• חדשות זמן אמת
• English

It is difficult to decide what is more disturbing about the New York Times’ latest rape allegation: the allegation itself, or
the fact that it was the New York Times that chose to publish it.

The claim that Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners sounds like something drawn from the darker traditions of political propaganda. Yet it did not appear on a fringe website, an anonymous Telegram channel, or an activist social media account. It appeared in the New York Times, and at a striking moment – just one day before the publication of a comprehensive official Israeli report documenting rape, sexual abuse, and gender-based crimes committed by Hamas on October 7.

Even before the report itself was released, a new narrative had already begun to take shape: Hamas was no longer the only party accused of sexual atrocities. Israel was now being cast in the same role.

This is difficult to dismiss as coincidence, because the issue at stake is not merely a single article, one opinion column, or an isolated journalistic failure. In his recent book, From David to Goliath: Israel in International Media Coverage, Professor Eli Avraham describes the mechanism of moral and political inversion through which international media transformed Israel from "David" into "Goliath." The New York Times episode reflects a new and far more radical stage in this process: the "Goliath" figure is now being transformed into a moral monster.

How does a newspaper such as the New York Times come to publish a narrative of this kind?

From David to Goliath

To understand how such a narrative suddenly becomes part of legitimate public discourse, one must step back and examine the broader process that made it possible. The claim that Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners did not emerge out of nowhere. It rests on a prolonged process of moral inversion, demonization, and the normalization of anti-Israeli narratives, through which central international media outlets have not merely portrayed Israel negatively, but have gradually assigned it a predetermined moral role.

In From David to Goliath: Israel in International Media Coverage, Professor Eli Avraham describes a profound reversal of roles that gradually took hold in international media coverage. Israel, once perceived as a small and vulnerable state, came to be framed as a colonial and aggressive power, while the Palestinians were increasingly cast as the ultimate victims: powerless, devoid of meaningful responsibility for their condition, and portrayed as responding to oppression with almost inevitable violence.

Avraham argues that this reversal was constructed through an entire system of journalistic choices: which images are selected, which sources are treated as credible, which headlines are written, what context disappears, and whose suffering occupies the center of the story. Wounded children, hospitals, ruins, and Palestinian death tolls become part of a consistent framing that positions the Palestinians as absolute victims.

The book places particular emphasis on the erasure of context. Time and again, Israeli actions are presented without the background that preceded them: terrorism, rocket fire, jihadist ideology, the use of human shields, Hamas control over civilian space, and the clear interest terrorist organizations have in producing images of Palestinian suffering. Once this context disappears, Israel no longer appears as a state responding to threat, but as a force exercising almost arbitrary violence.

Moreover, Avraham points to a deeper mechanism: the media not only highlights Palestinian suffering, but simultaneously erases Palestinian responsibility. Terrorism becomes "resistance." Terrorists become "militants." Rocket fire disappears from the background, while sources affiliated with Hamas, or operating under its control, are laundered into ostensibly humanitarian or official actors. Gradually, a seemingly clear moral picture emerges: one side suffers; the other is guilty.

This is the mechanism of reality inversion through which Israel ceases to be “David” and becomes "Goliath."

Yet the New York Times episode points to a far more radical stage in this process. "Goliath" is no longer portrayed merely as oppressive or aggressive. Through sustained framing, demonization, and the laundering of increasingly extreme narratives, parts of the international media are now transforming Israel into a moral monster, one onto which the public is prepared to project almost any accusation, including allegations that sound as though they were taken directly from the repertoire of totalitarian atrocity propaganda.
|

"The Big Lie"

The larger question is how such preposterous accusations come to appear credible to such large segments of the Western public.

In his article, From Hitler’s Lie to Contemporary International Discourse: How Victims Become Aggressors, on the propaganda war against Israel, Dr. Yoel Fishman describes how the mechanism of role reversal identified by Avraham escalates into an entire system for manufacturing reality. "Goliath" ceases to be a political actor and becomes the embodiment of absolute evil.

Fishman describes a form of propaganda that no longer relies merely on bias, exaggeration, or even conventional demonization, but seeks to replace reality itself with an alternative moral universe in which Israel is identified in advance with genocide, Nazism, sadism, and war crimes. Within such a framework, almost any accusation against Israel becomes plausible.

