Is The New York Times Good Now? No.
The New York Times has not suddenly developed a conscience; they are seeing the tides turn. On May 11, 2026, the newspaper published Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed titled “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” a belated acknowledgement of the widespread Israeli sexual violence against Palestinian detainees. This silence has been particularly loud in the pages of the Times. The Palestine solidarity movement’s decision to boycott, divest, and unsubscribe from the “paper of record” has raised the cost of that silence.
If the Times were a serious organization, the systematic sexual abuse in Israeli prisons would have been a front-page story years ago. Instead, the testimonies of fourteen survivors, Israeli lawyers on record confirming the rape of Palestinian prisoners, and a UN report describing sexualized torture as Israeli standard operating procedure collected by Kristof were relegated to the Opinion section. Now, after more than two years of sustained public pressure from the Palestine solidarity movement, the Times is catching up to reality — and trying to revise its own history.
Kristof bookends his piece with a false equivalence: He starts by uncritically invoking debunked claims of “brutal sexual assaults against Israeli women during the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023." He closes by placing these unsubstantiated claims on the same evidentiary footing as the well-documented abuse and torture that Zionist soldiers have inflicted on Palestinians in captivity: "The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day."
Kristof’s equivocations reframe a genocide into a both sides, tit-for-tat conflict. Yet no matter how hard he or the Times tries to contort reality, the global majority sees it clearly: Israel is committing genocide in Palestine, and sexual torture has long been part of its strategy.
Even when it documents Palestinian suffering, the Times foregrounds the false allegations of mass sexual abuse on October 7 — allegations that it played a key role in fabricating. The foundational piece of this myth, "Screams Without Words," is a masterclass in shoddy journalism. Its sources recanted under scrutiny, and one of its authors, a former Israeli intelligence officer, was fired for liking openly genocidal posts. Despite these violations of journalistic integrity, the Times has refused to retract the piece.
Do not mistake the bile directed at Kristof’s piece as evidence that the Times has turned a new page. The hundreds of Zionists who gathered outside the Times building and the Israeli officials now threatening to sue the paper share a deep sense of betrayal. The paper that has long served as Israel’s mouthpiece, with a long history of uncritically laundering Zionist propaganda, is showing faint signs of losing faith — or, more probably, losing subscribers. Kristof’s op-ed should be understood primarily as self-preservation for the Times’ brand.
A day after running Kristof’s piece in the Opinion section, the Times published a piece in its international section covering a new report repackaging old allegations of mass sexual violence at the hands of Hamas. What Isabel Kershner, whose two sons served in the IOF, failed to mention in the piece is that Israeli media already exposed the author of the report as a fraud who has been caught fabricating evidence of sexual abuse by Hamas before.
Cracks are beginning to show in corporate media’s commitment to the Zionist project. We must keep up the pressure. More than 500 writers and activists have pledged not to write for the paper’s Opinion section. Multitudes refuse to engage with the genocidal rag’s propaganda. Forcing the paper to retract “Screams Without Words” — a fatal hallucination on par with the Times’ lies about Iraq in 2003 — is a first demand. We owe it to the people of Palestine to demand that Western news outlets accurately report on the ongoing genocide and stop shielding the Zionst state from accountability.
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