Israel’s Sexual Atrocities Revealed
Helena Cobban / Just World Education
(May 16, 2926) — Two weeks ago, I told you about the searing report that the Geneva-based org Euro-Med Rights Monitor had released that provided extensive documentation on the deliberate use in many of Israel’s detention centers of different forms of sexual torture… On Monday, the veteran NY Times columnist (and previously reporter) Nick Kristof provided his own— also strongly documented— take on this story.
If you have not read it, I strongly urge you to.
Kristof traveled to the West Bank where he interviewed several Palestinian survivors of Israel’s prison system. He summarized his findings thus:
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.
That image is of Sami Sai, one of the many, unbelievably courageous rape survivors on whose account Kristof based his reporting.
After the NYT released Kristof’s article— and an accompanying video— two things happened:
- The very next day, the NYT’s Israeli reporter Isabel Kershner published a news article regurgitating many of the anti-Hamas accusations of sexual violence that Israeli propagandists circulated after October 7, 2023. (Quite clearly, the detailed, pre-publication editing and vetting that Kristof’s piece had required gave the NYT high-ups plenty of time in which they could coach Kershner through her task…)
- Israeli PM Netanyahuthreatened to sue the NYT for the publication of Kristof’s piece, which he described as defamatory.
On this matter of the lawsuit, I very strongly doubt it will proceed. For two reasons. First, the NYT quite assuredly would never have published the Kristof piece without conducting an excruciatingly detailed pre-pub screening of every word in it. Secondly, many of Israel’s own media— and indeed its law courts— have also widely documented the fact that these accusations of rape are well-founded.
If Netanyahu proceeds with his lawsuit, all that documentation from the Hebrew-language sphere would be revealed in public.
(I’ll quickly recall that in 1984, Israel’s former Defense Minister— later PM— Ariel Sharon sued Time magazine for libel for having reported (accurately) that he and other Israeli military officials had helped orchestrate the horrendous, nights-long massacre of innocents that their local Lebanese allies undertook Palestinian families in Sabra and Shatila in September 1982.
In the end, Time settled with Sharon— mainly because the mag could not openly reveal the provenance of the many incriminating, official-Israeli documents on which it had based its reporting. In the case of Kristof’s reporting-based column on the Israeli prisons’ rape culture, there would be no such impediment to the NYT’s defense.)
I also want to give a shoutout to Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada, who on Thursday issued this detailed analysis of Isabel Kershner’s whole tired replay of the— as it turns out, never substantiated— “Hamas as rapists” accusations.
