In
the frum community, you hear the stories of gedolim (great rabbis)
during the Holocaust. They are painted as fearless leaders who marched
with their flocks into the gas chambers or miraculously rebuilt from
nothing purely on the merit of their unbroken emunah. And some of these
stories are true. But if you dig into the actual historical records, the
truth is often much darker. Sometimes the revered tzadik (saint) who built a massive post war empire was, objectively speaking, incredibly selfish.
Take
Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, the famous Satmar Rebbe. Today, he is venerated
as the ultimate unyielding leader of ultra Orthodoxy who built a
massive, prosperous hasidus in America. He's also admired by some on the Jewish left for his antizionist theology.
But during the Holocaust, his actions were anything but heroic. The
historical record reveals a man whose self preservation consistently
cost others their lives.
Even
before the war, he was known for a relentlessly ambitious personality
and a lust for power. When his father the Sighet Rebbe died, his older
brother inherited the rabbinate of Sighet. His family exiled the jealous
17-year-old Yoel to Satmar to prevent him from interfering. Years
later, when his brother passed away, he considered his family traitors
for bypassing him again to appoint his 14-year-old nephew as the
successor. He then engaged in six years of bitter relentless campaigns
against his opponents in Satmar, whom he slandered both openly and
surreptitiously, before securing the position of chief rabbi of Satmar
in 1934.
Even
after becoming religious leader, his primary concern was himself. When a
virulently antisemitic government took power in Romania in 1937, he
simply packed up and traveled to Czechoslovakia despite his kehillah
(congregation) begging him not to abandon them in a time of crisis. Just
a few weeks later, the Romanian king dissolved the antisemitic
government. With the immediate threat over, Rabbi Teitelbaum returned
home to his community in Satmar. When he got back, he gave a sermon to
his congregation justifying his disappearance, making the claim that a
Tzadik could only do his holy work if he was safe. This was a harbinger
for what was to come.
As
the terrifying reality of the Polish extermination camps reached Satmar
in 1943, one man attempted to warn the Jewish residents of Satmar about
the impending threat and urged them to escape. In response, the Satmar
rebbe excommunicated him. Rabbi Teitelbaum himself cautioned his flock
against trying to immigrate to Palestine or other countries, preaching
that such a move would severely harm their strict Hasidic way of life.
Rabbi
Teitelbaum did not just passively fail to help. He actively dismantled
the escape routes others tried to build. At one crucial point, roughly
forty rabbis recognized the impending doom and signed a desperate
memorandum. This agreement would have integrated vulnerable Haredi
(ultra Orthodox) Jews into the established Zionist underground networks,
which were actively operating systems to help Jews hide and escape
across the border. When Rabbi Teitelbaum found out about this life
saving collaboration, he immediately stepped in to stop it. He appealed
to the Central Bureau in Budapest and aggressively demanded that the
Orthodox congregation in Oradea completely nullify the agreement.
Because of his rigid ideological refusal to cooperate with Zionists, he
deliberately severed a vital lifeline for his own community. He even
refused to let other rabbinic leaders organize a public Taanis (fast
day) to mourn and pray for salvation, worrying the government would see
it as a political protest. He forced his community to stay quiet and
reject the underground networks, paralyzing them right up until the
moment he slipped away in the middle of the night to save himself.
As
the Nazi threat closed in, his followers desperately tried to smuggle
him out, but his rigid ego continually got in the way. At one point, a
group prepared to cross the border into Romania, an escape route that
saved over ten thousand Jews. The organizers sent a vehicle to collect
him, but he refused to go, and because of his refusal, the entire plan
was aborted, dooming the rest of the group. Another time, a plan was
made to smuggle him to safety by train, but it required him to shave his
beard and wear goyishe clothing. He refused to alter his appearance,
killing that escape plan as well.
When
he finally did escape his doomed congregation, it was in a bribed Red
Cross ambulance with his wealthy followers. During the chaotic nighttime
departure, the very man who organized the rescue and knew the location
of their safe house was accidentally left behind. They did not turn back
for him. Because they left their guide behind, they got lost, wandered
the streets of Cluj, and were arrested and thrown into the Cluj ghetto.
In
the horrific conditions of the brick factory ghetto, he showed no
leadership or compassion. While regular Jews suffered, he demanded his
food be prepared in entirely separate vessels to maintain his strict
kashrus standards, despite the ghetto hosting a completely kosher
kitchen. He hid from the public, spoke to few people, refused to serve
as a chazzan for the makeshift synagogue, and begged his closest
associates to pull strings to get him transferred to a more comfortable
ghetto.
The
most hypocritical part of his story is how he actually survived. He was
a virulent anti-Zionist, preaching that collaborating with Zionist
institutions was a grave sin. Yet, when the opportunity arose, he
eagerly took a spot on the famous Kasztner train, a rescue transport
organized and negotiated by the very Zionists he despised. On the train,
leaving his community to be deported to Auschwitz, he spent the journey
hiding in the corner of the last car behind cloth sheets hung from the
ceiling, entirely shunning the other terrified passengers.
When
the train was diverted to the Bergen-Belsen transit camp, his
entitlement continued. While others suffered the brutal camp conditions,
he was exempted from roll calls by a doctor, and volunteers performed
all of his forced labor tasks. He refused to daven (pray) with the main
camp minyan. In a display of profound arrogance, he even picked a fight
with another captive rabbi, accusing him of giving a lenient psak
(halachic ruling) despite the fact that they were literally in a Nazi
camp!
