As backlash over a recent column published by the New York Times alleging that Israeli guards sexually abused Palestinian detainees reached a fever pitch on Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu broke his silence by threatening legal action against the paper.
“Today I instructed my legal advisers to consider the harshest legal action against The New York Times and Nicholas Kristof,” Netanyahu wrote in a post on X/twitter Thursday morning. “They defamed the soldiers of Israel and perpetuated a blood libel about rape, trying to create a false symmetry between the genocidal terrorists of Hamas and Israel’s valiant soldiers.”
Netanyahu’s legal warning, which followed a similar allegation of defamation over the paper’s coverage of starvation in Gaza last year, was dismissed by the Times in a statement distributed during a rally against the newspaper outside its Times Square headquarters late Thursday afternoon.
New York Times defends Kristof column
“This threat, similar to one made last year, is part of a well-worn political playbook that aims to undermine independent reporting and stifle journalism that does not fit a specific narrative,” said Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokesperson for the paper. “Any such legal claim would be without merit.”
The statement went on to defend Kristof’s column, titled “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” calling it “deeply reported” and describing him as “widely regarded as one of the world’s best on-the-ground journalists in documenting and bearing witness to sexual abuse experienced by women and men in war and conflict zones.”
A Jewish legal scholar, Jed Rubenfeld, said in an essay in The Free Press that Netanyahu’s threatened lawsuit, if filed, would be “dead in the water” based on legal precedent.
Despite the New York Times’ repeated defense of the column, which chronicled detailed accounts of sexual abuse by Israeli guards, many Jewish groups and leaders have said it relied on biased sourcing to advance claims made by Palestinian detainees, including that guards trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners.
Protesters rally outside Times headquarters
The backlash spilled onto the streets of Manhattan Thursday evening, when more than 100 protesters waving Israeli flags and carrying signs reading “#End Jew Hatred” gathered outside the New York Times headquarters to demand the paper retract the column.
While the Times has previously faced blowback from pro-Israel voices for its reports alleging widespread starvation in Gaza, recent demonstrations at its headquarters have more often come from pro-Palestinian activists who accused the paper of having a bias toward Israel.
Thursday’s protest, organized by pro-Israel groups including EndJewHatred, Stop Antizionism, Hineni, and the Movement Against Antizionism, featured impassioned chants of “shame on Kristof” and “we demand action” amid steady drumbeats.
“We want to say that we are saying no to this,” Adam Louis-Klein, the founder of the Movement Against Antizionism, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We are saying no to anti-Zionist libels, and we are making the connection that is inherent between anti-Zionist libels and the violence and hatred that Jews are being subjected to every single day.”
Many attendees carried signs that read “J’accuse” next to the Times’ logo, a reference to the Dreyfus affair, as well as others that read “When did the New York Times become Der Sturmer?” a reference to the notorious Nazi newspaper.
Ellis Shrem, a 30-year-old rally participant, said Kristof’s column was enough to make him cancel his Times subscription altogether.
“I’ve been a New York Times subscriber for a long time, and I know they’re left-leaning, fine, but when you print blood libel, like, that’s just another, I just canceled the subscription,” Shrem said. “It just threw me over the edge, and that they refuse to retract, refuse to give an inch on something that they know they printed is evil. I just couldn’t take it anymore.”
Protesters warn of rising antisemitism
Anya Levitov, a 52-year-old participant, said that she had been “enraged” not just by Kristof’s column, but also by the many comments supporting the piece in its comments section. She said that the experience had felt “worse than it was in my childhood in the Soviet Union,” when anti-Zionist propaganda reigned, fueling local antisemitism.
“It’s just so absurd and so beyond the pale that it was hard for me to imagine that so many people would print it in the first place, but so many people would buy it,” Levitov said.
The protest drew heckles from some passersby, including a child who yelled into the crowd, “F–ck the Jews,” and a taxi driver who shouted from his vehicle, “Zionist pigs.” One woman who passed the group shouted, “You guys are depending on US taxes, losers.”
For many at the rally, the underlying call for the paper to retract Kristof’s piece was rooted in a fear that it would further inflame antisemitism online and beyond, a sentiment echoed in signs reading, “Antizionism gets Jews killed!”
“It’s a watershed moment for The Times, New York, and for the culture to do the right thing and correct the record on the story, because it’s not just The Times’ reputation that’s at risk, but Jewish safety,” attendee Michael Wigotsk said.
