The NY Times Story That Crossed A Line

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]Hey, I'm Nom Weissman and this is Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history. This episode of Unpacking Israeli History is generously sponsored by Andrea and Larry Gil and Jod and Ari Storch. If you want to sponsor an episode of Unpacking Israeli History, or if you just want to say, "Hey," be in touch at no unpacked media. Before we start, as always, check us out on Instagram, on Tik Tok, on YouTube, all the places. Just search Unpacking Early History and hit the follow or subscribe button. Okay, yala.

[00:00:35]Let's do this.

[00:00:43]I am not in my normal studio right now.

[00:00:45]I'm traveling. I'm actually in Baltimore, Maryland. And I have the opportunity to be in conversation with my dear friend Java Gore. The reason we had to have this conversation over the weekend is because we had to reflect on a story that many of us have been hearing about, many of people have been curious about, many people have reached out about.

[00:01:05]The recent Nicholas Kristoff piece in the New York Times about alleged sexual abuse and torture of Palestinian detaininees in Israeli prisons was one of those stories that we had to cover.

[00:01:18]I was dreading reading it after October the 7th, after the videos, after the kidnappings, after the sexual violence committed against Israelis.

[00:01:27]There's a part of me that wants to shut down when I hear accusations thrown back at Israel. Especially now in a world where so many Jews feel like the rules are different for us. Where accusations spread before facts do, where Israelis often viscerally feel the profoundity of Greek philosopher Escilis who declared 2500 years ago that in war truth is the first casualty. Where nuance, that controversial and polarizing word dies instantly. where people who never once marched for Syria or Sudan or Yemen or the people of Iran suddenly speak about Israel as if it is the singular moral rot, the moral evil on earth. It hurts.

[00:02:13]It hurts. And yet there are things we do not get to look away from even when they arrive wrapped in propaganda.

[00:02:22]Even when they are amplified by people who are not operating in good faith.

[00:02:25]Even when the world is hypocritical.

[00:02:27]even when our enemies lie. Because if even some of these allegations are true, if detainees were abused, sexually humiliated, tortured, brutalized, and something is happening inside Israeli society that demands attention. Not because Israel is uniquely evil. No, not at all. But as a Jewish person, the story of Israel is part of my identity.

[00:02:50]Today's conversation with Khaviv probably is not going to be so easy.

[00:02:56]We're going to talk about propaganda, about media responsibility, about the collapse of trust, about dehumanization after October 7th, about whether prolonged trauma changes societies in ways that are hard to reverse. And maybe most painfully, we wrestle with this question. How do Jews hold on to moral seriousness while simultaneously feeling under siege? My dear friend Khaviv Retagor is a journalist and after Kristoff's article came out, Khaviv published a long and and very emotional response and I don't say the word emotional as some sort of porative but he produced this very long and emotional piece on Substack and his Substack and on his excellent podcast Ask Khiv Anything and what struck me about it was that he refused to choose between two instincts that often feel impossible to hold together. On the one hand, he argued there is a genuine global propaganda ecosystem fighting against Israel, one that traffics an exaggeration, distortion and sometimes outright lies. But on the other hand, Khaviv also wrote this and despite all of it, dear Jews, there really is abuse. And he said, "We fix the broken things within us as if the pgramists and their sering kristoffs don't exist." That tension, I think, is the conversation. Khaviv, thank you so much for joining me.

[00:04:23]>> Good to be here, Noah. Maybe not specifically for this conversation, but generally good to be here.

[00:04:29]>> So, Khaviv, let's start from the very beginning. Before we get into whether the article is fair, propagandistic, exaggerated, morally necessary, or anything else, I think we need to slow down and ask a simpler question, which is what is Nicholas Kristoff actually alleging in this piece in the New York Times? Because I think a lot of people are either immediately accepted it and they said, "See, there's moral decay.

[00:04:53]There's horrific stuff going on in Israel." Or immediately dismissed it without actually sitting with the details and implications of what's being claimed. when you strip away the rhetoric, could you tell me what is Kristoff fundamentally arguing?

[00:05:07]>> He brings forward uh 14 specific claims um of various kinds of sexual assault by Israeli security forces uh against Palestinians. Um some of them on the face of it sound believable, possible.

[00:05:28]Um such things happen in many places in the world and may have happened here.

[00:05:33]Some of them sound extraordinarily far-fetched uh even just biologically.

[00:05:39]And um all of them are uh first person claims made to Kristoff. Um and some of the first person claims made to Kristoff. There's no corroborating evidence which in itself is not uh unusual or necessarily uh disproof uh in cases of sexual assault obviously. Um but uh some of them are made by just you know kamas propagandists and and institutions that raise money uh to advance literal propaganda for the literal organization called kamas uh and who have been caught lying multiple times in the past. Um, so for example, the Eurommed Human Rights Monitor or whatever it's called, uh, which was the apparently the source of most or connected Kristoff to most of the of the people making the claims, uh, they have in the past alleged that Israel created a thermal weapon that vaporizes Palestinians and that's an explanation why there are bodies missing, where there should be more bodies and all kinds of very stupid, strange, fantastical claims. Um, because they're a propaganda outlet and they're nothing else. there's no newspaper there.