After
his release, he was brought to safety in Switzerland where he lived in a
private apartment funded by his American followers. Even in safety, his
refusal to play nice cost lives. He tried to track down Jewish orphans
hidden with Christian families, but his main goal failed completely
because his distaste for non Haredi organizations caused him to alienate
the Joint Distribution Committee and Agudas Yisroel. Because of this
pointless infighting, he failed to establish a rescue home for those
children.
When
the war was over, his ingratitude became absolute. He refused to send a
single letter of thanks to the people or institutions who secured his
rescue. Years later, when Israel Kasztner, the man whose train saved his
life, was put on trial, Rabbi Teitelbaum flatly refused to testify on
his behalf.
How
did he justify all of this to his new followers in America? Well, he
didn’t. Instead, he developed a radical theology claiming the Holocaust
was God’s direct punishment for the sin of Zionism. He taught that
Zionists violated the Shalosh Shevuot (Three Oaths) and that their push
for a state was a collective kefirah (heresy) that brought down the
harshest divine wrath. He literally wrote that Zionists were descendants
of the Erev Rav and Amalek. He even blamed religious groups like
Mizrachi and Agudas Yisroel, claiming they shared the guilt for the
slaughter of six million Jews. He claimed his own personal survival was a
pure miracle through the merit of Yaakov Avinu, while arguing that the
Zionists were only saved by the Satan who was trying to glorify himself.
He built an entire religious dynasty on blaming others, successfully
using a total anti Zionist worldview to expunge his own historical
failures and rewrite his cowardice as holy zealotry.¹
If America treats Iran as an equal strategic partner despite decades
of terrorism, hostage-taking, proxy warfare, and nuclear brinkmanship,
what message does this send to every authoritarian power watching? It
teaches that sustained aggression works. That ideological extremism
eventually earns a seat at the adult table. That democratic nations
possess no enduring moral memory.
There are moments in history when a democracy makes a catastrophic intellectual mistake before it makes a military one. The mistake is not weakness alone. It is not naïveté alone. It is something more dangerous: the decision to morally elevate a hostile regime into the status of a legitimate equal partner while pretending that language itself can erase reality.
That is the inherent danger in Donald Trump’s negotiations with Iran.
Not negotiations themselves. Nations negotiate with enemies all the time. Churchill negotiated. Nixon negotiated. Even Israel has negotiated with sworn enemies when necessity demanded it. The danger begins when negotiations stop being tactical and start becoming theological — when America unconsciously grants the Iranian regime the dignity, legitimacy, and permanence of a normal civilization rather than recognizing it for what it is: a revolutionary regime built upon permanent hostility toward the West.
Iran is not merely another nation-state pursuing ordinary interests. The regime in Tehran is an ideological project. It survives through hatred. Hatred of America. Hatred of Israel. Hatred of liberal democracy. Hatred of Western modernity itself. Its revolutionary identity depends upon confrontation. To treat such a regime as a standard diplomatic counterpart is like inviting a pyromaniac to co-author the fire code.
And this is where Trump’s style becomes dangerous for the free world.
Trump approaches negotiations like a real estate developer approaching a difficult zoning board. He believes every adversary ultimately wants a transaction. He assumes pressure plus incentives equals compromise. But ideological regimes do not think transactionally. They think historically. Religiously. Civilizationally. They are willing to absorb pain over decades because they view endurance itself as victory.
The Iranian regime watched America flee Afghanistan. It watched Washington beg for stability in the Middle East. It watched Europe collapse into moral exhaustion. And now it watches an American president publicly advertise his desperation for “a deal.” That alone shifts the psychological balance.
The problem is not merely what Trump may concede. The problem is the image projected to the world: America sitting across from a terror-sponsoring regime as if two morally equivalent powers are negotiating border tariffs between Belgium and Luxembourg.
The Islamic Republic understands symbolism better than many Western leaders. Every handshake becomes propaganda. Every summit becomes validation. Every concession becomes proof that persistence breaks democratic will. One of the oldest Jewish lessons in history is that civilizations often perish not when enemies become strong, but when free societies lose the ability to distinguish between good and evil. Europe did this repeatedly. The West called barbarians “partners” until the barbarians reached the gates. Intellectual confusion always precedes civilizational collapse.
The modern Western disease is the compulsive need to normalize fanaticism.
Iran funds proxies across the Middle East. Iran armed Hezbollah. Iran empowered Hamas. Iran helped destabilize Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. Iranian leaders still chant “Death to America” with the same enthusiasm university students chant for climate justice. Yet Washington behaves as though the regime merely seeks “security guarantees” and “regional respect.”
Respect? A regime that shoots women for removing headscarves seeks domination, not respect.
A regime that celebrates martyrdom does not negotiate the way accountants negotiate.
A regime whose political theology glorifies apocalyptic confrontation cannot be analyzed solely through the language of Western diplomacy.
And yet America repeatedly falls into the same trap: believing that hostile regimes become moderate once granted legitimacy and economic oxygen. The theory failed with the Soviet Union for decades. It failed with North Korea. It failed with China. It failed after the Obama-era nuclear negotiations. And now history threatens to repeat itself once again.
The deeper danger extends beyond Iran itself.
