What Did You Think Ben-Gvir Was Doing All This Time?
On the hysterical backlash to Nick Kristof’s reporting on Israel’s prison system.
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Nick Kristof, the veteran New York Times opinion columnist who has covered sexual violence in conflict zones for decades, published an extraordinary piece on Monday, The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians, in which he reports out the UN’s claim that Israeli leaders “have built a security apparatus where sexual violence has become one of Israel’s ‘standard operating procedures.’”
For my purposes here, I’m going to set aside the fact that Kristof felt compelled to open with two paragraphs of throat-clearing—both-sidesing the horrific testimonials of what’s being done to Palestinians right now against the alleged sexual assaults by Hamas on October 7, 2023, many of whose details have since unraveled under scrutiny.
Below, I’m going to quote from the piece at some length to give you a sense of the graphic sexual violence Kristof reported. Please consider this to be a major trigger warning. (If you’ve already read the Kristof piece, you can skip down to the next section beginning with “Predictably.”)
Here’s an account from Sami al-Sai, a 46-year-old freelance journalist arrested in 2024:
“They were all hitting me, and one stepped on my head and neck,” he said. “Someone pulled my pants down. They pulled down my boxers.” And then one of the guards pulled out a rubber baton used to beat prisoners.
“They were trying to force it into my rectum, and I was bracing myself to prevent it, but I couldn’t. It was so painful.” The guards were laughing at him, he said. “Then I heard someone say, ‘Give me the carrots,’” he recalled, adding that they then used a carrot. “It was extremely painful,” he said. “I was praying for death.”
…One of the guards was a woman who, he said, grabbed him by the penis and testicles, and joked, “these are mine,” and then squeezed until he screamed from pain…
After he was dumped into his cell, he concluded that the spot where he had been raped had been used before, for he found other people’s vomit, blood and broken teeth crushed into his skin.
From a Euro-Med report, which says “Israeli forces systematically employ rape and sexual torture to humiliate Palestinian female detainees”:
It cited a 42-year-old woman who said she had been shackled naked to a metal table as Israeli soldiers forcibly had sex with her over two days while other soldiers filmed the attacks. Afterward, she said, she was shown photos of her being raped and told they would be published if she did not cooperate with Israeli intelligence…
Hand-held metal detectors were used to probe between men’s naked legs and then smashed into their private parts; some men had to have their testicles amputated by doctors after beatings, according to the Euro-Med monitor.
On sexual violence against children:
Save the Children commissioned a survey last year of children ages 12 to 17 who had been in Israeli detention; more than half reported witnessing or experiencing sexual violence. Save the Children said that the true figure was probably higher because stigma left some unwilling to acknowledge what had happened to them…
I located and interviewed three boys who had been detained, and all described being sexually abused.
One, a shy boy in a Hilfiger shirt who was 15 years old at the time of his arrest, declined to say whether he had also witnessed actual rapes. But he said threats were routine: “They’d say, ‘Do this or we’ll put this stick up your butt.’”
The other boys told very similar stories of sexual violence as part of beatings and noted that the threats of rape were directed not only at them but also at their mothers and siblings.
On the threats that follow:
A half-dozen guards immobilized him by holding his arms and legs while pulling down his pants and underwear and inserting a metal baton into his anus. The rapists were laughing and cheering, he said.
Several hours later, he said, he fainted and was taken to the prison clinic. After he woke up, he said, he was raped once more, again with the metal baton.
“I was bleeding,” he recalled. “I broke down completely. I was crying.”
After being returned to his cell, he said, he asked a guard for pen and paper to write a complaint about the assaults. The request was denied. And that evening, a group of guards came to the cell.
“Who is the one who wants to file a complaint?” one guard jeered, he said, and another guard pointed him out. “The beating started immediately,” he recalled. And then they raped him with the baton for a third time that day, he said.
He recalled one saying, “Now you have even more to put in your complaint.”
A few days after I interviewed him, the farmer called to say that he didn’t want his name used after all. He had just been visited by Shin Bet and warned not to cause trouble.
