Over the past year, activists who accuse Israel of war crimes and other misdeeds have faced unfair charges of anti-Semitism and attacks on their free speech from the Trump administration. Now these advocates are being silenced by a new scheme: a grassroots petition to keep some 300 vociferous champions of the Palestinian cause from publishing editorials in The New York Times.
You might wonder why such an insidiously illiberal maneuver has produced no outcry from the left. The answer is that the effort to keep these voices out of the Times is in fact the brainchild of the activists themselves.
A new letter signed by more than 300 writers, academics, and other public figures, including the novelist Sally Rooney and the activist Greta Thunberg, attacks the Times as a bastion of “anti-Palestinian bias.” It is not uncommon for passionate activists to believe that they suffer from bias in the Times and other outlets. Traditionally, the solution to combatting this prejudice is to demand more space to make their case in the paper in question. Here, however, the activists are calling for less.
The writers threaten (if that is the right term for it) to withhold their writerly contributions from the Times op-ed page unless the paper meets three demands: “conduct a review of anti-Palestinian bias and produce new editorial standards for Palestine coverage,” publish an editorial endorsing a U.S. arms embargo on Israel, and retract the paper’s investigative feature about how Hamas “weaponized sexual violence on Oct. 7,” the veracity of which these activists dispute.
The Times aspires for its op-ed page to present “a wide range of intellectually honest opinions,” but the signatories seem to dismiss the idea that their rivals hold intellectually honest positions. “As past contributors, as well as novelists, essayists, scholars, lawyers, poets, political analysts, and various public figures covered in the pages of the Times,” they write, “we decline this invitation to participate in what Ghassan Kanafani, the revolutionary writer and martyr, called ‘a conversation between the sword and the neck.’”
But the extent to which these writers object to the sword depends on who is wielding it. The letter’s demands come from a coalition of nine groups, three of which have declined to condemn Hamas for the October 7 attack, while six—the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, the Palestinian Feminist Collective, the Palestine Solidarity Working Group, the Palestinian Youth Movement, Pal-Awda, and National Students for Justice in Palestine—rationalized or directly endorsed the massacre.
What’s also peculiar is the leverage these figures seem to believe they have vis-à-vis the Times. The writers acknowledge that there “is no U.S. newspaper more influential than The New York Times,” yet they also depict the paper as faltering (failing, as Donald Trump would put it) and in need of their imprimatur to salvage what remains of its reputation.
“Over the past few years, the Times has increasingly turned to ‘guest essayists’ to help repair its crumbling reputation,” the letter argues. “Opinion editors recruit respected subject matter experts to lend their diverse—often tokenized—perspectives as a countervailing force to the paper’s in-house conservatism. Without the voices, expertise, and freelance labor of these guest essayists, the Opinion section would be utterly worthless.”
That the Times op-ed page would be “utterly worthless” without the contributions of guest essayists is a bold thesis, one that the signatories do not even try to back up with evidence. (This may be a sign of the quality of the argumentation being withheld from the Times.)
The robust assessment these activists have of their own power may reflect the hothouse atmosphere within the left-wing subculture in elite academia, activism, and media, where it is more controversial to defend the Times than, say, Hamas. In this milieu, it might seem self-evident that walling off the far left from the Times will serve to marginalize the latter rather than the former. In the larger world, however, the Times has an enormous, growing readership and is unlikely to suffer a dearth of op-ed page submissions, including columns expressing strong condemnation of Israel.
From the standpoint of these activists, deigning to explain the obvious and morally uncomplicated nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Times’ readership seems to be a burden of which they’re eager to be relieved. “There is nothing appetizing or enlivening,” the letter states, “about the prospect of sitting across from the likes of Bret Stephens, Thomas Friedman, or David Leonhardt”—three prominent opinion staffers for the paper—“politely debating the definition of genocide while Israeli soldiers use American weapons to shoot starving children at aid sites and assassinate journalists in their tents.”
Given the signatories’ dim assessment of their ideological opponents, you’d think they would be eager to spar with them in print, confident that the force of their arguments would prevail.
Yet their objection may not be to the paucity of columns making their case but to the existence of opposing views at all. The paper, they argue, is too riddled with prejudice—too committed to “acting as a bullhorn for the Israeli government and military”—to deserve the opportunity to present a different opinion. Rather than help the paper “promote the appearance of diversity, equity, and inclusion,” these writers and activists refuse to participate in this debate at all.
Liberalism, at its core, is a faith in public reason. Enemies of liberalism tend instead to think of discourse in terms of domination. If they cannot cancel their opponents—if they cannot stop readers from consuming the Times’ “anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian biases”—then the only recourse they can imagine is to cancel themselves.
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