The New York Times is heavily featured in my book Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict for its propensity to report about the topic in ways that mask the true nature of US government policy.

Take, for instance, this recent summary from the Times of the US role in the so-called “peace process” and the rise to power of Hamas in Gaza:

For decades, support for a two-state solution has been official United States policy. But successive American governments also believed that Palestinian statehood should be realized after full peace negotiations settled between Israel and the Palestinians, not through unilateral declarations or U.N. resolutions.

Last year, the United States blocked the U.N. Security Council from moving forward on a Palestinian bid to be recognized as a full member state at the United Nations. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, explained that “Palestinians don’t have control over a significant portion of what is supposed to be their state. It’s being controlled by a terrorist organization,” she said, referring to Hamas.

The United Nations has continually supported the idea of a Palestinian state, and the idea has underpinned peace negotiations over decades. The Oslo Accords, signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1993, laid out a timeline for Palestinian self-determination, which was dashed by violence and mistrust.

In 2006, Hamas, which does not recognize Israel’s right to exist, won the Palestinian legislative elections, then seized control of Gaza. Years later came the Oct. 7 attack, when Hamas fighters killed some 1,200 people in Israel and took 250 people hostage.

Since then, Israel’s war on Hamas has led to widespread destruction, hunger and the death of about 65,000 people in Gaza, according to Gazan health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

First, the Times‘ wording conceals how the US has only feigned support for the two-state solution while working to block its implementation.

This deception is achieved by falsely conflating the two-state solution with the goal of the “peace process”, and specifically the Oslo Accords. In truth, as extensively documented in my book, the “peace process” was always the means by which Israel and its superpower benefactor blocked implementation of the two-state solution.

Whereas the two-state solution is premised on the applicability of international law to the conflict, the now defunct “peace process” was premised on a rejection of international law and the idea that the Palestinians must negotiate with their oppressors over how much of their own land they could continue living in and maybe someday exercise some kind of limited autonomy over.

The Times only hints at that in the first paragraph quoted above by saying the US has expressed support for “a two-state solution”—not to be confused with the two-state solution—and alluding to the US position that Israel must have an effective veto power over Palestinian self-determination.

Of course, the US did not oppose unilateral declarations or UN resolutions back in 1948, when the Zionist forces busy ethnically cleansing Palestine unilaterally declared the existence of the state of Israel, citing UN General Assembly Resolution 181, which, contrary to popular myth, neither created Israel nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionists for their declaration.

In other words, US policy is characterized by a rejection of Palestinians’ right to self-determination, but the Times won’t say so.

The Times suggests the Oslo Accords “laid out a timeline for Palestinian self-determination”, which just means that there were supposed to be phases of negotiations on a final peace agreement, which never happened in large part because Israel persisted in prejudicing the outcome of talks by expanding expanding illegal settlements in the West Bank.

The Accords also created the Palestinian Authority (PA) to effectively serve as Israel’s collaborator in enforcing its occupation regime.

The PA’s corruption and complicity in the occupation was a major reason why Hamas did so well in the 2006 legislative elections. But the Times jumps from that event to Hamas seizing control of Gaza, omitting the critical context of how the US and Israel colluded with PA President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party to overthrow the elected Hamas-led government.

The result was that Hamas expelled Fatah from Gaza and continued to rule there while the PA ruled the West Bank, with Abbas still in power even though his legal term ended in 2009.

The Times then jumps from Hamas becoming the governing authority in Gaza to “Operation Al Aqsa Flood” on October 7, 2023, omitting how Israel maintained an illegal blockade of Gaza to collectively punish the civilian population for living under Hamas rule.

The Times‘ summary of events also omits how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu maintained a policy of utilizing Hamas as a strategic ally to block any renewed movement toward peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

The Times describes Israel’s systematic assault on the defenseless civilian population and infrastructure of Gaza as a “war” when it clearly violates the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Illustrative of how the Times provides cover for this US-supported crime against humanity, it says this “war” has “led to” widespread hunger, as though it were an unintended consequence and not a deliberate policy of Israel’s to deprive the civilian population of goods and services necessary for their survival.

For numerous case studies of how the Times serves to manufacture consent for the US government’s longstanding policy of supporting Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, read Obstacle to Peace.

For more about how this policy has escalated under the Trump administration, read my March 27 special report “How Trump Greenlighted the Resumption of Israel’s Gaza Genocide” and my August 13 article “Israel’s Genocide Isn’t Stopping“.

Antiwar.com recently published an article jointly written by Institute Director Scott Horton and this author (Weeks). The piece, “Strategic Treason: The Empire Fetes Man Who Killed US Troops,” discussed Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s trip to New York City, which took place last week.

