As early as the 3rd century CE, Christian writers argued that Jews lived in exile, with their Temple destroyed and their sovereignty lost, because God had chosen to punish them for their rejection of Jesus. Jewish thinkers had a simple rebuttal: God was indeed punishing His people with exile—as the biblical prophets had said He would—but was doing so because they had failed to observe His Law. In the Middle Ages, as Jewish-Christian relations became more intimate, Jews developed what Michael Weiner argues is a different sort of answer: imagining that in some faraway land, Jews maintained their political independence:

The medieval legends told about such Jews, often understood to be the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, [suggest] that not all Jews were content to accept traditional explanations for exile and loss of autonomy, and desired the comfort of knowing that Jews still ruled somewhere, somehow.

[When] the 14th-century Spanish Rabbi Shlomo ha-Levi converted to Christianity, his [former] student Yehoshua ha-Lorki wrote a letter to him attempting to bring him back into the fold by rebutting arguments for Christianity. He included a telling passage insisting that Jewish subjugation under Christendom didn’t prove anything because, after all, “the members of the ten tribes continue to conduct an independent life, . . . not dominated by any foreign power.”

Other examples abound. The writings of Eldad ha-Dani, a 9th-century Jewish merchant who traveled throughout Europe claiming to be the member of a Jewish community in East Africa that descended from the Ten Lost Tribes, were widely read, discussed, and accepted by many. A medieval Jewish folktale about the origins of Akdamut, [a liturgical poem for the festival of Shavuot], relates that during a period of dangerous Christian anti-Semitism, Rabbi Meir of Worms traveled across the Sambatyon River, [the legendary stream that rests on the Sabbath], to meet with an otherworldly Jewish community beyond the river, some of whose members he sent back to Worms to defeat an anti-Semitic priest through mystical incantations and invocations of God’s name.

In a recent article, the New York Times Magazine asserts that Benjamin Netanyahu “prolonged the war in Gaza to stay in power.” Niranjan Shankar takes the argument apart piece by piece, showing that for all its careful research, it fails to back up its basic claims. For instance: the article implies that Netanyahu torpedoed a three-point cease-fire proposal supported by the Biden administration in the spring of last year:

First of all, it’s crucial to note that Biden’s supposed “three-point plan” announced in May 2024 was originally an Israeli proposal. Of course, there was some back-and-forth and disagreement over how the Biden administration presented this initially, as Biden failed to emphasize that according to the three-point framework, a permanent cease-fire was conditional on Hamas releasing all of the hostages and stepping down. Regardless, the piece fails to mention that it was Hamas in June 2024 that rejected this framework!

It wasn’t until July 2024 that Hamas made its major concession—dropping its demand that Israel commit up front to a full end to the war, as opposed to doing so at a later stage of cease-fire/negotiations. Even then, U.S. negotiators admitted that both sides were still far from agreeing on a deal.

Even when the Times raises more credible criticisms of Israel—like when it brings up the IDF’s strategy of conducting raids rather than holding territory in the first stage of the war—it offers them in what seems like bad faith:

[W]ould the New York Times prefer that Israel instead started with a massive ground campaign with a “clear-hold-build” strategy from the get-go? Of course, if Israel had done this, there would have been endless criticism, especially under the Biden administration. But when Israel instead tried the “raid-and-clear” strategy, it gets blamed for deliberately dragging the war on.