There is exactly one honest paragraph in Matthew Hennessey’s WSJ column about Mark Ruffalo, and it comes near the end, after he has run out of arguments and settled into pure contempt. He is describing what he believes terrorists do when they are hauled into court. They deny. They dodge. They point at the men who put them in the dock and say those men are the real criminals. This, he writes, is what terrorists always do when tried in open courts in democratic countries.
Read it again. Then think about the last three years.
Think about a state that has been found to have committed genocide by a United Nations commission of inquiry, that has watched its prime minister become the subject of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, and that has responded by calling the judges antisemites, calling the lawyers antisemites, calling the United Nations antisemitic, calling the aid workers Hamas, calling the doctors Hamas, calling the children human shields, and calling every photograph out of Gaza a fabrication. Think of a government that answers each new mass grave with the same sentence, worn smooth from overuse: they made us do it.
Hennessey wrote that paragraph about a Palestinian prisoner. He was describing Israel.
That is the shape of the entire column. Every charge he brings is a description of the thing he is defending. I want to walk through it, because the Journal put its name on this, and because the people it slanders are still in cages.
“Thank God For Freedom Of Speech”
The column opens with a small ceremony of self-congratulation. Ruffalo may say what he likes. Benedict Cumberbatch, Don Cheadle, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, Ian McKellen and the twenty-odd others who signed may say what they like. They live in the West, and in the West we have freedom of speech, and elsewhere in the world, speaking your mind costs you something. Then, as if reaching blindly into a hat and coming up with the one card he had grabbed, Hennessey produces his example: the Palestinian territories.
This is written by a man whose newsletter is called Free Expression, in the year 2026, in a country where a Columbia graduate student named Mahmoud Khalil was taken by federal agents in front of his pregnant wife, shipped to a detention center in Louisiana, and held for 104 days without being charged with a crime, because he had helped organize protests against a genocide. He had a green card. He missed the birth of his son.
In Britain, Palestine Action was proscribed under the Terrorism Act in July of last year. Since then, holding a piece of cardboard in a public square has been enough to get you arrested as a terrorist. By March of this year, police data showed 2,819 people arrested for expressing support for the group, forty-three percent of every terrorism-related arrest in Britain since 9/11. Only 484 of them had been charged. The rest were swept up, processed, and released, which was always the point. Ninety-seven percent of them were white, mostly older, many of them pensioners, which tells you the state was no longer bothering with the pretense that this was about security. It was about the sentence on the sign.
Across the United States, students were expelled, professors were denied tenure, writers lost columns, doctors lost hospital privileges, and workers were fired for a social media post. Journalists were pushed out of newsrooms for the crime of accuracy. Entire institutions rewrote their speech policies in a single season, and every rewrite pointed in one direction.
Hennessey knows all of this. He mentions it. He notes that people on the left describe a Palestine exception to free speech in the West, waves at the Wikipedia page devoted to it, and calls the notion preposterous. He does not engage a single case. Not Khalil. Not the three thousand arrests in London. He simply declares the thing absurd and moves on, in a column that exists because twenty actors signed a letter and he believes they should be humiliated for it.
He is right that free expression is not guaranteed everywhere. He just has the geographic coordinates wrong.
The Part Where I Agree With Him, Briefly
Let me be clear, because I have no interest in the kind of argument that requires me to pretend.
The Palestinian Authority arrests journalists. It arrests critics. It tortures some of them. The Human Rights Watch report Hennessey cites is real, and it is damning, and it covers both the PA in Ramallah and Hamas in Gaza. The last Palestinian election was in 2006. There are Palestinians voting age today who have never once voted. The PA coordinates its security with the occupation that rules it, and has arrested Palestinians for resisting that occupation, and this is a wound Palestinians talk about constantly among ourselves, in a register of grief and rage that has no analogue in the English-language press.
None of that is a secret. None of it is a defense of anything.
