The following is adapted from JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin’s address to the inaugural JNS policy summit in Jerusalem on April 27.
All of us who have gathered here for this summit, including the prime minister of Israel, members of his cabinet, the new ambassador of the United States to Israel and so many other Jewish leaders, thinkers and writers, as well as the nearly 1,000 people who have come to Jerusalem to hear them, are faced with an important set of questions.
We are met at a time of unprecedented challenges for the Jewish people, Israel and the United States.
More than 18 months ago, a Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terrorist assault on southern Israel was more than a barbaric set of atrocities. It was the initiation of a new war on Israel’s existence, unlike any other in its history. Not only did it inflict a traumatic loss of life, but horrific crimes were committed against entire families asleep in their homes on the morning of Simchat Torah and the kidnapping of more than 250 Israelis. It also unleashed a wave of antisemitic hate throughout the globe, most particularly on American college campuses, where Jewish students became the targets of violent pro-Hamas mobs who sought to silence, shun, intimidate and threaten them.
Thus, this latest round of conflict is not just another border skirmish or terrorist atrocity to be dealt with, but then quickly forgotten until the next set of attacks comes at a time of the enemy’s choosing. While the wars of survival that Israel fought in its early decades were existential in nature as Arab armies sought vainly to push the Jews into the sea, the challenge we now face is in some ways far more insidious and dangerous.
In the late 1940s, ’50, ’60s and even into the 1970s, Israel was embattled, but Jews abroad, especially in the West and even in America, weren’t subjected to this kind of hounding and delegitimization. Today, the fashionable, toxic leftist ideologies of intersectionality, critical race theory and settler-colonialism, coupled with the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), are fueling hatred and having a devastating impact on a generation of young people. So much of this generation has been indoctrinated in the neo-Marxist idea that the world is divided into two forever warring groups: people of color, who are always victims and always in the right no matter what they do; and “white” oppressors, who are always in the wrong no matter what they do. They look at the world and see only a race war in which—however illogical their reasoning and however divorced this intellectual construct is from the truth about the Middle East—Jews and Israel are inevitably part of the white oppressor class that must be defeated and destroyed.
This is why this targeting of Jews has been tolerated and encouraged by the administrations of elite educational institutions. It is also why these attacks on Jews are depicted in the mainstream corporate press, and even many outlets that purport to represent and serve the Jewish community, as merely the well-meaning activism of idealistic progressive youngsters who should be heard and validated rather than labeled for what they are: a mob of deluded supporters of a genocidal movement that is not so much analogous to the Nazis but to their successors, who believe that one Jewish state on the planet is one too many.
So, while Israelis continue to fight for their lives against terror groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and their paymasters in Iran, Jews elsewhere are now also under siege.
This set of dilemmas has also set up a new set of challenges for journalists—one that, unfortunately, most of them are failing to meet adequately.
For not only has the far-left undermined education, but it has also wreaked havoc on the media. In the last decade, a generation of journalists has entered the profession believing that their duty is activism on behalf of leftist causes rather than the traditional search for truth. Whereas media coverage of Israel and the Middle East had often been biased, in the past much of that slant was due to ignorance of the history and the context of the conflict, manipulation by Palestinian fixers or just plain sloppiness and laziness. But in the age of woke journalism, those already serious problems are now compounded by a false belief on the part of many in the newsrooms of most major outlets that Israel is a white oppressor and the Palestinians, their powerless victims, who have no agency in deciding their conduct or fate.
That is the formula for not just a biased media but also a media that is completely uninterested in learning about the reality of Israeli and Palestinian society. Like faux journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, a much-lauded writer who turned a 10-day trip to the region into a book published a year after Oct. 7 that never even mentioned the events of that day, Hamas or terrorism, today’s best and brightest in journalism aren’t interested in reporting and fairly evaluating both sides of the conflict. They think their job is merely to regurgitate anything that might confirm a predetermined conclusion that Israel is a replica of the Jim Crow South. Far from an outlier, Coates is emblematic of the way so many people at major print and broadcast media think.
In such a media environment, accurate accounts of the facts, context and sober reporting remain not only rare but are essentially deemed undesirable by most of those who inform Americans about the news. This is also felt in the media around the world, and, yes, even in Israel. Moreover, the prejudicial, race-obsessed account of Israel is utterly divorced from the reality of a war that has nothing to do with race but everything to do with genocidal Islamist beliefs. That reality is seldom conveyed to American media consumers. It also filters down into social media, where so many people, and nearly all young people, get their information about the world. Why, then, be surprised that polls show that even as young Americans are trending more conservative in their politics than their elders, nearly half of them side with Hamas—a genocidal organization of murderers, rapists and kidnappers with medieval attitudes about the world rather than with a liberal, democratic Israel.
Sadly, much of that prejudice also makes itself felt among young American Jews, many of whom know little or nothing about Israel or the reality of a conflict that Palestinians have no interest in ending on any terms other than Israel’s destruction. Nor are all too many of them aware of the plain fact that it is the Jews who are the indigenous people of the land of Israel.
In a media and cultural milieu in which false narratives about race invariably prevail over facts and lies about Israel obscure or deny the justice of the Zionist cause, what chance is there for journalists who want to practice their craft honestly?
If that’s your goal, you aren’t likely to get a job these days at The New York Times or most major outlets.
Indeed, to sum up the situation of the American media, there’s bad news, good news … and some even better news.
The bad news is that not only is anti-Israel media bias worse than ever, but in the case of mainstream corporate media, it’s not fixable since contemporary journalists aren’t just making mistakes out of ignorance that can be corrected. Instead, they deliberately skew the news against Israel to make it conform to their false woke activist beliefs about the world.
The good news is, as the 2024 U.S. elections proved, the mainstream media no longer matters as much as it once did. We can’t make it better and it’s a waste of time to try, but these leftist-dominated outlets are also increasingly the dinosaurs of journalism. While some of them, like The New York Times, have a profitable business plan geared to cater to the credentialed elites that are the backbone of the political left, their influence is declining and increasingly limited to those already inside the liberal bubble.
The even better news is that a growing number of alternative news sources that, far from being outliers, are now the only ones to trust to give you fair, honest and truthful accounts of the world.
I’m proud to say that JNS is one of them. Our incredible growth in the reach of our articles, unmatched array of news and opinion, and a growing lineup of popular podcasts are testimony to the hunger for honest journalism that exists today.
At the core of our mission at JNS is a relentless dedication to giving readers, subscribers to this wire service, listeners and viewers the truth about Israel, the Jewish world and the United States. Our success is linked to our belief that integrity and reliability, rather than the mere pursuit of clickbait, serve as the path to success. Our privilege in a world where so many claim to always acknowledge one’s advantages is that it is our job to tell the truth, rather than distort it to conform to ideologies that enable hatred and antisemitism.
Sadly, this is a time when so many journalists and Jews are still prepared to bow down to the false gods of woke DEI culture to the point where they are even opposing governmental efforts to defend Jewish students against antisemitism. They oppose efforts to end the reign of leftist indoctrination that seeks the destruction of Western civilization and the values of the American republic, in addition to the oppression of Jews.
But that also means there is a crying need for a home for a journalistic outlet that has the courage to speak the truth. That is the underserved niche of the media world that we at JNS are here to fill. We will not falter in this effort, and I know that you—our supporters, subscribers, readers, listeners and viewers—will stand with us and give us the resources to continue this fight. With God’s help, I know we will not only continue to grow, but that we will ultimately prevail.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.