← Call Me Back - with Dan Senor
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With a ceasefire in place, Israelis, tired but resilient, are turning their attention to rebuilding. Meanwhile, in the us, college age Jews are still facing peer pressure and a constant stream of anti Israel misinformation on campus, online and everywhere they turn. They can keep arguing about Israel from thousands of miles away, or they can do the one thing that actually works, go on a birthright trip and experience Israel for themselves. They will come back more grounded, more confident and more connected to who they are. So if your family member has been on the fence or if you've been waiting for the right moment, this is it. Because Israel needs them and they need Israel. Go to onetripchangeseverything.com Birthright One trip changes everything. You are listening to an art media podcast.
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We need to be able to have a discussion about our very real problems without playing into the hands of people trying to destroy the country. So I always try to ask when I'm looking at, you know, different kinds of discourse, is this person trying to make Israel better, or is this person trying to make Israel go away? If the discussion is about how to make Israel go away, which it often is, and I think that's the discussion that underlies this essay in New York Times, I'm not interested in that discussion, and I don't think I should be expected to have it. If the discussion is about how to make Israel a better country, a more moral country, a more successful country, a better place to live for Jewish citizens, for Muslim citizens, I'm very much interested in having that discussion, which is, I think, the most important discussion to have.
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It's 7:30am on Wednesday, May 12th here in New York City. It is 2:30pm on Wednesday, May the 12th in Israel. Before we get into the description for today's episode, I just wanted to provide a warning. Some of the topics and details we discussed today are difficult to listen to. On Monday, the New York Times published an opinion column by Nicholas Kristof titled the Silence that Meets the Rape of Palestinians. Kristof's effort was explicit to establish that sure, Hamas engages in systematic rape, that we know, but so does Israel. Isn't it a shame? Christoph implies that they are both depraved, sick, barbaric societies. Here is Nick Kristof in his own words, promoting his op ed in a video which was produced by the New York Times and is featured prominently on their website.
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Whether you consider yourself pro Israeli or
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pro Palestinian, here's one thing we should be able to agree on.
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We're anti rape. The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women
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on October 7 now happens to Palestinians
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day after day after day. The column is based on interviews with 14 Palestinians who, according to Kristof, were sexually assaulted by Israeli soldiers, prison guards and interrogators. The piece cites a Geneva based NGO calling Israeli sexual violence a standard operating procedure. Kristof describes trained dogs that were used to sexually assault prisoners, and it argues that sexual abuse has become embedded in Israel's security apparatus. Christoph apparently interviewed former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Omert, who is quoted as confirming Christoph's charges. Do I believe it happens? Ehud Omert says in the piece. Definitely now. Since the publication of the column, former Prime Minister Omert issued a statement to the Free Press in which he said the following And I quote, Mr. Kristof's article includes claims of extraordinary gravity that Israeli authorities have directed the rape of children, that dogs have been used as instruments of sexual assault, that systemic sexual torture is state policy. I did not validate these claims, omer said. The morning after the publication of Kristof's column, an Israeli civil Commission released a 300 page report called Silence no More, built on more than 10,000 photographs, thousands of hours of video and over 400 testimonies concluding that Hamas sexual violence on October 7th was systemic, widespread and deliberate gang rape, sexual torture, mutilation, and a new legal concept the commission calls kinocide forcing family members to witness or in some cases commit sexual acts against each other. The head of the commission said, and I quote, sexual violence was a deliberate strategy carried out with exceptional cruelty. Israeli media led with the report. The New York Times, which had been told the report was coming months in advance, published it almost 24 hours after publishing Kristof's column. Now, some of the details described in this column have been discussed on previous episodes of Call Me Back, the abuses at Stay Tayman prison as well as settler violence in the West Bank. There are certainly problems in Israel's detention system, but most of this column an unnamed woman, unnamed soldiers, an unnamed location, dogs trained to rape humans. Story after story with no date, no place, no name reads, according to reporters we've spoken to who spent the day going through the column, claim by claim as recycled from dubious channels, unverifiable, and in many cases certainly false. And Kristof, we're told, hid behind the opinion label to publish alleged facts without giving Israeli officials any real opportunity to respond. This has been a recurring problem for Nick Kristof, who has been forced in the past by the New York Times public editor to apologize for fantastical reporting earlier in his career. So the question we'll address in this episode is not just whether the column is fair, it's how does something like this get published in the New York Times? What is the pipeline from NGO to press release to Pulitzer Prize winners column that turns unverified claims into the paper of record? And why does that pipeline flow so reliably in one direction? Mati Friedman has been asking this question longer than almost anyone I know. He was a reporter and editor at the Associated Press in Jerusalem for years, where he covered the Israeli Palestinian conflict and the broader Israeli Arab conflict for a number of years. In 2014, Mati wrote what became one of the most debated pieces of media criticism of the last decade plus called what the Media Gets Wrong About Israel, which he published in the Atlantic and published a similar piece in Tablet in which he argued that the Western press has become less an observer of this conflict and more of an actor in it. He spent years documenting the specific Mechanisms by which NGOs hostile to Israel and with direct ties to enemies of Israel have shaped and in some cases actually dictated Western countries coverage of this conflict. He's also a prolific author. We have featured his books in a number of Call me Back episodes. He's the right person with whom to be having this conversation today. Now, before our conversation, one short housekeeping note. If you aren't already, please make sure to subscribe to our daily podcast Ark News Daily. Each morning Deborah Pardes thoughtfully walks you through the most important news concerning Israel and the Jewish world in under 10 minutes. I listen to it every day and it is very efficient. You can find that link in the description below or you can just go to arcmedia.org where you can find all our links and also subscribe to our newsletter. Mati, welcome back to the podcast. Hi Dan, I would say it's good to be with you or to good to see you, but this topic is so both maddening and uncomfortable that I am pleased to see you, but I wish we could be talking about other topics. But that said, let's dive into things and I know that this Kristof column has been picked over and scrutinized all over social media and in some published pieces like at your publication, the Free Press.
