The New York Times’s Complicity in Israel’s Genocide For me, the biggest point to be made in the Times’s coverage of Israel over the years is that, even in describing Israeli atrocities, it insists on implying that these atrocities are somehow deviations from an Israel which is, at heart, committed to human decency. For example, in an article in May describing the accelerating KKK style reign of terror conducted by Jewish settlers against West Bank Palestinians, Times reporters felt the need to stress that the core group of settlers behind this terrorism only “represent a small fraction of the roughly 700,000 Israelis living in West Bank settlements.” It is language like this that obscures the decades of destruction of homes, massacres, theft of land and water, collective punishment, ethnic cleansing and other atrocities committed by successive Israeli governments in the West Bank. It obscures the complicity of the broader community of Israeli Jews in the West Bank’s apartheid–not merely the messianic settler thugs terrorizing Palestinians but also the more decent and secular minded Israeli Jews who have settled (illegally under international law) in the West Bank after finding affordable housing there. It obscures the Jewish supremacy that has been Israel’s essence since its founding. Unless news media regularly provide the context of the barbarism that is Israel’s essence–rather than attributing Israeli excesses during the Gaza War to Netanyahu or a small group of fascist settler thugs–the door will remain wide open to what Johnson, in the conclusion to his book assesses as very likely: restoration in the coming years of the virtually unanimous support for Israel which existed in mainstream American life in the decades prior to the country committing genocide in Gaza.