Al-Sharaa once went by the war name “Abu Mohammad al-Jolani.” He fought for Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) during Iraq War 2. The man personally killed American troops. Yet Washington supported Jolani when he took his Jihad to Syria and helped lead a protracted dirty war to topple Bashar al-Assad’s government. Now the Empire outright partners with him.

Last week, al-Sharaa extended one of his blood-soaked hands to embrace Retired U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, Secretary of State and Acting National Security Advisor Marco Rubio, and President Donald Trump.

Now, of course, this is not what the American People want. This is what Israel wants. As we are constantly lectured by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: his country’s wars are America’s wars.

This should shock the American consciousness to its core because, in fact, Israel’s enemies are Al Qaeda’s enemies. Israel’s target is the so-called Axis of Resistance, which includes Tehran, Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis, the Shi’ite militias in Iraq and Syria, as well as Hamas. Whereas America’s coalition is made of the Resistance Axis’ enemies: Israel, Al Qaeda, and ISIS.

Hence, Washington’s unconditional bipartisan support for Israel’s effort to set the entire region ablaze during the Joe Biden and Trump administrations has led to a vastly more powerful Al Qaeda. The butchers of New York City now control Damascus. a major Arab capital city, with U.S. support.

“At long last, the Assad regime has fallen…A fall of the regime is a fundamental act of justice,” Biden declared last December before describing Al Qaeda’s victory as a “historic opportunity.” Likewise, Netanyahu dubbed the fall of Damascus to Al Qaeda “a historic day in the history of the Middle East.” The Israeli leader publicly took credit for the regime change during a visit to the illegally occupied Golan Heights, gloating that “this is a direct result of the blows we have inflicted on Iran and Hezbollah, the main supporters of the Assad regime.”

The American people, on the left and right, are always characterized as hopelessly divided, unable to reach a consensus on any of the day’s myriad hot-button issues. But now there is one exception: Israel. This is an entirely new phenomenon in American politics, which has seemingly crashed the Israeli PR machine.

Poll after poll over these last two years has demonstrated an increasing shift where majorities among both self-identified Democrats and indeed Republicans, particularly young conservatives, are now decidedly against America’s “special relationship” with Israel.

The parasitic pariah state, and its nakedly genocidal project in Gaza, which is now being expanded to the illegally occupied West Bank, has never been more universally unpopular. Israel’s days on the U.S. dole are numbered.

This poses a unique threat to the Blob (the foreign policy establishment), which thrives on domestic division, allowing both parties to get away with immiserating both working- and middle-class Americans on behalf of the Empire and its brutal, corrupt satellites, epitomized by Tel Aviv.

Luckily for the hawks, during a college event in Utah, Charlie Kirk was recently executed. He was shot in the neck while discussing gun violence and the Second Amendment. Both sides, left and right, played their roles perfectly. Before Kirk’s body was cold, right-wingers called for war on the entire American left, and an assortment of moronic liberals, as well as leftists, callously cheered and mocked the deceased conservative activist’s slaying.

Predictably, our Israel First Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is now using Kirk’s death as a PR prop to increase U.S. military recruitment. This comes as preparations are being made for what will surely be a catastrophic continuation of Washington’s unconstitutional war with Iran.

This is especially egregious because Kirk —although he ultimately backed U.S. strikes on Iranian civilian nuclear sites — had repeatedly made clear his vehement opposition to a potential U.S.-led “regime change war” against Iran. In a worst-case scenario, such a war could retrigger the draft, which, shamefully, was never abolished following the Vietnam War, in which nearly 60,000 American boys were slaughtered.

Nothing scares Netanyahu, Trump, America’s Zionist billionaire oligarchs, and their dutiful media stooges more than an organized, invigorated, and united American youth opposing U.S. troops fighting what they perceive to be Israel’s wars.

We have witnessed the immense costs of such destructive policies during the roughly $3 trillion Iraq war, in which, depending on when you stopped counting, at least one million Iraqis were killed. Additionally, thousands of American troops lost their lives, while tens of thousands more returned home as completely broken men and committed suicide.

If the draft is reactivated, it would not be the first time a dictatorship has conscripted young men to fight and die in a needless war against Iran. In 1979, America’s old friend Saddam Hussein conscripted young Shi’ite boys to invade the Islamic Republic as a way of preventing the spread of Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution next door.

Evenly split on both sides, the Iran-Iraq war saw approximately one million Iraqis and Iranians killed over the next decade. The war would perhaps never have taken place absent U.S. support for Baghdad and its notorious assistance in helping Hussein acquire chemical weapons. He unleashed these diabolical weapons on Iranian cities, targeting civilians and soldiers alike.

