Nicholas Kristof’s report on Israeli rape of Palestinians detonated a furious smear campaign. Will the mainstream media follow the story?

On May 11, Nicholas Kristof, the influential New York Times opinion writer, published a comprehensive, searing report that charged Israeli soldiers, prison guards and “settlers” with brutal rapes and sexual abuse of male and female Palestinian prisoners. Kristof did first-hand reporting in Israel, and based his article “on conversations with 14 men and women who said they had been sexually assaulted.” 

Kristof promptly detonated a firestorm of frenzied denial from Israel’s government and its allies, which included furious attacks that accused him of lying and antisemitism. Israel’s Foreign Ministry said he had written “one of the worst blood libels to ever appear in the foreign press.” The Israeli government followed up with an announcement that it will sue the New York Times for “defamation.” (To the Times’s credit, it had promptly issued a vigorous statement defending Kristof’s report.)

One standout example of the hysteria was the response from Deborah Lipstadt, an academic and expert on the Holocaust who served as the Biden administration’s Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combatting Antisemitism. Lipstadt approvingly re-tweeted a message that compared the Times and Kristof to Julius Streicher, the vicious antisemitic editor in Nazi Germany. She added: “Have they — the NY Times — no sense of decency and journalistic responsibility???” The blazing hostility from Israel’s government and the usual pro-Israel groups in the U.S. was no surprise, but Lipstadt’s reaction, and others like it, were genuinely puzzling. She is supposed to be a professor, carefully weighing evidence and not jumping to emotional conclusions.

There is more to be said about Kristof’s article and the frenzied reaction to it, so let’s start. First, it was hardly an exposé, as alternative media have been reporting regularly about Israel’s rapes and sexual abuse. This site’s Jonathan Ofir, for instance, published a post titled: “Understanding the mindset behind Israel’s usage of rape as a weapon of genocide.” In January, B’Tselem, the distinguished Israeli human rights organization, released a 16-page report titled: “Living Hell: The Israeli Prison System as  Network of Torture Camps.” The report cited testimonies from released Palestinian prisoners who had suffered “a grave pattern of sexual violence.”

But almost none of this consistent exposure of Israeli sexual brutality to prisoners had appeared in the mainstream U.S. media. So, to many Americans, Kristof’s bombshell must have come as a shock. This site has pointed out how the New York Times, for instance, has over the years only rarely cited B’Tselem or other human rights monitors in Israel/Palestine in its reports. 

And, unsurprisingly, the mainstream media malpractice is continuing after Kristof’s column appeared. First, so far, no newspaper, not even the Times itself, and no cable news networks, have tried to follow up his report from Israel, even though there are potential sources who Kristof himself was able to find. CNN, for example, could just send one of its Israel-based reporters over to the B’Tselem office and start to elicit some reaction. 

But there’s more. The storm over Kristof’s report should itself have prompted serious media coverage. (The British newspaper, The Telegraph, ran a report from its Jerusalem correspondent which did just that.) But in the U.S.: nothing. For instance, MS Now, which is supposed to be the progressive cable news network, at least should have invited Kristof onto one of its programs, along with a critic, asked questions, and let the audience start to form their own views. 

Instead, there was a truly astonishing alternative development. On May 12, one day after Kristof’s article, a group in Israel calling itself the “Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas” released a different report — which instead charged Hamas and Palestinians in Gaza with sexual violence against Israelis! Several online commentators accused pro-Israel strategists of holding this second report in reserve after they got wind that Kristof’s article was about to run — and then released it to drown him out.

There’s no proof that the release date was rigged, but the strategy succeeded anyway. Isabel Kershner in the New York Times gave the second report respectful treatment, and CNN also covered it. 

An article in Haaretz, the Israeli daily that can be more trustworthy than the mainstream U.S. media, had an interesting view of the two “competing” reports. Noa Epstein, a regular Haaretz columnist, said that “Kristof’s investigation presents readers with an evidentiary foundation that they can examine: personal testimonies, some given under full names and openly on camera, corroboration in certain cases, official responses and explicit caveats regarding what could and could not be verified. . . he presents serious, meticulous journalistic work.”

Epstein then makes a telling contrast with the second report, the one that focused on Palestinian alleged sex crimes against Israelis: “. . . it must be said that the material available to the reader is limited. . . it does not lay out the raw materials, the chain of corroboration or the connection between each case and the broader conclusion to the same extent that the New York Times does.”  

So what’s next for the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream? The entire sorry episode is reminiscent of what happened after the Times ran another blockbuster story, back in May 2024. Then, the paper published a long stunning comprehensive indictment of what it called “Jewish terrorism” against Palestinians, with specific examples that dated back decades. At the time, this site noted that the Times’s report was “astonishing,” given its long history of ignoring such accounts. 

A few weeks later, a friend of mine, a law professor, agreed that the Times report had been shattering. Then he added: “But then nothing more appeared in the paper. Nothing, no follow up, zilch.”

It looks like the New York Times and the rest of the U.S. mainstream are following the same game plan. Nicholas Kristof’s shocking report is already plummeting down through the memory hole. 

James North
James North is a Mondoweiss’ Editor-at-Large, and has reported from Africa, Latin America, and Asia for five decades. He lives in New York City. Follow him on X at @jamesnorth7