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How many Hebrew Israelites are there, and how worried should Jews be?
(JTA) — Dressed in matching purple hoodies and shirts, with gold fringes attached to the bottom in observance of Deuteronomy 22:12, hundreds of members of a controversial Hebrew Israelite group marched through the streets of Brooklyn on Sunday.
“Hey Jacob, it’s time to wake up,” they chanted, using a term for people of color who have yet to embrace their “true” identity as descendants of the Biblical Jacob, later called Israel. “We got good news for you: YOU are the real Jews.”
The march and a demonstration that followed at the Barclays Center were organized by Israel United in Christ in solidarity with Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving, who was suspended for eight games after he posted a link to an antisemitic film on social media last month and then was slow to apologize. But IUIC has also used the controversy to promote its incendiary ideology and recruit new followers into what it calls “God’s army.”
After the demonstration — the second held by IUIC outside of the Brooklyn arena this month — the group’s founder posted a message on his Twitter account. “We are not here for violence,” Bishop Nathanyel Ben Israel wrote, “we are here for the spiritual war.”
Before 2019, those American Jews who were even aware of the once-obscure Black Hebrew Israelite spiritual movement likely associated it with the loud but non-violent street preachers who would harangue pedestrians in city centers. In December of that year, however, extremists professing Israelite beliefs attacked a kosher grocery store in Jersey City, New Jersey and a Hanukkah party in Monsey, New York. Two Jews were killed in Jersey City, and a 72-year-old rabbi who was stabbed in the head in Monsey died from his injuries three months later.
With the memory of those attacks still fresh, and against the backdrop of a surge this fall in public expressions of antisemitism combined with threats of violence against Jewish communities emanating from other extremist corners, the militant posturing of IUIC has alarmed many Jews already on edge.
Rabbi Mordechai Lightstone of Crown Heights observed on Twitter that the Israelites who regularly preach near his home on Shabbat have been “particularly aggressive” of late, heaping verbal abuse on both him and his children. On Sunday afternoon, Lightstone posted a video of IUIC members assembling for their march and rehearsing their chants in Grand Army Plaza.
“Terrifying,” commented Elisheva Rishon, a Black and Jewish fashion designer who blames Hebrew Israelites for inflaming tensions between the two communities to which she belongs. A few Twitter users compared the march to the 2017 far-right rally in Charlottesville, at which participants chanted “Jews will not replace us.”
The recent IUIC rallies give the impression that the radical wing of the Hebrew Israelite movement is large and riled up. Meanwhile, recent comments by Kanye West, the rapper who now goes by Ye, and Irving that align with elements of Hebrew Israelite doctrine suggest the movement has broad support among powerful Black celebrities.
But how big is the movement in reality? What percentage are extremists who assail Jews as impostors who stole their heritage from them? And if Black Israelism has entered the marketplace of mainstream religions in the United States, should Jews be concerned?
The numbers
The only available statistics on Israelite identification in the United States were collected as part of a small national survey conducted by an evangelical Christian research firm in 2019. For that survey, which sought to capture African-American attitudes toward the state of Israel, Lifeway Research asked 1,019 African Americans, “Which of the following best describes your opinion of Black Hebrew Israelite teachings?”
Most respondents (62%) said they are not familiar with the teachings, but 19% said they agree with “most of the core ideas taught by Black Hebrew Israelites,” and 4% said they consider themselves Hebrew Israelites. The remaining 15% said they either “firmly oppose” the teachings or disagree with most of them. (The survey did not specify what those teachings are.)
The 2020 U.S. Census put the Black population at 41.1 million, so extrapolating from the Lifeway data, there are approximately 1.6 million Hebrew Israelites in the U.S. — not counting the small numbers of Latinos and Native Americans who also belong to Israelite groups — and 7.8 million people who may not identify as Israelites but who agree with the spiritual movement’s main teachings.
For lots of these people, the attention that West and Irving have brought to their belief system has been validating.
“Israelism is becoming part of the plausibility structure of Black America,” Christian activist and author Vocab Malone told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, referring to a social context in which certain ideas are considered credible. “The suspicions that a lot of folks have toward the Jewish community, they think they’re vindicated now.”
Scott McConnell, Lifeway’s executive director, told JTA that the survey’s sponsor, the Christian Zionist organization Philos Project, supplied the question about Hebrew Israelite teachings. Asked if there are plans to include similar questions in future surveys, he replied, “I know there are some pastors at African-American churches that have concerns about some of their parishioners being led astray by the teachings of the Hebrew Israelites, so we’ll keep it on our radar.”
