In the summer of 2010, an Egyptian government minister sought to explain why a series of shark attacks in the Red Sea had taken place exclusively in Egyptian waters and not in Israeli waters. His answer: The Mossad had systematically trained the sharks to eat only Arab flesh.
His remark was widely reported and equally widely ridiculed as just the latest example of belief in the superpowers of the Jews, bordering on black magic. Ridiculed or not, that explanation launched an entire genre in the Palestinian media of Israel's use of animals — dolphins, squirrels, pigeons — to spy on its enemies.
In 2024, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor in Geneva promoted a wrinkle of the genre: Israel has trained dogs to attack Palestinian prisoners in unnatural ways that degrade and dehumanize them. Nor was that the first of Euro-Med's charges of heinous behavior by IDF soldiers: A November 2023 report raised "concerns" that the IDF was harvesting the organs of Palestinian corpses.
For obvious reasons, these charges gained little currency. The impossibility of the former, for one; and the total lack of corroboration or supporting evidence of any kind with respect to the second.
The lack of credibility to Euro-Med's charges is no surprise. The head of the supposed human rights center, Ramy Abdu, was identified by Israel as a Hamas operative in Europe as early as 2013. Nor did he make any attempt to hide his support of Hamas. After October 7, he addressed a post to the Hamas perpetrators of mass slaughter in Israel, "History will immortalize you as knightly heroes who forged for us a pure glory."
Only when New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, published a 4,000-word "opinion" piece (nearly twice as long as my own too-long pieces), in which he recirculated Euro-Med's most astounding charge about the degrading abuse of Palestinian prisoners, did that claim gain widespread attention. It shouldn't have.
ROY K. ALTMAN, the youngest federal district judge in the United States at the time of his appointment to the federal bench, at 36, dissects Kristof's piece in appropriately lawyerly fashion in Tablet ("A Miscarriage of Journalism at the New York Times"). Kristof, he demonstrates, shuns all the traditional tools used by courts for distinguishing truth from fiction. First, he relies almost entirely on anonymous sources, without even providing dates or other identifying details of when the alleged actions took place. Those sources of necessity can never be cross-examined or challenged.
Israel, for instance, maintains complete video surveillance in its prisons. And the recorded surveillance could have either provided support for the charges being made or helped refute them.
Kristof defends his reliance on anonymous sources on the grounds that those sources might have been subject to reprisals had they been named. Leaving aside whether that justifies anonymity — it certainly would not have in a court of law — the experience of Kristof's few named sources refutes the claim that they would have been subject to reprisals. None of them were.
And when Kristof does provide names, he omits all the reasons to be suspicious of their testimony. Sami al-Sai, for instance, is described simply as a "freelance journalist." But al-Sai's descriptions of a Gazan terrorist as "our martyred leader," and a post on October 8 celebrating the "green flag [of Hamas] flying over the camps of the occupier," are not mentioned.
The term "journalist," in the context of Gaza, too often refers to a Hamas operative. Salo Aizenberg of Honest Reporting has identified at least 50 so-called journalists whose death notices have identified them as Hamas operatives. And the High Court found that to be true of al-Sai, in his petition that he was being wrongfully detained.
Kristol cites a Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) report to the effect that 32 percent of "journalists" detained by Israel since October 7 have been subjected to humiliating and degrading abuse. At the same time, CPJ has been busy scrubbing from its list of "journalists" killed in Gaza those who were affiliated with terror groups: ten names between March 29 and May 7, and another six in the weeks leading up to the Kristol piece. Furthermore, the CPJ itself admits that of the journalists on its list, at least 71 are employed by either Hamas or Islamic Jihad outlets.
Nor did Kristol mention that al-Sai has changed his story a number of times. (He probably did not know, since he was so credulous about the charges being made to him.) In his petition to Israel's High Court, he complained of the quality of his food, not of being abused by prison guards. And Kristol's NYT story contains many graphic details left out of al-Sai's earlier interview with the Washington Post.