If America treats Iran as an equal strategic partner despite decades of terrorism, hostage-taking, proxy warfare, and nuclear brinkmanship, what message does this send to every authoritarian power watching? It teaches that sustained aggression works. That ideological extremism eventually earns a seat at the adult table. That democratic nations possess no enduring moral memory.
The free world survives only when it maintains civilizational confidence — when it understands that not all systems are morally interchangeable. America’s power was never merely military. It was psychological. The belief that free societies possessed greater moral legitimacy than tyrannies.
Once that distinction dissolves, decline accelerates.
The frightening reality is that many modern leaders no longer believe in victory. They believe only in management. Temporary calm. Short-term headlines. Delayed crises. The obsession becomes avoiding discomfort today even if catastrophe grows tomorrow. That is how exhausted empires behave near the end of their historical cycle.
Trump may believe he is avoiding war. Perhaps he is. Perhaps negotiations buy temporary stability. But history teaches a cruel lesson: regimes built upon revolutionary hatred often interpret conciliation not as wisdom, but as weakness. Even analysts and diplomats have warned that rushed or symbolic agreements risk strengthening Iran’s leverage while leaving fundamental conflicts unresolved.
The free world should negotiate from strength, clarity, and moral seriousness — not from desperation for applause, markets, headlines, or legacy-building ceremonies.
Because once America psychologically accepts Iran as merely another respectable stakeholder in the “international community,” the battle is already half lost.
Empires rarely collapse from one invasion. They collapse when they forget who they are.
I
personally urge all parents to contact Ms. Bracha Goetz's website and
order this book and the many others of great importance! Link below.
Paul Mendlowitz
How to speak about the hard truth of child abuse
Acknowledging
abuse within our closest circles is excruciating, but silence is an
absolute betrayal. Our children’s futures depend on our willingness to
shatter the silence.
In
child protection, the greatest liability is the silence. For months, as
families across Israel sought refuge from geopolitical conflict,
children were confined to bomb shelters and closed quarters. While these
spaces offered physical shielding from the outside world, for many
vulnerable children, they became pressure cookers of private terror. At
ELI – Israel Association for Child Protection, we knew that a silent
wave was building.
Now, the floodgates have officially opened. As children have left the shelters and returned to their school desks,
ELI has witnessed a staggering doubling in the number of child abuse
cases. The classroom has once again become the ultimate front line of
discovery; it is where the vast majority of these cases are finally
brought to light.
Schools Are Often the First Safe Place
When the routine of school resumes, the defense mechanisms built during isolation begin to crack. Our teachers, school counselors,
and administrators are trained to spot these shifts. They are the eyes
and ears of a critical societal safety net, uniquely positioned to
notice a child’s sudden regression, behavioral changes, or explicit
disclosures. ELI has comprehensive programs actively working within the
educational system to ensure these professionals can act immediately.
But
the safety net cannot end at the school gates. The hardest, most
uncomfortable reality we must face is that we must learn the vocabulary
to address threats inside our own living rooms.
Historically, child abuse in our society
was met with institutional and cultural denial. There is the protective
but dangerous narrative that "such things simply do not happen in our
community." Today, that denial manifests as a powerful desire among
family members to hide what is often hard to believe and deeply
embarrassing for the family.
The Hardest Conversations Often Happen at Home
When
a child drops a hint, or when behavioral warning signs appear at home,
parents often experience a paralyzing cognitive dissonance. The instinct
to protect the family’s reputation or to shield oneself from an
agonizing truth frequently overrides the imperative to investigate.
We
must dismantle this stigma. Transparency breaks the cycle. If we do not
speak the hard truth, we leave the child completely isolated in their
pain, reinforcing the abuser’s power.
Giving Children the Language to Speak
To
combat this stigma, child protection must adapt. Through school-based
prevention programs that use an 'edutainment,' a play or musical about
the issue of child abuse, ELI gives children the language to recognize
and name abuse, before a "bad secret" becomes a life-long scar. We
teach them the difference between a good surprise and a toxic secret.
But adults need this vocabulary just as desperately. Parents must learn
to ask direct, non-judgmental questions, to actively listen without
reacting in anger or disbelief, and to prioritize a child's safety over
familial pride.
Acknowledging
abuse within our closest circles is excruciating, but silence is an
absolute betrayal. As we navigate the complex trauma of our current
reality, let us commit to radical transparency. Look closely, listen
fiercely, and speak up. Our children’s futures depend on our willingness
to shatter the silence.
Eran
Zimrin is the CEO of ELI – Israel Association for Child Protection,
founded in 1979 to prevent and treat child abuse in Israel. To learn
more or support our mission, visit eli-usa.org.
Protecting kids doesn't require scary
talks. Simple, calm conversations woven into everyday moments can give
children the language, confidence, and awareness to keep themselves
safe.
Not
long ago, conversations about child safety, especially those involving
personal boundaries, were largely absent from many Jewish homes and
classrooms. The silence was not born of indifference, but of discomfort,
uncertainty, and a deep desire to preserve childhood innocence.
Parents wanted to protect their children. They just weren’t sure how to begin.
For years, the prevailing assumption was that speaking to young
children about personal safety might frighten them or expose them to
concepts they were not ready to process. And yet, as awareness slowly
grew about the realities children can face, even within familiar
environments, it became clear that silence carried its own risks.
One of the most important realizations to emerge over time is this:
children do not need to be frightened in order to be empowered.
In fact, the most effective safety education often looks surprisingly gentle.
