as “a Maryland Democrat and foreign policy expert.” Yet since the Hamas terror group’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, Van Hollen has gone off the deep end. A Baltimore Jewish Times editorial recently reported, “Van Hollen’s relentless attacks against Israel have been so offensive that they recently prompted an unprecedented public letter of reprimand from nearly 80 Maryland rabbis from across the state and denominational affiliations expressing deep concern about Van Hollen and his pronouncements. In the rabbis’ words, they are ‘aghast’ at Van Hollen’s anti-Israel rhetoric.”

The editorial derided Van Hollen’s “self-righteous spewing of anti-Israel accusations and positions.” It concluded, “We face the uncomfortable reality that Chris Van Hollen is not our friend.” Kristof didn’t mention any of that.

Kristof also quoted “Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat,” without letting readers in on the context that Merkley was widely lambasted for alleged antisemitism in publishing a social media post on Easter that said, “On this Easter, let’s ponder [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, which has killed more than 20,000 women and children, and his restriction of humanitarian aid, which has pushed Palestinians to the brink of famine.” Kristof quit his Times column in 2021 to attempt to run for governor of Oregon as a Democrat, and Merkley was a senior figure in the Oregon Democratic Party.

Kristof also mentioned “Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the University of Maryland.” Yet Telhami was urging sanctions threats against “apartheid” Israel back in May 2023, long before the Hamas-Israel war. Kristof didn’t mention that context to readers, either.

Kristof quoted Menachem Rosensaft, identifying him only as “a Cornell law professor and general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress.” Rosensaft has a distinguished record of service to the Jewish people, but it’s also worth noting that he met with Yasser Arafat in 1988 and was criticized at the time; the New York Times reported back then, “The Americans meeting with Mr. Arafat have been criticized by some Jewish organizations and the Israeli government as unrepresentative of all Jews and for being exploited by Mr. Arafat in his effort to fashion a moderate image for the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization].”

Kristof quoted both Martin Indyk and Aaron David Miller, but not their fellow peace-processor Dennis Ross, who has a similar background of government service but who tends to be less publicly critical of Israel and of its wartime allies.

In short, Kristof’s sources and his descriptions of them were flawed.

Just as misleading was Kristof’s basic analytical framework. The column was headlined “What Happened to the Joe Biden I Knew?” It asked why Biden was “against the Darfur genocide and humanitarian crisis two decades ago” yet has demonstrated “complicity in the cataclysm of Gaza.”

What Kristof entirely omitted was the humanitarian crisis that unfolded in Syria during the Obama-Biden administration. It would be hard to chalk the US inaction then up to Biden’s supposed pro-Israel bent. Yet Kristof ignored that case entirely. Maybe what happened to Biden was that he was against humanitarian crises when they could be conveniently blamed on Republican administrations, or when he was not in the White House as president or vice president.

Or maybe the truth isn’t quite so partisan. Perhaps Biden truly understands somehow, correctly, that the humanitarian situation in Gaza is mainly the fault of Iran-backed Hamas, not Israel or the US. If so, then he’s more perceptive than Nicholas Kristof, who for all his Pulitzer Prizes and Harvard and Oxford degrees, has a vision of the US-Israel relationship that is as predictable, skewed, and self-righteous as too many of his sources.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.

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