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The mysterious disappearance of Yemenite children in Israel is the focus of a new play
(New York Jewish Week) — Shortly after the State of Israel was founded, Shanit Keter-Schwartz was born on a dirt floor, in a hut made of aluminum siding outside the burgeoning town of Tel Aviv. She was the second of six children, the daughter of Yemenite Jews who had recently immigrated to the new country. They’d faced discrimination and violence in their country of origin, so when Jewish emissaries turned up in 1949 to bring 50,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel as a part of “Operation Flying Carpet,” they were all in.
Unfortunately, Keter-Schwartz’s upbringing in Israel was no magic carpet ride. “[Yemenite Jews] were seen as savages, primitive, inferior in the eyes of the Ashkenazi Jews,” Keter-Schwartz recalled in an interview with the New York Jewish Week. “They were not sophisticated or educated. It was a cultural domination, a collective trauma in Israel. They faced war, hunger, poverty, and living in very harsh conditions.”
The worst, though, wasn’t near-starvation due to rationing, or the harsh conditions of the shanty towns that these new immigrants were placed in, or the way European children wrinkled their nose at her and called her smelly. No, the worst was when the government stole her sister, Sarah, whom Keter-Schwartz never saw again.
In what has become known as the Yemenite Children Affair, more than 1,000 children of Yemenite, Mizrahi and Balkan descent were separated from their children during the first decade of Israel’s existence. The families and their advocates have long insisted, over denials by officials, that the children were taken from their families by the Ashkenazi government during the first decade of Israel’s existence. More often than not, parents were told their children had died when they had, in fact, been given to families of European descent for adoption, according to Amram Association, one of several organizations dedicated to documenting these abductions and advocating for victims’ families.
Now, Keter-Schwartz — a writer and performer who lives in Los Angeles, and a mother to two grown daughters — has brought to life her family’s story and her search for her missing sister in the form of a one-woman show. Premiering on Thursday at New York City Center, and running through May 15, “Daughter of the Wicked” chronicles her family’s journey from the Yemenite ma’abarot (refugee camps) to shikunim (government housing projects), where they lived in a tiny two-room apartment amid a melting pot of Jewish immigrants who were often at odds with one another.
“It is overcrowded, and the people who live here come from many different places. In their countries they were… respected by their communities,” she says in the show, which is named after one of the many Yemenite curses her mother would hurl at her when she’d done something wrong. “But here [in Israel] they are forced into stereotypes.”
“Israel had no choice but to bring the Jews from the Arab countries because the European Jews population had been greatly diminished after the Holocaust, but they didn’t want us,” Keter-Schwartz told the New York Jewish Week. “They took control of our lives, tried to assimilate us, wanted the whole country to be secular and uniform. They made all the decisions for us.”
One such “decision” made by the government, she said, was to remove her oldest brother, Yossi, from the family home to “re-educate” him at an Ashkenazi kibbutz. It worked: Yossi returned as a proud secular farmer, disdainful and ashamed of his spiritualist, religious family and their traditional ways.
The disappearance of her baby sister, Sarah, inspired Keter-Schwartz’s play, which is also informed by the kabbalistic teachings of her father. (Russ Rowland)
In the case of Keter-Schwartz’s sister, the abduction occurred directly after she was born. “When my father went to the hospital to pick up the twins, my siblings, he returned only with David. They told him that the girl, Sarah, was sick, and he should come back the following day. But when he came back, they told him that she had died,” Keter-Schwartz said. “Being naive, he didn’t question this. He didn’t ask to see a death certificate. He didn’t even know [a certificate] existed. He didn’t demand to see her body, didn’t think to bury her or give her funeral rites. He never suspected for a minute they could deceive him.”
This story, and others, is conveyed in “Daughter of the Wicked” through a series of monologues, each tied to an idea from Kabbalah,the Jewish mystical tradition. Keter-Schwartz defines each concept — like ahava (love), metsuka (hardship), busha (shame) — then tells a personal story that relates to the topic.