Rather than dramatic warnings, it can take the form of calm,
age-appropriate conversations woven into everyday life. A parent
helping a child get dressed, a discussion before a doctor’s visit, a
reminder during swim time—these ordinary moments can become
opportunities to build a child’s awareness of their own body, their
boundaries, and their voice.
These conversations don’t need to feel forced or dramatic; ordinary
daily interactions can naturally become opportunities to build a child’s
lifelong awareness of personal safety.
Those involved in developing early resources for these conversations
have witnessed this shift firsthand, watching as what once felt like
unfamiliar territory gradually became part of the broader educational
landscape in Jewish homes and classrooms.
Another important shift has been the understanding that safety
education is not a one-time conversation, but an ongoing process. Just
as we revisit other areas of health and wellbeing as our children grow,
personal safety can be addressed in small, thoughtful increments, with
language that evolves alongside a child’s maturity.
Experts increasingly emphasize that even very young children can
begin learning simple, foundational ideas: that their bodies are their
own, that certain areas are private, and that they can speak up if
something doesn’t feel right. These messages, when delivered with warmth
and clarity, do not burden children; they strengthen them.
Perhaps most significantly, communities have begun to recognize that
these conversations are not in conflict with our values, but an
expression of them.
Teaching children to respect their bodies and trust their inner sense
of discomfort aligns deeply with a broader commitment to dignity,
responsibility, and care for one another. Protecting children is not
only about responding to danger; it is about equipping them, in
age-appropriate ways, with the tools they need to navigate the world
safely.
Today, something has shifted.
Parents, educators, and mental health professionals are increasingly
working together to create resources that make these conversations more
accessible. What once felt daunting is becoming more natural.
Safeguarding children begins not with fear, but with clarity and gentle, open communication.
By giving children simple language, by inviting their questions, and
by reassuring them that they can always come to us, we are protecting
them and strengthening their sense of self, helping to build a culture
where safety, trust, and dignity are paramount.
For decades, Israel has played the part of the loyal, reliable
frontline defender of Western values in a region that eats weakness for
breakfast. We have bled, we have fought, and we have held the line. But
the sobering reality of the spring of 2026 has exposed a bitter truth
that the Israeli establishment can no longer afford to ignore. The
United States is no longer a reliable ally to the West, let alone to
Jerusalem. Washington’s foreign policy is no longer driven by strategic
conviction, shared democratic values, or long-term stability. It is
driven by cold financial transaction and the narcissistic obsession of
Donald Trump, a man desperately angling for a Nobel Peace Prize at the
absolute expense of Israeli security.
Facing reality
The political landscape is shifting beneath our feet, and the global
public has been thoroughly brainwashed into believing a simplistic,
outdated narrative. We have been conditioned to believe that America is
the permanent force for good while Moscow represents absolute malice.
Yet, a cold look at historical data since 1950 reveals an uncomfortable
reality. When counting major conflicts with active combat boots on the
ground, the Soviet Union and Russia have been involved in 11 wars,
including their brutal campaigns in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and
Ukraine. In contrast, the United States has engineered or plunged into
12 separate conflicts, from Vietnam and Panama to the disastrous,
prolonged occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Add the current
escalating theater with Iran, and America’s record of global
interventionism outpaces the Kremlin. Washington has spent the last
three-quarters of a century treating the globe as its personal
chessboard, and now, under Trump, it is treating its most loyal allies
like expendable corporate subsidiaries.
A Dangerous Dynamic
The current war with Iran perfectly illustrates this dangerous dynamic.
For the United States, Iran is an abstract geopolitical problem located
safely across an ocean. The physical distance between Washington and
Tehran is roughly 11,700 kilometers, a massive geographic buffer that
shields the American public from the immediate fallout of a regional
explosion. For Israel, the threat is an existential reality ticking
right on our doorstep. Tehran sits a mere 1,700 kilometers from
Jerusalem. Iranian ballistic missiles, drone swarms, and proxy armies do
not threaten the daily life of a voter in Ohio, but they menace every
single citizen in the State of Israel.
Despite this stark disparity in vulnerability, Donald Trump is
demanding absolute submission from the Israeli government. He has turned
a vital security partnership into a tool of heavy-handed coercion. We
saw the mask slip completely on May 21, 2026, when Trump publicly
bragged that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would do “whatever I
want” regarding the diplomatic backchannels in Iran. This came on the
heels of a tense phone call where Trump dismissed Israel’s sovereign
right to dictate its own military timeline.
The White House has made it clear that because America shoulders a
massive financial and logistical burden, Jerusalem must sit quietly in
the passenger seat. When the Pakistan-brokered ceasefire was
implemented, Washington immediately threatened to cut off essential
logistical and air defense support if Israel took unilateral military
action to eliminate existential threats.
Think about the sheer audacity of that position. Trump is
actively holding our air defense systems hostage to protect a fragile
truce that serves his personal political legacy, ignoring the reality
that an intact Iranian war machine is a gun pointed directly at Israel’s
head.
This pattern of American betrayal extends far beyond the borders of the
Jewish state. Trump has spent the last two months systematically
dismantling the entire Western security architecture. He has openly
threatened to withdraw from NATO, branding a 77-year-old alliance a
paper tiger simply because European nations are hesitant to send their
naval fleets into the Strait of Hormuz to back his maritime blockade.