In Horton’s Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism, we find that Hussein was intent on forcing young Iraqis to fight as a way of cementing their ethnic and national identities lest, given their devotion to the Shi’ite sect of Islam, they emulated the Persians next door and launched their own Islamic revolution.

Saddam was a Sunni Muslim. Despite being only 20 percent of the population, Sunnis dominated the national government. This government ruled over the 60 percent Shi’ite super majority. The Persian Muslims next door in Iran were Shi’ites. Saddam feared Shi’ite solidarity and in fact, many Iraqi Shi’ites fled their nation when he launched the war to fight on Iran’s side.

Similarly, in America today, the majority of Americans oppose U.S. support for Israel and its genocidal project. However, we, the majority, are dominated by a powerful minority of Zionist billionaires and their well-funded lobbyists, pro-Israel foreign policy apparatchiks and war profiteers, as well as a bipartisan coalition of corrupt Israel First politicians and presidents. Together, these nefarious forces act as a dictatorship, especially regarding what is ostensibly U.S. foreign policy.

A U.S. war on Iran would be a nightmare for the American people but would benefit Israel tremendously, or at least its government. This tracks with the thesis that Israel controls the United States. That, of course, is the thesis’s maximalist version. There are more qualified versions, from the Israeli government controls the U.S. government to the Israeli government has a great deal of influence over U.S. Middle East policy. Versions of this thesis are put forth by Patrick Buchanan, Norman Finkelstein, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, Max Blumenthal, and Aaron Maté.

There is also the antithesis: The United States controls Israel. In this geopolitical model, Israel is a tool of the United States Imperial Government (USIG). It is a military enforcer in the Middle East, existing as a massive U.S. aircraft carrier; “Airstrip3” after Britain and Japan. Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and Ilan Pappé put forth versions of this thesis.

The tension between the above thesis and antithesis provides a space for our intervention:

Thesis: Israel controls the United States
Antithesis: The United States controls Israel
Synthesis: Coalitional Zionists dominate Washington, D.C. and beyond, but the U.S. national government dominates the Israeli government at the corporate agent level.

Donald Trump is surrounded by Zionists, and they are extremely influential within the U.S. national security apparatus. In fact, they dominate throughout what veteran CIA analyst Ray McGovern has called the MICIMATT (Military Industrial Intelligence Media Academia Think Tank) Complex.

As arch neoconservative Norman Podhoretz bluntly explained in the 1970s, Zionists are committed to keeping D.C. engaged in the business of empire so that Washington is always capable and available to crush Israel’s rivals in the Middle East and beyond.

The Zionists are engaged in a high-stakes project of shaping the symbolic order of our society so that it remains eternally, unquestioningly pro-Israel. The neoconservatives, Israel’s fifth column in America, have led the push for every war over many decades.

So, within the American National government and throughout centers of power and influence within our society, Zionists are extremely prominent. All of that empirical data tracks with the model of our thesis that Israel controls America. However, at the more profound collective action level, our antithesis that America controls Israel gains traction when viewed through the discourse of corporate agency. Here, it becomes immediately apparent that the United States government is a corporate agent that towers above the corporate agent that is the Israeli government.

The fact that the Zionists must come to America, the heart of the Empire, and work within the structure of the U.S.government reveals this dynamic. For an illustrative juxtaposition, consider the relationship between the U.S. government and the British government. Similar to our organized criminal enterprise with Israel, this is also dubbed a “special relationship.”

But according to the American historian Stephen Kotkin, that’s just being polite. Britain is America’s bitch. Now that’s our characterization; some of our colleagues prefer the term “puppet.”

But given that the United Kingdom is sending people to prison for Facebook posts now, we feel comfortable calling it a bitch, and certainly that characterization tracks with Britain’s history as a subservient sidekick to the clearly dominant American Empire.

After sharing this idea with U.S. soldiers who have engaged in combat, this author (Weeks) was told that when these men deployed in Afghanistan or Iraq or elsewhere, the British were there as well, only because the Americans were there.

In other words, British troops just go along with whatever America wants. That’s why no one claims that the British government controls Washington, D.C. The ubiquitous consensus is that the U.S. government dominates the British government. London is a vassal within Washington’s global imperial order.

Now, in the Brits’ case, we don’t see London filled with Americans who are dual citizens who served in the U.S. military and now wear their U.S. uniform to their job as a member of parliament, or work as an advisor to the Prime Minister, or fill key positions within the ministry of defense, or in military intelligence, or whatever they call their state department. This is because the real power lies in Washington. That’s the center of the Empire, not Tel Aviv. The fact that all these Zionists need to come to D.C. undermines the thesis that Israel controls America.

