'Genocide Isn't a Matter of Opinion': Over 300 Public Figures Refuse to Write for NYT Over Gaza Role

Read the full statement here

“Language makes genocide justifiable. A reason why we are still being bombed after 243 days is because of The New York Times and most Western media,” the Palestinian journalist Hossam Shabat wrote months before Israel assassinated him. As Palestinians in Gaza return to their homes and take stock of the destruction Israel has wrought with two years of air strikes, massacres, and starvation, it is our responsibility in the West to hold complicit institutions to account for these crimes. As much as any weapons manufacturer, the media is part of the machinery of war, producing the impunity and bigotry that enables and sustains it.

There is no U.S. newspaper more influential than The New York Times. Editors and producers in newsrooms across the West take cues from its coverage, it is widely considered the “paper of record” in the United States, and it uniquely shapes elite consensus on U.S. foreign policy. Historically, this consensus has been fatal: Iran, 1953. Iraq, 2003. Libya, 2011. Since Israel began its genocidal war on Gaza, The New York Times has obfuscated, justified, and outright denied the occupier's war crimes, thus continuing the paper’s decades-long practice of acting as a bullhorn for the Israeli government and military.

The paper has reprinted outright lies from Israeli officials, withheld or amended coverage at the behest of the Israeli consulate and pro-Israel lobby groups, and directed its reporters to avoid terms like “slaughter,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “occupied territory.” The paper’s anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian biases also seep into its hiring practices: Top executives, editors, and reporters at the Times maintain material ties to the Israeli occupation and to the Israel lobby in the U.S., while Arab and Muslim employees have been purged from staff or subjected to a “racially targeted witch hunt.” And while claims by Israeli officials are treated as fact in news coverage, genocide is reduced to a matter of debate in the Opinion section.

One of the primary avenues through which the paper of record seeks to maintain its prestige, mitigate years of reputational damage, and promote the appearance of diversity, equity, and inclusion is its Opinion section. Here, the Times invites contributions which “contrast with or challenge those of our newsroom and our own Opinion columnists and editorials.” The Times has described the section as a social gathering: “Picture a dinner party,” the NYT Open Team wrote. “The conversation swings from topic to topic and everyone is engaged in a lively discussion.”

As past contributors, as well as novelists, essayists, scholars, lawyers, poets, political analysts, and various public figures covered in the pages of the Times, we decline this invitation to participate in what Ghassan Kanafani, the revolutionary writer and martyr, called “a conversation between the sword and the neck.” There is nothing appetizing or enlivening about the prospect of sitting across from the likes of Bret Stephens, Thomas Friedman, or David Leonhardt, 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. There is no crumb of exposure worth the price of cooperation with a newspaper that has refused to research and authenticate these war crimes, let alone name their perpetrators. The Times’ opinion section is nothing without its contributors, and it is our responsibility to delegitimize and decenter the Times as the “paper of record.”

Allowing the most damning facts on the ground — like Israel’s systematic sniping of children — to be presented exclusively as a matter of opinion is journalistic malpractice. Until The New York Times takes accountability for its biased coverage and commits to truthfully and ethically reporting on the U.S.-Israeli war on Gaza, any putative “challenge” to the newsroom or the editorial board in the form of a first-person essay is, in effect, permission to continue this malpractice. Only by withholding our labor can we mount an effective challenge to the hegemonic authority that the Times has long used to launder the U.S. and Israel’s lies.

We, the undersigned, refuse to contribute to the Times’ Opinion section until three demands from the Palestine solidarity movement are met. These demands, of both the newsroom and the Editorial Board, have been put forward by a coalition that includes Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG), the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), the Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC), PAL-Awda: The Right to Return Coalition, National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), the US Palestinian Community Network, Palestine Solidarity Working Group (PSWG), Healthcare Workers for Palestine (HCW4P), and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). They are as follows:

1) The newsroom must conduct a review of anti-Palestinian bias and produce new editorial standards for Palestine coverage. The Times must correct decades of biased, racist reportage on Palestine by reviewing and revising its style guide, methods of sourcing and citation, and its hiring practices. The paper must bar journalists who have served in the Israeli Occupation Forces from reporting on Israel’s wars and end the practice of printing information gathered through embeds with the Israeli military.

2) The newsroom must retract the widely debunked investigation “Screams Without Words.” In 2004 the Times’ public editor acknowledged the paper’s misreporting on alleged but non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, which helped drive the disastrous U.S. invasion. “Screams Without Words,” with its unevidenced claims of “weaponized sexual assault” on October 7th, was just as damaging. Its key researcher was fired for liking openly genocidal social media posts, its key witnesses have been discredited, and its subjects have come forward to deny its claims. The reporting failed to meet the Times’ own factchecking standards.

3) The Editorial Board must call for a U.S. arms embargo on Israel. Since the editorial board finally backed a ceasefire in January of 2025 — after more than a year of genocide — that position was adopted by a number of lawmakers and finally implemented this October. But Israel has proven that a ceasefire deal is insufficient to stop its destruction of Gaza. Only an arms embargo can deliver a lasting ceasefire. The U.S. must cut off the arms shipments that make Israel’s crimes possible, and the Times editorial board should use its significant influence to call for the end of American weapons transfers to Israel.

These demands are neither impossible nor unreasonable. The paper has updated its style guide in response to public and internal pressure before. In 1987, facing public criticism, Times editors updated the paper’s style guide and later took stock of its scant and biased coverage of the AIDS crisis. The Times has also issued retractions. In the wake of the Iraq war, the Times catalogued the many unverified claims it repeated, pushed out the author responsible for some of its most egregious coverage, and apologized for printing biased commentary as fact. “The failure was not individual,” its public editor wrote, “but institutional.” The Times has also called for legislative action to limit arms sales, both nationally and internationally — including to Gulf states, South Sudan, China, and apartheid South Africa.

Perhaps most apt is the Times' own accounting of its “staggering, staining failure” to report accurately and urgently on the extermination of European Jews. “The failure of America's media to fasten upon Hitler's mad atrocities stirs the conscience of succeeding generations of reporters and editors,” a former executive editor wrote on the paper’s 150th birthday. “It leaves them obviously resolved that in the face of genocide, journalism shall not have failed in vain.”

We owe it to the journalists and writers of Palestine to refuse complicity with the Times, and to demand that the paper account for its failures, such that it can never again manufacture consent for mass slaughter, torture, and displacement.