[00:06:49]There's no uh you know, they've never broken an important story. Um and so what Kristoff did was bring forward a story where my gut instinct when I'm reading in a New York Times column about sexual assaults is to say, "Holy crap, there's sexual assault there." Um and it hurts more if it's my people, so to speak, whoever my people happen to be.

[00:07:12]Uh but but it's a it seems like a clean, straightforward sexual assault story.

[00:07:18]And then so much just rape by dogs trained to rape humans and um reports about things like somebody claiming that they're raped at the beginning of every shift. So shift on shift on shift comes in and rapes them and things that you know Kristoff you know the New York Times hadn't taken these stories and gone and done serious reporting and corroboration and and challenge the Israeli authorities and demanded answers and gotten answers and then we would have seen those answers and maybe the answers will validate some of the claims and maybe invalidate some of them and maybe for all I know there are six uh indictments against the soldiers involved or the security officers involved. I don't know anything because it was published as an opinion column which for some reason the New York Times thinks is kosher journalism. So, um there's it's it was something where I went in expecting hard-hitting serious uh claims that Israel has to answer for.

[00:08:14]There are thousands of prisoners from the Gaza war and there were hundreds of um new prison guards drafted urgently to oversee the thousands of prisoners as reserveists as people who are not well trained or whose training was years ago.

[00:08:30]Uh and if you tell me that that system in some places has degenerated into uh inappropriate activity up to and including extreme a handful of extreme cases, uh I will say that is that is possible. It's a little bit like telling me the American prison system in some places uh has has collapsed and and there's extreme abuse in some corners of it. You're not going to fall off your chair. It's a real country and it's a real prison system and it's in the middle of a war and every one of those prison guards watch kamas footage of massacres of Israelis uh on their way into the prison system. So, it's not that I'm incapable of believing that there's abuse, but if there is abuse, why do you need to do it so badly? Why do there need to be such strange fantasies? Why do there need to be so many propagandists where the only people listed? He even, just as a final point, he even with the case of the dog rape story links to a tweet by a a man I consider mentally ill, a a a UCLA, a formerly Israeli UCLA uh academic chased out of UCLA because of some sexual impropriy who then turned um extreme anti-sionist and shared this on a podcast and then he said there's no evidence that he has of it. And that's the that's the link by Kristoff to the the this this insane claim that then turns out was actually started by Eurommed who thinks Israel incinerates people with thermal weaponry that nobody understands how it could work scientifically. So it's a shameful moment for the New York Times and it's ridiculous and it could only happen on Israel. Its journalism is part of a campaign to destroy and not a campaign to shed light. that that is shedding darkness uh in every direction that it turns when it comes to Israel.

[00:10:19]>> Okay, Khaviv. So, I want to hold on to that for a little bit and come back to it. I want to talk about your feelings though uh while reading this and why why feelings is a incredible incredibly important part of the experience of internalizing the Israeli Palestinian conflict. It's just it's just such a huge part of it.

[00:10:41]there.

[00:10:42]You wrote something that was emotionally honest after reading the Kristoff piece and and I don't I I don't know if I don't hear it right now in your description of it, but here's what you said. You said it's agony to read about Israeli criminality. And then you shared that discovering obvious falsehoods in the article was almost a relief because it gave you permission to doubt the entire narrative. And when I when a lot of people when I speak to people, a lot of people like if I'm, you know, walking on on the street, people will come over to me and say, you know, how do you deal with this issue of, you know, is uh you know, this bad moment in Israeli history? How do you deal with that? Is it true that Israel does this? Is it true if Israel that Israel does that? Is it true? And I'm like, listen, I'm I'm not like on the ground to know, but is it possible that Israel has done horrible things and does horrible things? The answer is yes. your relationship to Israel is dependent on an infallible Israel, then your relationship is not going to endure. So, number one, learn how to be okay with there being Israeli criminality at points. If you're dependent on that, your relationship is not going to be a good one.

[00:11:48]>> I mean, I I mean, it just America's done a lot of bad things. Is America no longer a valid identity, country, order, political order? Uh uh what is that? You know, if if imagine, right? You just discovered Abu Grae. All right. Well, that's it. The 250 year American experiment, the story of the hundreds of millions of people, maybe a couple of billion by now, who have been Americans over the course of America's life. We're now in the 250th anniversary of America. I'm sorry. It's not morally tenable to have an America. Is that really the It's a stupid response. I It's not just that if your relationship with Israel can't handle the fact that it's a real country that's going to make terrible mist the prisons in Israel are full of criminals. You know what I mean?

[00:12:34]Like it's a society. If that was your relationship that it was somehow some kind of um moral um you know paragon to which you aspired then you were not actually in a relationship with Israel.

[00:12:47]You were not in a relationship with a real country and real people. you were with a relationship with a in a relationship with a cartoon that only ever existed inside your own heads. The claim that Israel has to be needs to be that it failed some kind of standard.

