Nine Reasons The New York Times’s Big Attack on Netanyahu Is Totally Bogus
Plus, a billion-dollar Hoover Institution for Harvard?
The New York Times has dropped an excessively long and hostile attack on Prime Minister Netanyahu with the headline “How Netanyahu Prolonged the War in Gaza to Stay in Power.”
Here are nine reasons not to waste your time with it:
The Editors rule of byline inflation. The Editors rule of byline inflation states that the reliability of any news content is inversely proportional to the number of journalists credited with producing it. In this case the Times credits Patrick Kingsley, Ronen Bergman, and Natan Odenheimer, with reporting contributed by Adam Rasgon and Johnatan Reiss. That’s five journalists, or four others for each individual one of them to blame for what is wrong with the article.
It’s interminably long. Journalist Mickey Kaus used to offer a “series-skipper” service in which he’d save readers time by summarizing the key findings of a newspaper series that was overly indulgent of readers’ time. This Times article is so long that the Times offers its own series-skipper of “Takeaways from the Times Investigation into Benjamin Netanyahu.” Some news organizations have taken to automatically labeling articles to help readers with expectations of how much time an article will take to read. The Times doesn’t do this, but if it did, the accurate label would be “too much time.”
Even the Times hasn’t found it fit to print. The Times still operates a print newspaper. Typically if you have a news organization and you come up with some genuinely newsworthy news, you put it on the top of the front page of your print newspaper. If you run a magazine, you put it on the cover. So far as I can determine (and I’m a daily print reader, even while traveling) Times management still hasn’t yet found a way to share this Times article with Times print readers.
The reporter on it confesses that he is confused. Though the Times hasn’t actually published the article in print yet, it did have its former Jerusalem bureau chief, Jodi Rudoren, interview the current Jerusalem bureau chief, Patrick Kingsley, “who is leaving his role this summer,” about the article. Rudoren asks, “Our colleague wrote recently that Israel has managed over the last two years to vanquish its enemies but also alienate its friends. What does that portend for its future?” Kingsley asserts that “Israel’s global standing has rarely been lower” yet concedes, “Israel is edging closer to breakthroughs with longtime foes.” He says, “It’s a bizarre and confusing situation.” The only one confused are the Times journalists, who are pushing the false claim that “Israel’s global standing has rarely been lower.”
The U.S. sourcing in the article is weak. The Times hype says that the “six-month investigation” included “interviews with more than 110 officials in Israel, the United States and across the Arab world.” Yet there’s only a single American official quoted in the entire interminably long Times article— “Ilan Goldenberg, a Mideast adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris.” Brett McGurk, now a Harvard senior fellow and thus reunited at Harvard with his Biden administration national security colleagues Jake Sullivan, Samantha Power, and Nicholas Burns, wrote a February 2025 Washington Post article blaming Hamas for intransigence in ceasefire negotiations. Wrote McGurk: “A U.S.-mediated deal to release hostages in exchange for a ceasefire broke down less than two months into the crisis when Hamas refused to free young women it had agreed to release. Hamas then rejected continuing talks unless Israel accepted a permanent truce up front, with a return to the Oct. 6 status quo. Hamas’s Iranian backers reinforced the group’s demands as it continued to attack Israel.” McGurk went on, “Though Hamas and its defenders claim it accepted this framework in early July, that is not true. Hamas reinserted demands for a permanent truce. And in those negotiations, it never — not once, even when nearly every other detail seemed locked down — agreed to a list of hostages that it would release if a ceasefire agreement was reached.”
Even the Times itself concedes that its own story is bogus. The Times’s own article says, “It is of course impossible to say that Netanyahu made key wartime decisions entirely in the service of his own political survival….His enemies in Lebanon and Iran posed genuine threats to Israel, and their defeat has strengthened Israeli security. And his adversary in Gaza, Hamas, has blocked or slow-walked cease-fire negotiations during key stretches of the war, including at a point early last summer when Netanyahu appeared more willing to reach a truce.”
What remains is the less-than-earthshattering news that it’s good for a politician in a democracy to win a war rather than lose it. The alternative approaches that the Times and its sources are retrospectively pushing would have left Iran with a nuclear program, Hezbollah in charge of Lebanon, and Hamas in control of Gaza in position to rearm itself through smuggling tunnels to Egypt. That would have been politically bad for Netanyahu (which may be a reason the Times is advocating it) but it also could have been dangerous for Israel and for America.
