Bret Stephens speaking at the 92nd Street Y, Youtube screenshot.

This article was originally published on CounterPunch in March 2024. For more investigations like this and to support our efforts, please consider subscribing today.

On October 15, 2023, a week after Hamas’s attack on Israel and in the early days of an indiscriminate Israeli response, New York Times editorialist Bret Stephens wrote a column titled “Hamas Bears the Blame for Every Death in This War.”

After allowing that “[r]easonable people can criticize Israel for not allowing enough time for civilians to get out of harm’s way,” Stephens, having rhetorically covered himself, endorses the impending ground invasion and arrives at the conclusion inscribed in the column’s title. “The central cause of Gaza’s misery is Hamas,” he writes. “It alone bears the blame for the suffering it has inflicted on Israel and knowingly invited against Palestinians.”

After five months of war, at least 30,000 Palestinians dead (12,000 children, certainly an undercount), innumerable documented atrocities, a partial indictment for genocide, and the prospect of a spiraling Middle East conflagration, you might think his tune would have shifted, even a little. After all, even Tom Friedman has managed to squeeze out some criticism of Israel.

Not Bret. As the horror of the assault has ballooned and the genocidal logic underlying it become clearer than ever, Stephens hasn’t budged, calling for the permanent defunding of UNRWA, attacking the UN investigation into allegations of genocide, even approvingly citing his October 15 essay in a late-January column blaming Hamas’s tunnel-building for the dismal state of the territory that has been blockaded for nearly two decades.

In doing so, he has arrived at something like the capstone of his career, two plus decades in media defending and cheerleading Israel and helping to prep the ground for genocide in what may be the most violent assault of the twenty-first century. Hats off to Bret, then, whose long career as Israeli propagandist could only lead him here.

A Brief History of Bret Stephens

Let’s go back to 2017, when editorial page editor James Bennet brought Stephens over from The Wall Street Journal as seeming correction for the Times’ myopia in the lead-up to the 2016 election. This was an odd choice, given that blind dismissal of Trump really lay in failing to understand a revolt against calcified elite consensus—a consensus few people in media embodied better than Bret Stephens, who grew up and entered media via extraordinary privilege.

Stephens’ ostensible “diversity” as a hire was in being a never-Trumper, but then so was everyone else at NYT; his public views—climate skepticism, anti-Arab racism, libertarian tax policies—were just particularly reprehensible. Fundamentally Stephens reflected an antiquated Bush-era neoconservatism, retrenchment rather than novelty in the Trump era, which made his hiring especially senseless.

He immediately leaned into the role: his first column for the paper offered half-baked climate denial which ultimately required a correction for factual inaccuracies, and led publisher Arthur Sulzberger to email frustrated former subscribers asking them to return. (Stephens has since lightly retracted these views on climate change; an exciting, one assumes all-expenses-paid junket to Greenland to see glaciers melting did the trick. Sounds fun!)

In subsequent years Bret has dutifully covered other ground. He endorsed Trump’s 2017 trickle-down tax bill. He claimed that masks to prevent Covid transmission didn’t work. He wrote a particularly galling column entitled “20 Years On, I Don’t Regret Supporting the Iraq War” in which he essentially claimed that Iraqis, not the United States, were to blame for the violence of the insurgency, and that even if nukes or chemical factories weren’t found Saddam Hussein himself was a weapon of mass destruction (throughout failing to make any of mention of the million-plus dead or forced to flee due to the war).

Nevertheless—perhaps Bret can see things others cannot? In another memorable column—“The Secrets of Jewish Genius”—he wrote about the genetic superiority of Ashkenazi Jews, citing as evidence a paper which had appeared in a eugenics journal (this column also required a correction and a long editors’ note, which reads, in a darkly comic way: “After publication Mr. Stephens and his editors learned that one of the paper’s authors, who died in 2016, promoted racist views”).

Zionist Ideologue

But nowhere has Stephens been so vociferous as on the issue of Israel.

The one-time editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post—a job he took in 2002 because he felt that post-9/11 media was insufficiently supportive of Israel (“Insofar as getting the story right helps Israel, I guess you could say I’m trying to help Israel,” he said)—who once wrote that antisemitism was a “disease of the Arab mind,” has repeatedly, aggressively, and unequivocally defended the Israeli state.

In 2018 he defended the passage of the Israeli nation-state law, a racist provision that legally elevated Jews over non-Jewish minorities in the country and established “Jewish settlement as a national value.” Running a particular kind of cover for Israel—an enduring theme—Stephens specifically implored........

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