The New York Times building in New York City. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The New York Times is receiving major backlash from its readers after the newspaper described victims of a cable car crash in Italy as “two British tourists and an Arab woman with Israeli citizenship.”

“I’m failing to see the reason of mentioning the woman’s ethnicity. Why didn’t you mention the two British tourists’ ethnicity since you’re at it?” said one Times reader, Rached Ben Yahya.

“Interesting how NYT is trying to distinguish Arab Israeli citizenship and suggest that Israeli citizenship is ‘imposed’ on her while her true identity is Arab and she is living unwillingly under occupation. Israeli media simply refers to her as ‘Israeli victim.’ I guess NYT is relying on their readers’ ignorance about Israeli Muslim citizens who enjoy full rights in every aspect of society,” another Times reader, Stanley Brill, commented on a New York Times Facebook post.

“NYT always dividing people … She was Israeli,” wrote another Times reader, Iniguez Mariano.

“I wonder if from now on we’ll be seeing the NYT casually describe accident victims as ‘Indian man with British citizenship’ and ‘Jewish man with American citizenship,'” another reader, Boaz Arad, commented on the Times social media post.

“The correct sentence would have been ‘three tourists, two British and one Israeli’ … not only did they decide to single out the Arab woman as being different, they decided solely to highlight her ethnicity. The British tourists didn’t get a similar description,” wrote one journalist and Middle East analyst, Seth Frantzman.

“They want to signal to their readers that it’s OK to be sad she died,” another reporter, Lahav Harkov, wrote in a post on X.

A fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Jason Bedrick, noted, “When Arabs with Israeli citizenship were accused of rape, the NYT just called them ‘Israelis,'” referring to an alleged rape of a British woman in Cyprus in 2019.

The social media crowd had a low opinion of the New York Times’s motives. “They want to let performative Western ‘leftists’ know that it is OK to feel sad that she died because she wasn’t a JEWISH Israeli, in which case, empathy for her would have been ‘Zionist’ and Not Acceptable,” wrote one user, with an account named Benjamin Ze’ev.

“We need to spell it out. A majority of readers of the NYT would celebrate if the victims were Jewish Israelis,” another social media commenter wrote.

The Times reporter responsible for the clumsy language, Elisabetta Povoledo, was ridiculed in 2017 for a sentence that said, “Jews and Catholics have a long history of mutual suspicion and conflict.” “Moral equivalence is our new religion,” was the headline Tablet put over its article mocking that whopper.

Povoledo also was the Times reporter who in 2015 claimed that Pope Francis said to the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, “you are an angel of peace.” Later reports cast doubt on that account, with one saying that Francis was offering an exhortation — may you be an angel of peace” —and another saying that the actual comment was “you are a bit of an angel of peace.”

So a Times reporter with previous instances of clumsiness and apparent inaccuracy when it comes to Jewish and Arab-Israeli issues has now, for the third time in a decade, managed to damage what remains of the New York Times’s reputation.

It’s as if Povoledo were imposing her own opinion that the tourist’s Arab identity is somehow more fundamental than her Israeli citizenship, or she can’t wrap her mind around the reality that Israel has Arabs with full rights serving in parliament, as students in universities, and as doctors in hospitals.

Poveledo’s Times biography says, “I was born in Italy, immigrated to Canada as a child.” It’s another example of the Times shift away from being an American newspaper. The social media editors who pluck the reporters’ sentences for use on social media don’t get bylines, and it’s not clear who was involved in this one or what their nationality or nationalities were. But as the comments on social media make clear, at least some segment of the Times readership — or former readership — has figured out what the newspaper is up to. Those readers — for good reason  —are fed up with the different treatment that the newspaper applies to Israel and Israelis, Jewish or Arab.

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.