Nicholas Kristof’s recent, incendiary op-ed about mass rape committed against Palestinians is now a confusing case in point about the political and moral morass that is Israel under Netanyahu after October 7. There is, in fact, reliable reporting about the systemic abuse, including a pattern of sexual abuse and rape, suffered by Palestinians at the hand of the Israel Prison Service. Kristof’s op-ed builds off that reporting. What begs belief is the sourcing behind the malicious claim by Kristof that Israel has trained dogs to rape Palestinians and the imputation that the government of Israel, in the mirror image of Hamas and worse, pursues a policy of systematic, mass rape. That the New York Times is no longer a reliable source of information and analysis on Palestine and Israel is its own professional responsibility –while the government of Israel has only itself to blame for the moral and political confusion and morass with which it has surrounded the country.

On its own, the op-ed by Kristof is a mix of truth and lies. There is every reason to believe as reported by Kristof the accounts told by victims of alleged rape and other acts of sexual violence at the hands of Israeli authorities. But when you break the op-ed into component parts, you begin to see how the larger takeaway does not hang together. Because for whatever reason, Kristof chose to rely heavily on Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Hamas-linked NGO based in Geneva, to frame this narrative about Palestine and Israel. About Euro-Med you can read here more at the rightwing site NGO Monitor. That Kristof did nothing in the op-ed to identify Euro-Med and the controversy about it makes for dishonest opinion, at the very least.

The op-ed follows a point-by-point logic:

[1] Kristof writes, “There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes.”

[2] Kristof continues, “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.” A report out last month, from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based advocacy group often critical of Israel, concludes that Israel employs “systematic sexual violence” that is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy” (emphasis added). Kristof goes on to compare this sexual violence with alleged accounts relating to the extraordinary scale of organized mass rape in the Tigray conflict in Ethiopia and in Sudan.

[3] Kristof concedes, “It’s impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are.”

[4] At this point, the analysis goes off the rails. After terrible stories by credible Palestinian witnesses is the claim that Israel is using trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners. This unhinged and impossible story has gotten the lion’s share of critical attention drawing attention away from grave and confirmed allegations about the ill-treatment of Palestinians under Israeli authority. Then, the final word of the op-ed compares the pattern of abuse in Israel with the mass scale of sexual assault by Palestinians against Israeli civilians on and after October 7. Again to draw a moral equivalence, Kristof claims that, “The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day” after having just said that it is impossible to know how common these assaults are.

How, then, to explain this garble on the part of a distinguished journalist? Absent the decision to allow Euro-Med to frame the analysis, Kristof’s op-ed would have more than held up based on the interviews alone; and the allegations would have not been so easy to dismiss by Israeli government officials and others acting in bad faith. If one were to hazard a guess, it is that, between Palestine and Israel, Kristof wants to maintain something by way of moral balance; and gets lost in the radicalized politics of the region. This is a sign of the times. To balance the ethno-religious fascism of an Israeli government hellbent on war crimes, Kristof goes to a Hamas front cum European NGO. But there is no balance to be had. Between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea, the entire region running through Israel and Lebanon and Palestine and Syria has gone helter-skelter after October 7.

As recognized by Kristof, the problem is that “The Israeli government rejects suggestions that it sexually abuses Palestinians, just as Hamas denied raping Israeli women.” Both claims are unbelievable. But the op-ed is also unbelievable, not in whole, but in some large and significant part. Introduced is a third element in the story, this one about Nicholas Kristof himself and reporting at the New York Times, responsibility for which lies on him and his editors.

By way of establishing moral equivalence, Kristof wants to establish a single narrative throughline. But, per here by Haviv Rettig-Gur, there are, in fact, two separate stories now surrounding the op-ed. . One is the election of the unhinged government of Netanyahu in November 2022 and the systemic abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, including grave instances of sexual assault, the destruction of Gaza, and galloping annexation in the occupied West Bank after October 7, 2023. The other story is the assault on Israel by the Iran-backed Axis of Resistance and, with it, the systematic demonization of Israel, and a tsunami of anti-Semitism, also after October 7, now based on narratives shaped in mainstream media by members of the so-called human rights community in synch with Hamas style talking points.

Responding to the Kristof op-ed, Hen Mazzig notes here that the New York Times has not had on staff a public editor since 2017. The public editor is an internal ombudsman position meant to ensure fair, accurate, and transparent reporting. You can read more about the decision here and here as reported at the New York Times itself, and wonder about the impact on the publication. Removing this layer of journalistic accounting sheds further light upon coverage and analysis of Israel and Palestine, now at a moment of radical crisis. Responding to the digital age, the decision by Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. was based on the assumption that “readers and social media followers collectively serve as a modern watchdog.”  Those of us who want to understand better about physical and moral injury and politics in Palestine and Israel are caught between a rock and a hard place in this challenging digital environment, assessing the difference between a truth and a lie, and the way they fold into each other with such stunning ease.