Veteran New York Times reporter blames Israel for Oct. 7 massacres

By Moshe Phillips, JNS

The former Israel bureau chief of The New York Times has discovered who is really to blame for the Hamas pogrom on Oct. 7: Israel.

This vile bit of slander comes from the pen of Ethan Bronner, who spent 26 years at the Times posing as an objective journalist. That included the years 2008 to 2012, when he served as its Israel bureau chief.

Bronner’s pro-Palestinian bias over the years has been well documented. (For dozens of examples, see: camera.org). Unfortunately, that troubling record didn’t stop Bloomberg News from making him head of its own Israel bureau earlier this year.

Perhaps the folks at Bloomberg are beginning to regret their decision, following Bronner’s outrageous statements about Israel in a Nov. 12 book review he wrote for the Times.

In the essay, he listed examples of what he called Israeli mistreatment of Arabs. He then declared that “Oct.7 and its tragic aftermath illustrate” that Israel cannot “turn away from these challenges and pay no price.”

So, according to Bronner, the pogrom is Israel’s fault. It’s the “price” that Israel is “paying” for its allegedly awful policies.

And what exactly has Israel been doing to the Arabs that’s so awful? The veteran journalist offered three examples, none of which are Israel’s fault at all.

First, “some 3 million Palestinians live under [Israeli] occupation in the West Bank.” Only, they don’t. Bronner apparently never wondered why he didn’t see any Israeli “occupation” troops when he visited Palestinian Authority cities such as Ramallah, Qalqilya, or Nablus (Shechem). It apparently never occurred to him to ask anybody why the Israeli military governor had disappeared.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin withdrew all of Israel’s troops and military administrators from the P.A.’s cities after signing the Oslo II Accords in 1995. The Israel bureau chief of The New York Times doesn’t seem to know about those agreements. Apparently, he still thinks that Israeli “occupation” troops are marching around Ramallah.

Second, according to Bronner, those Palestinian Arabs have “little prospect of attaining full rights.” That may well be true, but not because of the Israelis. Israel has not “turned away from that challenge,” as Bronner claimed. It is the P.A.—now run by Mahmoud Abbas, who turns 88 on Nov. 15—which for the past 28 years has denied its residents their rights. It is the P.A. that refuses to let them vote for their leader. It is the P.A. that jails dissidents and smashes labor unions.