Ask Haviv Anything - 115: Is Nicholas Kristof right?

Episode Date: May 12, 2026

To support our work, please consider joining our Patreon community (https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything), Substack (https://havivgur.substack.com/), or Buy Me a Coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur).And be sure to check us out on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/haviv.rettig.gur/) and TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@haviv.rettig.gur).--Welcome to our new short-form episodes interspersed with the regular interviews and lectures that dive into an often-asked question about Israel, Jews and the Middle East.Our current episode tackles the New York Times’ Nick Kristof's oped claiming systemic sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners, which many listeners have asked us to respond to. We ask the obvious question: Is Nicholas Kristof right?If you appreciate what we do here, please consider joining our Patreon community at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything or our Substack at https://havivgur.substack.com/. You can also Buy Me a Coffee at https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur. It helps us keep the lights on. Patreon and Substack are also the platforms where you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

So Nick Christoff published an op-ed in the New York Times, alleging mass sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners. A lot has already been said. I decided to say something else. My first thought, Willem reading it was everyone else's thought. It's horrifying. Their testimonies there of pain, of torture. We know that the Israeli prison service is often notoriously incompetent. There have been cases of Hamas prisoners abusing each other. There have been famous cases of them abusing female Israeli guards. We know prison systems are susceptible to this problem generally.

There are 2,000 claims against New York prisons by prisoners who faced abuse there. Abuse of prisoners is not something that's impossible. It's something that's virtually guaranteed in any prison system. And I was expecting to go into this op-ed and read about a terrible reckoning with things that actually happened. October 7, by the way, sent thousands of new detainees into the prisons. And in the early months, it also drafted into the prison system as guards under-trained reserve. reservists who had seen Hamas videos gleefully documenting their crimes. So I really did expect a hard-hitting story of real abuse that Israeli leaders had to take notice of.

And then I read it, and I came across the first obvious lie, and then the second obvious lie. And then a claim so odd that maybe it was possible, but how exactly and how would they have kept it quiet? And then another claim like it. And then one source who's a famed Hamas propagandist laundered as a reliable source. and then another one. If there's no doubt that abuse occurred, and there is no doubt that abuse occurred, why is there so much propaganda, so much obvious propaganda in Christoph's op-ed? I'm going to be honest here. I was relieved by the lies. I was, because it's agony to read about Israeli criminality, and the lies let me cast doubt on the whole thing. There's an obvious propaganda campaign at work here,

but as I read, not every claim was impossible, and I started to wonder, despite the propaganda, despite the obvious lies. What part is nevertheless true? How bad has it gotten? So I want to try and lay out what we know, or at least what I think I know. There's a campaign that seeks our destruction. But that doesn't mean there aren't things that are terribly wrong.

Christoph quotes people who celebrated October 7, who celebrated death, who don't care about sexual crimes if the target is the right target, who want an entire people destroyed and will lie to achieve that goal. He quotes people who are explicitly. and public about those views. And the timing is extraordinary. The UN Secretary General is considering which countries to put on a blacklist for sexual violence. Christoph seems to be timing his op-ed for that to pressure the U.N. Secretary General on that. And there's now a report coming out in the

press, including on CNN and in the British press, that dove into thousands of interviews and Hamas videos. It's a brand new report on mass sexual violence by Hamas. And it came out a day after Christoph's op-ed. In other words, this is not about revealing sexual criminality. It's about covering for it. We know how the lies made their way into the story. We know where they came from, dogs being trained to systematically rape prisoners. That's a claim that we know where it began. We know how fake it is. We know why it's spreading. We know why suddenly everyone's saying it. And even so, that doesn't mean there's no truth at all just because there are lies. Dogs did not rape anyone. The people who invented that particular inanity claimed it without evidence.