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I think first of all that it's important to say that many Israelis are concerned about human rights and the treatment of Palestinian detainees in detention facilities. And there's been some good Israeli reporting over the past year or two of incidents and there have been incidents that are reason for grave concern, including incidents of sexual assault. The most heavily covered one occurred at A detention facility called Stay Tayman and and has been discussed widely, including on this podcast. And there have been other incidents. So when I, as an Israeli look at this issue and look at the Israeli officials who are in charge of incarceration since October 7th, I'm worried. I wish I could dismiss all concerns as being a fabrication, but I think that if you put a politician like Itamar Benvir in charge of law enforcement in Israel, then you're going to have many reasons for concern. And becomes difficult for an Israeli to separate the legitimate concerns many of us have from this poisonous campaign of libel against the state. And being Israeli in 2026 involves as one of its main challenges differentiating between those two things.
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So Matti, before we get into how a piece like this gets written, with your perspective of this unique lens into the process that leads to a piece like this, I do want to just go through the main claims that Kristof makes in the piece. In other words, what are these claims? What are which ones are so obviously straight up lies, which are unfalsifiable or unverifiable and which may have legs. So can you just go through the key pieces?
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So Kristof gives us a list of terrible abuses directed, according to him, at Palestinian detainees. He's speaking to, According to him, 14 people, most of whom are not named in the piece. And he's also using information that's being given to him by anti Israel NGOs. So in that case it seems that he himself does not know the identity of the person who he's describing. So he describes detainees being raped with objects. He describes a female detenny being raped over the space of two days, according to this account, in an Israeli prison. He describes sexual assault, not rape, by another female detainee, by Israeli guards. And he describes one incident of sexual assault by a settler. So not by uniformed Israeli soldier, but by an Israeli civilian in the West Bank a few months ago. That's an incident, by the way, which is, as far as I know, accurate, much to our shame in the incident that is getting most of the attention. He describes a sexual assault perpetrated against a Palestinian prisoner using a dog. And you know when you read the piece, you kind of have to use your own compass to decide which charges could plausibly be true and which charges come from the world of conspiratorial anti Israel fantasy. I think that there is a plausible reason for concern about sexual assaults of prisoners. And we have an incident, the incident at Stittiman, where does seem to have been a sexual assault of a detainee by guards. So I don't think we can dismiss every account of sexual assaults against Palestinian detainees. But the piece kind of goes off the deep end by being credulous about charges that are much, much harder to believe, about facilities that are, after all, filmed. There are cameras in these facilities, there are commanders, there are lawyers. The idea that much of this could really have happened makes sense in the world of anti Israel conspiracies. And it makes sense if you're a reporter like Nicholas Christof, who isn't actually based here and doesn't speak any relevant language and doesn't have a firm handle on what's going on. A much more effective piece, I think, would have stuck to what is plausibly true, but I guess that would have been less viral.
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Well, we'll get into the frame, the moment in which he released this piece and both the timing and what he explicitly says he's trying to accomplish with the piece. But before we get into that, you and I were talking offline, like this whole conversation about dogs and rape. For those who haven't read the piece, it's a long piece and some of our listeners may not have read it. Because when you hear wet dogs, rape. If you don't know the context of what Kristof is writing here, I do think it's important. He charges in the piece that Israeli authorities have trained dogs to sexually assault human beings, Palestinian prisoners, that dogs are actually raping humans.