[00:13:00]None of those claims are serious. Nobody would make them against anyone but Israel. And so this moment is a moment of a really strange discrepancy. What I want is to be able to be an Israeli saying, u crap guys, we're doing something wrong. which I think in some of these cases, not specifically in the Kristoff article, I can't make heads or tails of what's true and false there because I know there's false stuff, so why would I trust the rest, but there are dozens and it's exceeded a hundred.

[00:13:26]I don't remember exactly how many, maybe it's even 200 um of real indictments by, you know, I I I I talked to at one point as a journalist to prosecutors in the in the uh in the Israeli military. There are real cases of abuse in the prison system. Now, does that shock you? There are 2,000 claims outstanding at this moment. I I read in the news against the New York prison system for abuse. Does that mean that New York State is somehow shocking or e evil or illegal or so? I want to have that conversation about what what the problems are because some of them are serious and we shouldn't look away. And then over here on the other side there is a completely psychopathic and insane and politics reordering and society shifting obsession with Israel and Jews and Israeli and Jewish criminality as being a cosmic evil that must be defeated for the world to ever emerge into a new better day. That is pure old anti-semitism. That is what Kristoff is engaged in. But also a real society really screwing up on some things. I think my society and I want to have that. How do you create that distance?

[00:14:26]And one of the ways that I think you create that psychological distance. You mentioned that it was emotional. Um I think you meant the cursing.

[00:14:35]I I curse I think four times and that's only because uh my wife took out a good three or four more curses in the text before I hit publish, you know. Um but the cursing is to create that psychological distance >> that can I curse here? I don't mean to curse here.

[00:14:51]>> You say what you got to say. Say what you got to say. the the Kristoff uh column is evil, stupid, wrong, and I say that so that I can push them so far away that the den that they make and the the the the sense that one nation can stand not in moral judgment, but the idea that if I judge them immoral, then something about their value and legitimacy to exist as a nation is now questionable and I'm allowed to question it. That whole universe of of that whole mental world, that whole fundamentally bigoted mental world has to be pushed so far over the horizon for us, for our experience, that we're free again. There are two ways that they can hurt us. They can hurt us by making us by hating us, abusing us, making us hated around the world. But also they can hurt us by being so obsessively um and and and often so just lying about the ex you know the cosmical evil of us that we can't actually have a real conversation about the real problems within us. That's also a kind of limitation that they impose on us. I refuse to be limited in any of those ways. And so [ __ ] off to the distant ends of the earth and I among my people which is really what it was addressed to all kinds of people responded to it in weird ways. Andrew Sullivan responded to it and said, "This guy seems to be having a written uh nervous breakdown."

[00:16:16]Andrew Sullivan had this interview with Eli Lake um about uh the Israel question in which Andrew Sullivan threw one idiotic talking point unexamined after another. He has become a very shallow person on any of these questions. He doesn't know much and he doesn't want to know anything. It is it is an emotional kink for him. He's not my audience. My audience is my people. push the evil campaign so far from us that we can deal seriously amongst ourselves with the actual problems because there are problems. I I think that uh when you talk about the pushing away in order to deal with our current our actual problems, I'm going to be releasing a podcast very soon about the history of Israeli self-critique and to demonstrate when and where Israeli self-critique takes place and the conditions in which one needs to operate in order to be willing to be self-critical. Because what you're talking about, Khabib, is what I was going to ask you is like when I read the piece of Kristoff, I was reminded of this cunning feature of the brain called confirmation bias. The way confirmation bias works when reading a piece like this is it's so wily. After reading a piece like this, if I want to believe what he said, I merely ask, can I believe it? And if I do not want to believe what he said, I ask a different question. Must I believe it? But the situation with with this sort of article, I think what it did is it did something else. It brought up this real tension of is it psycho is it psychologically possible to remain morally open while also feeling constantly accused? And and I think that that question is is the thing that really I I struggled with the most. Is it possible? What are the psychological conditions in which Israelis will be willing from your perspective Khaviv to be morally serious and morally open to these sorts of issues? Let's assume 5% 10%. I don't know the number that are true or whatever the number is true from from the claims. The issue that I see is there's no world in which Israelis are going to respond to this and be like, "Oh, Kristoff, you know what? Thank you for holding up a mirror to our society. Without you, I'm not sure we would have been willing to be self-critical. But now, Nicholas Kristoff, you came out. You really shed some light. We're on this. We're in this together. We're going to work on it. I don't believe that that is. And he states, by the way, that that's actually his stated goal. His stated goal is that hopefully, yeah, >> by virtue of the fact that he published this piece, Israeli society will be willing to, you know, be tougher. And it's and and I'm like Hhabibi Nicholas I don't think you understand the way the human brain works my friend. So how would what are the condition?

[00:19:10]>> It's not his stated goal.

[00:19:11]>> Do you have a similar reaction?

[00:19:14]>> His audience is not Israelis. Uh the audience is never convers but he's saying what his goal is. So talk so his his goal is to change that that's >> Yes. I think that's propaganda cover uh for what the real goal is. I think that's cover because >> um it the way it's framed is a conversation really that could only happen among foreigners who have transformed the question of Israel into a defining question of their politics.