They knew that nobody, certainly not self-appointed moral arbiters like Nick Christoph, would ever bother checking the providence of the claim because they never do, because why would they? So the claim spreads through a millions-strong activist network without investigation, exciting and mobilizing, not because anyone understands how it might even be possible, but for the sheer thrill of it. And Christoph cites it as a reliable report. There was a recently report by Norwegian NGO, which is also referenced there, the refugee council, that claims systemic sexual violence in the West Bank by citing 16 cases across three years

in a geographic region that contains of maybe three million Palestinians, half a million Israelis, 16 cases in three years, and some of the examples barely clear the bar for harassment. That's the evidence of systemic sexual violence. But the NGO that wrote that report knew for a fact that no journalist would look too deeply into any of it. It wouldn't go beyond the headline, and no journalist did, because they never, ever do. Because why would they? Friends, a paper trail is being created, just like they created a paper trail on mass starvation in Gaza, mass starvation that was first claimed in the first months of 2024, and then claimed

again and again and again by NGOs, by the UN, by everybody. Some were nuanced warnings. Some declared that mass starvation had already arrived. The headlines from both of them were basically the same. And then, in absolute thundering silence, the mass. starvation claim just faded away, never having materialized. Nobody checked their facts. Nobody asked how they'd missed it. What went wrong? Billions of ordinary people around the world who don't follow the day-to-day too closely are convinced that countless gossens died of starvation, something that

simply never happened. And then they moved on. A letter to the Lancet that claimed hundreds of thousands of deaths spread like wildfire, mostly because nobody actually read or understood what it claimed, and also nobody cared enough to check if it was remotely plausible. Then, just in the last time, case anybody forgets the Lancet, comes the claim by a UN rapporteur of the death of hundreds of thousands of children. I think it was 380,000 infants under five, allegedly had died, were going to die. That's more than the entire population of infants in Gaza under five. More were going to die than existed. It's stupid, right? But it was repeated again and again by activists, by protesters. Nobody checks. No costs are ever exacted for the never-ending barrage of fakery, because why would

they? A wild religious frenzy has taken hold. Hatred of Israel is now definitional to the activist left, to parts of the right. Gretta Thunberg has forgotten all about climate change, if you notice. An enemy of humanity has been identified just in time to unleash all the pent-up religious rage, and by complete and utter coincidence. How dare you suggest that it's on purpose? That enemy you're suddenly allowed to hate. That enemy of humanity is vaguely associated with the Jews. Yes, friends, it really is that simple. And also, bear with me, it isn't that simple. All the above is true.

They're fucking liars and bigots. They marched in their millions again and again and again for weeks and months and years. Marches completely unprecedented in size, regularity, and duration, in all the history of the West, in all the history of war, larger by orders of magnitude than all other marches for all other conflicts and wars and suffering currently underway on this earth combined, even though it was caused by their own governments, larger than any movement there had ever been in the past.

And no serious person pretends that anything similar could ever coalesce or will ever coalesce again unless Israel is involved. The American activist will shout at us, but we fund you to explain a mind-numbing selectivity. Yeah, but one-third of the city of Amsterdam marched. Millions of Spaniards and Brazilians and Indonesians. They also fund us. It was unprecedented. It was everywhere. And Nick Christoff has joined the new religion. He's not concerned about abuse. He doesn't care one whit whether he's trafficking in truths or lies. Only the Jews will ever ask to suss out and distinguish the nuance between what is true and what is a lie. Nobody else gives a shit. He throws it on the page and his membership in the glorious crusade is assured. The Jews are correct about the nature of this moment. Some things are so big and so fundamental in a culture, in a society, they're so assumed, they're so widespread,

that they become hard to see in the same way that fish don't notice the water. And so the Jew is made fearful once more. And throughout the lands of Christendom and Islam, the Jew is returned to his proper place in the social hierarchy, complete with anxious conversos and ideological purity tests. And yet, still, despite it all, their lies are not the end of the story. Their lies are a separate story, a campaign meant to justify brutality against us, not to end war or suffering or sexual violence. Nobody ends sexual violence by trying to cover for sexual violence. And despite all of it, dear Jews, there really is abuse. It's nowhere near as much as the psychotic claims of the fantasists, not by an order of magnitude, not by several orders of magnitude.