On the 2024 leaked video showing nine guards sodomizing a shackled prisoner, which led to riots in support of the rapists:
One Palestinian prisoner from Gaza reportedly was hospitalized in July 2024 with a tear in his rectum, cracked ribs and a punctured lung. Investigators obtained a prison video purportedly showing the abuse. The authorities detained nine reservist soldiers — but Israel’s right-wingers erupted in outrage, with a mob of furious protesters, including politicians, breaking into the prison to show support for the guards. The last charges against the soldiers were dropped in March, and last month the military approved the soldiers’ return to duty.
Netanyahu hailed the dropping of charges as the end of a “blood libel.” “The State of Israel must hunt down its enemies — not its heroic fighters,” he said…
That prisoner, who afterward reportedly required a stoma bag to collect his waste, was returned to Gaza, and an acquaintance of his said that he spent months in a hospital recovering from his internal injuries.
On the use of dogs:
On one occasion, he said, the guards zip-tied his testicles and penis for hours while beating his genitals. For days afterward, he said, he urinated blood.
On one occasion, he said, he was held down, stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.
“They were using cameras to take photos, and I heard their laughs and giggles,” he said. He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him.
On sexual violence by settlers against Palestinians:
Israeli settlers are not an official arm of the state in the same way that the prison system is, but the Israel Defense Forces increasingly protect settlers as they attack Palestinian villagers and use sexual violence to drive Palestinians to flee. “Sexualized violence is used to pressure communities” to leave their land…
The consortium surveyed Palestinian farmers and found that more than 70 percent of households that had been displaced reported that threats to women and children, particularly of sexual violence, were the decisive reason for leaving. “Sexual violence,” said Allegra Pacheco of the coalition, “is one of the mechanisms driving people from their land.”
In a remote Jordan Valley hamlet of Bedouin farmers, I met a 29-year-old farmer, Suhaib Abualkebash, who recounted how a gang of about 20 settlers rampaged through the homes of his family, beating adults and children alike, stealing jewelry and 400 sheep — and also cut off his clothes with a hunting knife and then tightly zip-tied his penis and yanked.
“I was afraid they would cut off my penis,” Abualkebash told me. “I thought this was the end for me.”
Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert weighs in:
To try to make sense of what I found, I called up Ehud Olmert, who was prime minister from 2006 to 2009. Olmert told me he didn’t know much about sexual violence against Palestinians but was not surprised by the accounts I had heard.
“Do I believe it happens?” he asked. “Definitely.”
On Israel’s response:
Israel welcomed a United Nations report documenting sexual assaults against Israeli women by Palestinians but rejected the report’s call to investigate Israeli assaults against Palestinians.
Predictably, after the piece was published, Israel and its defenders lined up to accuse the Times of printing lies, blood libel, and—you guessed it—Hamas propaganda.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry asserted that the prison guards filmed sodomizing a shackled Palestinian are the real victims here:
The WSJ op-ed below was written by the head of “Honest Reporting,” an Israeli propaganda outlet masquerading as a media watchdog that has published, among other things, numerous denials of famine in Gaza.
Bari Weiss, who recently allowed Netanyahu to pick his own 60 Minutes interviewer, wasn’t going to sit this one out. In addition to the article below, Weiss’s Free Press published a piece on the mechanics of dog rape.
As it turns out, all of the sources are “anti-Israel” on account of being raped by Israelis:
Here’s a remarkable thing to say about any army, let alone one occupying a people for far longer than this man has been alive:
Some pioneering rape-deniers even took to review-bombing “Kristof Farms”:
So, yes, the usual hasbarists and right-wing zealots were out in force—but I was particularly interested in the reactions of many so-called liberal Zionists.
Like Hen Mazzig, a hipster-coded Senior Fellow at The Tel Aviv Institute who has become ubiquitous online for fiercely defending Israel—and, more recently, for calling on the Israeli government to crack down on the radical settlers while conveniently omitting the fact of their open alliance:
This week, Mazzig suddenly became a media expert, firing off multiple tweets and Substack posts accusing Kristof of shoddy reporting.
Here he is suggesting that Kristof’s father, who died over fifteen years ago, may have been some sort of Nazi who influenced the article from the grave. Maybe you can decode the allegation, but I certainly couldn’t:
In fairness, this is far from Mazzig’s first foray into conspiracy theory—in October 2023, he asserted that a photo of a dead Palestinian baby was actually a “Pallywood doll.”
