A Letter to My Cousin, New York Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger

Dear A.G.,

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.

October 7

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.

Now it was your turn.

‘Screams Without Words’

A frontpage December 2023 Times story – headlined “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on October 7” – opened with these lurid lines:

“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

The Times’ quiet admission about Abdush paled in comparison to the loud claims found throughout “Screams Without Words” – like those of Sapir, a 26-year-old accountant who was “one of the Israeli police’s key witnesses” to October 7, according to the Times.

“[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.”

The Times glancingly acknowledged the questions surrounding Sapir’s account, but only in the story that appeared to confirm its initial reporting: “UN to Study Reports of Sexual Violence in Israel During October 7 Attack.”

ZAKA

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.”

Far from shunned, ZAKA was richly rewarded, with over $13 million pouring into its coffers, an impressive haul for a group that “faced insolvency” prior to October 7, Haaretz reported.

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.

Still, A.G., the Times stands by ZAKA, for the most part. Two weeks after “Screams Without Words” was published, the Times sheepishly noted of ZAKA’s Landau: “he acknowledged sometimes misspeaking in the immediate aftermath of the attack.” Once again, the admission was hard to find, buried in a flattering story on ZAKA.

That story omitted any mention of ZAKA’s founder, Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, who led the organization until 2021, “when he attempted suicide after shocking revelations of dozens of rape and sexual assault cases committed by him,” Mondoweiss reported. Prior to founding ZAKA in the 1990s, Meshi-Zahav was “the leader of ‘Keshet,’ an ultra-Orthodox Jewish terrorist group that targeted forensic pathologists and used explosives against shops selling ‘secular newspapers.’”

As concerns over “Screams Without Words” grew, the trio of reporters who bylined the story faced heightened scrutiny.

The Reporters

One of the reporters, Anat Schwartz, was a filmmaker and former IDF official with no journalistic experience prior to October 7. What Schwartz did have, however, was a hair-raising social media presence. “Turn the [Gaza] strip into a slaughterhouse,” read a post she liked. “Those in front of us are human animals.”

Sharing the byline with Schwartz was her partner’s nephew, Adam Sella, a recent Harvard graduate and freelancer who’d written mostly about food and culture prior to October 7. The two newbies teamed up with Jeffrey Gettleman, a veteran reporter and Pulitzer Prize–winner (who won by shamelessly nominating himself “to the horror of his peers”).

Among the sources the Times newbies leaned on was Eden Wessely, who filmed the body of Gal Abdush on October 7. The newbies told Wessely that by giving them her footage she could help advance Israeli propaganda, also known as “hasbara.” “They called me again and again and explained how important it is to Israeli hasbara,” Wessely told the Israeli site Ynet.

Days after “Screams Without Words” was published, Schwartz told Israel’s Channel 12 podcast that Israeli police pressured her to get the story out, the Intercept reported. “I’m also in this place, I’m also an Israeli, but I also work for New York Times,” Schwartz said in Hebrew. “So all the time I’m like in this place between the hammer and the anvil.” Schwartz wasn’t stuck there for long, however, as the Times quietly let her go the following month.

Gettleman also caused a stir after “Screams Without Words” was published when he appeared on a panel at Columbia University with billionaire Sheryl Sandberg. (Sandberg released a related film two months later, Screams Before Silence, which the Times gave a thumbs up, even though it also relied on ZAKA and other suspect sources.) On stage with Sandberg, Gettleman said his mission as a journalist was “to move people”:

“What we found — I don’t want to even use the word ‘evidence,’ because evidence is almost like a legal term that suggests you’re trying to prove an allegation or prove a case in court… That’s not my role. We all have our roles. And my role is to document, is to present information, is to give people a voice. And we found information along the entire chain of violence, so of sexual violence.”

“Alarmed” by Gettleman’s comments, 50 journalism professors wrote to you, A.G. If Gettleman was reluctant to describe his reporting as “evidence,” why does the word appear in his story’s subhead, the professors asked. And how, without evidence, can the Times “establish” a pattern of violence against women?

The professors called on you to commission an independent review of “Screams Without Words,” and to make public its findings. That was over a year ago.

Your slow-walking is conspicuous, especially considering the swift investigation the Times launched to uncover who in the newsroom leaked about the paper’s internal struggle over “Screams Without Words.” (The “racially targeted witch hunt” saw Times employees with Middle Eastern and North African backgrounds facing “particularly hostile questioning,” NewsGuild of New York’s president wrote to you.)

Rather than a witch hunt, an independent review of “Screams Without Words” is warranted — although I’m not sure your executive editor, Joe Kahn, will fare well.