Here is what Hennessey wants you to do with it. He wants you to hold up a police state operating under occupation, funded and armed and constrained by that occupation, and use it as proof that the occupied are unfit for freedom or dignity. The logic is as lame as it is old and it has been used on every colonized people who ever lived. Look how they govern themselves. Look at the state of them. As if the cage were incidental to the condition of the animal.
And if he wants to talk about who silences journalists, we can talk about that. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented at least 263 journalists and media workers killed by Israel since October 2023. Israel has now killed more journalists than any other government since CPJ began keeping records in 1992, which makes this the deadliest war for the press ever recorded. CPJ has determined that at least 75 of them were deliberately targeted in reprisal for their work, and says the real figure is likely higher, because Israel has refused access to Gaza for any foreign reporter or researcher who might check. Brown University’s Costs of War project found Israel killed more journalists than the Civil War, both World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, the Yugoslav wars and Afghanistan combined.
That is the press freedom record of the country Hennessey is desperate to defend.
The Lie About 2000
Hennessey then reaches for the oldest coin in the drawer. Palestinians, he writes, turned down President Clinton’s offer of a state in 2000. Israel left Gaza entirely in 2005. Offered coexistence, they chose violence. Offered peace, they chose war.
The truth is, There was no offer. There was no map. Nothing was put on paper at Camp David. What was discussed verbally was a state cut into pieces by settlement blocs and bypass roads, with no control of its borders, its airspace, its water, or its capital. Clinton’s own Middle East adviser, Robert Malley, who was in the room, spent years afterward publicly dismantling the myth his own president had helped build. The talks did not end at Camp David either. They continued at Taba in January 2001, where both delegations said they had come closer than ever before. Then Ariel Sharon was elected and it was over.
As for Gaza in 2005, Sharon’s own chief of staff explained the purpose out loud at the time. Dov Weisglass told Haaretz that the disengagement was formaldehyde, a preservative poured over the peace process to freeze it in place and take Palestinian statehood off the table indefinitely. Israel pulled out around 8,500 settlers and kept the airspace, the coastline, the borders, the population registry, and the power to even decide how many calories entered the strip. Two years later it sealed the place shut. Half of Gaza’s population were children who had never been permitted to leave.
Notice who has agency in his sentence and who doesn't. Palestinians are perpetually the ones who refuse. Never the ones refused. Something is always being extended to them and they are always turning it down, and so their dispossession becomes a bill they ran up themselves. Land taken from them, dignity taken from them, children buried by them, and still the only question anyone asks is why they will not accept.
So let us test it. Name the Israeli prime minister who offered a Palestinian state and meant it. Not spoke about one at a podium in Washington. Meant it, and built policy toward it, and stopped the settlements that make it impossible. There is no such person, and there is no such candidte waiting in the wings either. Gadi Eisenkot is the former army chief of staff now leading the polls to unseat Netanyahu in October. He named his party Yashar, which means honest. David Remnick profiled him in the New Yorker as “the anti-Bibi”, a plain soldier who wants a liberal and democratic state. Last week Eisenkot ruled out a Palestinian state in a post on X, writing that no such state exists and that none would be established under any government he forms.
Netanyahu said the same thing the same week. That is the choice on the ballot. Still, somehow, one of them is described, dishonestly, by the American press as the way out.
Someone here has spent sixty years refusing peace, and It isn't the side with no army.
The Gay Line
Near the end, Hennessey does something worth naming plainly. He tells his readers that Ruffalo and his friends will sleep peacefully tonight, that no masked men will come for them at midnight, and that some of them will go to sleep beside someone of the same sex, which he says would get them killed in Gaza.
There is a name for this and it has been in use for fifteen years. Pinkwashing. It works by conjuring queer people into the argument as a rhetorical device, holding them up as the reason Palestinians deserve the horrific injustices being done to them, and then setting them down and never thinking about them again. Queer Palestinians exist. They are not a hypothetical in a New York columnist’s closing flourish. They lived in Gaza and many of them have too been murdered by Israel now, killed by the same munitions as everyone else.
