NY Times removes quotation marks from Israeli ‘occupation’

Gabe Friedman
Published May 27, 2016

The New York Times newspaper being delivered to newsstands and all night deli's starting at 5 a.m. on May, 2008, in New York City. ( Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty Images)

The New York Times newspaper being delivered to newsstands and all night deli’s starting at 5 a.m. on May, 2008, in New York City. ( Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty Images)

(JTA) — The New York Times removed quotation marks originally used around “occupation” in one of its news stories.

The word appears in the phrase “Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza” in the article published Wednesday about the Bernie Sanders-led push to change the Democratic Party’s stance on Israel.

The quotation marks were removed Thursday. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald had criticized the Times’ use of the quotation marks as “abject cowardice” Thursday morning.

“This is journalistic malfeasance at its worst: refusing to describe the world truthfully out of fear of the negative reaction by influential factions,” Greenwald wrote in an article on The Intercept.

The Times did not add an editor’s note to the article or offer an explanation. The print version of the article published in the A1 section of the Times’ Thursday includes the quotation marks.

The article — titled “A Split Over Israel Threatens the Democrats’ Hopes for Unity” and written by Jason Horowitz and Maggie Haberman — reports on the effort by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and his representatives to “upend what they see as the party’s lopsided support of Israel.”

Other journalists who are left-wing on Israel, including AlterNet contributor Adam H. Johnson and 972 magazine contributor Noam Sheizaf, seconded Greenwald’s criticism Thursday.

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