[00:19:48]um and and and it's a toolkit that exists embedded deep deep in western civilization from Christianity from Islam uh where the Jew is the defined as the other against which I define myself and so if I want to say that I am you know uh a person of faith and the Jews are people who do not have faith I'm the opposite the Jew is the opposite of what I am I project onto the Jew what it is that I am not so I deal righteously the Jew is a lying cheat I um am landed and grounded. The Jew is a cosmopolitan. If I if I'm a if I'm a nationalist like a Nazi or an Italian fascist, I have an ancient tradition. The Jew is the wandering universalist trying to you know communist trying to break down my nation. If I'm a communist, of course, the Jew is the tribalist trying to ruin the great proletariat and universal right brotherhood of man. Um the Jew is the opposite of whatever I am. It begins in early Christianity and it is the same model and structure of it today. The hatred of Israel goes beyond the hatred of China. As if Israel's crimes are greater than China's. The hatred of Israel goes beyond the hatred of the perpetrators of the Yemen war. As if what? What Yemen suffered wasn't five times to 10 times worse than what Gaza suffered. First of all, death toll.

[00:21:01]Second of all, in the mass starvation of children that's actually happened. There was actually a mass starvation of something like 85,000 children who starved to death. And and those people doing that war with Western weapons and Western money and Western intelligence support didn't elicit a single protest.

[00:21:15]Whereas the Gaza war elicited more protests, longer protests, more regular protests than ever in the history of Western protest, more than Vietnam, more than a parttheid South Africa, more than all of it put together. And across nations, you know, when you say that to an American anti-Israel person, they say, "Well, I fund you." Well, first of all, the Yemen war you also kind of funded to some degree, but also it happened in Amsterdam. It happened in Brazil, it happened in Indonesia. So, I don't think funding us was the drive.

[00:21:42]It's the identical phenomenon. a politics um has been created uh in which a critique of the of the west has become has has has defined itself shaped itself around this this scapegoat for westernism. The the accusations against Israel are accusations that the progressive left makes of western civilization. But now instead of being the heir to the great crimes of the west, imperialism, colonialism, I get to project those crimes onto someone else, fight them, and be on the right side of all those moral equations. They are the opposite of what I am. This is the classic structure. It is the social function of anti-semitism. By the way, this is considered uh deep racism when it's done to Muslims and Hindus. And that's Edward Sades. Edward say wrote a book called Orientalism where the whole argument of orientalism is that Europe defined itself westernism in some senses even whiteness as as by projecting the opposite of what it thought of itself onto the east. So I am masculine and rational and scientific and advanced.

[00:22:44]The east is feminine and irrational and non-scientific and backward. And that image of creation of the east as a way to counterproject myself is how Europe created its own understanding of itself.

[00:22:54]That's Edward say and and there's a professor Derek Penslar of Harvard uh head of Israel studies at Harvard published a volume of essays called um Israel uh orientalism and the Jews in which he points out that the Europeans maybe learned to do this on the Jews.

[00:23:10]They've been doing this on the Jews for many many centuries before they started doing this to Islam. So when you point out this very same structure uh right that's considered something that every Middle Eastern studies professor in America has to agree with. You can't be an anti-Sadian and get a job in a university in America today. But but when the the exact same structures apply to the Jews, that's just being a progressive. So I stand in this in this hall of judgment before people who define themselves by my cosmic evil. And then your point and your right to make it is how do I then turn around and talk to my own people and be like, "Hey, you're supposed to now turn around and fix yourself and con and and and out loud debate your own wrongs and your own failings." And my simple answer is um in this moment the Zionist answer is, forgive me, I'm going to become known for this even though I almost never curse. [ __ ] all of them to the ends of the earth. None of them matter. Let them all jump in a lake. Let them all fall over the end of the earth. We will talk ourselves about our problems. The question of prisoner abuse is real. It's real. Our own prosecutors tell us it's real. Our own minister, who is the worst crime police and prisons minister we've ever had because mass waves of crime are happening that he doesn't care about because he's busy doing his radical right politics are helping to drive a real serious problem. And we have to deal with this problem and we have to look at it because we have to make sure that we remain a competent society and and and a decent society. And you know what we are we are you can you can make a lot of a lot of points about the Gaza war and you should make points about the Gaza not the crazy psychopathic western anti-semitic drive that's embedded deep in their so deep in their society they can't see it when they're acting it out.

[00:24:59]But there's it's a serious war with a lot of wounded and dead civilians. It's not like it's like therefore nobody gets to complain because anti-semitism. Of course you can complain and you should go forbid there should be wars that don't have complaints that don't have people seriously criticizing it but it is nevertheless a decent society. And just one final point you know connected to your specific question of when you're your stand in the dock accused at that scale at a civilizational scale at a definitional evil scale of cosmic you're the thing that is colonialism and imperialism and apartheid and genocide.

[00:25:29]There isn't a word that you aren't. You are all the great evils of their own history so that they can stand against their own evils. Um even when you stand in that. So you said, "So how do you talk about your own problems?" By the way, it's it's it's cognitively I think very similar to the experience Israelis have had for for 77 years of being told day in day out by their neighbors, by hundreds of millions of people around them, we're coming to kill you all. You know how much how hard it is to have empathy, never mind sympathy, when they're coming to kill you, when their whole politics are organized around it.