His administration has transformed NATO from a mechanism of mutual
deterrence into an instrument of raw extortion, withdrawing thousands of
troops from Germany and threatening to halt weapon funding programs
just to bully allies into submission. By browbeating historic partners
from Europe to the Indo-Pacific, Trump has completely isolated the
United States and destroyed its collective bargaining power against
major global adversaries like Beijing.
If the United States is willing to abandon its traditional
European partners and treats Israel’s survival as a bargaining chip for a
vanity peace deal, then the time has come for Jerusalem to break free
from this toxic dependency. We must stop pretending that Washington is
our savior. If America is transforming into a volatile, self-absorbed
entity that abandons its allies for cash and applause, Israel must adapt
to the multi-polar world of 2026.
Perhaps it is time to open serious, transactional dialogues with
Russia. Moscow understands the raw calculus of power in the Middle East.
They do not hide behind hypocritical lectures on democratic values
while threatening to pull air defense funding during a war. They operate
on cold, hard national interests. If the traditional Western alliance
is dead, killed by American narcissism, Israel must chart an independent
path. We cannot allow our national survival to be dictated by a
president who views our existence through the lens of a corporate
takeover.
The alliance with America has become a liability, and
Israel must start looking out for Israel, no matter who that alienates
in Washington.
Trump: US ‘in no rush’ during ‘constructive’ Iran talks; ‘perhaps’ Tehran will join Abraham Accords
Today, 5:52 pm
US President Donald Trump calls negotiations with Iran
“constructive,” while noting that “time is on [Washington’s] side” and
the US naval blockade against Iran will remain in effect until an
agreement is reached.
“The negotiations are proceeding in an orderly and constructive
manner, and I have informed my representatives not to rush into a deal
in that time is on our side,” Trump writes on Truth Social. “The
Blockade will remain in full force and effect until an agreement is
reached, certified, and signed. Both sides must take their time and get
it right. There can be no mistakes!” he adds.
Trump repeats his assertion that whatever deal is reached with Iran
will be better than the one previously negotiated by the Obama
administration, saying the current deal will be “THE EXACT OPPOSITE.”
“Our relationship with Iran is becoming a much more professional and
productive one,” Trump continues, while adding that “they cannot develop
or procure a Nuclear Weapon or Bomb.”
He thanks regional countries for their “support and cooperation,”
which he says “will be further enhanced and strengthened by their
joining the Nations of the historic Abraham Accords” normalization
agreements brokered by his administration, and goes as far as to suggest
that Iran, which is sworn to Israel’s destruction, perhaps “would like
to join [the Accords], as well!”
A Miscarriage of Journalism at ‘The New York Times’
Nicholas
Kristof’s column alleging Israeli sex crimes against Palestinian
prisoners embraces the erosion of our democratic norms, writes Roy K.
Altman. (Illustration by The Free Press)
Nicholas
Kristof’s recent essay about supposed Israeli sex crimes against
Palestinian detainees is a travesty—not simply because it’s wrong as a
matter of fact, or because it regurgitates long-debunked blood libels
against the Jewish state at a time of rising antisemitism around the
world.
It’s a travesty because it embraces the erosion of
democratic norms at an inflection point in our history. Since our
founding, the American political experiment has entrusted everyday
citizens with the revolutionary power to choose. We choose the men and women who represent us. We choose how to balance the intimate relationship between a free people and its government. We choose whether to send a member of our community to prison.
But
we entrust our fellow Americans with the power to make these choices
because we believe that a virtuous people will be equipped to make the right
choices—principally because we assume that our citizens will be
prepared to discern truth from fiction. And we feel comfortable in that
assumption because we’ve devised a system of laws—based on evidence,
burdens of proof, and a time-tested set of rules—to help us assess the
veracity of contested claims. In this way, the jury system isn’t simply a
means of ensuring fair trials. Rather, it’s a way of training free
citizens to make difficult decisions for themselves.
Today,
this whole system is being undermined by the proliferation of false
information—especially on the internet. But it’s one thing to have our
geopolitical and ideological enemies—whether China, Russia, or the
Muslim Brotherhood—pushing unverified claims about our closest allies
into our cell phones. It’s another thing entirely for TheNew York Times,
a supposed “paper of record,” and one of its Pulitzer Prize–winning
journalists to offer a story that—in its disregard of basic
evidence-gathering norms, its unwillingness to investigate the opposing
side’s position, andits inversion of common
sense—violates the fundamental rules of fairness and due process that
have, for centuries, served as the bulwark of our democracy.
In
his explosive essay, Kristof accused Israel of using sexual violence
against detained Palestinian prisoners as a kind of “standard operating
procedure.” Kristof’s claim is thus not merely that a few rogue Israeli
prison guards sometimes behave illegally—as happens in all Western
democracies, including our own. It is, instead, that the Israeli
government has implemented a systemic policy of deploying sexual
violence against Palestinian prisoners on a massive scale.
The
jury system isn’t simply a means of ensuring fair trials. Rather, it’s a
way of training free citizens to make difficult decisions for
themselves.
The timing of the essay is itself
troubling. Weeks ago, the independent commission charged with
investigating, and reporting on, Hamas’s widespread use of sexual
violence against Israelis on October 7 informed the Times that it would be releasing its report on Hamas’s egregious sex-crimes violations on or around May 12. According to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, when the commission offered to provide the Times with its findings, the Times said it was not interested. But then, on May 11, one day before the commission’s report was set to be published, the Times ran Kristof’s piece, which flips the script by portraying the victims of mass sexual violence as the perpetrators. (The Times denies
the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s version of events and insists that there
is no relationship between the timing of the commission’s report and
Kristof’s column.)
