Israeli Press
Israel's New York consul cancels the consulate's New York Times subscriptions
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Israel's consul general in New York, Ofir Akunis, has ordered his staff to cancel every New York Times subscription the consulate holds, the Jerusalem Post reported on Friday.
Akunis said the paper "consistently publishes false blood libels against the State of Israel, often based on 'anonymous' sources," and accused it of leaning on anti-Israel activists.
Two pieces of reporting sit behind the order, and both concern Palestinians and the people who try to reach them. One is the Times report published Friday in which activists detained after the Gaza-bound flotilla described beatings, rubber bullets and verbal abuse in Israeli custody.
The other is a May opinion column by Nicholas Kristof, which cited witnesses who said Israeli forces used dogs to sexually assault Palestinian detainees. The Israeli government denounced that column at the time in the same words Akunis used this week.
Akunis is a former Likud minister who was appointed to the New York post in 2024, and the consulate he runs is Israel's largest diplomatic mission in the United States.
The order is symbolic — a consulate's subscriptions are a rounding error in a newspaper's accounts. Its significance for Palestinian readers lies elsewhere: testimony from Palestinian detainees and from those detained alongside them is being answered not with an investigation but with a cancelled subscription, and the label attached to that testimony is the oldest one in the argument.
