Pete Tucker
In nearly eight years as New York Times publisher, you’ve achieved remarkable financial success for the paper. And as your grandfather Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger Sr. said, if the Times doesn’t make money, “we can’t have any other mission.”
Unfortunately, though, your success hasn’t been uniform. Your secondary mission – the news – has proved more challenging, particularly with regards to the Middle East, which was also your father’s Achilles heel.
Your dad, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., is remembered for frontpaging President George W. Bush’s lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. When you took over from him at just 37, I was hopeful the Times would become more skeptical of official claims, particularly those involving the Middle East.
My hope didn’t come from knowing you, as I don’t. (Our great-grandfathers, Arthur and David Sulzberger, were brothers, making us third cousins.) But I was still optimistic that, having seen your dad’s mistake, you wouldn’t repeat it.
In the wake of Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies made clear what was to come. “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip,” said Yoav Gallant, Netanyahu’s comparatively moderate defense secretary. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”
While much of the world was prepared to back an Israeli military campaign against Hamas, genocide was another matter, particularly one enacted on a population that’s been penned into an open-air prison for years.
To keep the world at bay, Israel needed Hamas – and by extension all Palestinians – to be seen as uniquely evil. So Israel sought to transform the October 7 attack, brutal as it was, into something it was not – a campaign to use rape as a weapon of war.
But news outlets were reluctant to make Israel’s mass rape claim their own. “Western coverage largely included the caveat that Israel had not presented evidence that such assaults had been part of a Hamas campaign, or that such attacks had been carried out on a large scale,” Ryan Grim reported for the Intercept.
“As the days went on, and October turned to November, the number of Palestinian children killed by Israel’s retaliatory campaign in Gaza climbed into the thousands. Proportionality may have been discarded by the IDF, but it still mattered to the world. Israel’s ability to continue prosecuting the war could no longer be justified as a proportional response. Global opinion was turning. Israel came under intense pressure to reach a ceasefire deal in exchange for the release of the hostages. In order to change the equation, the attack on October 7 needed to be understood globally in much different terms, Israeli officials recognized. The degree of suffering by innocent civilians was no longer a helpful comparison. The attack and the attackers needed to be understood as different in kind. They needed to be understood as animals, as beasts, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet routinely say. So those Israeli officials shifted focus from the number of Israeli victims, which by then paled in comparison to those killed in Gaza, and instead talked about the nature of the attack — specifically, the claim that Hamas had used rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war. Animals.”
But Netanyahu lacked the credibility to pull this off. He needed the Times to stamp its imprimatur on the mass rape charge.
When Bush faced a similar predicament two decades earlier, it was your dad, A.G., who came to the president’s rescue by turning WMD fiction into fact, as only the Times can.
“At first, she was known simply as ‘the woman in the black dress.’ In a grainy video, you can see her, lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed. Her face is burned beyond recognition and her right hand covers her eyes.”
The rape and murder of Gal Abdush, a mother of two, takes up a third of the Times’ blockbuster story. “She has become a symbol of the horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls during the October 7 attacks,” the Times reported, while claiming its “two-month investigation… establish[ed] that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on October 7.”
Gal Abdush, however, wasn’t raped, according to her family. “She was not raped,” Abdush’s sister wrote on Instagram. “The media invented it,” her brother-in-law told Israel’s Channel 13. “I plead with you to stop spreading lies,” another sister posted on Instagram. “We didn’t know about the rape at all. We only knew after a New York Times journalist contacted us,” Abdush’s mother told the Israeli website YNET.
While the Times acknowledged the family’s concerns, it took a month, and only eagle-eyed readers would have caught it. Buried in the 31st paragraph of a story that appeared to confirm the Times’ initial reporting, the paper noted, “Since the publication of the Times article, a few family members have denied or cast doubt [about Abdush’s rape].”
“[Sapir] said that she saw ‘about 100 men’… pass[ing] between them assault rifles, grenades, small missiles — and badly wounded women. ‘It was like an assembly point,’ she said… While one terrorist raped [a woman], she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast. ‘One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road,’ Sapir said… Around the same time, she said, she saw three other women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more women.”
But Sapir’s account wasn’t credible. “No record exists of women being beheaded on October 7,” Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate reported for the Grayzone. The duo also noted Sapir’s story appeared to have “radically changed” over time.
In addition to fluctuating numbers of victims and assailants, Sapir’s story detailed weaponry that migrated “from guns to the more bloody and primordial use of knives (stereotypical of Arabs and Muslims in Orientalist imaginaries),” the Feminist Solidarity Network for Palestine wrote in its takedown of “Screams Without Words.”
Also quoted in “Screams Without Words” was Yossi Landau, who told the Times, “I did not take pictures because we are not allowed to take pictures [of the dead].” Only Landau’s ultra-Orthodox emergency response group, ZAKA, is known to do just that, and more.
In the aftermath of October 7, ZAKA volunteers made “video calls and videos for fundraising purposes” that “used the dead as props,” according to an investigation by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which found, “As part of the effort to get media exposure, Zaka spread accounts of atrocities that never happened.”
Support for ZAKA extended to the highest levels of government. “You have an important role in influencing public opinion,” Netanyahu told the group in November 2023, as global opposition to Israel’s war mounted. “We need to buy time,” and ZAKA’s testimonies “give us the maneuvering room,” Netanyahu said, according to the news site Mondoweiss.
Netanyahu’s pep talk came the month after ZAKA’s Landau told CBS that he saw children and babies who had been beheaded by Hamas. President Biden parroted Landau’s claim from the White House, saying, “I never really thought that I would see, and have confirmed, pictures of terrorists beheading children.” The White House had to retract the false statement.
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Pete Tucker is a journalist based in DC. He writes at petetucker.substack.com
Source: CounterPunch