With this framework, Keter-Schwartz pays homage to her father, a spiritualist rabbi who spent his days poring over holy texts and divining the true meaning of the universe. She reads from his writings — which were collected and published towards the end of his life as a book, “Nachash HaNechoshet” — detailing her complex relationship to a man who was both an inspiration and, at times, inscrutable to all around him.
“The play is set in a hotel room, while I’m waiting for my sister to show up,” Keter-Schwartz explains. “As I wait, I tell my life. Behind me, on three screens, there’s archival footage from the 1950s that I got from Steven Spielberg’s archive. That footage tells the story, too, and so does the music.” The accompanying music, which transitions the audience from segment to segment, was written by Israeli composer Lilo Fedida, using traditional Yemenite melodies and instruments.
“We lived with this [tragedy] all my childhood, and I’ve been wondering all these years about my missing sister,” said Keter-Schwartz. “If I see her on the street, will I recognize her? Where does she live? Is she happy? I felt guilty that I never really tried to find her, I was so busy with my own life. But now I need to know.”
As a young woman, Keter-Schwartz said she went to great lengths to distance herself from her family’s tragedies. She lived in Amsterdam, London and New York, finally finding her footing in Los Angeles. She changed her name — from Shoshana to Shanit — and declared herself a new person in a new land. It was only when she lost all but one of her siblings, as well as both parents, that she felt an urge to revisit the past. When her last surviving sibling got so ill he almost died, she swore to search for Sarah. Initially, the idea was just to hire a private investigator to try to locate her. During her search, though, she began to feel an urge to share her story.
“I’d never written a play, so it took me two years [working] with coaches,” says Keter-Schwartz. “I’ve been an actress all my life, I’ve edited other people’s scripts, I produced movies, but to actually write — ha! I had amazing coaches. I’m especially grateful to Yigal Chatzor, the Israeli playwright. He brought the Israeli spice and the humor, which is wonderful now because now the play is balanced. It’s heart-wrenching and it’s hysterical. It’s everything, you know.”
The Yemenite Children Affair has never been formally confirmed by the state of Israel, which maintains the position that most of the babies died of malaria or malnutrition and were not, as some have proposed, sold to Ashkenazi families in exchange for donations to the young country. Several government-led commissions have claimed that there was no official wrongdoing, but testimonies continue to emerge that suggest otherwise. According to a 2016 article in Yediot Ahronot, a prominent Israeli news source, the government has sealed the official records of these disappearances until 2071, despite ongoing demonstrations and demands for actions.
In 2021, the Israeli government authorized tens of millions of dollars in reparations to families whose children disappeared while in government care. Nonetheless, no official admission of guilt or apology has been issued, a fact which caused many affected families to reject the plan, calling it “hush money.” Only a fraction of the affected families are eligible for these payments and, according to recent reporting, very few have claimed the money. Less than 1% of the allocated funds have been distributed thus far.
For Keter-Schwartz, no amount of money could compensate for the loss of her sister. She’s more interested in creating connections with others who lost family members and bringing awareness to this chapter in Israeli history. “Going back to my roots, revisiting the past, is an act of forgiveness,” Keter-Schwartz said in a statement. “By writing this play, I was able to forgive and accept the past. I hope that when audiences see my play they come to terms with their own history, and that they feel a sense of what it means to be free, and the challenges that confront us in maintaining that freedom.”
That is a major throughline of “Daughter of the Wicked”: Keter-Schwartz does not forsake the country that gave her her identity and childhood; rather, she insists on loving it while demanding recognition of past wrongs. Towards the end of her show, Keter Ashkenazi raises both arms to the sky and screams at those who wronged her: “My country! I blame you, shame on you for forsaking us, shame on you!”
But then, she lowers her arms and says, voice cracking with heartbreak: “I love you, I blame you, I love you. My country, I love you.”
—
The post The mysterious disappearance of Yemenite children in Israel is the focus of a new play 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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