Malone, who uses an alias in keeping with hip-hop culture, is a close observer of the Israelite world. The Phoenix resident frequently engages in debates on the street and online with members of groups described as hateful by the Southern Poverty Law Center — including IUIC, Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge, Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ, and The Sicarii — in hopes of convincing them to follow what he considers to be the true path of Christianity.
Founded in 2003, IUIC has proven the most adept at creating public spectacles and garnering media coverage. The group operates 71 U.S. chapters and 20 international ones, according to the Anti-Defamation League, and it holds men’s conferences each year that culminate in choreographed marches on city streets, like the one on Sunday in Brooklyn. Based on the size of those marches, Malone estimated that national membership has grown from around 5,000 in 2015 to around 10,000 today. Other radical groups likely have much smaller memberships but don’t share any figures, preferring to “play their cards close to their chest,” Malone said.
These estimates suggest that the extremists comprise a very small percentage of the 1.6 Hebrew Israelites living in the United States.
Ultimately, IUIC has a goal of recruiting 144,000 Black, Latino and Native American people who will be spared by God during the end time, as foretold in the book of Revelation. In order to achieve this goal, the group sends representatives to proselytize overseas, including in parts of Africa and the Caribbean. (IUIC did not respond to requests for comment from JTA.)
Both the Southern Poverty Law Center and the ADL monitor the activities of IUIC and other radical camps, as Israelites call their groups. However, spokespeople for both organizations told JTA they do not know how many people belong to these camps.
An online movement
What is clear is that the camps have greatly expanded their reach in recent years, taking their message from street corners to the entire globe thanks to the internet and social media. IUIC members run dozens of YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts where they post a constant stream of videos and memes, many containing antisemitic tropes. One recent Instagram post shows a startled-looking Hasidic Jewish man holding his hat above the words “The Synagogue of Satan.” (Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, uses similar language about Jews. A video he recorded this month defending West and Irving has been viewed millions of times.)
The main IUIC YouTube channel, @IUICintheClassRoom, has 126,000 subscribers and 29.4 million video views. A series of videos posted three years ago on the channels of local chapters provide some insight into how members hear about IUIC and why they join.
The most common way these members say they found their way to the camp was via videos they watched online. “Prior to actually coming to IUIC, I did do some Israelite window shopping,” recounts Officer Joshua of IUIC Tallahassee. “I always questioned myself, why is it that our people are at the bottom? How come we get the worst jobs and so forth? I knew Christianity wasn’t answering my questions, so what I did was I just started soul searching.”
As part of his quest, Joshua says he stumbled upon a video of Bishop Nathanyel and other IUIC leaders preaching on the street. “I was like man, these brothers really know what they’re doing, they really have our history,” he says. “That’s what actually made me do more research on IUIC and the truth.”
Sar (“Minister”) Ahmadiel Ben Yehuda speaks at the African Hebrew Israelites’ annual New World Passover celebration in Dimona, Israel, May 2013. (Andrew Esensten)
In another video, Sister Ezriella from the Concord, North Carolina, branch explains that as a young adult, she felt uncertain about her life’s purpose. Then her mother shared information with her about IUIC. “She was so happy it changed her life, I had to take notice and I had to come check it out for myself,” she says. “I fell in love with it. I fell in love with finding out who I am.”
A number of Black, male celebrities have also been drawn into the wider Israelite orbit in recent years, including rappers Kendrick Lamar and Kodak Black, TV host Nick Cannon, boxer Floyd Mayweather and retired NBA player Amar’e Stoudemire.
Some of these celebrities appear to have been exposed to Israelite teachings by relatives and other acquaintances. Lamar, who famously rapped “I’m a Israelite, don’t call me Black no mo’” on a 2017 song, learned about Israelism from a cousin who was involved with IUIC. Black began identifying as a Levite in 2017 after studying scripture with an Israelite priest while serving a jail sentence in Florida. Stoudemire has said his mother taught him he had “Hebraic roots.” (He officially converted to Judaism in 2020, a step most Israelites reject because it contradicts their claims of already being authentic Jews.)
Isabelle Williams, an analyst at ADL’s Center on Extremism who tracks radical Israelite camps, said celebrity endorsements of the ideology can have a big impact because they come from figures who are widely respected.
“If people came upon an extremist Black Hebrew Israelite group street preaching, it might be easier to dismiss it and recognize the extreme ideology behind it,” she said. “But when it’s being shared by these influential figures, people might be less likely to recognize the really insidious ideology and dangerous antisemitic conspiracy theories that are behind these statements.”
Williams added that a range of extremist groups have seized on comments made by West and Irving. “It’s not just BHI and NOI groups that are leveraging this moment,” Williams said. “We’ve seen white supremacists who are also using this recent attention and circulation of antisemitic conspiracy theories to promote their own agenda.”