A better way to spend your time than reading the Times investigation, if you are seeking understanding of the security dynamics in the Middle East? Check out Prime Minister Netanyahu’s interview with Mark Levin on Fox News. It’s a friendly interview but it has to be to make up for all the hostility to Netanyahu from press outlets such as the New York Times.
Netanyahu’s office itself has responded saying, “The NYT article of July 11, 2025, rehashes long-discredited claims of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s political opponents. It defames Israel, its brave people and soldiers, and its Prime Minister…Prime Minister Netanyahu’s leadership brought about the covert detonation of Hezbollah pagers, the destruction of its missile stockpiles, the destruction of Assad’s armaments, the elimination of Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist chiefs, and above all, the decisive action against the Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile programs aimed at annihilating Israel. Contrary to the article’s claims, Prime Minister Netanyahu was not a passive bystander in these achievements but led them forcefully, often against strong reservations from senior security officials who urged him to capitulate to Hamas’s dictates and prematurely end the war. Had he done so, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Assad regime, and Iran’s nuclear and missile programs would all still be intact today. Those senior officials, whose anonymous politically motivated supporters are widely quoted throughout the article, have since been replaced.”
None of this is to say that Netanyahu or Israel is perfect or beyond criticism. But the Times article is ridiculous. I could go on, but why spend any more time on it?
A Hoover Institution for Harvard?: Harvard has discussed with potential donors “a center for conservative scholarship,” and “The cost of creating such a center could run somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion, a person familiar with Harvard’s thinking estimated,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
Almost anyone thinking of giving that kind of money to Harvard for that purpose is also probably reading this newsletter, so let me provide some friendly advice: Do not do it. Here’s why:
If Harvard wants to hire conservative scholars, let them use existing faculty budget lines to do it, using vacancies either created by attrition or by offering buyouts or early retirement to existing professors. It’d be a good test of the sincerity of their commitment.
But $500 million or $1 billion would go toward subsidizing left-wing administrators to harass and henpeck any conservative scholars who get hired. It would go to underperforming but expensive money managers to manage an endowment that can get taxed away at any time. It would go to lobbyists to cajole the Boston or Cambridge city governments to approve any new building that gets built.
Also, a good test of how “conservative” a scholar is, or not, is watching how vocally anti-Trump they become once they land a tenured or tenure-track position at Harvard. Not that Trump is perfect or beyond criticism, not at all, but “conservative” Ivy faculty are not exactly representative of the U.S. conservative movement generally in terms of support or opposition to Trump.
Anyway, the right move for any potential funder here would be to hold on to the $500 million or $1 billion in their own control rather than turning it over to Harvard and surrendering control.
Hoover is a wonderful institution, but it hasn’t been an overwhelming success in terms of making Stanford University less antisemitic or less left-wing. At worst, it becomes an excuse for the rest of Stanford to be even worse: If you want conservative ideas, go over to Hoover, not here at the regular Stanford history-economics-or-political science departments, we are mainstream academia.
Harvard has been talking about hiring more conservative faculty. At $5 million per tenured professorship, $500 million would be 100 new conservative faculty. That is a lot, even in an institution of Harvard’s scale.
What’s more, Harvard got itself in the trouble it is in in part by adopting left-wing political litmus tests for faculty. Maybe the answer isn’t reversing that by adding right-wing political litmus tests but instead making a renewed attempt to make the faculty hiring, and student admissions, politics-free rather than left-wing or “conservative.”
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Here is one reason not to waste your time with it: It appears in the New York Times.
I have friends in Israel who for over a year have been saying that the only reason PM Netanyahu hasn't ended the war is in order to stay in office. But that never convinced me because Netanyahu's main war goal - deposing Hamas - was clearly the reason the war was continuing.
And who was responsible for Hamas still being in power? I blame the Biden-Harris administration, who said it was impossible for Israel to enter Rafah to seal off the arms pipeline through the border with Egypt without committing a war crime. I blame the people in Israel who mandated that one could not attack Hamas forces if hostages might be in the vicinity.
People say that it is unrealistic to demand that Hamas surrender. Even if that is true, surrender should still be demanded to make clear what is holding up the end of the war.