What David Remnick calls a “zone of denial” says far more about his and other Western newsrooms than it does about the Jewish state. It’s a denial of history, of trauma, of the deeply rational fear driving Israeli behaviour
August 8, 2025 12:32
It’s always impressive when someone manages to miss the story and the point at the same time. But when that someone is David Remnick – the longtime editor of The New Yorker, an author of celebrated books, a man with access to just about anyone on earth – it becomes something closer to performance art.
In his latest dispatch from the moral Olympus – titled Israel’s Zones of Denial no less – Remnick takes us on an exquisitely worded tour of Israeli indifference to Palestinian suffering. Israelis, he tells us over the course of 10,000 words, aren’t thinking about Gaza. They’re going to the beach. They’re laughing over bottles of wine. They’re mourning their own dead but showing little interest in those dying just over the fence. There’s pain in Gaza, but Israelis won’t look at it. How grotesque.
But what’s actually grotesque is that Remnick, with all his access (his piece boasts interviews with the crème de la crème of Israeli journalism), prestige, and presumed curiosity, never pauses to ask a basic journalistic question: Why, in this moment, might Israelis be so indifferent to the suffering of Gazan civilians? Why might a country that prides itself on its moral character suddenly stop caring?
The answer, of course, is staring him in the face. But acknowledging it would require breaking ranks with the orthodoxy of the Western press – an orthodoxy that treats Israeli emotional detachment as incomprehensibly pathological and Palestinian extremism as an obvious response to Israeli oppression.
As a result, Remnick offers his readers a long-form lament, one where the conclusions are baked into the premise. Israelis aren’t morally serious. Israelis can’t empathise with the other. Israelis are in denial.
So let me offer the answer Remnick won’t: Israelis are “indifferent” to Gazan suffering because Gazans kidnapped their children and dragged them into tunnels. Gazans murdered families in their pyjamas. Gazans raped women, mowed down party-goers, and live-streamed it. Gazans celebrated it. Then Gazans held a gun to the heads of 250 hostages and dared Israel to come get them.
David Remnick, meanwhile, seems shocked that Israelis aren’t gathering in Tel Aviv every Saturday night to light candles for the residents of the Gaza Strip.
What makes his essay so grating, however, isn’t just its moral preening, though there’s plenty of that. It’s the fact that it participates in a broader Western media pattern: a relentless fixation on Israeli behaviour coupled with a stunning indifference to Israeli psychology.
Editors and correspondents who would never dream of profiling Ukrainians without first seeking to understand their trauma, or chronicling African American life without accounting for its devastating history, turn around and cover Israelis like zoologists studying a species in Africa. They mourn. They vote. They refuse to show remorse for enemies who slaughtered them. Fascinating.
Of course, it’s never phrased quite that directly. There’s a tone to these pieces – Remnick’s included – that is elegant and dispassionate. But don’t be fooled. Underneath the literary gloss lies the same lazy thesis we’ve seen in one form or another since October 8: Israelis are doing it wrong. They’re too right-wing. Too militarised. Too Jewish.
This is how the bulk of prestigious Western media outlets are framing this war. According to the logic of The New York Times, The Guardian, and co, it’s only fair to expect, even demand, that Israelis show the same care for children in Gaza that they have for their own. But do Palestinians owe Israelis anything in return? Don’t be absurd.
Remnick, to be fair, does hint at complexity. He quotes journalists on both sides of the political aisle, as well as a brave Israeli who bemoans the “non-existent” state of Israel’s liberal camp. He even finds space to mention a woman whose home was destroyed by an Iranian ballistic missile.
But he never actually talks to the people he’s pathologising: average Israelis who don’t have doctorates but do have sons fighting in Gaza, daughters mourning their dead husbands, and 21-year-olds who spent months in captivity in Gaza’s terror dungeons. Their voices are absent, because their views would puncture the narrative.
Instead, we get yet another dispatch from the “Tel Aviv is normal and that’s terrifying” genre – a genre that flourishes in elite journalism because it allows writers to moralise without reporting, to emote without asking hard questions, and to feel very, very brave while doing neither.
And let’s be honest: Remnick isn’t trying to understand Israeli society. He’s trying to shame it. He’s writing for the New Yorker reader who believes that all suffering is created equal, except when it’s Jewish. He’s writing for people who believe that noticing Palestinian pain is a sign of moral refinement, yet noticing Jewish trauma is provincial.
In the end, what David Remnick calls a “zone of denial” says far more about his own newsroom than it does about Israel. It’s a denial of history, of trauma, of the deeply rational fear driving Israeli behaviour today. It’s a refusal to grapple with the fact that for many Israelis, this isn’t about mere politics – it’s about surviving a genocidal enemy while the world asks you to apologise for fighting back.
Remnick had the resources and reach to write something insightful, to give The New Yorker’s audience an insight into the Israeli psyche. Instead, he wrote what his peers already believed. That’s not journalism. It’s an echo chamber in prose.
Remnick’s piece ends as it begins: with despair, not inquiry. But the real tragedy here isn’t the story he tells. It’s the story he refuses to consider: that in this war, the real “zone of denial” is not in Israel – it’s in the editorial offices of The New Yorker. And David Remnick is its mayor.
Josh Feldman is a Jerusalem-based writer, and contributor to the book “Young Zionist Voices: A New Generation Speaks Out.” Twitter/X: @joshrfeldman
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