Rabbi Capers Funnye is the most prominent Israelite leader in the U.S. He serves as chief rabbi of the International Israelite Board of Rabbis, an organization that provides spiritual guidance to about 2,500 people in the United States, along with tens of thousands of Israelites in southern and west Africa.
In an interview, Funnye condemned West, Irving and the radical Israelite camps that have rallied around them. “God is never about divisiveness,” Funnye said. “God is never about hatred. God is never about, ‘You ain’t.’ I don’t have to say what you aren’t to make me who I am.”
A member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis and the leader of a Chicago synagogue with a mixed membership of around 200 Jews and Israelites, Funnye was at pains to differentiate his community from IUIC and its ilk: His follows the Torah and supports the state of Israel, he said, while others follow both the Old and New Testaments, worship Jesus and reject Israel’s government as illegitimate.
“Whatever army that Kyrie is speaking about, we are not a part of his army,” he said, referring to a comment Irving made during an Oct. 29 press conference about how he has “a whole army” behind him.
But Funnye said another of Irving’s recent statements — “I cannot be antisemitic if I know where I come from” — resonated with him and his congregants.
“We are Semitic,” he said of Black people who identify as Israelites, “so now we really have to draw a line when antisemitism is only defined by one’s complexion or ethnicity. We were not the ones that racialized Judaism, and we will never racialize it because Jews are not a race.” (“Semitic” refers to people who speak Semitic languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic.)
Outside of the United States, the largest organized group of Hebrew Israelites is located in Israel. The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem are a Dimona-based community of more than 3,000 African-American expatriates and their Israeli-born offspring.
African Hebrew Israelite youth serve in the army — not Kyrie Irving’s or IUIC’s army, but the Israel Defense Forces. After 53 years in Israel, the community has never been fully accepted, in part because they are not Jewish according to halacha, or Jewish law. Currently, some 100 community members are being threatened with deportation for living in the country illegally.
Ahmadiel Ben Yehuda, the African Hebrew Israelites’ minister of information, said he interpreted Irving’s remarks as a reference to “the global awakening of people of African ancestry to their Hebraic roots.” He said the backlash Irving has faced shows that the conversation around this awakening must involve qualified representatives of communities who can cite reputable sources — not documentaries such as the one Irving boosted — “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America” — in support of their claims of Israelite ancestry.
“What is certain is that Israel and Judaism must figure out a way to better accommodate these communities,” Ben Yehuda said. “This is not going to fade away, and it shouldn’t. It will intensify as the awakening continues.”
How this awakening will affect Jews and established Jewish communities remains to be seen.
In September, George Washington University’s Program on Extremism released a report titled “Contemporary Violent Extremism and the Black Hebrew Israelite Movement.” The report noted that the “predominant threat” today comes not from Israelite groups themselves but from “individuals loosely affiliated with or inspired by the movement.”
Malone, the Christian activist, cautioned that as the extremist wing of the Israelite movement grows, more violent lone wolves may emerge.
“There’s a big funnel with any movement, and the bigger the funnel is, you get certain things down at the bottom,” he said. “This is not Buddhism. This is a different kind of thing with a different kind of rhetoric.”
—
The post How many Hebrew Israelites are there, and how worried should Jews be? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Released Murderers of 75 People Are Running for Fatah Leadership Positions
People hold Fatah flags during a protest in support of the people of Gaza, as the conflict between Israel and Hamas continues, in Hebron, in the West Bank, Oct. 27, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Mussa Qawasma
Today, at the Eighth General Conference of the Fatah Movement, at least 32 released terrorists who together murdered or were responsible for the murders of 75 Israelis and others will be running in the leadership elections for the Fatah Central Committee and Fatah Revolutionary Council.
Fatah is the party headed by Mahmoud Abbas, who also leads the Palestinian Authority (PA).
Director of the PLO Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs, Raed Abu Al-Humus, revealed the list of candidates a week ago. Among the 32 terrorists are 15 murderers who in total murdered 22 people, eight terrorists who orchestrated attacks in which 53 people were murdered, and nine other terrorists who carried out attacks and terror activity against Israelis (see list below).
Abu Al-Humus repeated what Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) has already exposed — that terrorists who have been imprisoned more than 20 years were granted membership in Fatah’s Conference:
The Palestinian leadership and the Fatah leadership honored the recently released prisoners [i.e., terrorists] from Fatah by approving the membership of anyone who served 20 years or more [in prison], which allowed the membership of 388 members, including some released female prisoners.
