There is a note about Gaza hospital coverage
Israel’s responsibility for the Israeli airstrike on Gaza: Comments on the New York Times, The 21st Century, and An Expanded Version of Thrall
On October 17th, The New York Times published a story on an explosion at a hospital in Gaza City, which led to coverage by Hamas government officials who said hundreds of people were killed or injured in an Israeli airstrike. The report included a large headline at the top of The Times’s website.
Israel subsequently denied being at fault and blamed an errant rocket launch by the Palestinian faction group Islamic Jihad, which has in turn denied responsibility. American and other international officials have said that the rocket was likely fire from Palestinian fighter positions.
The Times continued to update its coverage as more information became available, reporting the disputed claims of responsibility and noting that the death toll might be lower than initially reported. The headline and text at the top of the website showed the scope of the explosion, as well as the dispute over responsibility.
The Times editors should have been more careful with the presentation of the news due to its sensitive nature, as well as the prominent promotion it received. While procedures for using the largest headlines in the digital report are still being looked at, there are also safeguards that may be needed.
An expanded version of Thrall’s widely praised 2021 New York Review of Books article of the same name, the book follows a Palestinian man named Abed Salama as he searches for his 5-year-old son after a deadly school bus crash in the West Bank, a search hindered by Israel’s restrictions on Palestinian movement. Thrall, the former director of the Arab-Israeli project at the International Crisis Group, uses his reported account of the Salama family’s tragedy to offer a panoramic look at life under Israel’s occupation. He is deeply concerned with Palestinian grief, but also writes rich portraits of Israelis, including Beber Vanunu, founder of a settlement in the West Bank, and Dany Tirza, architect of the separation wall that cuts through the territory.
I asked Thrall if he was glad to be asked the question. “Because that was absolutely the ambition of the book, to depict real people” rather than villains and saints.
“How does one promote a program on this subject to a largely Jewish audience when people on all sides are being bombed, killed and buried?” Andrea Grossman, whose Los Angeles nonprofit called off an event with Thrall, said in The Guardian. American Public Media, which distributes content for public radio stations nationwide, even pulled ads for the book. In an email, the spokesman said that airing the sponsorship spots for Thrall’s book would be “insensitive in light of the human tragedies unfolding.”
The fact that the statement was only vaguely at Hamas is not in line with what I think. The Jewish organization, 92NY, called off his Friday appearance due to rules created by the left, which privileges sensitivity to traumatized communities. And supporters of Israel are hardly alone in creating a censorious atmosphere; particularly on college campuses, it is Zionists who feel silenced and intimidated. A professor at the University of California, Davis, is facing investigation by the university for a social media post calling for the targeting of “Zionist journalists,” which said, “They have houses with addresses, kids in school,” and included emojis of a knife, an ax and three drops of blood.
Nevertheless, a commitment to free speech, like a commitment to human rights, shouldn’t depend on others reciprocating; such commitments are worth trying to maintain even in the face of unfairness. “Art is one of the things that can keep our minds and hearts open, that can help us see beyond the hatred of war, that can make us understand that we cannot be divided into the human versus the inhuman because we are, all of us, human and inhuman at the same time,” Nguyen wrote on Instagram.
If the statement he signed didn’t live up to his own words’ generous spirit, 92NY would have been a good place to ask him why. The moments when dialogue is most fraught and bitter is when leaders most need to model it.
The Ezra Klein Show with Ackerman and Beinart: The Israeli Left Needs to Speak Out Against the 9/11 Era
You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. You can find a list of recommendations from guests here.
Grief moves slowly and war moves quickly. After Hamas assailants killed at least 1,400 Israelis and took hundreds more hostage, Israel dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza in the first week of a conflict that is still ongoing. More than 5,000 Palestinians have been reported dead and many more injured. There is no one way to reconcile all that is happening and that needs to be felt.
My approach is going to be to try to cover it from many different perspectives, but I wanted to start with the one I’m closest to, which has felt particularly tricky in recent weeks: that of the Jewish left. So I invited Spencer Ackerman and Peter Beinart on to the show.
Ackerman is an award-winning columnist for The Nation and the author of “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump” and the newsletter Forever Wars. Peter Beinart is an editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, the author of the Beinart Notebook newsletter and a professor of journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. And they’ve each taken up angles I think are particularly important right now: the way that Sept. 11 should inform both Israel’s response and the need to empower different kinds of actors and tactics if we want to see a different future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.