At the center of this phenomenon, Fishman argues, is an old propaganda technique used by the Nazis. Although they did not invent it, they refined it and turned it into a totalitarian instrument. In Mein Kampf, Hitler himself traced the origins of the method to British atrocity propaganda during World War I, but adopted what he saw as its central principle: it is better to tell large lies than small ones. "All propaganda," Hitler wrote, "whether in business or in politics, achieves success through continuity and the sustained uniformity of its application."

This is also the darkest dimension of the current moral inversion. Israel is no longer portrayed merely as an aggressor, but as the embodiment of Nazi evil itself. The historical inversion is almost complete: the crime once committed against the Jews is turned into a rhetorical weapon against the Jewish state.

A central point emphasized by Fishman is that Hitler did not regard the "big lie" as a moral failing, but as a sophisticated technique of controlling perception. He understood that people struggle to believe that anyone would dare lie on such a vast scale. Small lies are familiar from everyday life. Monstrous lies, by contrast, create dissonance. Their very audacity gives them power. At first, the public may reject them as absurd; later, it becomes accustomed to them; eventually, it accepts them as part of reality.

Persistence, then, becomes a central part of the method. Fishman cites Harold Nicolson, the former British diplomat who served in Germany, who observed that Hitler preferred to cling to an argument even when its falsehood was widely understood, rather than open a discussion that might weaken it. This was not simply the spreading of lies. It was a form of propagandistic discipline: never correct, never retreat, never enter into factual examination, but repeat the same claim again and again until it acquires the status of political truth.

The Nazis used this principle not only to lie about their opponents, but to reverse the entire moral relationship between victim and aggressor. Jews, a powerless minority confronting a totalitarian state, were portrayed as an all-powerful enemy, the source of danger and destruction. The aggressor recast itself as the victim, while the victim was presented as a dangerous aggressor that had to be neutralized. This was more than demonization. It was psychological preparation for the denial of rights, persecution, and ultimately extermination.

To explain how such systems survive even when the lies themselves begin to collapse, Fishman draws on Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarian propaganda. According to Arendt, totalitarian propaganda does not rely on isolated lies. It constructs an entire fictional world, governed by its own internal logic, that competes with reality itself.

The strength of this fictional world lies in its consistency. The "big lie" does not appear as a single event, but as an entire system in which each accusation reinforces those that came before it. Even when one narrative collapses, the larger structure survives because it offers audiences a complete, organized, and morally coherent account of reality. Moreover, one accusation clears the ground for the next: genocide, apartheid, deliberate starvation, Nazism, the massacre of children. Each allegation becomes part of the same system in which Israel has already been defined in advance as the source of evil.

From October 7 to the "Dog Allegation"

Anyone who has followed elite media coverage since October 7 is unlikely to see this latest episode as unusual, or an isolated incident. From the first days after the massacre, major international media outlets began amplifying unverified Hamas claims, repeating misleading narratives, and consistently blurring both the identity of those who carried out the atrocities and the context in which they occurred.

The clearest example was the explosion at the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza. As I showed in an analysis published several days after the incident, the New York Times quickly echoed Hamas’s claim that an "Israeli strike" had killed hundreds at the hospital, placing the allegation in the main headline of its online edition. Only after the damage had been done, and after the newspaper faced intense criticism, did the headline begin to "evolve" from an "Israeli strike," to simply a "strike," and eventually to an "blast." 

Yet even then, the paper did not take real responsibility. Nearly a week passed before the New York Times published a weak editorial note acknowledging only that its editors "should have been more careful." There was no apology, no serious institutional reckoning, and no recognition that the newspaper had helped give international legitimacy to a false and inflammatory narrative in real time.

The consequences went far beyond a headline correction. The New York Times did not simply get the facts wrong. It allowed Hamas to shape the initial framing of the event, and then tried to retreat from that framing gradually and cautiously, without dismantling the moral assumption already planted in readers’ minds: Israel is guilty unless proven otherwise.