[00:26:07]What do people think Hamas says to Israelis? Like you're sitting there in a propaganda war over in the West. The Israelis say something, the Palestinians say something, everybody's on one side or another. Kamas, never mind that what what people are saying to you. You're not the protagonist in this story.

[00:26:20]Israelis and Palestinians are. What does Kamas actually say to Israelis every day? It says to them, "We're coming to murder you and your children. And if you pull out of the West Bank, we're going to take over that space and murder you from there. Everywhere you ever pull out of we're going to murder you from that place. That's what happened after the withdrawal from Lebanon. That's what happened after the withdrawal from Gaza.

[00:26:35]And it's definitely every Israeli will tell you just about what's going to happen if we ever pull out of the West Bank. Do you know what hearing that from the Palestinians does to the Israeli mind you how much space is left for sympathy, for empathy? Let's imagine for a moment, Nom, that you and I are secret lefties who desperately want peace, reconciliation, love, and two nation states living side by side, shopping in each other's shopping malls. Let's say that's our fantasy. How do we clear that space >> when the the major political force of the other side only ever speaks to Israelis in in exterminationist terms?

[00:27:08]And so, you know, that's the same kind of cognitive problem. Now, I would say very simply, the Western fantasies, the Western anti-semitism, we push it off the edge of the horizon. We we do tell them we do tell them to go look for somebody to to deal with their own.

[00:27:24]They're going to crush their own societies with this anti-semitism, organizing them around the Jews. Every problem is now the Jews. Listen to Tucker Carlson about the Jews inventing pornography. What a psychopath. And we deal with our own stuff as if they don't exist. That's my That's my view. Sorry that was so long.

[00:27:39]>> I I struggle with this issue. It's 78 years. I was doing the math. 78 years, by the way. And by the way, it's even more than 78 years if we're being if we're if we're being fully honest. It's been longer than that. But one of the reasons that Israel never even created a constitution was because it was always dealing with the urgent in front of the important during the 1948. It's one of the reason 4849 they didn't have time to create a constitution. I view that as some sort of metaphor for Israeli society to an extent not ever be being able to deal with higher level issues because they're constantly under attack and Israelis have constantly been under attack. There's a there's a term for that. There's a phrase turn of phrase that David Bengurian is famous for saying which is It doesn't matter what non-Jews say. It matters what Jews do. And I agree with you. I agree with you. Where I'm saying I don't I can't figure out where to believe what you're saying is if you do believe fum if you do believe what Bengorian said, it doesn't matter what they say. It matters what we do. One of the things that and you you I you're your friend. You're a proper friend of mine. And I texted you after your your long post which like you know got me all jazzed up and a lot of people were reaching out being like yeah or some people were like what did Khaviv say or like it was is one of those two reactions and I said to you I the one thing that I the one thing I I I'll look at our WhatsApp conversation right now um I'll go to it right now and one of the things that I texted you was I said the following. I said, "You had a great a serious response to me, but you I I I said,"Wh do you keep calling Itamar Bender incompetent?"

[00:29:25]That's the minister that you're referring to. That seems like you're being forgiving to him and not assigning actual moral darkness to what he is doing, what he does in the Israeli prison system. Like, why did you use the word incompetent? Because incompetent to me, and maybe I'm misunderstanding the word, comes across as I don't know, maybe the guy has decent intentions, but he's not doing a great job overseeing it. He's not doing a good job. But were he, you know, if he took a if he if he was, you know, 10 years old and he finally got like an executive functioning tutor, then maybe he'd be more competent and maybe he'd actually, you know, do the right thing in in the Israeli prison system. And I want I so I want to challenge you on the word incompetent with when you refer to Eimar Benvir and the Israeli prison system. Is that what it is? Or is there if you're actually going to put people who are not operating good faith to the side? Is there actual things that Israeli society needs to work through? and and and and not just from a level of competence versus incompetence, but through a level of there's some sort of moral decay happening within Israeli society in this sort of moment for as as at at an example like this. Again, I want to be clear. I made the point already that in there's no psychological world in in which that Israel will respond positively to what Kristoff said. As a matter of fact, they're suing the New York Times right now. And I deeply understand that because what he did is lielist. It's horrific. It's anti-semitic. All of those things. But if you're going to follow your philosophy, which is the Zionist ethos of Ephim, I want to hear what you think should be taking place within uh Israeli society to respond to this moment.

[00:31:08]>> Yeah. Uh that's a that's a very uh good and appropo question. I Itar Benb wants a war uh a total war because he thinks we'll win it. Um and he isal anything between Israelis and Palestinians. Um, and he he is not anything uh remotely as bad as Kamas for very specific reasons uh that I'm happy to delineate. Uh, but that specific point he shares with with Kamas, which is that they also want an absolute total complete total war in which one nation uh succeeds and one nation uh fails, falls, collapses, either dies or expelled. Um, that that is what I believe he believes. Uh that is what I believe he has always believed. The man had Kahana's uh picture in his living room for decades until he tried to run in Israeli politics just centered enough to be a legitimate far-rightist. Um so he then took down that uh picture. He also had a picture of of Bar Goldstein the mass murderer of in the Hebrron terror attack in 1994.