[PLO Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs, Facebook page, May 8, 2026]
Abu Al-Humus explained:
It was necessary that we adequately represent the magnitude of the struggle and sacrifice of hundreds and thousands of years that were burned in prisons, show loyalty to the resolute brothers we left behind, reflect our culture, affiliation, and commitment to the Fatah leadership and its [Fatah] Chairman [and PA President Mahmoud Abbas], and be part of the decision-making process. [emphasis added]
[PLO Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs, Facebook page, May 8, 2026]
The following is the list of terrorist candidates as published by the PLO Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs:
“Candidates for the [Fatah] Central Committee:
Zakariya Muhammad Abd Al-Rahman Zubeidi [i.e., senior Fatah terrorist]
Tayseer Salem Al-Bardini [i.e., involved in murder of 1]”
“Candidates for the [Fatah] Revolutionary Council:
- Ahmed Abd Al-Qader Ibrahim Salim [i.e., terrorist convicted of murder]
- Ahmed Ali Mahmoud Abu Khader [i.e., responsible for murder of 9]
- Ahmed Mustafa Ahmed Bisharat [i.e., murdered 1]
- Ismail Aref Daoud Oudeh [i.e., 3 counts of attempted murder]
- Ayman Ibrahim Farhan Al-Awawdeh [i.e., murdered 1]
- Bassel Imad Subhi Arif [i.e., murdered 1]
- Bassel Suleiman Amin Al-Bizreh [i.e., terrorist]
- Jihad Jamil Mahmoud Abu Ghaban [i.e., deliberate manslaughter]
- Hassan Farouq Bahri Al-Dam [i.e., terrorist]
- Khalil Mahmoud Yusuf Abu Arram [i.e., responsible for murder of 5]
- Rateb Abd Al-Latif Abd Al-Karim Hreibat [i.e., terrorist]
- Rabia Ibrahim Hussein Dar Rabia [i.e., deputy leader of a Hezbollah-directed terror cell]
- Shadi Muhammad Hussein Ghawadreh [i.e., murdered 1]
- Saleh Qanni Saleh Mansour [i.e., responsible for murder of 2]
- Issam Mahmoud Muhammad Al-Faroukh [i.e., murdered 1]
- Ammar Mustafa Ahmed Mardi [i.e., murdered 1]
- Abd Al-Rahim Abd Al-Qader Muteir Abu Houli [i.e., Fatah terrorist]
- Adnan Muhammad Hassan Abayat [i.e., responsible for murder of 8]
- Qutaiba Muhammad Saleh Musallam [i.e., terrorist]
- Kamal Jamil Mahmoud Abu Shanab [i.e., Fatah terrorist, involved in murder]
- Majed Ismail Muhammad Al-Masri [i.e., terrorist]
- Muhammad Ibrahim Nimr Naifeh [i.e., responsible for murder of 13]
- Muhammad Ahmed Mahmoud Al-Sabbagh [i.e., murdered 3]
- Muhammad Adel Hassan Daoud [i.e., murdered 2]
- Muhammad Abd Al-Karim Hassan Zawahreh [i.e., murdered 1]
- Mansour Saleh Mansour Shreim [i.e., responsible for murder of 11]
- Nasser Musa Ahmed Abd Rabbo [i.e., murdered 1]
- Nasser Muhammad Yusuf Naji Abu Hmeid [i.e., responsible for murder of 4]
- Yusuf Abd Al-Hamid Yusuf Arshid [i.e., murdered 5]
- Yusuf Abd Al-Rahman Abd Al-Muhsin Al-Skafi [i.e., responsible for murder of 1]”
[PLO Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs, Facebook page, May 8, 2026]
The author is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this story first appeared.
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Kristof column alleging Israeli abuse of Palestinian prisoners sparks outrage, scrutiny and debate among Jews
(JTA) — A New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof published Monday detailed graphic allegations of sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners by Israeli guards, amplifying claims that guards had used dogs to rape Palestinian detainees.
As the allegations in the column, “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” sparked a widening online debate over their credibility, Jewish groups and leaders began weighing in with a mix of condemnation, skepticism and concern over conditions in Israeli prisons.
Israel has rejected all of the allegations in Kristof’s column, which included claims that guards inserted objects into Palestinian detainees’ rectums, beat detainees’ genitals and subjected them to systematic humiliation. The Israeli Foreign Ministry described his writing as “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press.”
“In an unfathomable inversion of reality, and through an endless stream of baseless lies, propagandist Nicholas Kristof turns the victim into the accused,” the ministry said in a statement, adding that the country would “fight these lies with the truth – and the truth will prevail.”
Related: From Rutgers speaker to Kristof column, disputed dog rape claim against Israel goes mainstream
Several progressive Jewish groups and Israeli human rights organizations welcomed the scrutiny the column has placed on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. But many others in the Jewish community have expressed outrage over reporting they consider dubious and agenda-driven.