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Right. I mean, the writer is staking his credibility on that anecdote, which really comes from the world of the darkest conspiracies that you hear while riding in cabs in. In Middle Eastern countries. And there are multiple anti Israel conspiracies that involve animals. And this is one sub category. And it's been floating around for quite a while. If you've been paying attention. There's been this story about rape using dogs. It's kind like drug use and that you need to constantly up the dosage. So if you know, at one point you could say Israel is an apartheid state and that got people agitated, at some point, it stops delivering the charge. So you start saying, no, Israel's a genocidal state. You have to keep on ramping it up. So, you know, if last year you could say Israeli soldiers are shooting kids on purpose, that doesn't have the same effect anymore because people become inured to it. So you have to keep on coming up with more and more colorful and shocking charges. So the dog charge has been floating around. It's been ignored by mainstream press outlets until now. For good reason. It's clearly ludicrous, but this article really shows that the walls between the world of conspiracies and the world of the mainstream press, those walls have largely come down. So that's what Christoph has really done in this article. He's kind of dismantled the wall between the insane stuff floating around online or the kind of crazy stuff that you hear if you travel in the Arab world about Israel. But the wall that prevented that stuff from getting to the New York Times has now come down. And there is less and less difference between the world of conspiratorial thinking and the world of legacy media. And that's TR of this dog charge. But it's true in the case of the genocide charge, which is equally false, and it's true of many other things. So the claim that a legacy media outlet would have made 10, 20 years ago, that they're an island of sanity that will, you know, provide you good information in a world of disinformation, that claim is increasingly threadbare.
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All right, so Matti, I want your professional read. As a practitioner, as a journalist in the Middle east, you've seen how the sausage is made. You've seen how the process works. You spent years inside the Associated Press bureau in Jerusalem. You know how sour sources are used, how sources are cultivated, how a piece like this gets built, where the sourcing comes from, how the editorial decision making chain of command works, what the checks are on a reporter or writer based on fact checking and whatnot. So describe as you're reading this piece, and you're almost like reverse engineering it as you're reading it, knowing how a piece like this gets engineered. What did you see was going on here?
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When I wrote about my time in the press, I was a correspondent for the AP, which is the big American news agency. Between 2006 and the very end of 2011, one of the things that I thought was important to say, which is something that isn't clear often to readers, is the role of NGOs in creating the reporting that they're seeing. The press corps, certainly over the past 20 years, has become much weaker than it used to be. It's harder to make money in the press. Staffs are much smaller, and yet the demands of the 24 hour news cycle are much greater. So if 20, 30 years ago, you had to produce maybe an article a day, now you have to produce multiple articles a day, and that is being done by fewer people who are less experienced and more poorly paid. So into the Vacuum created by that Change come political NGOs who have a lot of money and who have an interest in swaying coverage in their direction. So when I was at the AP, I saw this happen. Big NGOs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and a plethora of smaller NGOs operating around this conflict. Some of them call themselves international, some of them would call themselves Palestinian or Israeli. Most of them are funded by European governments and big progressive foundations. And they became essentially the source of information for the reporters. So Human Rights Watch would come out with a report and the AP would write up the report as a news article. So this started happening in a big way when I was in the press. So when I read this article, I can see the machinery right away. Nicholas Kristoff is not based here. He doesn't have a handle on events here. What's happening is that he's being handed a package by NGOs. The two he mentions are Euromed, which is, let's just call it Hamas affiliated. It seems to go beyond that. But. But that's certainly true. It's. It's an NGO, kind of from the far edge of the NGO universe. And, you know, they've claimed in the past that Israel is using weapons that vaporize Palestinians, and they've, you know, claimed that Israel is harvesting organs. Relying on Euromed is a bit of a stretch even for the world of the mainstream press. And he also mentions an anti Israel activist named Sarai Bashi, who is kind of a creature of the anti Israel campaign, and she's been around for many, many years. She lives in Rama. So he's being handed this story by local activists. Obviously they're introducing him to the people who he interviews, and they're passing on this other material that he's using, kind of unverifiable material, which includes some of the more inflammatory charges. So essentially this is an NGO hit job that a New York Times writer has decided to stake his credibility on. So that's obviously what's going on in the piece, if you read it with the eyes of someone who's been a writer or editor at any of the mainstream press organizations here.
