Genocides are made of story. That’s why over 200 former contributors to the New York Times so far—alongside over 300 other writers—have collectively decided to withdraw their labour from the Opinion section of the so-called “paper of record” until three demands are met: a review of anti-Palestinian bias conducted, an editorial calling for an arms embargo on Israel published, and the debunked rape atrocity propaganda “Screams Without Words” (from December 2023) retracted.
The campaign’s name? “No Opinion.” Its central damning observation: genocide is created in Gaza in part when Palestinian humanity is treated as a matter of opinion in imperialism’s liberal headquarters—the “number one” Anglophone news organ on earth.
To be a working writer is often to feel individualised and powerless to refuse literary platforms. By banding together strategically to deny NYT Opinion the principled voices on which the paper as a whole depends for its fig leaf—thereby endangering its pretence to impartiality—writers are demonstrating that this perceived powerlessness in the face of hegemonic media behemoths is an illusion.
Collective action amidst growing contempt
NYT Opinion’s guest essay format was explicitly designed to stage a “dinner party” of diverse views: a politically heterogeneous façade behind which the news and reportage sections of the paper can get away with their utter refusal to grant personhood to Palestinians resisting annihilation, including at the very level of syntax. But dinner party guests are not obliged to drink the wine of holocaust bullhorns. They can, if necessary, refuse to participate in treating specific things as “up for debate,” and overturn the table instead.
“No Opinion” is initiated by eleven organisations and led by Writers Against the War on Gaza. The boycott mobilises many household names—for example Sally Rooney, Susan Sarandon, Hannah Einbinder, Chelsea Manning, Rashida Tlaib, Rupi Kaur, Aaron Maté, Mosab Abu Toha, Eileen Myles, China Miéville, and Viet Thanh Nguyen—together with dozens of respected scholars whose contributions have been actively solicited by the Times.
I stand proudly in this picket line myself, as a precarious freelance writer and former NYT op-ed contributor, because the practice of writing is, for me, inseparable from the desire to live humanely. There is simply no amount of prestige or “reach” for a freelancer that could ever be worth the price of cooperation with a media apparatus so entwined with the project of eliminating Palestinian life.
The refusal to continue legitimising the NYT by accepting its tokenising “guest” invitations to us antifascists—i.e., to come and converse, comment, listen, and disagree on divers matters in its dining room while Gaza still starves and dies—is a minimal act of solidarity with those who have been collectively punished for NYT-fabricated terrorist sex-crimes supposedly perpetrated on October 7.
This courage to withstand, as feminists, the reformulated myth of the black rapist at the core of Zionism’s femonationalist gambit is also a profound antifascist commitment. We are, quite simply, drawing a line and then holding it, until our ultra-reasonable demands are met: Dear New York Times, you shall no longer buy us until you put your racism-related style guidelines in order, until you say publicly that arms sales to Israel must cease, and until you retract the twenty-first century’s most egregious journalistic obscenity.
“Screams Without Words,” which is unaccountably still online, has been proven to be an utterly unevidenced story of systematic and weaponised sexual assault by Gazans against Israeli women and girls during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Its core source was utterly discredited, and its key researcher was fired for liking openly genocidal social media posts. Published mere weeks after the day in question, it detailed an orgy of Arab sexual violence so barbaric that death is supposed to have been preferable in the minds of the (impossible to locate, as it turned out—much too late) victims and their families.
In turn, the most ambitious imaginable forms of mass killing became somehow theoretically justifiable in revenge. Of course, real rape does not justify bombing either—but “Screams Without Words” appears to have been one big inflammatory lie. It was a murderously timed hoax, on a par with the non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” that helped drive the U.S. invasion of Iraq (a falsehood admitted to by the Times in 2004).
Drawing the line
Gaza’s cosmos has been pulverised; the genocidaires and their stenographers must and can be held fully accountable. As the dust begins at last to settle on the hellscape that US-armed Israeli fascists have made of their so-called homeland, the Times will, of course, make every effort to quietly change its tune and retroactively rewrite its own involvement in this utterly predictable and unconcealed culmination of 77 years of Nakba.
Attempts at such responsibility-dodging are already beginning to happen. But against this craven and bloodily belated move, Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) are demonstrating what it means to draw lines that any opponent of fascism—a category which theoretically includes the NYT—must be willing to draw as well.
We are happily but one Palestine solidarity campaign among many, and even when it comes to the Times in particular, we are backed by a gigantic tide of public feeling. Righteous contempt for the Times, especially over its transphobia, Islamophobia, redbaiting, and blatant championing of settler-colonial war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank, has been growing rapidly.
Following thousands of activists’ lead, the celebrity children’s rights advocate Ms. Rachel last week publicly unsubscribed from the paper in protest of its “biased and dehumanizing coverage of Palestinians and Palestine.” Slowly but surely, the tide of popular outrage about the NYT’s incessant anti-Palestinian lying, a bias proven over and over again throughout decades of scholarly research, has become difficult to ignore.
The Zionism in question is, to be sure, a direct reflection of the paper’s highest-ranking editors’ and owners’ decades-long personal ties to Israel. Thanks to WAWOG’s playful agit-prop, you can even now enjoy a facsimile of the Games app’s “Connections” puzzle, linking staffers and trustees, in groups of four, to the occupation.
At the intensely pro-Israel magazine The Atlantic, the journalist Jonathan Chait has disparaged the NYT Contributor Boycott as an “insidiously illiberal maneuver” that abandons “faith in public reason.” He is right on this point. Antifascism undeniably involves—at least outside of dinner parties—a conscious measure of illiberalism.
Against the “marketplace of ideas” framework for stopping fascists, the history of myriad anti-Nazi leagues teaches us that the antifascist moment is defined by no-platforming and many other techniques of physical disempowerment and material blocking. Antifascism, as I see it, is a specific thing: a barricade that is built when people collectively refuse to pretend any longer that public reasoning, persuasion, and debate are appropriate in the face of the whirr of the killing-machines.
By opposing the Times, ironically, we are taking seriously the kind of line-drawing that was articulated by the paper’s then-executive editor Max Frankel not so long ago. Namely: in 2001, on the occasion of its 150th anniversary, Frankel reflected openly on the Times’s dire neglect of the Nazis’ systematic destruction of Europe’s Jews while it was occurring. He reproached his own institution for playing a role in the twentieth century’s “bitterest journalistic failure”, and resolved for the future that “in the face of genocide, journalism shall not have failed in vain.”
The immortal worldwide post-Shoah resolution “Never Again” was supposed to mean “never again for anyone.” However, for over two years, a livestreamed US-Israeli repetition of the “crime of crimes” has been applauded and justified in the world’s most influential news organ as though its own identity depended on it. (It indeed seems to.) Our strike offers a practical as well as spiritually transformative lesson in what honouring “never again” entails for journalists.
Sophie Lewis is a Philadelphia-based feminist writer and self-described “recovering academic.” She is the author of Full Surrogacy Now (2019), Abolish the Family (2022), and Enemy Feminisms (2025). Her forthcoming books include Femmephilia (2026) and The Liberation of Children (2027). You can follow her work at patreon.com/reproutopia, or sign up to her online courses on social theory at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
Follow Sophie on BlueSky: @reproutopia.bsky.social and Instagram: @reproutopia
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