When the establishment journalism of Nicholas Kristof of that most establishment of papers, the New York Times, draws the ire of a foreign regime, and an unnaturally allied foreign regime at that, a pulse might be detected in the moribund state that is the Fourth Estate. In his piece alleging a campaign of sexual violence against Palestinians by Israel’s security apparatus, he shines some blistering light on practices long suspected and discussed. It begins a proposition that, “Whatever our views of the Middle East conflict, we should be able to unite in condemn rape.”
With that solemn theme declared, Kristof begins by remarking on the “brutal sexual assaults against Israeli women during the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct.7, 2023.” Members of the US administration and the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had rightly condemned them. “And yet in wrenching interviews, Palestinians have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children – by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency, and, above all, prison guards.”
Brandishing his credentials as veteran war reporter, he makes it clear that, when writing about sexual violence, he knows what he’s talking about. Interest in the fate of Palestinian prisoners – especially in that way – was piqued during a visit to the activist and professor of non-violence Issa Amro. Amro had himself been sexually assaulted and suspected this to be a common practice “but underreported because of shame.” Interest then shifts to the conditions of incarceration, with something in the order of 9,000 Palestinians being held as of May. “Many have not been charged but were detained on ill-defined security grounds, and since 2023, most have been denied visits from the Red Cross and lawyers.”
Kristof then makes use of material gathered in 14 conversations with men and women who claim to have been sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers and the security forces, supplemented by the accounts of family members, investigators, officials and other sources. Reports are cited – Euro-Med, Save the Children, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the United Nations. The views of Sari Bashi, an Israeli American human rights lawyer who heads the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel are documented: “Rampant sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners is a thing; it’s been normalized.” While he had seen no evidence such acts had been executed in accordance with a plan or program, “the authorities know it’s happening and are not stopping it.”
Kristof restates that point, finding “no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes.” But what had germinated in recent years was “a security apparatus where sexual violence has become, as a United Nations report put it last year, one of Israel’s ‘standard operating procedures’ and ‘a major element in the ill-treatment of Palestinians’.”
And, as if we ever needed evidence to demonstrate that Israel’s prison system has become a foul stew of corruption, brutality and malice towards its Palestinian inmates, we only need witness the gloating joy of Israel’s Minister for National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, who makes a ghoulish habit of posting videos glorying over their misfortune and suffering. (Sexual violence doesn’t tend to make the cut, but threats of execution do.) The fact that he thought such treatment appropriate for the activists of the Global Sumud Flotilla (his posted video sufficiently demonstrates this point) showed a consistent ecumenicism on cruelty: All who dare go against Israel’s interests or dare provide sympathy to the enemy (all Palestinians are, in Ben-Gvir-lese, the enemy) deserve what they get. For such a figure to boisterously thrive, the soil had to have been appropriately manured.
Reaction to the article in Israel was biliously swift and full of rage. The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, worked himself up sufficiently to claim that Israel’s soldiers had been “defamed” by Kristof; a “blood libel about rape” had been perpetrated by an attempt to “create a false symmetry between the genocidal terrorists of Hamas and Israel’s valiant soldiers.”
In a media post, Israel’s ministry of foreign affairs announced what steps would be taken. “Following the publication by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times of one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press, which also received the backing of the newspaper, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar have instructed the initiation of a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times.”
Kristof’s critics have decided to layer the blood libel allegation with sinister suggestions that writing about Israeli sexual abuses against Palestinian prisoners and detainees should not take place because it seasons pre-existing antisemitic sentiments. Avoid the talk about plans, programs and systems gone to the bad: patterns suggest conspiracy, and conspiracy suggests hidden forces in clandestine boardrooms plotting predation and cruelty. Thus, we have David Frum rumbling in The Atlantic about the increasingly violent attacks on Jews in the broader Western world as attributable to “anti-Jewish sentiment that draws on the deepest foundations of anti-Jewish myth.” Presumably, Palestinian victims of rape have added their share to that myth.
To its credit, the paper has held the line. Spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander confirmed that the accounts of the 14 men and women interviewed for the article had been “corroborated with other witnesses, whenever possible, and with people the victims confided in – that includes family members and lawyers. Details were extensively fact-checked, with accounts further cross-referenced with news reporting, independent research from human-rights groups, surveys in one case, with UN testimony.” Independent experts were also called upon through the reporting and verification phase. In a separate statement, the paper noted that the legal threat was “part of a well-worn political playbook that aims to undermine independent reporting and stifle journalism that does not fit a specific narrative. Any such legal claim would be without merit.”
Lawyers in Israel specialising in defamation law speculate about the chances of such an action credibly taking place let alone credibly succeeding. Liat Bergman Ravid of the firm Klein & Co is of the view that such a civil claim had “a low likelihood of success” seeing as the country’s Defamation Law barred collectives from bringing civil actions to court. The Attorney General might, however “file an indictment against the person who made the statement, but this is a rare event, bordering on non-existent.” Rare or non-existent, Idan Seger of Simchony, Klein, Sananes & Co was open to the suggestion. Were the case to groan into court, the paper “would face a far more stringent burden of proof in Israel than under the US standard, as a mere lack of malice is insufficient to avoid liability.” Absolute truth would have to be proved. That would be most telling on the Israeli authorities, were that allowed to happen.