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So, Matti, the column, as you just pointed out, leans heavily on this group, this NGO called euromed Human Rights Monitor. And it's cited multiple times, including, by the way, for the claim about the trained raping canines. And Euromed has been flagged, as you just alluded to, for ties to Hamas and other organizations that Israel says is tied to Hamas fronts. How does a group like that become a primary source for the most influential newspaper in the world. Don't editors and fact checkers in a news organization. And I get that you say that the layers of resources that news organizations have has been thinned out over years, but this is the New York Times and you yourself have submitted pieces to the New York Times for publication, as have I. So I've gone through their fact checking process and I've seen when their fact check checking process is very rigorous. I don't want to cite names, but I've spoken to people at the New York Times over the last 24 hours who describe what a normal process there involves when they do want to be scrutinizing, when they do want to be rigorous. What is this Euromed and how does it slip through their process?
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Look, I think it's important to understand that the adults in the room who were there 10 or 20 years ago are to a very large extent no longer there. I mean, the New York Times op ed section had an excellent journalist running the show named James Bennett, and they fired him after a mo uprising followed the publication of a totally sane op ed by a conservative senator. So the show is being run by activists. Things that would not have been journalistically viable 10 years are now because much of the press has become essentially an ideological fantasy that's designed as a weapon in the fight for justice, as they would describe it. So information that helps the fight for justice is the judge. And Euromed, in their eyes, helps the fight for justice by revealing the evil that is Israel. And I'm not sure there's a distinction anymore between a group like Euromed, which we can make fun of, and massive influential and very powerful group like Amnesty, for example, which claims, and this claim is equally false, that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, not just has committed but is currently committing genocide in Gaza. So, you know, if Amnesty is legit, then why not Euromed? When you enter the world of the press, and there are exceptions of course, I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, but when you enter the world of the press, you're entering a world of ideological fantasy. And the question is not is this information accurate? The question is who does this help? Does this information help the right people? And if it helps the right people, the information is true. So when Euromaid comes to a guy like Nicholas Kristof who has a history of being credulous and he's had a few missteps and he's not a sophisticated writer, even if we believe that his heart is in the right place, he sees information that helps him make the point that he wants to make and he decides not to look into it. If the Israeli government came to him with information that, that seemed equally hard to believe, of course he would vet it a hundred times and the New York Times fact checkers would go over it with a fine tooth comb and they would probably reject it for publication. But because we're working with a pretty obvious ideological script, this stuff gets in. And it's really important to understand that there's a very large, very well funded ideological campaign against Israel. It's being waged through dozens of NGOs, it's being waged by arms of the United Nations. It's being waged by parts of the academy and big parts of the press which have become activist in nature. We need to understand it that way. One of the most interesting things I saw in the press corps is that you're not allowed to mention the campaign.
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What do you mean?
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There's this vast campaign. You're constantly being bombarded with ideological information. The world of the press is the same social world as the world of the NGOs. These are very influential forces working on the press, but you're not allowed to mention it. So you'll never see in a mainstream press article a description of the anti Israel campaign, which is a multi million, if not billion dollar industry that shapes almost every facet of press coverage. And they don't mention it because when you're in the whale, it's hard to the whale. But once you step out and you understand the contours of the way this works, it's pretty clear where this Nicholas Kristoff piece exists in the universe of ideological information that we're being bombarded with.
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And more than one New York Times reporter I spoke to, and when I said reporter, I mean people in the newsroom. Just for listeners who don't follow the layers and the complexity and the nomenclature of the journalism industry or journalistic enterprise. More than one of the reporters in the newsroom. Not, not on the opinion page, which is where Kristof wrote this piece. They made the point this piece would have never made it through the news process. It only slipped through the opinion process. Can you just explain the difference between something on the opinion page and the news page and why they would make that claim that like Kristof was able to get this printed on the opinion page, but it wouldn't have gotten printed in the news section.
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Like the new section in the New York Times reported early in the war that Israel had hit a hospital in Gaza and killed more than 500 people. That was on the homepage of the New York Times, and that's just one example of many. So I don't really buy the distinction between the opinion section and the news section. My experience is that much of what is presented as news coverage is kind of passive aggressive opinion. So instead of saying I think you'd have to write experts, say Nicholas Kristof at least is honest enough to present it as opinion. But I don't see much difference. If you're going with the ideological flow, you're not going to get a lot of pushback. If you're trying to swim against the ideological current, you're going to get a lot of pushback. So Nicholas Kristoff is clearly swimming with the current here. This is what his colleagues and editors want and got published.
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But let me put it a different way, like let's talk about the dog charge. If it were true. And again, there's plenty of reasons, not the least of which is like the scientific, biological, physiological basis upon which to conclude that it's not true goes without saying. But if it were true, it's such an unbelievable news item that seeing that, as you said earlier, it's been circulating among some of these more extremist Hamas tied NGOs for a while now, if there was a basis on which to say, ooh, maybe this is true, it probably would have wound up in the actual news section of some mainstream news organization. The idea that the first time a claim like this surfaces is on the opinion page of the New York Times is revealing.
