Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a meeting with his Likud Party in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in Jerusalem, June 14, 2021. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

In an appearance on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the New York Times.

Netanyahu traveled to California to meet on Monday with the social media platform’s controlling shareholder, Elon Musk, who also runs the Tesla electric car company. Musk said during the meeting that he received “frankly the most amount of negative pushback” about conducting the interview with Netanyahu from people at Tesla than for anything he’d ever done.

Musk then asked Netanyahu about judicial reform in Israel. Netanyahu accused his critics of preferring a Platonic model of a philosopher king and appointed guardians, rather than popular democracy. “We have the most activist judicial court on the planet,” Netanyahu said. He added that he’s been looking for a “happy middle” and a “consensus” to bring back the balance with “a minor correction.”

“I’m described as something between, I don’t know, Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan,” Netanyahu said. “It’s not an easy thing to be maligned.”

“I know you’ve never seen that, right?” Netanyahu teasingly asked Musk, whose own press coverage, once adulatory, has turned more hostile.

Musk followed up by observing, “Certainly the press in the US has not portrayed the reforms you mentioned in a positive light.”

Netanyahu replied, “Especially the New York Times. They are on a fantastic, obsessive campaign. They usually get it wrong, so it’s not important.”

Later, Netanyahu and Musk suggested that print coverage is less important than it might have been in the past.

“Who reads today? Do people read?” Netanyahu asked.

Musk replied, “They watch TikTok videos. There’s much less reading.”

Most of the conversation was devoted to the emerging technology of artificial intelligence, which is a topic of interest to both Musk and Netanyahu.

Netanyahu also took the opportunity to stress the danger of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.

The Israeli prime minister urged Musk to support free speech and also to combat antisemitism. “I encourage you and urge you to find the balance. It’s a tough one,” Netanyahu said.

Musk has accused the Anti-Defamation League of damaging his business, which the ADL has faulted for becoming a platform for hate.

“Israel will be, always, a democratic country,” Netanyahu said.

Musk volunteered toward the end of the one-on-one session, “I went to Hebrew preschool and I can sing a pretty good ‘Hava Nagilah.'”

Netanyahu has a history of publicly pushing back against the Times. In December of 2022, he issued a post on Twitter that said, “After burying the Holocaust for years on its back pages and demonizing Israel for decades on its front pages, the New York Times now shamefully calls for undermining Israel’s elected incoming government. While the NYT continues to delegitimize the one true democracy in the Middle East and America’s best ally in the region, I will continue to ignore its ill-founded advice and instead focus on building a stronger and more prosperous country, strengthening ties with America, expanding peace with our neighbors, and securing the future of the one and only Jewish state.”

In 2019, after the Times apologized under pressure for publishing an antisemitic cartoon of Netanyahu, the prime minister’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, called the New York Times “a cesspool of hostility to Israel.”

A Times spokeswoman didn’t immediately reply to an email from The Algemeiner seeking a response to Netanyahu’s latest criticism of the newspaper.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.