New York Times Marks Oct. 7 Anniversary With Front-Page Lie About Israel
Editorial suggests U.S. threaten to cut off military aid
The New York Times is marking the anniversary of the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel with an attack of its own—a falsehood about Israel on the front page of the Sunday newspaper.
The Times claims that Israel is “more isolated than ever.” That is false.
Here are some of the ways that Israel is less isolated than it has been in the past.
Peace agreements. Israel has peace or normalization agreements with Egypt (1978), Jordan (1994), and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco (2020). Before 1978 it was more isolated than it is now, because it did not have any of those agreements.
U.S. military support. The Biden administration delayed or halted some shipments of arms to Israel. The Trump administration has ended that quasi-embargo and resumed the resupplies, making Israel less isolated now than it was before Trump took office.
International air travel. Immediately after the October 7, 2023, attack, and during the Iran-Israel active war of June 2025, flights in and out of Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport were halted. Israel is now less isolated than it was then, because flights have resumed. You can look at the flights coming in and out—it’s a long list of airlines (Austrian Airlines, Emirates, Air France, Air Canada, Ethiopian, All Nippon Airways, Lot, Lufthansa) and international destinations (Rome, Budapest, Athens, Baku, Geneva, Barcelona, New York). More are coming; there are some recent reports that Turkish Airlines is planning to resume service. United is planning to resume flights to Israel from Washington and Chicago effective November 1. Delta resumed its daily JFK-TLV flight September 1, 2025, making Israel less isolated now than it was before the flight resumed.
Foreign direct investment, net inflows: The World Bank has data through 2024 on foreign direct investment in Israel. It took a wartime hit in 2023 but bounced back in 2024, such that more foreign money was invested in Israel in 2024 than in any prior year from Israel’s founding through 2016.
Educational travel: Study-abroad programs by U.S. universities in Israel, Birthright Israel trips, and school trips by U.S. Jewish schools, many of which were suspended in the early days of the war, are back up and running.
The market appears to be starting to wake up to this. The iShares MSCI Israel ETF (EIS) is up about 53.9 percent over the past year, while New York Times stock (NYT), is up about 0.42 percent over the same period. (Disclosure, I own some EIS.) It’s possibly a way to make money by having a variant perception. The trailing-12-months price to earnings ratio for EIS is about 15, while for NYT it is about 29. If you think the Times is wrong and that Israel, far from being “more isolated than ever,” is on the verge of a postwar economic boom, maybe the Israeli public market at 15 times earnings is still a bargain even after a 53.9 percent run-up. There’s certainly plenty of room to cut taxes and regulations in Israel, a point that supply-side economist Arthur Laffer made publicly when he visited Israel in May 2025 and met Prime Minister Netanyahu and Finance Minister Smotrich. (How isolated is Israel? Not so isolated that Arthur Laffer isn’t visiting.)
I’m not saying Israel doesn’t have enemies or public-diplomacy troubles or internal and external genuine challenges. But “more isolated than ever” is Thomas Friedman “pariah state” nightmare-fantasy bleeding over into the news coverage. Maybe Israel could wind up in that spot eventually if it makes bad choices or if America heads down the route of Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But it’s not there now.
The Times error is the latest in a series. The Times’ own editors’ notes have conceded the problems. One about Gaza hospital coverage acknowledged “Times editors should have taken more care.” Another one about a skeletal Gazan child acknowledged the child “had pre-existing health problems” that were not disclosed to Times readers. We’ll see if this one generates a correction or an editors’ note or if it just gets covered up.
A Times editorial (“This Terrible War Must End”) is as logically flawed as the front-page claim about Israel’s isolation. “The war needs to end,” the Times declares. It allows that “After the war ends, Israel will be able to monitor Hamas and strike it if necessary” and also that a “multinational authority” would have the task of “disarming any Hamas fighters who keep fighting.” If Israel is still striking Hamas, and if the Hamas fighters are fighting while some multinational authority tries (how, precisely?) to disarm them, that doesn’t really sound like the war ending, it sounds like the war continuing while the New York Times, from the relative safety of New York City, pretends that it is over.
The Times can’t even make up its mind whether Hamas can be defeated. At one point, the editorial declares, “eradicating the group seems like a fantasy. …Hamas is a terrorist organization with roots in the 97-year-old Muslim Brotherhood. Such groups are rarely eliminated.” At another point, the same editorial declares, “Deradicalization programs succeeded in Germany and Japan after World War II.” Talk about a mixed message.
Also in the mixed message department is this: “the president could explain that the United States is losing its patience and will soon restrict American military aid…By insisting on that, Mr. Trump could make clear that he is a friend of Israel’s.” Some “friend” that would be, threatening to impose an arms embargo while its ally is in a war against Hamas terrorists and Iran-backed Houthi terrorists. If America had been this kind of “friend” to Western Europe during the Cold War, Soviet Communists might even today control Paris. If America had been this kind of “friend” to Britain during World War II, the Nazis might have won.
Speaking of friends of Israel: A Bloomberg News article about Paramount acquiring Bari Weiss’s Free Press reported, “Weiss and the Free Press have been staunch supporters of Israel. The degree to which that colors the news reporting at CBS remains to be seen.” It’s funny, if odd, to see Bloomberg so hypervigilant about the supposedly grave hypothetical risk of pro-Israel editorial influence at CBS.
A later version of the Bloomberg story dialed it back somewhat to “Weiss and the Free Press have been staunch supporters of Israel. Since Ellison’s takeover of Paramount in August, the company has put out a statement supportive of Israeli filmmakers, when thousands of others in Hollywood called for a boycott over the fighting in Gaza. Paramount’s streaming service is releasing a miniseries on Tuesday dramatizing the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.”
If the Bloomberg reporter proposed to dwell on that issue, she might have mentioned that the Free Press also ran Andrew Sullivan under the headline, “Andrew Sullivan: How Many Children Is Israel Willing to Kill?” It also ran an editorial (“No Deportations Without Due Process”) calling for due process for Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, two anti-Israel foreign-national campus activists detained by immigration authorities this year.
Anyway, I’m proud of Bari for her successes and her deal and I wish her and her Free Press colleagues (many of whom are my former Forward and New York Sun colleagues) well. We’re staunch supporters of Israel here too though so far it hasn’t translated into our taking over CBS news or selling our company for a reported $150 million. I do take it as an encouraging development about the possibility of growth. As Weiss put it, “it would not have happened without our subscribers betting on us.”
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Sickening and on brand for the shameful former paper of record.