The American Jewish Committee echoed the foreign ministry’s condemnation, calling the allegation that Israel trains dogs to rape prisoners a “modern-day blood libel,” a reference to historic antisemitic myths accusing Jews of ritual murder.
“Allegations of abuse toward Palestinians deserve serious, rigorous investigation,” the AJC continued. “Yet this piece, while opinion, appeared to be presented as an investigative report and fell alarmingly short of that standard while amplifying inflammatory narratives that have real-world consequences in a time of surging hatred toward Israelis and Jews worldwide.”
One of the most widely circulated allegations from the piece came from an anonymous Palestinian journalist, who said Israeli guards had ordered a dog to mount and penetrate him while he was blindfolded and handcuffed. The column also cited conversations with over a dozen former Palestinian detainees, who described sexual abuse or humiliation by Israeli settlers or security forces.
In the wake of the column’s publication, some pro-Israel voices are renewing their campaign against The New York Times, which they believe is biased against Israel. Pro-Israel groups, including EndJewHatred, Stop Antizionism, Hineni and the Movement Against Antizionism, are planning a protest outside the newspaper’s New York City headquarters on Thursday.
Michelle Ahdoot, EndJewHatred’s director of programming and strategy, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the column had been “hurtful and angering,” adding that she believed it was “direct cause of true incitement and violence against the Jewish people.”
“We’ve been calling on The New York Times and other media sources to stop the lies and stop the incitement that’s a result of this horrific reporting, and this, frankly, was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she said.
The column’s critics, who also include a handful of Palestinian voices who have previously condemned Hamas, have pointed to Kristof’s reliance on a report issued by an NGO that Israel has alleged for more than a decade serves as a Hamas propaganda operation.
While Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Palestinian writer and advocate in the United States, wrote that he had “no doubt” that “incidents of sexual abuse have occurred in Israeli prisons,” he criticized the sourcing used in Kristof’s piece, writing in a post on X that Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based NGO, and others have “troubling records on accuracy, conduct, and associations.”
“They are not credible sources, even if the article relied on others as well,” Alkhatib wrote. He said that other Palestinian testimonies were “anonymous due to shame and fear of retaliation for reporting sexual torture, which complicates verification but does not automatically invalidate their claims.”
Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, the senior envoy for Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, similarly criticized Kristof’s use of Euro-Med’s report in a post on X. Euro-Med’s leaders have long drawn accusations from Israel of being Hamas operatives, and the NGO has faced scrutiny for referring to the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas as having been “arrested and moved to the Gaza Strip” and for claiming that Israel steals the organs of deceased Palestinians.
“This is not a human rights organization with a bias,” Rodan-Benzaquen wrote. “It is an organization whose leadership has documented family and organizational ties to Hamas, operating under institutional cover at the heart of our democracies, and is cited by the @nytimes.”
Hen Mazzig, an Israeli activist, also maligned Kristof’s citation of a tweet by Shaiel Ben-Ephraim in a Substack post, pointing out that he left UCLA amid accusations of sexual harassment in 2020. (Ben-Ephraim has acknowledged that he engaged in “inappropriate behavior” at the time.)
Ben-Ephraim’s viral tweet from April, which Kristof linked to in his claim that Israel had trained dogs to rape Palestinian detainees, listed a series of alleged testimonies from Palestinians’ unnamed Israeli guards who claimed they had experienced or seen the practice.
“The accusations against Israeli settlers and security officials deserve serious investigation,” Mazzig wrote, later adding, “But if you are willing to platform a man accused of sexual harassment, and an organization that calls Jewish rape allegations propaganda, to make your case on the same topic, the conversation is over.”
Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, told the Free Press that his comments in the column appearing to validate the allegations appeared out of context. Many have also questioned the timing of Kristof’s column, coming just a day before a widely anticipated report from an Israeli civil commission about the extent of sexual violence during Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Neither The New York Times nor Kristof responded to questions from JTA. But a spokesperson for the newspaper, Charlie Stadtlander, defended the column and its author late Tuesday, writing online about a viral claim that it could be retracted, “There is no truth to this at all.”
On Wednesday morning, he also rejected claims that Kristof’s column had been timed in relation to the Oct. 7 sexual violence report, which he said the Times had not known about before its release. The newspaper covered the report late Tuesday.
Kristof, too, has waved off concerns, dismissing criticism that the piece ran in the Times’ opinion section rather than its news pages. He also greeted skepticism about the possibility of training dogs for sexual assault with “exasperation.”
“I appreciate the intense interest in my column,” Kristof wrote in a post on X. “For skeptics, why not agree on Red Cross and lawyer visits for the 9,000 Palestinian ‘security’ prisoners? If you think these abuse allegations are false, such monitoring visits would be protective. So why not?”