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Yes, I think that's true. If there were any chance that the claim was accurate, you would have seen it in the news section of one of the big newspapers which are very much on the lookout for any charge that can draw an equivalence between Israel and Hamas. And that story of course would serve their purpose. So I think that distinction is correct.
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Matti, in your piece in the Atlantic in 2014, which again I strongly encourage our listeners to read, which we will link to in the show notes you wrote, and I quote here, the Western press has become less an observer of this conflict than an actor in it. Close quote. And that was again, that was before, long before October 7, 2023, before the current war, before this Nick Kristof column. So here we are, 12 years later after you wrote that piece, the New York Times publishes an opinion piece by based substantially on NGO claims, with two what I believe are self undermining admissions buried inside the piece. In Nick's own words, and I quote, Here he writes, there is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes, close quote, and I'm quoting here, it's impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are, close quote. And yet he still concludes that sexual violence is standard operating procedure in Israel. So clearly, Nick Kristof either didn't read your piece in 2014 flashing the warning signs of what was coming of Western journalism, or he did read it and didn't leave much of an impression.
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Yes, I think that we can conclude that those pieces, although they were widely read, had very little effect on any of my colleagues. The trends, unfortunately. I'm not saying I'm happy to be right about this, but the trends that I wrote about in. It's actually two pieces, one for the Atlantic and one for Tablet. The is truth trends that I describe in those essays. Not only are they still relevant, they've been supercharged. And I think this piece is. I'm not that surprised by it, to be honest. I mean, it's kind of an extreme example of a problem that I've been noticing for a long time. I mean, it's a sad comment, I guess, on the state of an institution like the New York Times. On the state of the New York Times is a sad comment on the state of the noble pursuit of journalism. I'm not sure that the legacy institutions can really be be rescued at this point. There are too many people inside them who have a very different idea of what journalism is supposed to be. And that idea does not include trying to understand what's going on in very complicated corners of the world. And it doesn't include trying to grasp context, and it certainly doesn't include rigorous confirmation of information before publication. All of the things that I mentioned are now seen as barriers to truth and justice. And by making that leap, I think these institutions have really. They've committed suicide. Because in the world of disinformation and social media and just, you know, the sheer amount of BS that we're all bombarded with on a daily basis, these institutions could have been islands of sanity and good information to which people would swim for relief from the storm of nonsense that we're all, you know, beset with. And instead, my colleagues decided that they didn't want to cover the circus, they wanted to be in the circus. And I think this piece is a great example of that.
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With a ceasefire in place and flights to Israel resumed, this is the moment to send young Jewish adults on a birthright trip to Israel. Not next year now. Because after two and a half years of misinformation Reality needs to speak for itself. Over the past 25 years, Birthright has sent more than 900,000 young Jews to Israel. They come back more confident, more connected to each other and to Israel. They go on to build Jewish families, lead our communities, and feel part of a 4,000 year Jewish history that belongs to them. Birthright's new goal is to send another 200,000 young adults to Israel by 2029. But it takes people like you to make that happen. To help shape that Future, go to onetrippchangeseverything.com on the same day that Kristof's column ran, the New York Times, we know, was sitting on the most comprehensive report ever assembled on Hamas. Hamas's sexual crimes on October 7. It is called the civil commission. On October 7, crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children. It consists of 300 pages, 10,000 photographs, 400 testimonies, and by the way, most of the content for it comes from my understanding, from actual Hamas video images and other photographs from their own GoPro cameras. From their own. I mean, Hamas documented all of this, this or a lot of this. I don't think there's ever been a report quite like this that captures so much of what happened. And unlike the Nazis during the Holocaust, which tried to suppress and hide and distract from what they were doing here, Hamas documented so much of it and broadcast so much of it to the world. So I hate to say this, this is like Hamas in its own words. And it ran on cnn. The Israeli media led with it. The New York Times published nothing on this until some 24 hours after Nick Kristof's column was published. What would you say about what was in this report? And how do you explain the timing in terms of what's going on here between this report and Kristof's column?
