Nicholas Kristof’s illogical, overreaching anti-Israel rant in the NYT  

In a 2023 paper entitled “Prison Rape and Sexual Assault: Prevalence, Vulnerabilities and System Responses Current Guidelines” by Kylee Synovec and April N. Terry of Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kansas, the authors noted that “according to a US Department of Justice report, more than 200,000 incarcerated persons are sexually assaulted in the United States every year.”

The report continued: “Some incarcerated people are at greater risk for prison sexual abuse, including groups such as women, those identifying as LGTBTQ+, and youth. Prison rape and sexual assault is not limited to inmate-on-inmate abuse; rather, studies find equivalent offending rates for both incarcerated people and facility staff. Many barriers exist to reporting the abuse, including, but not limited to, being ashamed, fearing the perpetrator’s response, and concern for retaliation by staff. If an incarcerated person makes a report, perpetrators are rarely punished.”

This perspective is important for an understanding, but certainly not acceptance, of the issue of alleged sexual abuse in Israeli prisons as described in the New York Times op-ed of Monday, May 11, by Nicholas Kristof, entitled: “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.”

Chicago native Kristof is not a lightweight. A respected American journalist and political commentator, he has won two Pulitzer Prizes, is a regular CNN contributor, and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times.

In his piece he writes:  “…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. There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes. But in recent years they have built 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.”

The UN is, of course, not a friend of Israel, given the fact that from 2015 through 2024, the UN General Assembly adopted 173 resolutions against Israel and 80 against all the other countries of the world combined. Nevertheless, Kristof does not hesitate to take their report as gospel.

That said, there does appear to be some level of sexual violence that goes on in Israeli prisons and, similar to the rest of the world, often the perpetrators are not held accountable. The fact that this goes on in prisons worldwide does not, of course, make it acceptable practice and Israel has taken a strong policy position against such activity.

But Kristof often relies on sources that themselves have been found to be unreliable. In a series of posts on X, the pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting challenged Kristof’s journalism, noting that the most explosive accounts in his op-ed came from unnamed sources, while the stories of those named had grown “steadily more lurid over time, with dramatic new details added years later.”

For example, one of Kristof’s sources, Sami al-Sai, had taken to social media on October 8, 2023, to praise the Hamas onslaught one day after it occurred, and eulogized the leader of a West Bank terror cell as “our martyred prince.”

HonestReporting also noted that, about a year ago, Sai spoke to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem about his alleged assault, and did not mention several specific, graphic details that he provided to Kristof, including being sodomized with a carrot, having his genitals grabbed by a female guard, and discovering “other people’s vomit, blood, and broken teeth” in his skin.

It also pointed out that Issa Amro, who told Kristof in 2024 that he had been assaulted on the day of the Hamas attack, had earlier told The Washington Post that he had been “threatened with sexual assault” on that day, not that he had been assaulted.

None of this, of course, excuses illegal activity of prison guards or, here in Israel, members of the IDF. Nor does it give a pass to a government that drops the charges against the accused, as it did in the Sde Teman case, simply because of community pressure.

This kind of activity is certainly not in keeping with the values of a county such as ours, which promises in its Declaration of Independence: The State of Israel “will be based on freedom, justice, and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race, or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, and culture; it will safeguard the holy places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the charter of the United Nations.”

Finally, Kristof engages in illogical overreach when he states: “Yet our American tax dollars subsidize the Israeli security establishment, so this is sexual violence in which the United States is complicit.”

Truth be told, the $3.8 billion of annual US military aid to Israel is used to purchase armaments from US defense manufacturers and, of course, has nothing to do with the prison system or its faults. A weapon used by an IDF soldier in Gaza cannot be linked to prison abuses. Actually, it is the weapons used against us on October 7^th and afterwards, paid for by the Iranians and Qataris, that are more logically linked to the alleged abuses in Kristof’s piece.

Given Kristof’s credentials and his admitted experience suggest that he would have exhibited a more nuanced sense of balance as opposed to his long anti-Israel rant. He acknowledges having had a “career covering war, genocide, and atrocities, including rape, sometimes in places where the scale of sexual violence is far greater than anything committed by either Hamas militants or Israeli guards or settlers. In the Tigray conflict in Ethiopia a few years ago, 100,000 women may have been raped (and) mass rape is now unfolding in Sudan.” Then again, it is the New York Times.