Thread by @MarkGoldfeder

The @nytimes has published many one-sided pieces on Israel since October 7, but this ridiculous piece by @Megankstack buries the central fact so completely that you have to excavate the article to find it:
Israel did not start any of this. Hope that helps.
Now let me explain:

@nytimes @Megankstack The piece frames Israeli military action in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and Iran as evidence of a new expansionism, a country drunk on American backing, settler messianism, and military impunity.
Interesting.

What it treats as merely background noise is that every front it describes was already an active front of war against Israel.
That is the premise on which the entire argument depends.

@nytimes @Megankstack The author wants the reader to see Israeli action everywhere and hostile action almost nowhere.
Israel moves, invades, occupies, escalates.
Hezbollah appears mostly as a grievance Israel invokes.

@nytimes @Megankstack Hamas is reduced to the opening clause of a sentence.
The Houthis become scenery.
Iran is a country whose nuclear infrastructure might be destabilized by Israel, rather than the regime that built, funded, armed, and coordinated the regional campaign against the Jewish state.

@nytimes @Megankstack The question the article cannot afford to ask is the simplest one:

@nytimes @Megankstack If Hamas had not carried out October 7, if Hezbollah had not fired across the northern border, if the Houthis had not attacked Israeli shipping, and if Iran had not armed and directed the ring of fire around Israel would Israel be fighting in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, or Iran?

@nytimes @Megankstack Obviously not. The article never asks because asking would collapse the thesis.

@nytimes @Megankstack The most dishonest move in the piece is the complete erasure of agency for Israel’s enemies. Talk about the bigotry of low expectations!

@nytimes @Megankstack Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and Iran are not treated as decision-makers with strategies, doctrines, weapons, and responsibility for their own choices.

@nytimes @Megankstack They are treated as conditions. Weather. Things to which Israel reacts too strongly, but never serious actors who generate the conflict in the first place.

@nytimes @Megankstack That matters because agency is the difference between a war and a morality play. In a war, there are adversaries. In this article, there is mostly Israel. Israel becomes the only party capable of moral choice and therefore the only party capable of moral blame.

@nytimes @Megankstack Hezbollah can fire rockets at Israeli towns and convert southern Lebanon into an Iranian forward operating base, but the story begins when Israel crosses the border.

@nytimes @Megankstack Hamas can massacre civilians, take hostages, embed military infrastructure in hospitals and neighborhoods, and repeatedly subordinate Palestinian welfare to its own survival, but the story becomes Israel’s “devastation of Gaza.”