Similarly, Issa Amro told the Washington Post that he was "threatened" with humiliating assault. By the time it reached the Times, that threat was taken as having been acted upon.
A SECOND MAJOR FAILING noted by Altman is that Kristol appears to have made little or no effort to get the story from the other side — i.e., Israel — either with respect to specific events or on what he claims is a pattern of systematic abuse of Palestinians both in Israeli prisons and elsewhere.
Instead of relying on the conclusory statement that Israeli prison wardens who abuse Palestinian prisoners are seldom punished, made by one Sari Bashi — a former senior official of Human Rights Watch, an organization whose own founder, Robert Bernstein, accused it of extreme anti-Israel bias — Kristof could have checked Israeli legal data bases. Since 2023, 182 complaints about the conditions of their confinement have been filed on behalf of Palestinian prisoners, 85 by Israeli officials themselves. Only four such complaints (out of a prison population of 10,000) had anything to do with the kind of abuse Kristof alleges is systematic.
Kristof does not mention that the offenses he alleges are systematic are illegal under Israeli law, and that the IDF is bound by additional strictures. The IDF has initiated a dozen disciplinary procedures against its soldiers, including one of a complete military discharge, for abuse of Palestinian prisoners. Other investigations have led to prosecutions and serious prison sentences. Israel's police force has an elite unit, Lahav 433, dedicated to investigating misconduct by the Israeli Prison Service.
Remarkably, Kristof did not interview any members of this unit, or even mention it. Nor did he speak to any prison official or guard. Had he done so, Dinah Bucholz points out at her excellent Substack, he would have found out that surveillance cameras record everything that takes place in Israeli prisons, and that the footage is transmitted directly to prison service headquarters for review. Prison doctors have their own independent pipeline for reporting abuse.
Moreover, according to Col. Dakar Eilat, a former director of two prisons, 130 international and national organizations conduct oversight and inspections of Israeli prisons, while animal rights organizations supervise the training of all animals used by the prison services. Concludes Bucholz, any widespread or systematic abuse of prisoners would require the involvement of hundreds of conspirators, which is highly implausible.
IRONICALLY, THE WORST "enemy of Kristof's column is Nicholas Kristof himself," writes Omri Tubi in a Jewish News Syndicate piece. Tubi quotes extensively from Kristof's 2024 memoir, Chasing Hope: A Reporter's Life. There Kristof describes numerous instances in which he was hoodwinked by speakers to whose cause he was sympathetic — "too credulous, or too glib, or too simplistic." With respect to pro-democracy protestors in China's Tiananmen Square, he writes, "[W]e were instinctively sympathetic to the protestors, and this risked making us gullible when they lied," in "lurid, 'eyewitness reports.' "
In 2014, he vigorously promoted Somaly Man as an anti-human trafficking activist, only to have to write a mea culpa column, "When Sources May Have Lied."
On the basis of number of such experiences, Kristof learned to be cautious about interviewees' accounts, even from sympathetic speakers. From his Tiananmen reporting, he realized "victims lie, too." And he laments that "many who call themselves journalists — especially in the opinion world — seem to have no standards whatsoever. They hear it and they broadcast it, write it or tweet it, without any serious effort to enjoy wielding it as a weapon."
Given his own strictures against naively believing uncorroborated accounts, especially when one is sympathetic to the "witnesses" account, how can we account for the extreme credulity Kristof displays in his latest piece? He labels as "far-fetched" the suggestion that his Palestinian sources, such as they are, lied. "Far-fetched?"
Those sources are hardly without a motive to lie. A crucial part of Yahya Sinwar's October 7 strategy was to delegitimize Israel. In that, every civilian casualty was a propaganda victory, which is why Hamas never allowed civilians into its underground labyrinth, and adopted a military strategy of fighting from within and underneath civilian structures, which guaranteed civilian casualties.
