Media Analysis

Why Michelle Alexander’s ‘NY Times’ column is having such a huge impact

We are delighted here at the site that Michelle Alexander’s excellent long New York Times column is getting huge attention — and we are also a little puzzled. The Times has previously run occasional opinion articles critical of Israel and sympathetic to Palestinians, but none of them has had the reverberating impact of Professor Alexander’s January 20 piece. Her article is already clearly a watershed moment, with arguably even more impact on mainstream U.S. opinion than Israel’s onslaught last spring against Gaza’s Great March of Return, which left more than 150 Palestinians dead and another 5800 wounded by live ammunition.

Israel’s Hasbara Central has already recognized the danger. The Israel lobby’s usual suspects struck back immediately, calling Alexander’s measured article “a rant,” with “countless outrages,” that even amounts to “a strategic threat” to Israel. 

Why has Alexander prompted such a huge reaction? I have some tentative explanations.

  * First, Alexander reveals an open secret — that many mainstream American progressives have been afraid to speak out against Israel because they fear losing funding for their other important causes, or they fear being smeared by the pro-Israel forces. Alexander bravely includes herself in this category, hinting that she worried that her pathbreaking research and writing into systemic racial discrimination in America could be jeopardized if she came out decisively for Palestine. Her headline told the story: “Time to Break the Silence About Palestine.”

* The U.S. political climate is changing, to be steadily more sympathetic to Palestinians. Young people, Jews and others, no longer uncritically accept the Israel lobby’s propaganda. For the first time, two members of the U.S. Congress, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, outspokenly favor the nonviolent program of Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS).

* Michelle Alexander is a respected and experienced scholar, who won sufficient renown in her field to be offered a regular New York Times column. (Hasbara Central must be panicking that she will continue to speak out regularly, now that she has broken the ice.)

* We in the alternative press forget how successfully the Times and other mainstream media have protected themselves inside a pro-Israel propaganda fortress. You have to set the occasional pro-Palestine opinion article in the Times alongside the paper’s chronically biased news coverage, day after day, year after year. So when Michelle Alexander says straightforwardly that Israel has “adopted some practices reminiscent of apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crow segregation in the United States,” her view will come as no surprise to regular visitors to Mondoweiss, but those who read the Times on the 7:17 train down from Westchester into New York City may jump out of their seats. 

* That Michelle Alexander is a distinguished African-American academic may also be a factor. Many black Americans have for decades seen certain parallels between their situation and the oppression that Palestinians face, a comparison that is surely giving the Israel lobby nightmares. 

* Finally, Alexander’s article is extraordinarily eloquent and moving. You expect well-crafted pieces in the Times, but she has written a masterpiece. Here is how she ended: “In this new year, I aim to speak with greater courage and conviction about injustices beyond our borders, particularly those that are funded by our government, and stand in solidarity with struggles for democracy and freedom. My conscience leaves me with no other choice.”

Her article will surely appear in eventual histories about the liberation of Palestine, marking a turning point in history.  

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Dershowitz in The Hill:

The front page of the New York Times Sunday Review featured one of the most biased, poorly informed, and historically inaccurate columns about the conflict between Israel and Palestine ever published by a mainstream newspaper.

There was a time when Dershowitz would make me angry. Now he just makes me laugh.

Thanks for this thoughtful summary of the factors that make Michelle Alexander’s article so outstanding. It’s definitely an “Emperor’s News Clothes” moment, when a society-wide lie is stripped naked. Once done it can’t be undone. And the public was well-prepared for this moment, as you note, thanks to the determined efforts of many people over many years. The extreme shock to the Emperor’s court indeed created a huge reaction, contributing to the explosive effect. And the superb quality of Alexander’s analysis and presentation made it unassailable.

From the recent Mondoweiss report on the NYT’s new publisher, it seems to me Alexander’s and Michelle Goldberg’s recent NYT article
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/opinion/rashida-tlaib-israel-antisemitism.html
are two steps in a well thought-out process. Goldberg laid the ground with the fundamental point that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, itself a breakthrough in the NYT and MSM. Alexander then built upon that platform an in-depth analysis of Zionism (expertly done within the constraints of an op-ed article). My thanks to new publisher A.G. Sulzberger for his serious committment to the whole truth. I see no reason why he would reverse that course.

This breakthrough opens up further questions. Most notably, how was such a widespread blanket of silence imposed? It is not credible that a relatively small bunch of religious fanatic “settlers” would have such power. It’s also important that the mainstream Jewish community was itself subjected to this deception. As Israel-born, Jewish therapist Avigail Abarbanel has written “It’s time for American Jews to recognize they have been duped”
http://mondoweiss.net/2015/07/american-recognize-duped
Abarbanel further examines the cult-like methods used in “Why I left the cult”
https://mondoweiss.net/2016/10/why-i-left-the-cult

In a country that guarantees freedom of the press to print the whole truth, I look forward to the NYT fulfilling the role that makes a newspaper great.

This posting is part of Mondoweiss’s track record of wildly exaggerating every straw in the wind as a turning point in support for the Palestinians. The publication of this piece in the NY times has only minor significance, if that. The hard copy circulation of the NY Times has declined from 1.1 million in 2010 to only 500,000 today, in common with circulation declines across the board in the print newspaper media. Its online circulation has grown, but is chiefly read by commuters and has no real impact. Presumably the NY Times will publish many refutations of the nonsense
in Alexander’s article. Everyone knows that the NY Times is a left-liberal paper (the last Republican it endorsed for President was in 1956), and is just as fair and balanced as Pravda under Stalin, and her article will be ignored for this reason.

“Her article will surely appear in eventual histories about the liberation of Palestine, marking a turning point in history”

Yes if we drop our habit of writing women out of things once enough time has elapsed..

“The Irish Revolution’s Overlooked History of Nonviolent Resistance”

“The usual story’s framing of violent versus reformist methods in Irish nationalism is true as far as it goes, but also incomplete. What it misses is a powerful third tradition of radical, extralegal, but still nonviolent resistance. In the 19th century, many rural communities, often organized by women in the Ladies’ Land League, refused to pay rent to British absentee landlords or work for their local land agents at harvest time. Indeed, our word “boycott” is named for Captain Charles Boycott, a land agent in County Mayo ostracized by his local community in 1880 during a noncooperation campaign.”

https://truthout.org/articles/the-irish-revolutions-overlooked-history-of-nonviolent-resistance/

Well! Would you ever – the Guardian has come out in sympathy with this op-ed, with its own takedown of current israel:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/22/the-guardian-view-on-israels-democracy-killing-with-impunity-lying-without-consequence