Allegations of abuse against Palestinian detainees in Israel surfaced repeatedly before and during the war in Gaza, including in testimonies by detainees and prison guards by Reuters and the Associated Press, albeit not necessarily in as much detail as many of the cases described in Kristof’s piece. In January, reports obtained by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel from the country’s Public Defender’s Office found evidence of widespread, systematic abuse in Israeli prisons against Palestinians.
In March, Israeli military prosecutors canceled indictments against five IDF reserve soldiers who were accused of sexually assaulting a detainee at the Sde Teiman detention facility, a case that was caught on video and sparked international outcry.
And in January, an Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, released a report alleging sexual abuse in Israeli prisons. The group cited the column in a post on X Tuesday, writing that “the international community continues to stand by and allow Israel to commit crimes against the Palestinian people” even as the column and others report on them.
Kristof’s column is indeed prompting some to give new attention to the conditions in Israeli prisons, its ostensible purpose. Some Jewish critics of the column are emphasizing that they find the broad allegation of abuse in Israeli prisons plausible, troubling and deserving of scrutiny and action. Many point to comments boasting of poor conditions in prisons by Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right minister who has overseen the Israel Prison Service since late 2022, to say they believe that abuse may have worsened, and the consequences diminished, in recent years.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, head of the liberal Zionist advocacy and lobby group J Street, wrote on Substack that while “disputed” details in the piece must be “rigorously investigated,” the report’s “serious allegations of systemic abuse cannot simply be waved away because they are painful or politically inconvenient.”
The Nexus Project, a liberal-leaning antisemitism watchdog, took aim at the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s assessment of the column, writing in a post on X that “to weaponize the term ‘blood libel’ to dismiss Kristof’s thorough reporting is dangerous.”
Other progressive Jewish groups have also called for the allegations in the piece to be investigated, including the rabbinic group T’ruah, which demanded “an impartial independent investigation, so the perpetrators can be brought to justice.”
Elissa Wald, a Jewish activist living in Oregon, argued in a Substack essay late Monday that while she believed The New York Times had a “strong anti-Israel bias,” many things could be true at once.
“The wide[s]pread, knee-jerk denial of everything Kristof wrote by many of my fellow Jews is incredibly troubling to me,” she wrote, adding, “Just as we don’t know enough to immediately believe everything written in this piece, especially given the context we’re all familiar with, I also don’t think we know enough to immediately discount and dismiss it all.”
Others worried that Kristof’s approach might set back the effort to get to the bottom of these allegations. Israeli policy analyst and pro-Israel influencer Eli Kowaz argued in a Substack post that Kristof had foregrounded the most sensational allegations in his piece and neglected claims that were more documented, including Ben-Gvir’s rhetoric and a recent report by the Israeli Public Defender’s Office documenting systematic violence from prison guards.
“By Thursday, the conversation will be about Euro-Med’s credibility and whether unverified accounts can be trusted,” Kowaz wrote. “The documented case — the one that required no advocacy org, no anonymous source, no unverifiable claim — will be largely beside the point. That is what this kind of journalism costs, and someone should say so.”
The post Kristof column alleging Israeli abuse of Palestinian prisoners sparks outrage, scrutiny and debate among Jews appeared first on The Forward.
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From Rutgers speaker to Kristof column, disputed dog rape claim against Israel goes mainstream
(JTA) — A week after a university commencement speaker was canceled because of a tweet claiming that Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners, the allegation leapt into the pages of The New York Times.
The columnist Nicholas Kristof included the claim in a column alleging widespread sexual abuse against Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons.
Detailing the account of an unnamed Gaza journalist who says guards summoned a dog when he was imprisoned in 2024, Kristof writes, “He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him.” Linking to a range of pro-Palestinian sources, he notes that other prisoners had recounted similar experiences elsewhere.
Israel has rejected all of the allegations in Kristof’s column, which has elicited condemnation from Jewish groups for what they say is a “a modern-day blood libel” even as some say they believe it is important to take seriously claims of abuse in Israeli prisons. The New York Times has stood behind the column and said Kristof’s column reflects rigorous reporting and standards.
Neither Israeli officials nor The New York Times have commented specifically on the dog-rape claim, and the newspaper and Kristof did not respond to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s requests for comment. But a canine training expert said the allegations seem implausible if not completely impossible.
James Crosby, a retired police lieutenant and canine aggression expert affiliated with Harvard University’s Canine Brain Project, told JTA that it was “highly unlikely that anybody is going to be able to train a dog to successfully commit a sexual assault.”
Crosby said dogs can be trained to carry out some behaviors that could be seen as sexual but he was much more skeptical of the central claim that Kristof described.