[00:32:15]Um so uh you know vile racists and and mass murderers of Muslims at prayer are people he he uh heroicizes and so uh absolutely that is that is exactly what it looks like morally um just to remind people and Gana said many things one of the things he said was that the peace process would fail because the Arabs would would take the guns they're given as a security forces to run you know Palestinian cities and they would turn them on us and murder us and people are like you see Kahana was right Kahana was right 50% of Israeli politics was arguing that at the time uh you don't have to go to Kahana to see that that's right. The thing that distinguished Kahana from say Benjamin Netanyahu in the 90s uh was that Kahanab would present uh in 1985 if I'm not mistaken people can look this up presented a bill in the Knesset to make uh sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews uh a felony a crime that has to be investigated that the state has to actively investigate. Not even just a misdemeanor that if a cop catches you then it's a problem. An actual felony that has to be investigated by the state. He presented that bill to the Knesset uh to make Jew non-Jew sex illegal. That is, you want to talk about apartheid, that is literally South African apartheid. That is racism taken to a kind of perfection. Uh and that is Kahana. Everything else that Kahana argued and said beyond that totalizing kind of just deeply European 19th century blood racism, everything else about Kahana uh was shared by others. So you can say not Kahana was right but that guy was right or the other one was right. Right. Kahana specifically what's unique about him was that racism. And so for Kahana to be on the guy's wall tells you something very profound about Benvir and it's always been his entire adult political life. And he's doing fairly well politically. He's uh you know in the best polls he may be 10% of the Israeli electorate. In the less good polls he's 5% of the Israeli electorate.

[00:34:06]Um what do those 10% and 5% actually make of him? probably less than what he actually is, but nevertheless that he can put, you know, kick in the pants of the right-wing establishment. All kinds of other things. People will vote extremes even when they themselves don't actually give extreme answers on polls.

[00:34:21]These are dynamics that we know from every European country currently experiencing a flourishing of the far right. Um, so all of that is true and Benvir didn't just give the order in the prison system to lower the amount of uh benefits that prisoners get. um prisoners in the Israeli prison system, Palestinian prisoners, security prisoners for, you know, terrorism offenses, terrorism suspicions, some of them not not imprisoned on trial, after a trial or during a trial process, but imprisoned on administrative detention without a trial because there's not enough evidence against them or there's national security evidence against them, which it doesn't meet the bar of civil prosecution. Um that's several thousand people and and they have all kinds of rights. For example, they used to uh used to three years ago um they would bake their own bread, their own pitha bread in prison, for example, they had access they got degrees. They got uh you know uh online degrees from online Israeli universities. Um for example, they had all these um uh visits by family that were very very organized and systematic and frequent. Uh they had a lot of benefits and he canceled most of those benefits. He massively uh lowered their level, quality of life. And um he visited in a famous video uh a prison where prisoners were uh brought out and made to kneel on the ground with their faces uh on the floor. Um now I don't know the details of these prisoners. If these prisoners were Nukeba fighters who came across on October 7 and murdered children, uh I I don't I don't mind their humiliation. I am horrified by the the kind of prancing sort of I am going to humiliate them kind of theatrics that our minister of prisons is doing with them as props because that is a collapse of our prison system and our prison standards and our legal system and our own morality. you know, even if these people deserve a just to die, you know, in a in a in a in a court-ordered uh death sentence, which is something I do believe about the force of kamas, I am in that very narrow sense radicalized uh toward the only death sentence I've ever believed in, which is specific to those kamas people who cross that border. So itar Bengir is a moral I think as much in as much as he has the space to become one he will be a moral disaster and then I'm going to say something a little controversial. The moral question is secondary for me and I'll explain very simply why I think it's very important morality. Okay, the son of a rabbi, morality is is fundamental to a healthy society. But it's unconvincing to people who think everything is at stake. I have discovered in 25 years of Israeli Palestinian conversations that when I come to Palestinians and I say to them, "How could Hamas bomb a school bus?" I mean, a a morning bus in Jerusalem full of school children. How how could they do Why would you think that would be a healthy thing for the Palestinian cause? It demolished the Palestinian cause. 140 bombings of the second inifat. Their answer to me is not, "Oh my goodness, you're right. I didn't realize the moral depravity of it." That is not their answer because they're not children. Their answer is everything is at stake. You did this because we had no other recourse. Now, I disagree with them. They had no other recourse. Kamas argues they have no other recourse, but Kamas destroyed every peace process it ever touched. But second, that that aside, the reason they think that they're not interested in the moral conversation about their behavior is that they think that they face an existential threat. If you come to Israelis now and you say, "How could you behave in the bad ways you behave?"

[00:38:03]Israelis will say to you, "They will literally murder my children." You think it's some kind of a figurative thing.

[00:38:09]You think in abstractions. You think this is about a morality play running in your head over there in New York or Miami or London. They were literally physically in this world. Every Israeli parent, every Israeli parent, every ArabIsraeli parent watched kamas hold families hostage, murder the parents in front of the kids because these videos are on the internet and then mock the kids as they eat from the fridge in the family home while the children sit there and then those children odds on, you know, the better odds are they themselves were then killed. Every Israeli parent went through that experience knowing the video is real. They will definitely murder my I don't give a rat's patute what your morality says. I genuinely don't. And if I have to do evil things so that that never happens to my family, those evil things are going to happen.

