Jodi Rudoren’s latest article from Israel for the New York Times is another promotion of Israel’s fortress mentality: a loving profile of an artist who emigrated from the U.S. and produces pieces about Iran building nuclear weapons to attack Israel. The artist, Andi Arnovitz, is obsessed with the alleged threat from Iran.

There is “Fordow’s Underground,” a reference to the secret uranium-enrichment plant whose fate has been among the sticking points in negotiations between Iran and six world powers, rendered here from bits of images of Persian carpets as flowers atop machinery operated by men in turbans. . . Some of the titles could be agenda items from the nuclear negotiations: “The Centrifuges Are Spinning,” “Fission and Fusion,” “Isfahan Is Very Quiet,” “Making Uranium Ore Concentrate.”

And we learn that Arnovitz combs Hali magazine, an art magazine for the Islamic world, and finds “disturbing things” there.

The message of the story is: our very existence is at risk here, the Iranians could be dropping bombs on us and I’m doing art about it.

With this piece, Rudoren shows her hand yet again. This article was contrived: There’s no reason to go out and write about an artist depicting a theoretical Iranian attack when Rudoren could easily find Palestinian kids who are having bombs dropped on their heads right now and who have made art about that. (See the painful drawing above.) So the story selection is clearly designed to support Israel.

The Times editors have made a contract with pro-Israel readers. There’s a special meaning to the term, “contract pieces;” the late publisher A.O. Sulzberger Sr. used to have things he wanted covered in the paper, say, changes to Central Park, or another of his hobbyhorses. And a reporter was sent out cover it. The “contract pieces” were mostly innocuous and didn’t appear every day.

But Rudoren’s latest piece of propaganda shows that the Times has abdicated any responsibility as far as Israel/Palestine is concerned to publish all the news that’s fit to print. The paper has an ideological agenda to build support for Israel.

I say this as someone who doesn’t automatically object to the Times’s foreign coverage. Its Cairo correspondent, David Kirkpatrick, does an excellent job of reporting on a complicated situation; they should let him write more. The Times’ coverage of China over the years has been excellent. I don’t criticize the Times just because it’s an establishment paper.

But the Israel coverage is something different. The paper relentlessly promotes the Israeli view of the world: from sanctifying an Israeli soldier who lost his life in 1973, to characterizing the boycott movement of Israel as anti-Semitic, to enshrining Israelis who got tattoos in memory of the Holocaust, to praising Israel’s “glorious” film festival, to spotlighting a book that prints the word “Jew” 6 million times to commemorate the Holocaust, to Rudoren’s papering over of genocidal statements by Israeli officials, to her claim that only a “small strain” in Israeli society believes that the West Bank should stay in Israeli hands.

There is just nothing to compare with this slavish coverage when it comes to conveying Palestinian life to Americans.

And the danger here is that while there are lots of online sources for people who don’t subscribe to this view of Israel — and many of Times’ own readers are challenging the mainstream narrative in the comment section — the Times is our leading newspaper and it is setting the agenda even more than it used to because other papers don’t have foreign correspondents anymore. What goes into the Times very much affects the debate.

The Times is now a pro-Israel weapon. Who’s decided that? I don’t know.

Its function reminds me of that British diplomat who was later quoted about the runup to the Iraq war; Washington has decided that it is going to invade, and the task now was to collect the intelligence to justify the attack. The New York Times has decided it is going to support Israel; the task now is to write stories that make readers agree this is the wise course.