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I mean, the writer is very clear about the motivation behind his piece. And I think a more sophisticated writer wouldn't have been that obvious about it. But he repeats several times in the piece that these allegations of sexual assault against Israel are meant to even out the allegations of sexual assault, rape against Hamas. And he says this explicitly at the beginning of the piece, and then he returns to it. He wrote this down because it stood out to me. Think of it this way. This is Kristof's words. The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on October 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day. So he's saying, not only is what I'm writing based on the work that I've done, not only is it all true, which it clearly isn't, but it actually balances out the charges of, or the descriptions of mass sexual assault and rape that we saw on October 7, in which of, indeed detailed in this report that the timing seems unlikely to be coincidental. I mean, I don't know exactly what the Times had and when they had it, but I think it's safe for us to assume that the Times staff here in Israel had the report, which was distributed in advance, of course, and, you know, had a chance to read part of this report. And it's harrowing reading. I mean, it's really, really disturbing. And I think we should salute the many dozens of people who put it together and had to wade through some of the most horrific material that it's possible to look at. And, you know, if listeners have the stomach for it, it's worth looking at it just as a reminder of how this war started and who started it and using what tactics. I don't think that excuses everything that Israel has done since October 7th. I don't think that this report means we shouldn't investigate allegations of sexual assault if they're credible. I remain concerned about the people in charge of our detention facilities and the people in charge of law enforcement in Israel. I do not have complete faith that the right people are running this, to be honest, and that we're pursuing every allegation of misdeeds by our own soldiers. However, the publication of this piece and the publication of this report, the two things happening within 24 hours of each other, seems unlikely to be coincidental. You know, whether or not Nicholas Kristof was aware of this, I'm not sure. Again, he was fed. He was clearly fed information by activist NGOs who know what's going on and are seeking quite blatantly to deal with October 7th in two ways. One is by diminishing what happened on October 7th and pretending that it was not as bad as described. And secondly, by making the case that Israel is so bad that it is at least equal to Hamas and it's evil, if not more so. What that ends up doing is making a case that Israel deserved October 7th and deserves whatever violence can be delivered against it. I recently had the opportunity to write an essay, but about new books coming out about the Gaza war, and they very explicitly do this. They both try to downplay October 7th and make the case that Israel is so bad that essentially October 7th was justified. That's the motivation for the genocide charge, which is like the dog charge. It doesn't make sense once you look at it. I mean, the Population of Gaza, according to Hamas, is slightly larger now than it was on October 7, 2023. Which is not to say that people aren't suffering terribly and haven't been displaced, but there clearly wasn't intention attempt to murder everyone in Gaza. But the charge is not meant to describe reality, just as Nicholas Kristoff's essay is not meant to describe reality. It's meant as an ideological weapon to enable the war against Israel.
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What he's basically saying is Hamas is a sick, depraved society. And now we know, as Christoph Albert says, Israel is a sick, depraved society. Isn't it a shame that both societies are so broken and deviant and barbaric? It is the quintessence of moral equivalence.
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Right. That's a way of dealing with October 7th. I mean, the. The anti Israel campaign, which by the way, is vast. I mean, billions of people in the world see it as a priority to rid the world of Israel. It's worth thinking about because it's quite a disturbing feature of. Of global culture. And October 7th poses a problem for people, particularly in the west, who support the campaign, because October 7th is obviously hate, heinous, and it couldn't be covered up easily because the people who perpetrated it were very public about what they were doing, as you pointed out, they filmed it, they broadcast it, and the evidence is undeniable. So someone like this writer can't deny that it happened, because it clearly happened. So the only other option is to make an argument that basically that the Israelis deserved it or that there's no real difference between Israel and Hamas. And the idea is to kind of erode American support for Israel so that eventually Israel can be sacrificed to the forces that are trying to destroy the mountain.
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Sure.
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How much Nicholas Kristof understands about the use that's being made of him. Again, I don't think he's a particularly smart or sophisticated writer, but he's participating in a political campaign whose goals are obvious. And I'm saying they're obvious because he explicitly states them, which I think a smarter writer would not have done.
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Mati, you've explained the cost of this type of work to journalism. What do you think the cost is to Israel?
