Fake History: NY Times Spreads This Dubious Statement About Jews in Israel

The New York Times exposes its own bias again with a statement about Jewish presence in the Land of Israel that questions basic historical facts.

By United with Israel Staff

Veteran journalist and media critic Ira Stoll consistently identifies problematic coverage in The New York Times, exposing an agenda that disparages the State of Israel and promotes dangerous messages about Jews in the diaspora.

This week, the former managing editor of The Jerusalem Post pointed out in an Algemeiner piece a truly disturbing statement published in The New York Times that seems to question basic facts related to the Jewish people and the Land of Israel.

Specifically, Stoll analyzed an article by a New York Times correspondent named Raja Abdulrahim in which she claims that “Israel insists that there has been a Jewish presence in [Judea and Samaria] for thousands of years.” She makes this statement in the context of promoting the narrative that modern Jewish towns in those areas are somehow “illegal” under “international law.”

Setting aside the fact that the so-called “illegality of these towns has been rejected by the U.S. State Department and debunked by actual legal experts like George Mason University’s Professor Eugene Kontorovich, Abdulrahim’s ignores established historical facts by implying that Jewish presence in the Land of Israel is merely a contention or the opinion of one side in the conflict.

Israel doesn’t simply “insist” that Jews lived in Judea and Samaria for thousands of years. The historical record, archeological artifacts, carbon dating, and authenticated evidence proves that Jews lived in the Land of Israel for thousands of years.

As CAMERA senior research analyst Gilead Ini pointed out in a tweet referenced in Stoll’s Algemeiner piece, “This is the same paper, by the way, that had questioned whether Jewish temples existed on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount,” adding that the paper was “eventually compelled to correct the piece.”

Ini continues, “It’s the same paper that told readers—as a criticism of Israel!—that ‘East Jerusalem was exclusively Arab in 1967.’ Unmentioned: It had been ‘exclusively Arab’ for a mere 19 years, only because Jews were ethnically cleansed from the area in 1948.”

Stoll adds, “[Y]ou get the strange formulation of an entire country — Israel — insisting on something, as if it’s a cranky restaurant customer or a petulant child. It’s almost like the Times is afraid of investigating the underlying facts for fear that they might disturb the newspaper’s far-left readers, or hamper the reporter’s ability to operate freely in the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank.”

He concludes, “The Times and its apologists may insist that this is honorable journalism or depict it as just reporters doing their job. But, sadly, biased journalists are driving integrity out of the newsroom today.”