But we should recognize that this
preemptive co-opting of the real story here—the systemic victimization
of Israeli women and girls—is no innocuous question of timing. As any
experienced trial advocate or jury consultant can attest, the
psychological doctrine of primacy—which explains why a fact finder is
often most persuaded by the story he hears first—dictates the order in which evidence is produced, and witnesses are called, in many American trials. The Times later
ran a shorter story about the Israeli commission’s report, but by then,
as the doctrine of primacy teaches us, it was too late.
In
law as in logic, we can and should use a party’s conduct in deciding
whether we believe what the party has to say—principally because that
conduct may help us understand the party’s incentives, its biases. And
the Times’s conduct as it relates to a story about
Hamas’s sex crimes—followed in quick succession by its decision to
publish an inflammatory opinion piece about supposed Israeli sex
crimes—tells us a lot about the Times’sbiases.
On
the merits, Kristof’s article violates three central precepts of our
legal system: It disregards basic rules of evidence gathering; it
refuses to investigate the opposing side’s views; and it ignores logic
and common sense.
Let’s start with fairness. One of the
fundamental rules of our justice system is that a man should be
permitted to confront his accuser. Whether in civil or criminal cases,
we have for hundreds of years rejected the English Star Chamber’s
technique of allowing anonymous witnesses to advance salacious claims in
secret. This principle is so essential to any basic system of fairness
that it appears repeatedly throughout our laws—from the Sixth
Amendment’s Confrontation Clause and its guarantee of public trials to
our hearsay rules, which preclude out-of-court statements the accused
never had an opportunity to cross-examine. But Kristof’s article relies
mostly on anonymous sources whose credibility—much less their political
or ideological affiliations—cannot be tested and thus cannot be known.
Kristof
justifies his reliance on anonymity by suggesting that his sources
would face retribution, either from Israeli authorities or from their
own communities, if they came forward. But there are at least four major
problems with this excuse.
One, Kristof provides no evidence of any similar retribution against one of the men he spoke with who has
publicly accused Israeli guards of sexual assault. For months now, Sami
al-Sai has repeatedly and publicly claimed, including to major news
outlets like NPR and the Times, that he was
sexually assaulted while in Israeli detention. There are real problems
with al-Sai’s claims. For one thing, soon after his detention, he filed a
petition with the Israeli Supreme Court, arguing that he was wrongly
detained and asking for his immediate release. In that petition, he
complained about the quality of the food he was given and said that he
was treated badly,but he notably never mentioned any of the sex allegations he’s now advancing.
The New York Times
didn’t respond to a request for comment as to whether Kristof reviewed
any of al-Sai’s judicial records before publication of his report. It’s
safe to assume, however, that he didn’t. How Kristof could report
reliably on al-Sai’s condition while in prison in the absence of any of
these legal documents is a question worth pondering.
For
another, the Supreme Court’s order denying his petition found credible
evidence that he was affiliated with Palestinian terror groups and that
he had thus been properly detained—an obvious stain on his reliability
as a witness against Israel, the central target of every Palestinian
terror group. (Kristof describes al-Sai merely as “a freelance
journalist.”) But the point here is that, far from suffering any
retribution for complaining about his detention, al-Sai was later freed, and Kristof never suggests that he’s since been subject to any form of punishment.
Two,any
cursory review of Israeli legal databases would reveal that Israeli
prisons allow Palestinian prisoners to file complaints about the
conditions of their confinement—and that these complaints do get filed.
Indeed, since 2023, Israel has received 182 such complaints filed by
Israel Prison Service detainees from the Gaza Strip. Of those, 83 were
filed by the prisoners’ attorneys, 85 were reported by Israeli officials
themselves, and four involved allegations of sex offenses—a tiny
fraction among a prison population that includes some 10,000
Palestinians. But the point is that Kristof offers not a single shred of
evidence that any of the Palestinian prisoners
who filed complaints has ever been subjected to retribution—much less
that this speculation about retribution has ever been a feature of the
Israeli prison system.
Three,
Kristof’s reliance on anonymity ensures that no one—most especially the
Israelis—can ever prove him wrong. That’s because he not only tells us
very little about the accusers, he tells us nothing about the offenses.
No locations. No dates. No perpetrators. Israeli prisons, like many of
our own, are often videotaped, and those recordings are reviewed not
just by prison guards but by prison officials and lawyers. If Kristof
had conducted anything resembling a fair analysis, we would have
expected him to have asked to review some of this footage. But there’s
no indication that he ever did. Nor can anyone else do so now because
Kristof gave us no details to check against his claims. There’s an old
adage that says it’s impossible to prove a negative—all the more so when
there are no facts to investigate.
Four, we should
acknowledge that it’s always hard for victims of sexual assault to
advance their claims publicly. But any system committed to basic
fairness recognizes that the accuser’s preference for anonymity must
bend to the accused’s right to confront the claims against him. And
that’s not just because we want to allow the accused to test the
reliability of the accuser’s claims. It’s also because we presume that
the mere act of declaring something publicly itself evinces some degree of credibility.
Palestinian
Chairman of the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor Ramy Abdu, center, in
Gaza city in 2015.