The Palestinians have hardly proven to be paragons of honesty over the years. Since October 7, we have witnessed casualty figures from the Gaza Health Ministry that were clearly refuted statistically: Somehow Israeli bombs managed to kill women and children in a wildly disproportionate fashion. Then we had the claims of mass starvation that never was. And of a genocide — the deliberate destruction of a people or ethnic group — which ran afoul of the fact that Israeli forces in Gaza achieved an unprecedently low ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths in fighting in densely populated urban enclaves.
For anyone inclined to believe in the Palestinians' scrupulous honesty, a little history lesson should help. In late March 2002, after 130 Israelis were killed by suicide bombers that month, including 28 in the Seder night massacre at the Park Hotel in Netanya, Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield. During fighting in the Jenin refugee camp, the center of terrorist activity, the Palestinians claimed that the Israeli forces had killed 5,000, buried 500 in mass graves, and systematically shot captured prisoners with single bullets to the head.
Each of these claims was duly reported by some of the world's leading media outlets; each was proven to be completely false. Phillip Reeves of the Independent informed his readers that Israel's cover-up of a "monstrous war crime... has finally been exposed.... The sweet and ghastly reed of rotting human bodies is everywhere, evidence that this is a human tomb." UN Middle East envoy Terje Larsen spoke of an overwhelming stench of death permeating the camp
Daily Telegraph reporter David Blair described cold-blooded killings of Palestinian civilians, with single shots to the head. Veteran war correspondents, like the Evening Standard's Sam Kiley and the Times' Janine Giovanni, termed the scope of the destruction in Jenin the worst that they had seen in decades of covering wars around the world.
Giovanni compared the destruction in Jenin to that in the Chechen capital of Grozny, after Russian artillery leveled the city of 300,000. Kiley wrote of Israel's "staggering brutality and callous murder."
All these statements were blatant lies. In the end, a UN investigation found no more than 56 Palestinian casualties, the overwhelming majority of whom were armed fighters. There were no bodies with bullet holes in the head fired at close range. There was no overwhelming smell of death; the number of dead was not of that magnitude. There were no mass graves. And the total area of destruction of the camps was a few hundred square meters.
Far from callous murder, 13 Israeli reservists were killed in a booby-trapped house, which any other army in the world would have leveled, without worrying about civilians inside.
IN THE SAME VEIN, Kristof and the New York Times have joined together to portray Israel, in Douglas Murray's words, as "uniquely evil, uniquely disgusting, uniquely inhuman."
Not coincidentally, one suspects, they did so one day before the report of the Israeli Civil Commission report documenting in horrifying detail the gender violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 and thereafter — violence against Israeli women and men, while alive and after death, on October 7 and in captivity in Gaza. The Commission's findings were not based on a few accounts of anonymous witnesses, but rather upon over 1,000 hours of videos, mostly gleefully livestreamed by the Hamas perpetrators themselves, the testimony of hundreds of named eyewitnesses to the violence on October 7 and that of released captives, and thousands of photos from autopsies of those slaughtered.
They establish beyond a doubt, in the words of the Commission Chair, international law expert Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, that "organized and systematic [gender] violence was part of the plan." "Some acts," she writes, "were carried out with a level of cruelty that exposes a difficult truth: Our vocabulary is insufficient to describe what human beings are capable of doing to one another." A failure to comprehend the magnitude of the evil perpetrated has nothing to do with "the absence of evidence, but in the limits of comprehension."
Kristof's shoddy, poorly sourced diatribe and the timing of Times' publication were designed to negate the impact of Hamas's inhumanity and draw attention from it. That failure has nothing to do with Kristol's lack of intelligence — he was a top Harvard graduate and Rhodes scholar — or with his failure to grasp the traps for opinion journalists of insufficiently testing the veracity of one's sources, as his own memoir makes clear.
In the end, there is only one explanation: Sinah mekalkeles es hashurah — Hatred breaks all protocol.