Israel’s consulate in New York will no longer pay for The New York Times. Consul General Ofir Akunis announced Friday that he has ordered the cancellation of every Times subscription held by employees of the Israeli Consulate in Manhattan, ending a standing institutional expense at one of Israel’s most prominent diplomatic posts abroad.

Akunis said the decision followed what he described as a series of false blood libels and sustained incitement against the Jewish state in the newspaper’s pages. He called the Times a paper that “consistently incites against the Jewish state.” Pointing to a recent report, Akunis accused the paper of building its account on unnamed and unreliable figures, and said the sources behind an earlier story were Hamas terrorists.

He did not identify the specific article by name. The Times had not issued a public response as of Friday evening.

What the consulate actually buys

The order covers workplace subscriptions — the digital and print access the consulate purchases for staff as a business expense, the same way law firms, banks and government offices buy news access for employees. Akunis is not directing Israeli citizens or the broader diplomatic corps to cancel anything. The action is confined to what the consulate itself pays for.

The consulate at 800 Second Avenue is Israel’s largest mission in the United States outside Washington and handles public diplomacy, business ties and consular services across the Northeast. Akunis, a former Likud lawmaker and government minister, has held the post since May 2024.

The financial math

For the newspaper’s owner, the dollar impact is close to nothing.

The New York Times Company reported second-quarter revenue of $762.5 million on August 5, up 11.2 percent from a year earlier, with operating profit of $118 million. The company added roughly 280,000 net digital-only subscribers in the quarter, lifting its total base to 13.35 million. Average revenue per digital subscriber came to $9.94 a month.

At that rate, a few dozen canceled workplace subscriptions amount to a few hundred dollars a month against a company generating more than $400 million a quarter in digital subscription revenue alone. The move is a statement, not a financial blow.

What makes the timing notable is that the Times is already under pressure from a direction that has nothing to do with Israel. Shares fell more than 13 percent after the quarterly report, because the 280,000 subscriber additions came in below Wall Street forecasts and below the 310,000 the company added in the prior quarter. Chief Executive Meredith Kopit Levien attributed the softness to a shifting information landscape controlled by a handful of large technology companies that are sending less traffic to publishers. The company also guided third-quarter digital subscription revenue growth down to a range of 12 to 15 percent.

In other words, the subscriber engine that made the Times the benchmark of the paid-news era is slowing for structural reasons — search and AI answering readers’ questions before they ever reach a paywall — and a diplomatic cancellation lands on top of that rather than causing it.

A longer-running dispute

Friction between the Israeli government and the Times is not new. The paper has previously revisited its own reporting on Gaza, including a case in which it said it had obtained new information, among other sources from the hospital that treated a Gazan child featured in its coverage. Israeli officials have repeatedly challenged the paper’s sourcing on Gaza; the Times has defended its reporting practices and its use of confidential sources.

The fight is over credibility rather than cash. Institutional subscriptions carry a signaling function beyond their price: universities, embassies and corporations buying a paper is a form of endorsement, and canceling is a form of withdrawal. Governments that have taken similar steps in the past — declining to renew media contracts, revoking press credentials, pulling advertising — have generally found the symbolic value outweighs the accounting.

What to watch

Two questions follow. The first is whether other Israeli missions in the United States follow the New York consulate’s lead, which would turn a single office’s decision into a government-wide posture. The second is whether consulate staff simply lose access to a newspaper their jobs arguably require them to monitor — a practical cost that falls on the consulate, not the publisher.

For advertisers and media buyers watching the New York market, the episode is a reminder that the institutional segment of news subscriptions, small as it is relative to consumer sign-ups, is exposed to politics in a way the consumer base is not. For the Times, the number that will move the stock next quarter is still the one that has nothing to do with Jerusalem.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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