Israel’s Critics Have Canceled Themselves

Over the past year, activists who accuse Israel of war crimes and other misdeeds have faced unfair charges of anti-Semitism and attacks on their free speech from the Trump administration. Now these advocates are being silenced by a new scheme: a grassroots petition to keep some 300 vociferous champions of the Palestinian cause from publishing editorials in The New York Times.

You might wonder why such an insidiously illiberal maneuver has produced no outcry from the left. The answer is that the effort to keep these voices out of the Times is in fact the brainchild of the activists themselves.

A new letter signed by more than 300 writers, academics, and other public figures, including the novelist Sally Rooney and the activist Greta Thunberg, attacks the Times as a bastion of “anti-Palest