- [33:22]
B
That's a great question. It's a cost that's harder to see. But I think that the cost is very real. The term human rights to most Israelis is interpreted as a threat to them because so much of the criticism coming at Israel is not designed to make Israeli society better. It's actually designed to Make Israeli society go away. And Israelis have realized that, that, you know, Human Rights Watch is not a group interested in improving the moral fiber of Israeli society. They're part of a campaign against the state of Israel. And I think that's, you know, that take on it is accurate. And that's true of Amnesty and it's true of the array of human rights organizations. It would be nice to be able to trust the New York Times and, you know, when there was an expose on human rights abuses in Israeli prisons. It would be good for Israelis to be able to see that and say, this is real. This is something we need to take seriously. This is something we need to address. And we can't because the information has become ideological. And even worse is that the internal organizations that were created to police human rights in Israel. Think of organizations like B'Tselem or organizations like Breaking the Silence, which begin as. As Israeli organizations that are trying to fight for human rights in Israel. Those organizations get co opted by the International Anti Israel Campaign. Today, they're funded almost completely from abroad. They speak in English to audiences abroad, so they're staffed by Israelis. But these are effectively franchises of the international Left or the International Anti Israel Campaign. And what that means is that we don't have organizations that Israelis trust that can speak to us about problems like the ones that are supposedly being discussed in this article. And I think that we need to be able to have that discussion. That is, we need, as Israelis, to be able to have a discussion about the moral quality of our military and our detention facilities and the way we prosecute this war. And we need to be able to have that discussion without cooperating with the forces trying to destroy the country. And it is very hard to do that. And that ends up serving the forces which are present, unfortunately, in Israeli politics, which have no interest in human rights, which are openly contemptuous of human rights. And I'm thinking of forces like Itamar Benvir. Not only him, there are also big parts of the ruling party that are more or less there politically. So essentially, this has kind of neutralized human rights discourse inside Israel at a moment when we really need it. And one of the main challenges for us at this dark moment is preserving our soul and our morality and our moral compass amid this war. That would be much easier. It would never be easier, but that would be much easier if we had trusted organizations that spoke to us in a language that we could understand and that we could trust. And we don't have that in large part because of the ferocious nature of the anti Israel campaign pivoting off that.
- [35:56]
A
And I want to close with this question. In preparing for this episode, one of the members of our team messaged, and I'll quote here, the hard part. This was after reading the piece, obviously not digging into many of the details that we've now discussed which have since been surfaced. But this person wrote, the hard part is that even if the worst claims in the peace are distorted or false, that doesn't make the real failures, meaning in the Israeli prison system, any less painful. Now, being intellectually honest, that sentiment, I do think is shared by many in Israel that was articulated by this member of our team and in the Diaspora. What do you say to those listening who are concerned about problems that you have pointed to in this conversation, including a moment ago in the Israeli prison system, but don't know what to believe, who to believe, how to tackle what Christoph has done here, given that they're struggling with real problems in Israel at the same time?
- [36:50]
B
Right. And I share the concern expressed by your unnamed staffer. We need to be able to have a discussion about our very real problems without playing into the hands of people trying to destroy the country. So I always try to ask, when I'm looking at, you know, different kinds of discourse, is this person trying to make Israel better or is this person trying to make Israel go away? And once you answer that question, it becomes easier to have a discussion. Discussion. If the discussion is about how to make Israel go away, which it often is, and I think that's the discussion that underlies this essay in the New York Times. I'm not interested in that discussion. I'm not going to have it, and I don't think I should be expected to have it. If the discussion is about how to make Israel a better country, a more moral country, a more successful country, a better place to live for Jewish citizens, for Muslim citizens, I'm very much interested in having that discussion, which is, I think, the most important discussion to have of the volume of this campaign. The campaign that's on display in this quite ludicrous piece makes it very hard for us to have that discussion. And in some ways it's easier in this regard to be Israeli than to be a Jew in the Diaspora. Israelis have a pretty loud discussion about the right way forward for Israel. And because it's easier for us here to have a discussion that doesn't play into the hands of the many forces trying to undermine the security of the state. But I think, I think it's crucial for us to have that discussion. So I think we need to be able to acknowledge that a lot of this criticism is not criticism being made in good faith. And a lot of the actors trying to push information or giving us information that is fictional. And I think that's true of not all of the information in this piece, but much of it. And I think at the same time, we have to be able to look at our prison system and look at our military in Gaza and say we want our institutions to observe the highest standard and we're clearly failing. Terrible things are going to happen. I mean, terrible things happen in the carceral system in New York, and terrible things happened in Iraq, as you know. And it's a. You know, I wish that Israel could say that we're better than everyone else. I'm not sure that we can say that. And we need to be able to address our own moral issues without participating in this kind of deranged discourse.