A similar pattern appeared in the paper’s changing language regarding Hamas terrorists. In an article about the massacre titled "Hamas Leaves Trail of Terror in Israel," the New York Times changed its description of the Hamas terrorists who carried out the atrocities from "terrorists" in the original version to "gunmen." Only after a storm of criticism did the paper revise the wording again, reverting to "terrorists." This, too, was part of the same pattern: blurring the identity of the aggressor, softening the nature of the crimes, and shifting attention away from the atrocities committed in Israel toward the question of Israel’s response.

In the months following the massacre, this pattern deepened. As evidence accumulated regarding the massacres, abuse, and sexual violence committed by Hamas, a parallel effort emerged to create a kind of moral symmetry. The atrocities themselves were not always denied outright, but they were blurred, minimized, surrounded by doubt, or folded into a broader narrative of "violence on both sides."

Paradoxically, the clearer Hamas atrocities became, the less central they were to the story itself. In their place emerged a narrative according to which Israel was "exaggerating," "inflating," or "exploiting" the atrocities for propaganda purposes. And as that narrative grew stronger, a new moral symmetry gradually took shape, one in which Israel itself was portrayed as acting with the same barbarity once attributed to Hamas.

As Israel was increasingly framed as a colonial, "genocidal," and morally unrestrained power, accusations that would once have seemed entirely absurd began to appear increasingly plausible. The "dog allegation" is a direct continuation of this process. It rests on a prolonged campaign of demonization in which Israel is no longer portrayed simply as a state fighting brutally, but as an entity capable of almost any imaginable act of barbarism.

Why Sexual Allegations?

The shift toward sexual demonization is not incidental. Throughout history, accusations involving rape, sexual sadism, and sexual degradation have repeatedly served as powerful instruments of dehumanization against minority groups and political enemies. Such allegations are not meant only to shock. Their purpose is to evoke disgust, fear, and a sense of existential threat. The more extreme, monstrous, and sadistic the accusation, the more deeply it reshapes the public’s moral imagination.

This is also why sexual accusations tend to appear during particularly extreme stages of political propaganda. Once the enemy is portrayed as capable of "bestial" acts, the discussion ceases to be political. The target of the accusation is transformed into something outside the boundaries of the human.

The use of dogs is not incidental either. Throughout history, atrocity propaganda has repeatedly used images of animality, contamination, and sexual humiliation to strip its targets of basic humanity. The dog appears here not only as an instrument of violence, but as a symbol of unrestrained brutality, the loss of human identity, and the passage from the human to the animal.

The timing of the New York Times episode gives the allegation an even wider meaning. As noted earlier, Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times opinion piece, published under the headline “The Silence Meeting Palestinian Rape,” appeared on the newspaper’s website one day before the release of an official Israeli report on the crimes of October 7. This is not simply another extreme anti-Israel narrative. It turns sexual atrocity itself into an instrument of moral inversion.

This inversion is part of the same mechanism described by both Avraham and Fishman: the victim becomes the aggressor, and the aggressor the victim. But it also marks a further stage in the escalation of demonization. Israel is no longer accused only of violence or war crimes, but of a form of "monstrous," almost subhuman sadism, precisely of the kind historically used in atrocity propaganda to place certain groups outside the boundaries of the human.

From the Inversion of Reality to the Production of an Alternative Reality

The New York Times episode is not simply another false narrative. It exposes the depth of the crisis within elite journalism, which no longer limits itself to reporting reality, but increasingly participates in constructing an alternative version of it.

Nor is this the first time such a process has occurred. During the Holocaust, the New York Times also played a deeply troubling role in obscuring the scale of the Jewish catastrophe. Under the leadership of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the newspaper repeatedly buried reports about the extermination of the Jews in its inner pages, avoided presenting Jews as the central target of the Nazi machinery of destruction, and preferred a more universal and softened portrayal of the atrocity.

The historical irony today is difficult to ignore. The same newspaper that once failed to recognize and convey the scale of Nazi antisemitism now lends legitimacy to narratives that once again rely on mechanisms associated with totalitarian atrocity propaganda: demonization, moral inversion, and the denial of the legitimacy of Jewish self-defense.

And perhaps this is the most disturbing aspect of the "dog narrative." Not the existence of the story itself, but the fact that it appears within a media institution long regarded as one of the central authorities of the liberal Western world.