[00:38:59]You better believe it. And I would be immoral not to do them. And so I don't like the question, the conversation about morality because it's totally meaningless to people who feel besieged.

[00:39:09]And one last sentence and I'm done. I'm sorry my answers are long today, right?

[00:39:12]But um >> these are fundamental things. But um the last point is when I say incompetent um I mean it in the way that I use the word when I talk about Arab countries around us. Um not that it isn't immoral, it's immoral. The the Egyptian dictatorship is profoundly immoral. It it it jails people. The Egyptian prison system is, by the way, the claims about the Egyptian prison system, which receives massive amounts of US money every year, uh, would would make your raise the hair on the back of your neck.

[00:39:46]I mean, it is horrifying, horrifying, uh, regime with with horrifying prison system. Um, but the worst thing it does to Egypt is that it's allowing the slow collapse of its economy because the army owns half the economy and the whole country has become a kind of um just it's not that there's corruption in Egypt, it's that there's almost nothing but corruption in Egypt. The the the the powers that be literally own everything.

[00:40:10]Ditto Iran. And these countries are in slow collapse. And as they descend into this slow collapse, they come to believe conspiratorally that the whole world is set against them. when in fact the world uh monetary fund the international monetary fund and the American government and everybody would like them to actually succeed and flourish but they themselves are collapsing so badly they have to convince themselves it's everyone's else's fault but their own that is a deep deep incompetence that I often explain is a lot of the reason for Israel's success in war you know the Iranian air force never took off in the war in June and in the six-week war just now it literally never flew against the Israelis and the Americans why did it never even take off because it doesn't functionally really exist? Why does the air force not functionally exist?

[00:40:51]Because the Iranian regime needs to make sure that the Iranian military isn't strong enough to overthrow the Iranian regime. So the Iranian regime has a separate ideological military called the Revolutionary Guards, they have some competent forces, not an air force, but the Iranian military is actually not very competent. So you have a state that for reasons that are structural and ideological, not because Iranians literally couldn't run intel if they if if they were living in America as free people. In Iran, they can't run in Intel because in Iran, all the structures of government and political culture, all those structures are um are are structures that actually force you into a state of incompetence. In that sense, in the sense of moral and ideological degradation, absolutely. But also, it turns us incompetent. But the dangerous thing with with with Benvir to me is that what if the Palestinians are not removable? Morally, it would be horrifying to remove them. But if they're not removable, what does that total war for all time generationally actually do to Israel? Arguably, that is exactly that kind of Arab world incompetence where ideology trumps policy, it trumps strategy. Uh that's how you produce, for example, I really don't want to connect the two, but I'm just saying when ideology trumps just careful thinking and strategy and good policy, countries degrade, countries weaken, countries become poor, countries become radicalized. Um the education system I loved education. Moral education is something I want my kids to have. They need English and math too and large parts of don't have that. I call that a kind of incompetence. Now, these people sit and study more hours than my kids do where they learn a lot of English and math, but the actual learning hours, the kid is probably learning more than my kid, but they're not learning enough things to actually participate in a modern economy. So, he's incompetent. That doesn't at all mean he's not also immoral. That was a long way of saying that. Khaviv, I want to ask you one last question about journalism. This is a this is a put putting your journalist hat on and I I tend not to be a conspiratorial thinker. I I actually loathe conspiratorial thinking because I think it actually makes people dumber. I think it makes people have to go through the process of seeing and exploring evidence and making sense of the evidence. And if you don't understand the evidence, then uh you try to all of a sudden make up a story that makes you feel better. I think it's a very dangerous uh feature of the human brain. Uh and I think it's there's a direct relationship between conspiratorial thinking and anti-semitism. Bracket that for a second, but I want to put your journalist hat on. I want you to do this for a second because I I I do the one conspiratorial moment that I have is timing in this article. This article came out almost simultaneously with renewed public discussion and investigations into the sexual violence committed against Israelis on October the 7th. I think for a lot of people around the world, and you don't have to be Jewish or Israeli to notice this, the timing felt uh emotionally loaded. It felt something of that that that that made people's uh hearts race a little bit perhaps. as a journalist, I just don't know how this I'm not a journalist, you are. So, I don't know how this works with a newspaper. Did Did that timing strike you as meaningful, as intentional, as as coincidental perhaps, or or something else? because it seemed odd that that article came out the day the day before the renewed public discussion and investigations were reported uh in uh in all the different news outlets about the horrific systemic sexual violence that was committed against Israelis on October 7th. the biggest report we have with the most evidence with thousands of interviews, with thousands of video hours, uh, details and specificity and names and times and all the public statements by all the victims, all of that all in one major report. And a day before, which by the way, we know that the um, Israelis offered to the New York Times, the New York Times declined to run that freaking story. And not only did they decline, that meant that they also knew the um they had a um uh May 12th um embargo.