And then there’s Deborah Lipstadt, President Biden’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, who amplified a call for Nick Kristof to be executed:
What’s interesting about Mazzig, Lipstadt, and their peers is that they’ve built their reputations as liberal Zionists in part by being willing to denounce Israel’s far-right extremists. Controlled opposition, if you will. In these circles, it’s become fashionable to condemn, in particular, the cartoonishly evil National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, framing him as a fringe figure who doesn’t represent Israel.
Here is Mazzig saying it is his “ultimate fantasy” to see Ben-Gvir removed from office:
In 2019, Lipstadt publicly cut ties with her synagogue after it supported Netanyahu’s alliance with Ben-Gvir’s far-right political party, Otzma Yehudit:
The article reports:
“This is a party that has racist views,” [Lipstadt] said. “This is a party that condones murder. This is a party that condones the man who committed the largest mass murder in Israel by a Jew. Those are all things that I find despicable, and to say it’s just politics is really bad.”
All this leaves me wondering: What exactly do Hen Mazzig, Deborah Lipstadt, and their liberal Zionist friends think Ben-Gvir has been up to during his tenure as National Security Minister—a role that, among other things, has him overseeing the Israel Prison Service?
Did they think his noose lapel pin was just a fashion statement?
That he popped champagne after the passage of the apartheid death penalty law as a gag?
That he had a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Muslim worshippers in 1994, hanging on his wall because he thought it tied the room together?
Do they think he’s joking when he boasts about starving Palestinian prisoners—“They come in fat and leave thin”—or when he proudly rebuffed the Israeli Supreme Court’s ruling that the state was failing to provide enough nutrition to ensure even “a basic level of existence” and had to remedy it?
Are they actually surprised that the minister who celebrated his birthday with a noose-themed cake oversees a prison regime of torture and humiliation targeting the people he is desperately trying to execute?
In short, I find it rather bizarre that many liberal Zionists will concede that Ben-Gvir is evil, yet react with complete outrage and incredulity the moment the evil he has brought to bear is exposed.
The only way to hold these contradictory beliefs is to remain in complete denial about the extent to which Israel’s state apparatus has been captured by figures whom even they would regard as sadistic—and about the degree to which those figures, rather than being fringe, reflect the spirit of Israel itself, including the soldiers, prison guards, police officers, and settlers who carry out their orders.
Sde Teiman, for reference, is the Israeli prison where guards were filmed sodomizing a shackled Palestinian detainee.
Once you’ve spent enough time around settlers and soldiers in the West Bank, you begin to understand that they humiliate Palestinians as a matter of course. A soldier swiping a tray of fresh cookies off the counter of a Hebron cafe; pistol-whipping an elderly shepherd for complaining that a settler had stolen his sheep; strip-searching a woman in a hijab at a checkpoint. These little indignities unfold everywhere you look.
And the impulse to defile has been on full display since October 7. How many IDF soldiers filmed themselves dancing in the underwear of Palestinian women whose homes they’d occupied? What do you think these men would’ve done if those women were around?
Kristof writes that “decades of covering conflict” has taught him that “a combination of dehumanization and impunity” can lead to the type of savagery that often includes sexual violence. So it should come as no surprise that some of the worst abuses are taking place inside Israeli prisons, which effectively became black sites after October 7 when the state barred the Red Cross from visiting “security prisoners” indefinitely, in open defiance of international law.
To be clear, Israeli prisons were never a summer camp. And Israeli forces—whether in Gaza, the West Bank, Arab towns in ‘48, or the prison system—have never been a benevolent force. But under this government, they’ve channeled the id of a racist state more nakedly than ever before, effectively handed carte blanche by political leadership to humiliate and brutalize their “human animal” subjects.
Watch the video below and then ask yourself: Where exactly do you think this man draws the line?
To quote an Israeli MK in defense of raping Palestinian prisoners: “Everything is legitimate.”
On Thursday, Netanyahu announced that he’d instructed his “legal advisers to consider the harshest legal action against the New York Times and Nicholas Kristof”:
One way to fight these supposed “lies” in the court of public opinion would be to abide by international law and allow the Red Cross into the prisons. One has to assume that hasn’t happened for the same reason international journalists are still barred from entering Gaza.