- [38:45]
A
The only thing I would add to what you're saying, Monty, is that there are abuses in prison systems all over the world. I'm not saying that's okay. It is a fact. In New York City, there are abuses. I mean, again, I don't want to get into the merits of each charge and just type into Google, abuse is Rikers Island. You will see all sorts of cases or claims or charges or obviously you mentioned Abu Ghraib, which I was in Iraq, as you alluded to, during Abu Ghraib. So I followed that case very closely. I had to deal with the press during that time on behalf of the US Government. I'm not in any way comparing what Israel's accused of to Abu Ghraib. But I just, you know, there have been UN peacekeeping forces, all sorts of accusations of abuses all over the world. In Africa, I mean, we can go on and on and on. It's both not shocking, and it's a problem like both things can be true, that, as you said, as an Israeli, you have to deal with. But the problem I have is that once I can see that point, then if I were having a conversation with Nick Kristof, which I hope to have at some point, I think his response, and the critics of Israel say, okay, so maybe he doesn't get everything right. But you're acknowledging, Dan, you're conceding that there's a larger truth here, there's a larger set of facts, that again, even if Nick misses the mark to some degree, you're acknowledging there's a problem. And then his big lie, which is Hamas equals Israel when it comes to rape as a strategic tool of warfare is fair game. It's a fair debate. We may disagree on the details, you may say it's not as bad as he says, but then you're in it. You're drawn into this debate, which is really, as we talked about earlier, is about moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel. And that, to me, is why I strenuously resist, maybe to a fault, but I strenuously resist saying what you just said, which is, look, we need to understand there are problems in the Israeli prison system and Ben GVIR is a bad guy. And like, okay, like, sure, but I just feel like once you're in that muck, you're in the muck. I mean, it was like during the quote, unquote, mass starvation charges from the summer of 2025, where friends of mine, colleagues of mine, very reputable journalists who are generally, I think, very sensible, were starting to publish pieces. Israelis in the English language press saying, it may not be mass starvation, but there's a problem, okay? And I'm like, no, the claim is whether or not Israel's orchestrating mass starvation. Your obligation is to respond to that libel, to that blood libel. And the moment you say that's not true, but this is true, you're like, responding to a different charge. If people want to make the claim that there are problems in the Israeli prison system like there are in prison systems all over the world, fine, let's have that conversation. But that is not the conversation Nick Kristof is having. And by responding to his. The conversation he wants to have, by making concessions about a different conversation, you are legitimizing the frame or the conversation or the core, what I believe is a blood libel that he's trying to thrust into the public discourse.
- [41:45]
B
I agree. It's kind of like Jews being accused of using the blood of Christian children for matzah. And then we explain that actually according to the law, laws of kashrut, you can't eat blood, so that charges. You know, I think you get drawn into these discussions, which is why I said earlier that I think we need to be able to differentiate very clearly between two different discussions. One is how to make Israel better, and one is about how to make Israel go away. And I don't suggest getting dragged into the latter discussion. I think we need to be able to talk about the campaign against Israel. There is a very powerful, well funded ideological campaign which you might call anti Zionism. It has different names and it's being waged, of course, across the Islamic world and has been for about 100 years. But it's increasingly being waged through the institutions of the west, including Columbia University and Harvard University and the United nations and Human Rights Watch and the New York Times and the ap, where I used to work. And that's just a short version of the list. We have to be able to point to that campaign and understand it as a campaign. So when we see an essay like this, I think you're right. The response is not to say, well, well, this is true and this isn't true. I think Israelis need to be on top of this without any connection to an essay in the New York Times. The right discussion to have about an essay like this is a discussion about the motivation behind this essay, the motivation behind the institution that not only allows this essay to be published, but has published many similar libels over the past, not just since October 7th, but even before. So often we kind of take the charge on its own terms and try to answer it. That is not the right response. The right response, and I think this is increasingly happening, is to ask, understand the campaign. Why is this happening? Who's driving it? Why are we seeing the kind of stories that we're seeing? And what effect is this having? I think that's the right response when that. I agree with you.
- [43:26]
A
All right, Mati, thank you for doing this. Like, you know, Ilana and I said you were the perfect person for that exact reason to have on the podcast is you were the person we wanted to talk to that you actually having lived it, you on the other side, you really do understand what's happening, the process, how it's happening, why it's happening. So I. I really am grateful for your taking the time with us today, and we'll. We'll look forward to having you back on soon.
- [43:46]
B
Thanks so much for having me.
- [43:56]
A
Call Me Back is produced and edited by Lon Benatar. Our production manager is Brittany Cone. Our community manager is Ava Weiner. Our music was composed by Yuval Singh. Mo Sound and video editing by Liquid Audio. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.
- [44:27]
C
Hi, it's Gabe Silverstein from the ARC Media team. You may know me from research by Gabe Silverstein. This summer, I participated in a Birthright trip. So I can tell you exactly what they mean when they say, one trip changes everything. Birthright didn't just connect me with my Israeli brothers and sisters in a spiritual and lasting way. Birthright gave me a deeper understanding of what it means to be a Jew and where I fit into the Jewish story. It's incredible to me that this organization exists. And I know that behind every one of these trips are generous people. People who made it happen. People like you. Birthright Israel's goal is to inspire and empower a new generation of Jewish young adults. To help make that happen and to create more life changing experiences like mine, please visit BirthrightIsrael Foundation. Callmeback. One trip changes everything.