I wept while reading the names of children. Mian Yahya Youssef Al-Astal, age 0; Zein al-Din Suleiman Moin al-Najjar, age 0; Yasmine Ramez Abdul Razzaq El Masry, age 0. I read from the first edition of the New York War Crimes, a protest prop headlined: “CEASEFIRE NOW!” The paper was meant to record and honor a small fraction of Gaza’s dead, in the order of their ages. Page one ended with Zaid Adel Awni Al-Dous, age 4. The four-page spread ended before the list of dead children.
It was November 9, 2023, and I was standing in the lobby of the New York Times headquarters in Midtown with comrades from the Writers Bloc, a protest offshoot of the Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG), and 200 people called to action by us. Our group — journalists, editors, artists — had rapidly spun up the action in the weeks after October 7, driven by both fury and despair. At the time of the protest, over 10,000 Palestinians had been killed. While videos of children blown apart flooded our Twitter timelines, the New York Times innovated with the passive voice: After Israeli forces bombed a hospital in Gaza, the Times headline read “Hundreds Reported Killed in Blast at a Gaza Hospital.” Who does the blasting? And who is killed? At the Times, where even using the word “Palestine” is discouraged, the starkness of the genocide is muddied.
As we were driven out of the Times building by the cops, we screamed the names of the dead and papered the lobby with copies of the New York War Crimes. At the time we had no idea what could come next, or to what lows the mainstream media would go to co-sign the genocidal actions of Israel and the United States. But we promised to be back.
As long as the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets continue to misrepresent what is happening in occupied Palestine, WAWOG’s hundreds of members will continue to hold the cultural front against Israeli genocide and occupation. Since its formation in October 2023, WAWOG has led efforts to get publications to sign on to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), campaigned for writers to boycott PEN America due to the free speech group’s genocide apologia, led numerous actions including disrupting the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, promoted fundraisers for Palestinians, and hosted political education with chapters that have sprung up across the country.
Over the last nine months, New York War Crimes has gone from agitprop to movement resource. We have produced 12 issues. Each edition has a circulation of 5,000 to 10,000. Each edition must be fact-checked, designed, printed, and distributed — all of which takes skills and money. It’s a daunting task, but luckily there are dozens of us, and more join every day. I am one of many inside this collective, and just a small part of it. The following reflections on how the paper has grown are my own, but were developed inside the collective space that WAWOG has built together.
ALL FOR ONE, ONE FOR ALL
The first three issues of the New York War Crimes, all produced to accompany actions during fall 2023, were records of the dead. In 2024 the collective decided to expand the purpose of the paper to be a counterbalance to the feckless and damaging coverage by the Times and other media outlets. On January 12 we printed a special “decolonial feminism” edition in which we invited the Feminist Solidarity Network for Palestine to write detailed responses to the Times’ controversial and now largely discredited October 7 story on mass rape against Israelis by Palestinians. By not attaching any particular writer’s name, and instead listing it under a collective, we avoided doxxing and harassment.
In future issues we continued to avoid individual bylines. This offers protection for freelance journalists who fear blacklisting from the mainstream media publications they rely on to pay rent, but it also reflects our commitment to collectivity. We are part of a movement and no one stands alone. The clout economy of publishing often threatens collective politics. By rejecting the individualism of bylines for our in-house writers, the New York War Crimes avoids becoming a way for any one of us to gain particular prestige and, therefore, propriety over it. Our writing belongs to and is presented by all of us.
We did continue to use bylines for Palestinian writers who are featured in the paper. These writers are being shut out by the mainstream media and it is important that their voices are elevated and recognized when in so many other spaces they are shunned.
PHYSICAL MATTERS
The fact that the New York War Crimes is a physical paper is key, though it introduces some challenges. To make the paper look convincingly like the real New York Times, we needed to find the paper’s typeface. Luckily, we knew someone who knew someone with access to the typeface and layout. This is the benefit of WAWOG: We were the people who made the mainstream press possible, in part, and the divestment of our labor from those publications means that we can bring our skills, experience, and shit we stole from those places over to the New York War Crimes.