“You could train the physical behaviors of jumping up and moving the hips back and forth and so forth. That is not necessarily sexual behavior from a dog,” Crosby said. “The actual penetration and so forth, I think that would be a lot more problematic.”
Israeli human rights groups have separately alleged both sexual assault in security prisons and the use of dogs to intimidate and assault Palestinian prisoners.
Kristof is defending the claim that the two phenomena happen in tandem, tweeting on Tuesday, “To those who say that canine rape is impossible, despite the many Palestinians who have described it, I’d note that at least three different medical journal articles discuss rectal injuries in humans from anal penetration by dogs. Sigh.”
A handful of records in medical literature have concluded that injuries to humans came from being penetrated by a dog. A review of the cases included in PubMed, a medical research database, showed that most reflect instances where humans forced dogs to perform sexual acts on them, but one 2019 case report from Uruguay described injuries to a 6 year old girl that a physician attributed to the family’s pet.
Crosby said that he was unsure if it was biologically possible to train a dog to have an erection on command but stopped short of saying that training dogs to rape humans was “impossible.”
“I’m not saying it can’t happen because, I mean, I’m a retired police officer, and I’ve also been dealing with fatal dog attacks and dog stuff for a long time, and there are always people out there that are twisted enough to do what you don’t think they can,” Crosby said. “The depths of human stupidity and nastiness are just always unplumbable.”
Whatever the case, it’s clear that the dog-rape claim has escalated rapidly as a charge against Israel in recent months.
The accusation has circulated for nearly two years but became turbocharged only in the last month, according to Travis Hawley, a Jewish self-described “open source intelligence” analyst who works as a contractor for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and is also affiliated with the Network Contagion Research Institute, a center affiliated with Rutgers University that produces research about how information spreads online. The institute referred him to JTA.
After seeing the discourse about Kristof’s column, Hawley decided to trace the claim’s path on social media. He shared his findings with JTA on Tuesday.
Hawley found that the claim made a brief splash on social media in 2024 before falling dormant until last month. The 2024 cycle stemmed from an interview with the director general of the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry posted by Al Jazeera’s Arabic-language X account in June, according to his research. The official said that Israelis “made these dogs carry out vile actions against these detainees.”
Al Jazeera’s post got relatively little traction on its own. But days later, the account “Suppressed News” shared it in English, increasing the spread and introducing the word “rape” into the online discourse.
The account TrackAIPAC, which opposes the Israel lobby’s influence on U.S. politics, shared that post, Hawley found, as did the journalist Ryan Grim, whose coverage often criticizes Israel, and Briahna Joy Gray, a former press secretary for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign who has frequently shared anti-Israel posts that have drawn allegations of antisemitism.
After the June 2024 cycle, the claim simmered online but was relatively inconspicuous compared to more prominent allegations against Israel, including that it was deliberately starving Palestinians in Gaza, a claim that Israel similarly rejected as a blood libel.
Then in March, Israeli authorities dropped charges against Israeli prison guards who had been accused of sexually assaulting prisoners at the Sde Teiman detention facility, in an incident caught on video that had shocked many Israelis, roiled the country’s security establishment and fueled allegations that Israel was seeking to cover up abuse.
Hawley found that Sde Teiman’s return to the news cycle provided “the contextual hook the dormant June 2024 dog-rape narrative needed to re-ignite.”
Weeks later, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based NGO that Israel has accused of having affiliations with Hamas, issued a report promoting the allegation. The organization is frequently cited by critics of Israel, and some of its claims have overlapped with those of independent sources. But its reports have also argued that Israel exhumes Palestinians to steal their organs — a claim with no evidence that medical experts say is impossible.
Euro-Med’s founder and chairman, Ramy Abdu, had shared the dog rape allegation during the 2024 wave. Now his organization said it had interviewed former prisoners who had experienced the phenomenon themselves.
Just days later, the claim had its biggest moment online yet, when an Israeli living in the United States, a former UCLA researcher and prominent online anti-Israel influencer named Shaiel Ben-Ephraim posted that an Israeli source had confirmed the dog rape allegation to him. He did not name the source or offer any additional evidence.
Ben-Ephraim had long faced challenges to his credibility from pro-Israel voices, in part connected to his admitted record of misconduct. But Hawley said Ben-Ephraim’s post, which echoed comments the Israeli had made on a pro-Palestinian podcast days earlier, appeared pivotal to the claim’s ascendance. He said Ben-Ephraim had injected a crucial element to the claim structure: that Israelis, and not just Palestinians and their allies, believed the dog rape claim.
Before April, “it wasn’t some acceptable narrative. It was allegations and bots and stuff like that,” said Hawley, who emphasized that he could not say whether the allegation was true. “It took a couple viral moments in the last two months before you could call it, I guess, mainstream.”
