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New York Times Campus ‘Middle-of-the-Road’ on Israel Is Actually Pretty Far Out
The New York Times building in New York City. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
“It Can Be Lonely to Have a Middle-of-the Road Opinion on the Middle East,” is the headline over a recent New York Times news article. “Some college students and faculty members are seeking space for nuanced perspectives on the Israel-Hamas war on deeply divided campuses,” a subheadline explains.
What examples does the Times offer up of “nuanced perspectives” and “middle-of-the road” opinion?
One person named in the Times article is a Columbia student named Aharon Dardik. The Times describes him as “a pacifist who spent his teen years with his family in the West Bank but who ultimately refused to serve in the army in Israel. He believes in working with Israelis and Palestinians toward collective liberation and a world not divided by ethnonationalist allegiances.”
A “world not divided by ethnonationalist allegiances” seems like an extremist utopian fantasy, not “nuanced” or “middle of the road.”
The Times doesn’t mention Dardik’s extreme description of Israel’s actions in Gaza as a “plausible genocide,” his praise of extreme anti-Israel congresswoman Ilhan Omar, or his support for gradually phasing out Columbia’s partnership with Tel Aviv University, all of which were mentioned in a piece about him in RealClearPolitics. The Times doesn’t mention that he was court-martialed by the Israel Defense Forces six times and spent about 4 months in an Israeli military prison, as Moment magazine has reported. It doesn’t report Dardik’s expression of support for the Columbia “encampment” and for the takeover of Hamilton Hall by anti-Israel protesters, which are also in the Moment account.
It all doesn’t sound too nuanced or middle of the road to me.
Another person named in the Times article is a professor at Swarthmore College, Sa’ed Atshan. The Times claims the professor “tries to make sure there is complexity in everything he teaches in his Contemporary Israel and Palestine class.” Atshan told NPR that he is a pacifist, and that “it’s difficult to be a pacifist in the U.S. where guns are so pervasive and a world where violence is so pervasive. In a world where the military industrial complex is transnational and has its tentacles everywhere we go.” The Philadelphia Inquirer has described him as a supporter of the movement to Boycott, Divest, and Sanction Israel, and as a proponent of a “one state solution” that would be an end to Israel as a Jewish state.
Another of the Times’s examples is Dov Waxman, a professor at UCLA who “wrote on social media that he supported the International Criminal Court’s request for an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a position he said he took as a supporter of international law.”
These people don’t seem that “middle of the road” or “nuanced” to me. That the Times would describe them as such says more about the Times and its biases than about the realities of the situation on American college campuses.
It’s not even clear how “lonely” these characters are. The Times claims Dardik started a group at Columbia that has “over 100 members.” Waxman recently was invited to speak at a Harvard conference on antisemitism on campus, convened by Derek Penslar, who describes himself as “Head of Harvard’s Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias.” There, according to an account in Harvard magazine, Waxman asserted that “the media often exaggerated campus antisemitism.” Atshan gathered support from a petition signed by 750 people, according to the Inquirer. They’re all getting adulatory press coverage from the New York Times describing them, not that accurately, as “middle of the road.”
Maybe they look like “middle of the road” from the vantage point of the New York Times newsroom. Not so, though, from the perspective of the Israeli or American public. The real loners are the Times editors, who persist in pushing a point of view about Israel that is far out of the mainstream. It may boost Times circulation on a few formerly elite college campuses, but it also explains a lot about the newspaper’s fading credibility.
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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Smotrich Says Defense Ministry to Spur Voluntary Emigration from Gaza
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich attends an inauguration event for Israel’s new light rail line for the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, in Petah Tikva, Israel, Aug. 17, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
i24 News – Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Sunday that the government would establish an administration to encourage the voluntary migration of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
“We are establishing a migration administration, we are preparing for this under the leadership of the Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] and Defense Minister [Israel Katz],” he said at a Land of Israel Caucus at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. “The budget will not be an obstacle.”
Referring to the plan championed by US President Donald Trump, Smotrich noted the “profound and deep hatred towards Israel” in Gaza, adding that “sources in the American government” agreed “that it’s impossible for two million people with hatred towards Israel to remain at a stone’s throw from the border.”
The administration would be under the Defense Ministry, with the goal of facilitating Trump’s plan to build a “Riviera of the Middle East” and the relocation of hundreds of thousands of Gazans for rebuilding efforts.
“If we remove 5,000 a day, it will take a year,” Smotrich said. “The logistics are complex because you need to know who is going to which country. It’s a potential for historical change.”
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Defense Ministry: 16,000 Wounded in War, About Half Under 30
A general view shows the plenum at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
i24 News – The Knesset’s (Israeli parliament’s) Special Committee for Foreign Workers held a discussion on Sunday to examine the needs of wounded and disabled IDF soldiers and the response foreign caregivers could provide.
During the discussion, data from the Defense Minister revealed that the number of registered IDF wounded and disabled veterans rose from 62,000 to 78,000 since the war began on October 7, 2023. “Most of them are reservists and 51 percent of the wounded are up to 30 years old,” the ministry’s report said. The number will increase, the ministry assesses, as post-trauma cases emerge.
The committee chairwoman, Knesset member Etty Atiya (Likud), emphasized the need to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy for the wounded and to remove obstacles. “There is no dispute that the IDF disabled have sacrificed their bodies and souls for the people of Israel, for the state of Israel,” she said. Addressing the veterans, she continued: “And we, as public representatives and public servants alike, must do everything, but everything, to improve your lives in any way possible, to alleviate your pain and the distress of your family members who are no less affected than you.”
Currently, extensions are being given to the IDF veterans on a three-month basis, which Atiya said creates uncertainty and fear among the patients.
“The committee calls on the Interior Minister [Moshe Arbel] to approve as soon as possible the temporary order on our table, so that it will reach the approval of the Knesset,” she said, adding that she “intends to personally approach the Director General of the Population Authority [Shlomo Mor-Yosef] on the matter in order to promote a quick and stable solution.”
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Over 1,300 Killed in Syria as New Regime Accused of Massacring Civilians
Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad speaks during an interview with Sky News Arabia in Damascus, Syria in this handout picture released by the Syrian Presidency on August 8, 2023. Syrian Presidency/Handout via REUTERS
i24 News – Over 1,300 people were killed in two days of fighting in Syria between security forces under the new Syrian Islamist leaders and fighters from ousted president Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect on the other hand, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on Sunday.
Since Thursday, 1,311 people had been killed, according to the Observatory, including 830 civilians, mainly Alawites, 231 Syrian government security personnel, and 250 Assad loyalists.
The intense fighting broke out late last week as the Alawite militias launched an offensive against the new government’s fighters in the coastal region of the country, prompting a massive deployment ordered by new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa.
“We must preserve national unity and civil peace as much as possible and… we will be able to live together in this country,” al-Sharaa said, as quoted in the BBC.
The death toll represents the most severe escalations since Assad was ousted late last year, and is one of the most costly in terms of human lives since the civil war began in 2011.
The counter-offensive launched by al-Sharaa’s forces was marked by reported revenge killings and atrocities in the Latakia region, a stronghold of the Alawite minority in the country.
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