Yes, our national government is filled with Zionists who routinely put the interests of Israel above the American people’s interests. Or at least they prioritize what they perceive to be the interests of Israel above virtually anything else.

We should confront and interrogate that reality, and forge a stronger anti-imperialist, antiwar, anti-Zionist movement. For it is not enough to merely oppose the genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Although doing so, especially in mass movements, is a heroic act of collective moral rebellion and such activism is most imperative.

But our synthesis allows us to do that while recognizing why the Zionists must come to Washington, because D.C. is where the true imperial power is located. Therefore, that is precisely where it must be defeated.

He clenched his fist around the USB, impatience gripping him as he waited. He had just finished pacing only to sit down, unaware of his rocking back and forth. Once he saw her, he was back to his feet. He wanted to push it into her hand and disappear. Instead, she guided him to a table, “let’s have a drink first,” she offered.

“Sure.”

They sat, ordered drinks. Small talk. He looked around, more small talk. The crowd was distant, his mind never leaving what he ha seen. How he felt.

Once the drinks were in front of them, she sipped hers, a tall cold beer. She looked at him, “tell me what is on that, what you found.”

“It’s bad. There is a lot of sadistic, horrible child exploitation material in here,” he held his glass of straight whisky.

“I understand, can you give me a summary?”

He gulped down his whisky.

“Most of it’s point of view. The man has a camera on him, so they are filming what they are doing from their perspective. I saw them pull a kid from a bed, throw the kid to the ground, strip them naked. The kid is crying, they are scared. He keeps pulling and prying, feeling them all over. Prodding hands over their body. They do this to another kid, just as young. I saw them tie the kids up, naked, face down. Bound, hands and feet tied together. The kids are screaming, begging for mercy. Calling for their parents. Screaming for God to help them. No one comes to help them, just tears and screaming.”

“My God, that’s horrible,” she sipped her beer.

He went on, “in other clips, he kicked over a boy, that had his throat slit. The boy was still holding a bottle of water. His eyes wide open. Then another video, I could see a child running through a field. Chased, they tormented him. Then, then….they shot him. They shot this kid dead.”

“The boy, they killed him?”

He nodded, “yeah. It goes on like this. A lot of molesting and stripping but the other folders are far worse.”

“How so?” she had finished her beer.

“I think that it’s a collection put together. In one, there were boys, young, crying. They had their arms and legs beaten. Bashed until they bruised. In one, I could see the bone break the skin. The kids had their limbs shattered. Another, a truncheon sodomised the boy. The kid kept begging for help, no one came to save him. It was horrible…”

“Those poor angels,” her face trembled between anger and empathy.

“I then saw toddlers, small, fragile little things laying in dirt, bullet holes through their head or heart.”

“Sniped like game?”

“I think so.”

They ordered another drink. Her hand went for his, a waiter pushed the drinks pushed in front of them both. He carefully continued, “I saw a little girl, broken and burned. Her body falling to pieces from the trauma. She was dead but brutally so. And, and another, I saw her laying there, eyes open. Her chest busted open, I could see her heart ripped from her little body covered in ash and dirt.”

“Whoever did this will pay. The bastards.”

“I remember this one, two men held a boy down they electrocuted him and then poured water down his throat until he drowned. He begged, why would they not stop? He was scared, calling for mercy. Why was there no mercy?”

“The sadistic bastards.”

“A kid, coughing up blood, another hugging them holding them, siblings, they, they embrace. One dies while their bloody hand print is stained on the others chest. Why would someone do that?”

“Horrible.”

“I could go on, but…”

“It’s OK. Do you know where this all was filmed?”

He nodded, “yeah, Afghanistan. The other folders Iraq, Syria, Palestine…”

She broke out in laughter. A release of relief. Her eyes no longer wet from rage and sickness, instead from a strange joy.

“What, what’s wrong?” he asked confused.

“It’s OK. You mean these were filmed from the solders doing this? From wars over there?”

“Yeah.”

She pushed the USB back towards him, “it’s OK, there is a context. It’s all fine. Go home, take a sleeping pill and sleep. You are worried about nothing.”

She put money on the table to cover her drinks, stood up and smiled, “nothing there is wrong.”

“It’s wrong to me,” he whispered defeated.

She smiled, “get some sleep. It’s not wrong, you just need to learn the importance of context.”

“These are innocent kids…”

She spoke over him,“there is no innocent parties in there, you just need to understand the context. Collateral sure, but innocent they are not. You are overthinking it is all. Good bye,” she walked back into the crowd, to her career.

He sat, the USB firmly in his grip. He paid for his drinks stood to leave, as he left he dropped the USB and all within into the bin. He went home, with no peace of mind, regardless of context. She went back to her job, certain that context mattered. Context…