If it was that much, they wouldn't need to lie so much. But it's there, nonetheless. many dozens of cases at least, probably in the low hundreds by now, most of them without sexual aspects, but still wanton violence. It's hard to come by exact numbers. The army gave a few estimates to the courts a couple of times over the past three years. There have been many indictments filed against soldiers, serious ones. I know something about a handful of those cases. I know that the problem is real. It's there, it's real, and it doesn't seem to be stopping. And if it isn't stopped with an iron will and an uncompromising hand, and real,

and hard enforcement, it will continue to fester and it will continue to grow. And it must be said, even though we don't feel like saying it right now, but it must be said. Neither Ben-Vir nor Netanyahu are interested in fixing it. Nobody at the top cares about the rights of prisoners. Let me be clear about this. For the first time in my own life, I supported death penalty. Nobody who crossed over the border to massacre and kidnap on October 7 should be left alive. that came to kidnap children

precisely because they sought the release of mass murderers kept alive in our prisons. Hamas, as always, in its totalizing brutality, forces the choice. If their murderers live, our children may die. I choose our children so that there are no more hostages.

I choose our children. And those who came for our children cannot be deterred. They can't be reformed. They can't be reformed. can't be deradicalized. They say so, and they show it. They murder their own, on a mass scale, to clear a path to murdering ours. So I believe, I believe them, and that's why I believe they have to die. We have to try them, convict them, and destroy them. And even I radicalized in this

narrow, specific way, and putting it all on the table, I say we can't collapse into torture and abuse. That's not justice, it isn't even vengeance. It's participation in Hamas's way of war. Our leaders also don't seem to care about just the simple breakdown of discipline that these abuses represent. The kind of breakdown we saw again and again with the looting incidents in Gaza and in the early cases of prisoner abuse that came to light, that kind of breakdown and discipline will also reveal itself on the battlefield. So no, dogs aren't being trained to systematically raped prisoners, you nattering half-wits. And no, Hamas propaganda operatives are not reliable sources on the question of Israeli crimes. The vast, vast majority of soldiers are honorable

men who walked into fire so that my family can live. The whole world may turn on them, I will stand with them, grateful for their sacrifice. And Nick Christoph, a willing purveyor of propaganda, thrilling to a moral crusade engineered by would-be genocides, he pretends not to understand. is no messenger of moral reckoning. But friends, so fucking what? Let the narcissistic, gutter snipes strut their moral emotions before the world. Let the UN publish endless reports

that don't hold up to basic scrutiny. Let the NGOs dream their rabid, sick dreams that no journalist ever fact-checks. Yes, they're lying. We, still, for our sense, because fuck them must see that it isn't all fake. The problem is real. It's far, far smaller than they claim, but it's real nonetheless. And when discipline and morality break down, it will only get worse. We either crack down now or we watch it fester and we watch it grow. And our own

Ben-Gvirs are stubbornly refusing to fix what is actually broken, the real thing in the real world. And so we're caught in a strange sort of vice, the same vice we find ourselves in with genocide lie, a vast propaganda machine that seeks to destroy us. Countless activists too high on their own self-regard to see the irony of raging against a genocide while calling for the erasure of a people. All while our own incompetent, venal, self-absorbed political class insist in their mindless chatter on confirming every claim of our enemies for sheer bald egotomania. Every time you say Israel is definitely not pursuing ethnic cleansing in Gaza, there's Ben-Veer and Smutridge saying otherwise. I'm sick of it all. I know you're all sick of it too. And that in a nutshell is what I think about

this. Just because they're lying, just because a vast, perfidious campaign has overwhelmed global elites in a bid to clear the way for our removal. Just because they're still, after two millennia, building their visions of redemption on the evil Jew, doesn't mean there isn't also separately a problem on the ground. So what do we do now? To me, it's simple. We see. it, we acknowledge it's happening, we bring our anger and our rage and our sense of betrayal to our inept leaders until they bend to our will and act to stop the breakdown. And then we soldier on. We soldier on because the enemy really is coming to murder us.

Because Hamas must still go, if Gaza is ever to rise to a new day, because Hezbollah will yet destroy Lebanon on the altar of destroying us. as the Ayatollah's bitler hold damn religion on the extermination of our children. We fix the broken things within us as if the pogromists and the simpering Christophs don't exist. We owe no answers to the propagandists trying to clear a path to our death, but we do owe answers to ourselves. Despite the raging mob, despite the enemy who still seeks our destruction, and yes, despite feckless incompetence like Ben-Vir,

our minister of prisons currently overseeing a vast spike in crime, across all parts of Israeli society, who claim to lead us. Despite it all, we remain the strongest, freest Jews who ever lived, more capable and committed than our self-destructive enemies ever imagined us to be. We do not waver, we do not stumble, we soldier on, because fuck them all. Thank you for listening.