Joe Kahn

Joe Kahn’s late father Leo Kahn was a billionaire who made a fortune co-founding the office supplies company Staples. But it’s Leo Kahn’s nearly two-decades on the board of CAMERA that I find concerning.

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis is a group dedicated to attacking news organizations that insufficiently parrot right-wing Israeli talking points.

You’re no doubt familiar with CAMERA, A.G., since for over a decade the group has paid for a billboard directly across the street from the Times. And that’s not by happenstance. CAMERA uses this choice real estate to attack the Times over its coverage of Israel, even going so far as to compare the paper to Hamas, the Intercept reported.

I get that you may be sensitive to the sins of the father being visited upon the son. But a Times profile of Joe Kahn noted that father and son “often dissected newspaper coverage” together. And I think it shows.

As internal dissent over “Screams Without Words” grew, Kahn’s editors stifled it, while Kahn heralded the story.

Kahn also had kind things to say about President Biden’s backing of Israel’s genocide. Seven months in, Kahn told Semafor that Biden had demonstrated “a degree of engagement and mastery” with foreign policy, citing the Gaza War as an example.

I just used the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s conduct in Gaza. But under Kahn, reporters are discouraged from using that word, as well as others like “ethnic cleansing” and even “Palestine,” according to a Times memo.

And I was sorry to see, A.G., that you seem to be self-censoring as well. “A record number of journalists have been killed or jailed in recent years,” you said in a recent speech, calling out “authoritarian states like China and Russia,” as well as India and Hungary. But you conspicuously left out Israel, even though it’s carrying out one of history’s deadliest attacks on journalists, the media watchdog FAIR noted.

More journalists have been killed in the Gaza War, according to a Brown University study, “than the U.S. Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War… and the post 9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined.” The lesson Israel has learned, wrote the study’s author Nick Turse, is that it can “permanently silence Palestinian journalists with complete impunity.” Unfortunately, A.G., your speech is proof of that.

Back in the Times newsroom, while some words are frowned upon, others are ok to use… if the victims are Israeli Jews. Take “horrific,” for example. The Times used the word 11 times as often to describe Israeli victims as opposed to Palestinian. And the imbalance only grows for “slaughter” (22 times as often) and “massacre” (53 times), according to a January 2024 study by the Intercept.

Meanwhile, the study’s author, Adam Johnson, noted how sparsely another word is used by the Times, as well as the Washington Post and LA Times.

“Despite Israel’s war on Gaza being perhaps the deadliest war for children — almost entirely Palestinian — in modern history, there is scant mention of the word ‘children’ and related terms in the headlines of articles.”

UNRWA

Under Kahn, the Times hasn’t just downplayed Gazans’ suffering, it has heightened it by targeting a key organization keeping Palestinians alive. Only hours after the International Court of Justice ruled in January 2024 that Israel was committing a “plausible genocide” in Gaza, Israel offered a new salacious accusation: terrorism was rampant at UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.

Israel’s evidence consisted of the names of a dozen employees, out of UNRWA’s 13,000-person agency, who allegedly took part in the October 7 attack. Israel had these names – indeed, it had the names of all UNRWA employees – because UNRWA had provided them to Israel for vetting earlier in the year.

The Times could have called Israel out for its naked attempt to push the ICJ ruling off the front page. Instead, the Times homepage the next day downplayed the ruling, while using font twice as big to highlight Israel’s new accusation, Adam Johnson reported.

Credit: Adam Johnson’s The Column

Amid a series of Times stories on UNRWA, the US, UNRWA’s largest donor, suspended funding for the organization. Over a year-and-a-half later, it has yet to be restored.

This void was recently filled by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a new group backed by Israel and the US. GHF’s novel approach to distributing aid – via the barrel of the gun – has resulted in the killing of over 870 Gazans “in near daily aid massacres,” Drop Site News reported.

Your Legacy

Just as our generation was radicalized by Iraq, this generation won’t forget Gaza. In both wars, the Times was complicit.

Your dad is remembered for Iraq. My hope, A.G., is that you will be remembered for more than Gaza.

To make that happen, you need to write peaceful second and third acts to your career. And to do that, you need a new executive editor, one who’s antiwar and not biased in favor of Israel.

Unfortunately, there’s no one like that on the Times masthead, and custom dictates your executive editor must come from the masthead.

Breaking with tradition is hard, and you strike me as the cautious type (probably a good quality for someone heading a $9 billion company). But with your legacy and our world hanging in the balance, it seems worthwhile.

Sincerely, 

Pete

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