[00:45:04]That's when uh people give you a story ahead of time so you can be ready to publish, but they say, "But the condition for giving you the story is you can only publish it at that time when everyone will publish together."

[00:45:12]The fear often that PR firms or just advocates or activists have is that if one outlet publishes it first, the second outlet won't publish it because then it'll just look like they're behind the other outlet. That's the way journalistic outlets sometimes compete.

[00:45:26]And so there was an embargo that the New York Times knew about. Taking that data point, the fact that this thing published a day before and the fact of the people who gave it to Kristoff, for example, Eurommed, um, all of that tells us tells me I'm I'm utterly convinced of it.

[00:45:48]It would be a it would be just a one in tens of thousands chance that it's totally coincidental that he created the one storm, the one stink that they didn't wait to to report in the newspapers on on these stories, but it ran as an opinion piece with massive claims of sexual assault. Can you imagine specific claims of sexual assault in an op-ed without it being reported? Why wouldn't you report this?

[00:46:13]Why wouldn't this be five front page articles in the New York Times if these specific cases are real? Report it as news. When did the New York Times transfer that to the op-ed? And the answer is when you need to make a deadline because you're trying to preempt a massive Israeli um report on every agonizing detail of kamas sexual criminality. And that's what this was ultimately about. And it's what it was only about. This wasn't about revealing sexual assaults. This was about covering and hiding sexual assault. And so they ran with sexual assault that are hard to trust. There there there has been sexual assault.

[00:46:51]These are millions of people living all I mean I my point is not that there isn't Israeli criminality and that you won't find it if you look for it. Of course you'll find it. You'll find it in the indictments of the Israeli prosecutor. My point is this wasn't about that. That's not what this was about because nobody would ever do this on in this way and the timing is guaranteed an attempt to cover and hide and lessen the blow of the report on kamas sexual criminality the day after which means that if Kristoff knew that timing then uh then Kristoff uh doesn't actually oppose sexual assault. Kristoff just prefers one side sexual assault to another side's sexual assault. In fact, his phrasing is deliberately tailored to make sure you understand that whatever you think Kamas did, the Israelis are worse because he says these examples, these 14 examples with zero corroborating evidence and and and taken from activists, you should know is what Palest what what Israelis experienced on October 7th. He writes those words.

[00:47:51]People should look up the exact sentence is what Palestinians experience every day. He writes, "The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on October the 7th now now happens to Palestinians day after day."

[00:48:02]>> Day after day. In other words, the whole point of the piece is you're about to hear the scale of Hamas's crimes. So, I want to tell you because I got it from Eurommed and we're going to do it the day before. It's about covering for sexual assault. And and so Kristoff has gone so deep into this into this cosmic evil framing of the world's one Jewish state uh that he now will cover for every crime, but he'll do it in ways that of course say that all crime is bad. I'm just going to cover for every crime. Um that's the heart of it, that timing. The New York Times was told the date it would publish, the Israeli report would publish, and this publishes a day before and the people running it. Now, if he didn't know about the the Israeli report and and somebody at the New York Times forgot to tell him or he didn't get that email to the newsroom about the embargo, >> that's incompetence in the simple sense of the word. Uh and and then then his handlers, his handlers who he names in the piece, I mean the you know, Euromid is one of them. There's one or two others. Uh his handlers manage that and they are nothing but uh that PR campaign. And so, yes, it absolutely that is not a conspiracy. There is no chance it wasn't that.

[00:49:14]>> Wow. Khaviv, thank you for our conversation. I know this was a a tough conversation about a topic that is so difficult to talk through, so difficult to deal with, so frustrating, causes so much anger. And I and you know when I said when I described your uh re initial reaction as emotional, like I said, it's not a porative. I think that I think that for anyone like you or me to not be emotional after that after that uh article that would have been strange that would have been odd. Uh so I I thank you for the intensity in which you spoke uh the direct nature in which you spoke and also the the willingness to explore what it means for Israeli society to operate independent of the external threats, the external claims, the external demonization. That is a conversation that I think is a conversation that if Israeli society is going to continue to live out the dream and the promise of Zionism, it's going to need to take very seriously for itself. And my my my wish for the world is to allow Israeli society to actually do that, to actually allow Israeli society to behave independently of. And if the world is going to demonize and delegitimize and do all the things that the world too often does about Israeli history, which is my favorite topic, as everyone here knows, if it allows the Jews and allows Israelis to be self-critical, I assure you there's nothing that Jews and Israelis like to do more than be self-critical.

[00:50:52]So So, so you know, that hurts me when you say it that way. You know, that hurts me when you say it that way. It physically grinds in my ear that the world allows.

[00:51:04]There is no world and it doesn't allow.

[00:51:06]Uh the world is living through its own insanity and and and we we don't have to be bothered by it.

[00:51:13]>> Yeah.

[00:51:14]>> Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep.

[00:51:16]>> I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me on.

[00:51:18]>> Stay tuned everyone for an episode on the history of actually is Israel and Israeli society dealing with these sorts of things. Um because it's a it's a fascinating history. Khaviv, thank you so much for joining me today. Uh, as always, such a pleasure to have you on as as the journalist you are, as the podcastaster you are, and as as the friend you are. So, thank you so much for joining.