Before the paper goes to print, there is a collective review of each piece. Imagine a magazine’s editorial process and then imagine it just a little bit more chaotic. Art is sourced from archives or occasionally created by members or friends of the paper. Once the text has closed, typically one or two designers lay out the issue, which takes about a week or less. After the editorial collective for that issue reviews the proofs, they are sent to a printer in Long Island City, who is able to produce the thousands of copies needed with a one-day turnaround. They leave the papers out on the loading docks for us and we do a typical New York scramble to find a car for the day.
Printing thousands of papers requires cash and we’re lucky to have easily fundraised through our Twitters, Instagrams, and at our magazine job happy hours. For those who are sympathetic to the cause but cannot express their views at their jobs, we always welcome cash donations. Despite the initial relative ease, it remains true for us and all alternative left publications that money is a constraint. One of the ongoing tasks for left media in general is to figure out how to take the profits of the empire and invest them in tools that work against empire.
Despite the costs and the logistics, producing a real, physical paper matters. (Though we do also publish online, as of March.) When something exists on the same plane as you do, as life does, and not merely on a screen, it becomes more real. People in the imperial core treat this genocide as something happening far “over there,” on a separate physical plane from “over here.” The paper is one way we try to bring Gaza here. We put it in your hands, and say, see: These people live.
BE OUT ON THE TOWN
From November to March, the paper was only distributed at actions, like occupying the Times lobby or protesting the Committee to Protect Journalists’ annual International Press Freedom Awards dinner. In March, we organized a multi-site action against the Times’ offices, disrupting their annual all-hands meeting and their distribution center in Queens.
Our goal was to disrupt people’s ability to consume the paper that morning and to present an alternative. So we created a network of “newsies” who hawked the free papers on corners across Manhattan and curated a list of bodegas and bookstores where people could pick up the latest edition. This was a huge success in getting the paper to more people, and making it less ephemeral — it doesn’t just exist on the day of an action.
The newsie network also provided another entry point to the work for those who aren’t writers or editors. The network is constantly growing, and people’s personal connections to their local shops helps us expand locations where the New York War Crimes can be found.
FROM PALESTINE, WITH LOVE
We have developed authentic relationships to people under siege in Palestine, and through these relationships we’ve been able to publish perspectives from Palestinians on what is happening in their homeland and how they feel about the ongoing struggle for liberation.
Commissioning work from Palestine, especially from Gaza, can be difficult. People do not always have reliable communication methods, and even when they do, their situations are such that just surviving can take up all their time. Writing can be a luxury. But Palestinians continue to call out to the rest of the world; in the pages of the New York War Crimes, we elevate their voices. Often, we collaborate with other organizations for new translations. For instance, for Issue 6 (“Stop the Presses: Free Palestine!”), we republished diaries written in Gaza and translated by the Passages Through Genocide project; this included entries by Noor Swirki, a Palestinian journalist who has continued to report despite her own displacement. For Issue 11 (“No Pride in Genocide — Shame!”), we worked with Pinko magazine to republish email exchanges from queer Gazans living in Rafah and Northern Gaza. These are perspectives that the New York Times does not show.
We also commission new work. In our May Day edition, we published a call from the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions for workers worldwide to stand behind the workers of Palestine through work stoppage and the boycott of Israeli goods. Sometimes we publish poetry, in both Arabic and English, like a poem by Haidar al-Ghazali, a student at the Islamic University of Gaza (destroyed on October 10, 2023, by Israeli airstrikes). Both dispatches show that Palestinian people refuse to be only victims of a genocide; they demand dignity as workers, as students, and recognition of their humanity. And they will fight for their lives in every way they can, and ask us to fight with them. One stanza of al-Ghazali’s poem reads:
Teach your children
that the earth is one body
that borders are an invention
that killing you will be easy
if you don’t refuse to kill.
Voices from Palestine demand not just a ceasefire, but true solidarity from those abroad and true liberation from the Zionist occupation.
GO HARD
The New York War Crimes will never compromise on being pro-liberation and pro-revolution. This is the line that the mainstream media can never promote or acknowledge. The New York Times is a propaganda machine for the imperialist world order. It is our duty to be the counterweight.
We say in the pages of the paper the same thing that the masses say in the streets: It is right to rebel!
Cheryl Rivera is an editor at Lux.
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