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Israel threatens NYT lawsuit
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said they had instructed the “initiation of a defamation lawsuit” against The New York Times over Nicholas Kristof’s article alleging sexual assaults against Palestinian detainees by Israeli security services.
“have instructed the initiation of a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times”
The dispute centers on Kristof’s claim of “a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children” carried out by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, “above all, prison guards.”
Netanyahu framed the threatened legal action as a response to what he called “one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press,” and he said, “Under my leadership, Israel will not be silent.”
The New York Times responded that any legal claim would be “without merit,” and it said Kristof’s piece was “deeply reported” and based on corroborated accounts from “14 men and women he interviewed.”
Defamation fight and backlash
The New York Times said the threat is “part of a well-worn political playbook that aims to undermine independent reporting and stifle journalism that does not fit a specific narrative,” while Netanyahu and Sa’ar accused the paper of publishing “one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press.”
In a video statement, Israel’s ambassador to the US, Yechiel Leiter, said “the only clear crime on display here is the violation of journalistic standards by Mr Kristof and his paper,” as the BBC reported “scores of Jewish protesters” demonstrated outside the newspaper’s Manhattan office.
The BBC also reported that the article described a claim by an unnamed person Kristof said was a Gaza journalist who “was raped by a dog on the command of the dog's handler,” and it noted Kristof wrote that “there is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes.”
Legal analysts cited by the BBC said a state defamation case would be challenging, with Liat Bergman Ravid saying the Defamation Law “prevents the bringing of a civil action by a collective” and that governmental bodies face low likelihood of success as a matter of public policy.
What’s at stake next
The threatened lawsuit’s next steps remain unclear, with CBS News reporting it is “unclear if litigation will be filed in the United States or Israel, or who the plaintiffs will,” and it quoted Rodney Smolla saying “A government itself cannot sue for defamation in the United States.”
“unclear if litigation will be filed in the United States or Israel, or who the plaintiffs will”
CBS News also tied the legal fight to constitutional limits, citing Nadine Strossen’s account of New York Times v. Sullivan and saying a plaintiff would have to show “that there was intentional or reckless falsity, that they knew or had great reason to know that what was being said was false.”
In parallel, the BBC reported that Israel’s foreign ministry alleged Kristof based his piece “on unverified sources tied to Hamas-linked networks,” while the New York Times maintained that its reporting was “extensively fact-checked” and cross-referenced with “U.N. testimony” in one case.
As the dispute continues, the BBC noted that the article was published on Monday and that the Netanyahu-Sa’ar statement came on Thursday, with the New York Times responding that the threat is “without merit” and that the accounts were “corroborated with other witnesses, whenever possible.”
