Monday, September 29, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
The word controversial looks like a neutral descriptor. It simply tells readers that people disagree. But when you look closely at how The New York Times, CNN, and The Washington Post have used it over the past year in stories about Israel and the Palestinians, the pattern is anything but neutral.
Israeli government actions - settlement expansions, judicial reforms, buffer zones in Gaza, Netanyahu’s leadership - are routinely described as controversial. By contrast, Palestinian positions such as the recognition of a Palestinian state, or even Hamas’s governance in Gaza or positioning military assets in civilian areas, are almost never given that label.
This matters, because controversial when used as a default term isn’t just a description. It carries an implicit judgment: that something is outside the bounds of normal behavior, that it deserves suspicion or moral doubt. And when the word is applied almost exclusively to one side of a conflict, it tells readers who is presumed to be the violator and who is presumed to be the victim.
Labeling something controversial allows journalists to suggest that Israel is breaking rules without proving which rules or explaining why they apply. It’s a shortcut that plants suspicion in the reader’s mind without doing the hard work of evidence and argument.
The double standard is easy to see by reversing the roles. If the recognition of a Palestinian state were routinely described as controversial, many of these outlets would denounce it as delegitimizing. Yet Israeli actions - even when they follow domestic democratic processes - are freely stamped with the label. The result is consistent: one side is weighed down by suspicion, while the other is rhetorically sheltered.
There are two exceptions that prove the rule.
One is for references to the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which is sometimes called controversial. Yet in those cases the term is attributed to critics rather than the journalist’s own framing.
A second exception comes from civil liberties groups. The New York Civil Liberties Union was quoted as saying, "City and campus officials should take great care to distinguish between controversial speech, which helps students and society develop, and actual threats." In the case of anti-Israel statements, "controversial" is reframed as admirable - a standard that is never applied to, say, campus speech that supports Israeli actions in Gaza or settlement policy.
All of this shows how much weight a single word can carry. Controversial doesn’t just describe disagreement: it assigns moral suspicion. And when that suspicion is aimed overwhelmingly at Israel while its opponents either escape the label or, in some cases, even benefit from it, the press cannot honestly call itself impartial. This isn’t balance. It’s framing, and it quietly shapes public opinion far more than most headlines ever will.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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