I’ve said for a long time that one of the great failures of the press since October 7 has been its near-total silence on the 10,000+ Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, many without charge, in what Israeli human rights groups have called a “network of torture camps.” This has been the case precisely because the prison system is a perfect distillation of what Zionism looks like in practice: a state apparatus organized around domination, humiliation, and dehumanization. Today, confronting that reality unravels the liberal Zionist fantasy that Israel’s extremists are somehow cordoned off from the rest of society and devoid of significant material influence. Now that a mainstream outlet has finally exposed what’s happening inside these prisons, the country’s defenders are understandably treating it as a grave threat.1
Two additional stories from the past week illustrate how the cruelty of settlers and soldiers that even liberal Zionists can occasionally muster the courage to criticize are not aberrations at all, but expressions of Israeli policy.
Last Friday, a video went viral showing settlers in the occupied West Bank forcing Palestinians at gunpoint to exhume the body of a village elder who had died and been buried earlier that day. In response to the outrage, the IDF released a statement condemning “any attempt to act in a manner that harms public order, the rule of law, and the dignity of the living and the deceased.”
But the settlers, who were accompanied by soldiers, weren’t acting out of random malice. They had come down from Sa-Nur, one of the newly minted northern West Bank settlements, formally reestablished by the government last month, just over twenty years after its evacuation.
In an interview with the Times of Israel, Meir Goldmintz, a “heavily bearded yeshiva teacher,” looked out at the neighboring Palestinian villages from his new home in Sa-Nur and said, “I don’t know why they are here. This is Jewish land.”
According to the government that illegally handed the settlers that land, Goldmintz is exactly right. Who can really blame him for not wanting a cemetery in his new backyard?
Just south of Sa-Nur, near the tiny secular settlement of Shaked, the Israeli Civil Administration—the bureaucratic arm of the occupation now effectively controlled by Bezalel Smotrich—uprooted 3,000 “illegal” Palestinian olive trees to clear space for settlement expansion. (The concept of “illegal trees” is difficult to wrap your head around.) You cannot overstate the cruelty of this—many olive trees in the West Bank are hundreds of years old, with families harvesting them for generations.
But again, it wasn’t random; according to the Times of Israel, “Smotrich said the trees were planted within the boundaries of the zoning masterplan for Shahak [an industrial park near the Shaked settlement] and that removing them would enable the further expansion of the industrial park together with the establishment of a new settlement, in accordance with policies the government has already approved.”
In other words, this move, like the reestablishment of Sa-Nur, is part of the Israeli government’s broader effort to repopulate and entrench Israeli control over the northern occupied West Bank. It’s the same project that was on display last week at the settler real-estate fair held inside Park East Synagogue, where developers marketed homes in Karnei Shomron, another growing settlement in the north. Protesting that, of course, was deemed antisemitic.
Zionism is filled with contradictions, which means that liberal Zionism requires a staggering amount of cognitive dissonance to hold in one’s head. The same mental gymnastics that allow people to condemn Itamar Ben-Gvir while denying his actual influence allow them to divorce these daily acts of cruelty—the exhuming of bodies, the uprooting of trees—from the reality that they’re advancing the central state project of ethnic cleansing, one materially supported in synagogues across the United States.
One final note. Israel’s i24 News reported on Tuesday that the IDF is expected to close the case against the undercover agents who shot and killed four members of the Odeh family—a mother, father, and two of their children, aged seven and five—as they drove home from a Ramadan shopping trip.
The agents who fired the shots were never even questioned.
In fairness to the liberal Zionist organization that I often criticize, J Street, its founder, Jeremy Ben-Ami, published a Substack in which he wrote of Kristof’s piece, “Jewish Americans must demand a credible, independent investigation – not denial – into horrific allegations of sexual abuse.”
That said, it’s clear that Ben-Ami still thinks of this moment as an aberration, rather than a manifestation of Zionism: “It is a gut punch to all who have fought for an Israel that will live up to its founding ideals – and to the liberal, democratic and Jewish values we cherish.”
Thank you for keeping me sane with your journalism.
It is mostly crickets here in Germany when it comes to the NYT piece. Infuriating enough you’d think but no what really made my blood boil today was an article in the left newspaper TAZ.de picking apart Kristof’s article for its shoddy research and calling it a hit piece well timed to take away attention from the report on sex violence committed by Hamas which was published also this week.
Oh and of course all the newspapers reported about the latter one.
I am seriously considering moving to Spain at this point. 🤦🏻♀️
Mr. Jasper, how might I contact you?