Hawley’s findings lined up with those published independently last week by Eli Kowaz, an American-Israeli analyst who formerly worked at the Israel Policy Forum. Kowaz published an essay arguing that the dog rape allegation was not credible, several days before Kristof’s column.
“You can hold two things at once: that Israeli detention conditions have produced credible, documented abuse allegations warranting serious investigation — and that a viral claim about trained rape dogs, built on a collapsed case and an advocacy podcast, does not meet any serious evidentiary bar,” he wrote. “Choosing which claims to believe before examining them tells you what the ‘evidence’ was ever actually for.”
Days after Ben-Ephraim’s tweet, the dog-rape claim had such reach that Ramy Elghandour, a bio-tech entrepreneur who had been invited to give the commencement address at Rutgers University’s engineering school, included it in a tweet condemning Israel.
“They’ve committed genocide,” Elghandour wrote in the tweet, a response to a Democratic lawmaker’s vow not to allow additional military aid to Israel. “They’re running dungeons where they train dogs to sexually assault prisoners … Weapons embargo is the absolute minimum.”
His invitation to speak was rescinded, but the claim was still climbing. Days later, Kristof’s column was published, bringing the claim to a vast audience including many people who would not previously have been exposed to it but who may have followed Kristof’s award-winning, impactful career as a columnist reporting about the Darfur genocide, human trafficking and global poverty. As evidence, Kristof’s column cited the Euro-Med report and linked to Ben-Ephraim’s post.
The prominence of the platform surprised even Hawley, who routinely watches discourse cycles reach unexpected heights. “To go from very obvious anti-Israel-narrative people, and then to the New York Times directly, is like, OK, how do we make that big jump?” he asked.
To some critics of Kristof’s column, the answer is that a well oiled pro-Palestinian propaganda machine had worked exactly as intended.
“His attempt to slip a salacious ‘dog rape’ trope from reportedly Hamas-linked operatives into the paper under the guise of an opinion piece is a failure of basic gatekeeping,” tweeted Albert Aaron, a pro-Israel Jewish New Yorker who posted that he was canceling his subscription, in one representative social media comment.
“Kristof quotes people who celebrated October 7 and want Israel destroyed, and will lie to achieve that goal. We know how the lies in this story made their way into it, where they came from and what purpose they serve,” Haviv Rettig Gur, an Israeli commentator, said in a viral post in which he described feeling a sense of relief to encounter what he believed were obvious lies in Kristof’s column. One of them, he said: “Dogs did not rape anyone.”
Claims of dogs trained to rape have been attached in the past to some of history’s most vicious figures. The journalist Lawrence Wright wrote that Egypts used dogs to rape prisoners under the regime that fell during the Arab Spring in 2011.
Ingrid Olderock, a Chilean-born German, is known as “The Dog Lady” because of allegations that she trained German shepherds to rape female dissidents during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile.
And JTA reported in the 1980s about allegations that Klaus Barbie, the Nazi Gestapo leader known as the “Butcher of Lyon” for his brutality, had trained a dog to rape women.
Some who are inclined to believe the dog rape allegation about Israel say the stories about Barbie have difficult implications for those who reject the claim.
“Dogs were used to rape humans during the Holocaust. I did not expect Israeli propaganda to turn into literal Holocaust denial,” tweeted the progressive journalist Ziad Jilani in response to a Jewish physician who had written, “Dogs cannot anatomically rape humans. As a physician, I thought I would just point that out. Why are antisemites such idiots?”
The Pinochet example and others like it that allege canine rape of women is not relevant in the case of the prisoners Kristof spoke to, Rabbi Natan Slifkin argued in a Substack essay on Wednesday. Slifkin runs Israel’s Biblical Museum of Natural History, which reflects his passion for and expertise in zoology.
“Without getting into gruesome detail, suffice it to say that the stories were not comparable. There are physical differences between male and female humans, and physical and behavioral differences between male humans and male dogs, alongside other differences in circumstances and in the descriptions of what happened in each case,” Slifkin wrote.
Noting that allegations have also circulated that the Israeli military has trained sharks and eagles to surveil and attack Palestinians, he continued, “The general view of experts in canine behavior … is that dogs cannot be trained to rape men.”
While Crosby, the dog scientist, said he was familiar with accounts of law enforcement and military personnel using dogs to intimidate individuals, citing the illegal use of dogs at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, he said he had never encountered an example in his research of a dog raping a human being. If misconduct involving dogs is taking place in Israeli prisons, he said, he is skeptical of the specific claims of rape.
“I would be more focused on the idea that they’re doing it as a form of intimidation and harassment,” Crosby said, “rather than literally having the animals sexually abuse somebody.”
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