The country Hennessey is defending has no civil marriage of any kind. Two Israeli men cannot be married in Israel. In 2014, forty-three veterans of Unit 8200, Israel’s elite intelligence corps, signed a public letter refusing further service. They said the material they were ordered to collect on Palestinians included information about their sexuality, and that it was used to coerce them into becoming informants. Threatening to out a gay Palestinian to his family was a recruitment method. That is the tender regard for queer life on offer here.
Hennessey does not give a shit about queer people in Gaza. He needed them for one sentence. He put them down when he was finished, you know, the way you set down a prop.
Marwan, Palestine’s Mandela
And now the man himself, whom the column calls a convicted murderer and a terrorist and the architect of the Second Intifada, and whose imprisonment is treated as a settled matter because a corrupt court in Tel Aviv said so.
Marwan Barghouti was seized from Ramallah in 2002 by the army of the state that tried him. He was charged over dozens of deaths. He refused to mount a defense, telling the judges that their court was an instrument of the occupation and that he would not dignify it. The panel found insufficient evidence on 21 of the deaths in the indictment and convicted him on five. The Inter-Parliamentary Union examined the case and concluded that his arrest and trial involved numerous breaches of international law and that the trial was not fair. He has now been in a cell for twenty-four years. His lawyers and his family continue to report that he is being beaten, held in isolation, and starved.
By February of this year, UNICEF reported 71,803 Palestinians killed in Gaza, among them at least 21,289 children. Close to three in every ten. When the United Nations commission of inquiry published its findings in June, it treated that ratio as evidence. The commission concluded that Israel had deliberately targeted Palestinian children, during the war and after the ceasefire, and that this was one of the key elements establishing genocidal intent.
Let’s sit with that ratio for a second. Of every ten people Israel murdered in Gaza, three had not finished growing. The killing did not stop when the ceasefire came either. It has since slowed to about one child killed a day.
The Journal has published no column listing the names of Gaza’s children, because the column would be thousands of pages long.
The Mandela comparison enrages Hennessey, as it should. Because it fits.
Mandela was convicted too, in a court that called itself legitimate, in a country that called itself a democracy, under laws that called him a terrorist. He had led an armed wing. He did not deny it. When the apartheid government offered him release in 1985 on the condition that he renounce violence, he refused, and his daughter read his answer to a crowd in Soweto. He would not buy his freedom by granting the state the right to have jailed him.
Barghouti made the same calculation in a Tel Aviv courtroom in 2004. He would not mount a defense, because mounting one would concede that the court had standing over him.
The rest of the parallel is the part Hennessey will not touch. Mandela mattered because he was the one figure who could hold a fractured movement together and negotiate on its behalf. Barghouti has topped every Palestinian poll for twenty years, from prison, ahead of Abbas and ahead of Hamas. He drafted a document with prisoners from every faction that pointed toward a state on the 1967 lines. He told an Israeli court in 2012 that the conflict ends when the occupation does. He is the closest thing to a partner Israel has, which is precisely why he is in a cell.
Margaret Thatcher called the ANC a typical terrorist organization. The Journal’s editorial page spent those years warning about the dangers of divesting from South Africa. The United States kept Mandela on its terrorism watch list until 2008, fourteen years after he was elected president. This is the argument that was made about a man the world now names airports after. Hennessey is making it again.
The Confession
So here is what I would say to Matthew Hennessey, and to the editors who ran this, and to whoever wrote the headline about the enemies of civilization.
You told us what terrorists do when they are put on trial. They deny the legitimacy of the court. They attack the judges. They insist they had no choice, that their victims forced their hand, that the killing was made necessary by someone else.
Israel has stood before the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court and done all of it. It has called the proceedings a blood libel. It has sanctioned the prosecutor. It has told the world that every hospital was a command center, every school an armory, every dead child a regrettable consequence of someone else’s decision. They made us do it.
Matthew, you wrote the confession yourself. You put it under a masthead that says Free Expression, on a page that spent three years explaining why the students should be expelled and the reporters should be fired and the protesters should be arrested.
That paragraph is the only honest one in the piece. I would only fix the attribution.
Thank you for your excellent explanation. Israel is Evil.
Excellent writing! When will it all end?