The few sources Kristof doesname
underscore why anonymity is so problematic. Beyond al-Sai, Kristof
relies heavily on a report by Euro-Med, an organization with known ties
to Hamas. While Kristof says that Euro-Med is “often critical of
Israel”—an almost laughable understatement—he never discloses that
Euro-Med’s leader, Ramy Abdu, is affiliated with Hamas, that he has
advocated publicly for “a million October 7ths,” and that he has
repeatedly peddled implausible (and now discredited) claims about
Israel, including the absurd allegation that Israel “harvests organs.”
Kristof similarly relies on a United Nations Human Rights Council
report, which is itself based on anonymous reporting and which openly
dispenses with its typical corroboration requirements in favor of “a
single primary source.”
Whatever one thinks of Israel
or its prison system, we must ask ourselves: Why does Kristof never
tell his readers any of this? Don’t we deserve to know that the NGO on
which he based so much of his “opinion” has hurled false claims about Israel before, or that its director is affiliated with Hamas?
All
of which brings us to the second major defect in Kristof’s piece: his
failure to seriously investigate the opposing side’s position. Our
adversarial system stands on a simple but profound premise: Truth is
best tested through confrontation. No just system would accept, without
question, the accuser’s claims and call it a day. But Kristof does
exactly that. Here are three examples of this basic flaw in his
reporting.
First, in advancing his claim that Israel permits
or encourages sexual abuse of detainees as a matter of state policy,
Kristof fails even to mention that sexual offenses are strictly
prohibited under Israel’s penal code. Indeed, the Israeli legal system
imposes enhanced penalties when sexual offenses, including by security
personnel, are motivated by race, skin color, or national origin. And
Israeli military forces are bound by a host of additional directives,
which further protect prisoners from state-sponsored violence,
including sexual violence. Again, Kristof discussed none of these laws
and never attempted to assess the extent to which violations of these
laws are ever punished. What was he trying to hide?
Our adversarial system stands on a simple but profound premise: Truth is best tested through confrontation.
Rather
than engage with these laws, Kristof offers the unchallenged and
uncorroborated view of Sari Bashi, who told him that Israel rarely
punishes prison guards who violate Israeli law. Not so. Even in the
aftermath of October 7, when there was understandably little sympathy
for the Palestinian terrorists who had suddenly flooded Israel’s jails,
the Israel Defense Forces cracked down on misconduct. Looking to
incidents reported by Israeli commanders and soldiers alone, the Israeli
military has instituted more than a dozen disciplinary proceedings or
measures against soldiers for law violations against Palestinians, some
even resulting in military discharges—a severe penalty in a society that
views military service as the ticket to socioeconomic advancement.
Military prosecutors have also launched three criminal investigations
into alleged sexual offenses by soldiers against Palestinians, and five
more are currently undergoing a preliminary examination.
Several
other Israeli investigations have led to prosecutions and serious prison
sentences. One Israeli soldier, for example, was convicted and
sentenced to jail for physically abusing Palestinian inmates and
requiring them to speak in a demeaning way. Another who inappropriately
searched Palestinian women and foreign tourists was sentenced to
fourteen months in prison. Two soldiers were convicted and sentenced to
prison for assaulting a Palestinian detainee during a security
inspection. Each of these cases eviscerates Kristof’s suggestion that
Israel fails to punish soldiers or prison officials who behave illegally
toward Palestinians—and they’re simply incompatible with Kristof’s
thesis of state-sanctioned abuse. But the more fundamental point, again,
is that Kristof curiously never tells his readers any of this.
Second,
Kristof likewise fails to disclose that there’s an elite unit in
Israel’s police force, called Lahav 433, tasked with investigating
misconduct by the Israeli Prison Service. Now, it’s entirely possible
that Israel created this unit inside what’s known as the “Israeli FBI”
and filled it with elite servicemembers who do nothing but sit in an
office all day, twiddling their thumbs and happily allowing misconduct
to go unchecked. The far more plausible inference, I submit, is that
Israel didn’t create this elite investigative unit
simply to do nothing. But the point is that we don’t know—and cannot
know—the answers to any of these questions from Kristof’s “opinion”
piece because he never bothered to mention this unit, never thought to
interview its members, and never investigated the extent to which it
actually enforces Israeli law.
Third, rather than
inquire into the practices of the men and women charged with enforcing
Israel’s penal code, Kristof turned to former Israeli prime minister
Ehud Olmert, who conceded he didn’t know anything about Israeli abuse of
Palestinian prisoners and yet proceeded to speculate that he “was not
surprised by the accounts [Kristof] had heard.” Several glaring issues
here. For starters, Kristof never tells his readers that Olmert, a
disgraced and embittered former politician, was convicted and imprisoned
on charges of fraud and bribery. Nor does Kristof explain why it makes
any sense to question Olmert about the policies of a prison system he
says he knows nothing about and a government he hasn’t participated in
for more than a decade. We wouldn’t trust Richard Nixon as an expert in
the policies of the Bill Clinton–era Bureau of Prisons. But all this is
mostly beside the point because, once the article came out, Olmert
clarified, in a statement to The New York Times and obtained by The Free Press,
that “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 systematic sexual
torture is state policy. I did not validate these claims.”
Former
Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert received a six-year prison sentence
on charges of fraud and bribery.
