Bombshell! NYT exposes Israel’s fostering of deadly Jewish extremism, brutal repression of Palestinians

The New York Times, of all publications, has exploded the Israeli government’s information-control narrative that has sought to portray the conflict with Palestinians as having started with Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023. The 18 May New York Times Magazine published a threepart bombshell on Israel’s decades of legal double standards between Jews and Palestinians, going back to at least the 1970s, which have resulted in systematic persecution, torture, and murder against the Palestinians, while a soft touch was applied to Israeli extremists who are acknowledged terrorists, fostering their expansion to the point where known terrorists are now in the Israeli government. The NYT feature is striking because such coverage critical of Israel is virtually unprecedented in US mainstream media. As prominent US economist and foreign policy critic Jeffrey Sachs commented on in a 21 May YouTube interview on Judge Napolitano—Judging Freedom: “The New York Times Magazine ran an astoundingly accurate, I’d say unexpected article, showing the violent shame of how Israel has ruled the occupied lands, with murder, with displacement, with lawlessness, with complete impunity. And the New York Times, not exactly an anti-Israel publication, let’s put it that way, lays it out in all the brutality.”

The NYT piece is titled “The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel”, and subtitled: “After 50 years of failure to stop violence and terrorism against Palestinians by Jewish ultranationalists, lawlessness has become the law.” The feature is in three parts, which NYT summarises: “The first documents the unequal system of justice that grew around Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. The second shows how extremists targeted not only Palestinians but also Israeli officials trying to make peace. The third explores how this movement gained control of the state itself. Taken together, they tell the story of how a radical ideology moved from the fringes to the heart of Israeli political power.”

The feature is a blow-by-blow account of the persecution and murder of Palestinians by all of Israel’s main agencies (Shin Bet, IDF, the police, various government departments, government officials, at least partially the judiciary, etc.) over decades since at least the early 1980s, with some heroic exceptions such as the murdered prime minister who tried to bring pace, Yitzhak Rabin. Although it does not per se feature the Temple Mount issue that the Australian Citizens Party has exposed in the December 2023 dossier, “Plunging towards World War III: The Madein-London ‘Temple Mount Plot’ Behind the Israel-Hamas War”, the series includes several pointed accounts of how prominent actors in Israel attempted to blow up the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque precisely to rebuild Solomon’s Temple in its place. That, the co-authors observe (even quoting some of the Israeli messianists), would also entail abolishing the present Israel “democratic state” and replacing it with a bloodthirsty theocracy. 

Very prominently, the feature profiles the backgrounds of two current Netanyahu government ministers, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, showing them to be actual terrorists. The weakness in the feature is that it traces this extremist element to the rise of the terrorist Rabbi Meir Kahane and his Kach party in the 1970s, who was outlawed as a terrorist; however, as the ACP’s dossier exposed, the roots go much deeper, to the British Empire in the 19th century sponsoring a current of messianic fundamentalist Judaism led by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and his son Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook who promoted the idea that Solomon’s Temple must be rebuilt for the messiah to return, which, sponsored by British, European and American freemasonic and Christian Zionist networks, became a powerful agenda following the 1967 Six Day War when Israel occupied the Palestinian territories. In a 3 April 2024 Citizens Insight interview on YouTube, ACP Research Director Robert Barwick covered this history with dossier co-author Michele Steinberg, who emphasised how it shaped the rise of the extremists in charge of Israel today, particularly: “Itamar Ben Gvir—now I want everybody to remember that name, today, and tomorrow, and the next day”, she emphasised. Many informed Israelis have recently spoken out on precisely this issue as the driver of all of Israel’s current problems, even forecasting a likely “civil war” in Israel due to the conflict between this ruling “messianism” and the more democratic, secular Israel of old, notwithstanding its birth in the horrific 1948 Nakba genocide against the Palestinians.

Whilst it doesn’t go as deep as the ACP’s dossier, nevertheless the NYT feature is both timely, and an extraordinary intervention in the political reaction to Israel’s genocidal slaughter of Gazans since 7 October. The co-authors, Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti, are decades-long specialists in Israel/Palestine, who have been researching this article for a long time, going as far back as 2016. The questions raised by the NYT publishing this feature are “Why?”, and “Why now?” Does it signal a shift in the US establishment’s position on Israel which until now has facilitated the mass-slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza? The NYT feature is accessible at this (paywalled) link: www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/magazine/israel-westbank-settler-violence-impunity.html

By Robert Barwick, Australian Alert Service, 22 May 2024