“There is no nation that feeds its enemies.  The British didn’t feed the Nazis nor did the Americans feed the Japanese, nor do the Russians feed the Ukrainians now.” 

– Amichay Eliyahu, Israel’s Heritage Ministry, July 24, 2025

“How many times can a man turn his head/and pretend that he just doesn’t see.”
– Bob Dylan, “Blowing in the Wind,” 1962

“Israel is prolonging the war, even though we do not see where further progress cans be made.”

–Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s special envoy, 2025

Last week, Bret Stephens, the New York Times’ leading warmonger and apologist for Israel, penned a lead editorial that denied Israel was committing genocide in Israel.  The editorials and articles in the NYT’s have always favored Israel, but no NYT’s columnist compares to Stephens, whose writings are chauvinistic and bellicose.  Stephens, a former editor of the Jerusalem Post and a supporter of all Israeli policies, left the Wall Street Journal to join the Times in 2017 because he believed Israel was not getting a fair hearing in the mainstream media.  In doing so, he joined other Jewish columnists at the Times (Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, Paul Krugman, and Roger Cohen).  However, while these men bring some objectivity to the problem of Israel, Stephens has no limits in his support of Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Stephens limits his definition of genocide to assault against innocent civilians, which allows him to ignore the international definition developed during World War II that includes cultural genocide.  Even with his definition, Israel is committing genocide on the basis of the brutal starvation of the Palestinian population, which is an assault on the physical survival of Gaza’s population. 

Israel is clearly committing cultural genocide to ensure that its militarism stops Palestinians in Gaza from ever constituting itself as a political, social, or cultural entity.  The convention against genocide mandates that signatory states must prevent genocide and that war criminals who carried out genocide must be punished.  The International Court of Justice stipulates that severe sanctions can be imposed on nations that conduct genocide.

The targeting procedures of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are consistent with the objectives of cultural genocide.  The IDF has made Gaza uninhabitable and, in the process, has systematically destroyed or damaged virtually the entire civilian infrastructure.  This military campaign has targeted every government building, hospital, medical clinic, school, university, mosque, library, and archive.  Israel had turned Gaza into an outdoor prison before the war, and there is no chance that Gaza can now be revived for civilian life.  As Netanyahu said in May, “We are destroying more and more homes.  They have nowhere to return to.”  Certainly, this is genocidal.

The relentless and repetitively compulsive Israeli attacks over the past two decades indicates that Israelis are making innocent Palestinians pay for the savagery of the Germans 85 years ago.  The current massacre, such as the one in Sedalia, with Palestinian children carrying white flags and running for their lives from Israeli tanks and artillery, is reminiscent of the massacre of the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest of all Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II.  We know so little of Israel savagery because the Israelis have kept journalists out of Gaza.  There is also terrible savagery in the West Bank, but Western journalists have displayed little interest in covering the terror imposed by Israeli settlers against Palestinians. The mainstream media is finally getting around to covering the starvation in Gaza after the evidence mounted in a year and a half of savage bombing with U.S.-supplied weaponry..

Now, we are seeing the IDF target women and children who are trying to get food and medicine from a very limited assistance effort that Israel is permitting.  According to Omer Bartov, a Professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, “Gaza now has the grim distinction of having the highest number of amputee children per capita in the world.” Chronically ill Palestinians have very little access to hospital care.  The fact that Palestinians must risk their lives to acquire a bag of flour is absolutely repulsive.

Stephens justifies Israeli savagery as necessary against Hamas, but there is little left of Hamas to target.  Instead, the IDF is preoccupied with moving Palestinian civilians from one part of Gaza to another, while its bombardment continues everywhere in the Strip.   The IDF fight against Hamas was essentially over more than a year ago, and the weakened group that still emerges from their tunnels to contest the IDF is extremely limited. Stephens explains that Israel could kill many more Palestinians if it was truly pursuing genocide.  What a pathetic statement.  Israeli intent is obvious.

Israeli acts of violence against innocent Palestinians have been taking place for over 75 years, beginning with the terrorism and ethnic cleansing that took place in the 1948 war…the Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic.  The forced displacement and dispossession of Palestinians from their homes that began in 1948 is still taking place in the West Bank, in addition to Gaza.  The Nakba in 1948 involved the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians from what became the Jewish state.  Palestinians are the only refugees in the world that have hereditary refugee status among international relief agencies..

There are several certainties in this narrative.  First, the New York Times will always give Israel the benefit of the doubt, and Bret Stephens will excuse any barbarity that Israel imposes on the Palestinian people.  The NYT’s Walter Duranty, ironically, was the leading apologist for Stalin’s genocide in the 1930s.  Second, when scholars and academics study genocide in the future, they will frame their writings and research around Joseph Stalin and Ukraine (the Holodomor); Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust; and Benjamin Netanyahu and the latest Nakba.  Third, the United States—particularly Biden and Trump—will be guilty of complicity for the barbarity that Israel is imposing on innocent Palestinians.

The post The New York Times’ Leading Apologist for Israel is Still at It appeared first on CounterPunch.org.