Of
course, an essay isn’t a courtroom. But when a reporter in our supposed
“paper of record” advances a series of allegations that are this severe
and pernicious, not solely against an individual but against an entire
nation, we should demand that he produce evidence to match the gravity of his assertions. And Kristof—who has been forced in the past to admit that he’d been lied to by his sources—has fallen well short of this standard.
Which
brings us to Kristof’s final departure from our fundamental precepts:
his lack of common sense. The most salacious claim in Kristof’s piece is
the allegation that Israel is now systematically training dogs to rape
Arab Muslim men. This claim used to live only on the fringes of the
wildest internet conspiracy theories. In 2010, there was a spate of
shark attacks in the Red Sea, situated between Israel and Egypt. For
whatever reason, most (if not all) of these attacks occurred on the
Egyptian side of the border. I happened to be in Israel that summer and
heard an Egyptian minister wondering whether the Mossad, Israel’s
foreign intelligence service, was systematically training sharks to eat
only Arab flesh. My father and I, hearing this over the radio in a cab,
laughed at the absurdity of the claim.
But we aren’t laughing now.
What we’ve seen over the last few years is that wild and illogical
conspiracy theories that used to reside only on the internet and in the
anti-Israel Arab street now circulate in the mainstream media, brought
there by irresponsible journalists who flout evidentiary standards,
ignore basic notions of fairness, and disregard common sense and the
truth. What kind of a society will we be if we don’t reverse this
disturbing erosion in our ability to tell truth from falsehood?
There is a tragic similarity in the psychology of collective accusation. When Nicholas Kristof paints Jews as uniquely bloodthirsty, uniquely indifferent to suffering, or uniquely responsible for every death in a complicated war, he participates in an ancient instinct: the need to turn Jews into a moral monster large enough to absorb the world's rage. The language may wear the suit and tie of humanitarian concern, but underneath it lives the old medieval poison — the belief that Jewish power is uniquely sinister, uniquely corrupting, uniquely illegitimate.
What makes Kristof’s rhetoric so poisonous is not merely that it is dead wrong but that it drags an ancient moral sickness into a modern newspaper costume and calls it conscience. To smear Jews collectively is bad enough; to dress that smear up as concern, to launder accusation through the language of virtue, is a deeper disgrace. It is the old blood libel with better tailoring. The setting has changed, the vocabulary has changed, but the instinct is the same: take a whole people, flatten their humanity, and present suspicion as if it were wisdom.
And yet the hypocrisy does not stop there. The same kind of collective indictment, the same lazy moral vandalism, appears inside Israel itself, where ultra-Orthodox factions too often speak as though the state, the secular public, and the IDF are not fellow Jews but something alien to be scorned, blamed, or exploited. The result is a grotesque mirror image. One side slanders Jews from the outside; the other erodes Jewish solidarity from within. One attacks with accusation, the other with contempt. Different uniforms, same moral defect.The secular Jew becomes spiritually contaminated. The Israeli government becomes a machine of impurity.The soldier who risks his life becomes morally inferior to the man who condemns him from the safety of a Beit Midrash study hall. History should have cured Jews of this madness. It should have taught us what happens when Jews become incapable of distinguishing disagreement from demonization. For two thousand years, defenseless Jews prayed for someone — anyone — who could defend Jewish blood. Now, for the first time in centuries, there exists a sovereign Jewish state with Jewish pilots, Jewish tanks, Jewish intelligence officers, Jewish infantry. And still there are those who speak of these defenders almost as if they are agents of evil rather than the shield standing between Jewish life and annihilation.A serious people cannot survive on this kind of poison.
Jews have endured too much history, too much exile, too much blood, to surrender to the cheap thrills of collective accusation. The enemy outside and the fracture inside feed each other. When Jews speak about one another as if they were strangers, traitors, or moral contaminants, they hand ammunition to every anti-Semite who ever claimed Jewish unity was a lie. And when outsiders revivify the ancient charge against Jews as a people, they confirm why that unity matters in the first place.
One does not need to agree with every Israeli policy to recognize the grotesque imbalance of moral scrutiny imposed upon the Jewish state. Nor must one abandon religious devotion to understand that the existence of Israel is not sustained by miracles alone. It is sustained by young men and women standing guard at borders while "intellectuals" abroad condemn them and sectarians at home spiritually belittle them.
The old blood libel claimed Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes. The modern version declares Jews enjoy oppression, crave domination, thirst for war, and manipulate world powers. It is more sophisticated in vocabulary, but not necessarily more enlightened in spirit. And when Jews themselves begin describing their fellow Jews as moral contaminants, spiritual Nazis, or enemies of God merely because they inhabit modern Israeli society or serve in its army, they unknowingly echo the same dehumanizing impulse that has haunted Jewish history from the beginning.
A civilization cannot survive if every internal argument becomes an accusation of cosmic evil. Israel was not reborn so Jews could resume the luxury of civilizational suicide. The secular Israeli soldier and the ultra-Orthodox scholar are bound together whether they like it or not. One preserves the body of the Jewish people; the other preserves part of its soul. Sever either one completely, and the entire structure begins to crack.
The enemies of the Jews never cared whether a Jew wore a black hat, a knitted kippah, or no kippah at all. In Auschwitz, they did not separate the observant from the secular before sending them into the smoke. Jewish history is cruel precisely because it reminds us that the world has often seen Jews collectively — while Jews themselves remain determined to fragment into tribes incapable of recognizing a shared fate.
