Rafi Addlestone

A lot of subscribers have asked what I made of the Nick Kristof oped. So much has already been said. What more is there to say? My first thought was everyone else's. Horrifying. Testimonies of pain and torture. We know that the Israeli Prisons Service is notoriously incompetent. There have been cases of Hamas prisoners abusing each other, and even famous cases of them abusing female Israeli guards. We know, too, that all prison systems struggle with the problem: New York prisons face 2,000 claims against them. So abuse of prisoners isn't merely possible, it's guaranteed. October 7 and the ensuing war sent thousands of detainees into the prisons. And in the early months, drafted into the system undertrained reservist guards. Guards who had seen Hamas's videos gleefully documenting their crimes. I expected, therefore, a hard-hitting story of real abuse, something Israeli leaders must take notice of. And then I came across the first obvious lie. And then the second. And then an odd claim -- maybe possible, but how exactly? -- and then another just like it. And a famed Hamas propagandist laundered as a reliable source. And then another. Why, if there is no doubt that abuse occurred -- and there is no doubt -- was there so much obvious propaganda in Kristof's oped? I won't pretend the lies weren't a relief. They were. It's agony to read about Israeli criminality, and the lies let me cast doubt on the whole narrative. There's an obvious propaganda campaign at work here. But as claim followed claim, it became hard not to wonder: Despite the propaganda, what part is nevertheless true? How bad has it gotten? So here's what we know, or at least what I think I know. This is a campaign that seeks our destruction. 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. Even so, I'm not willing to conclude there's no truth at all in there, just because there are lies. Dogs did not rape anyone. The people who invented that particular inanity claimed it without evidence, knowing that no one, certainly not self-appointed moral arbiters like Nick Kristof, would ever bother checking the provenance of the claim. Because they never, ever do. Because why would they? So the claim spreads through the millions-strong activist network without investigation, exciting and mobilizing -- not because anyone understands how it might be possible but for the sheer thrill of it. And it's cited by Kristof as a reliable report. A recent report by a Norwegian NGO, also referenced, claimed "systemic sexual violence" in the West Bank by citing just 16 cases across three years in a geographic region containing as many as three million Palestinians and over half a million Israelis. And some of the examples scarcely cleared the bar for harassment. But the NGO in question knew for a fact that no journalist would look too deeply into any of it. And indeed, no journalist did. Because they never, ever do. Because why would they? Friends, a paper trail is being created. Just like they created a paper trail on mass starvation in Gaza -- mass starvation first claimed in early 2024, and then claimed again and again by NGOs, the UN, everybody. Some were nuanced warnings of a "possibility," some declared it had arrived. The headlines from both were largely the same. And then, in thundering silence, the mass starvation claim just faded away, never having materialized -- while billions of ordinary people around the world who don't follow too closely remain convinced that countless Gazans died of starvation. So they moved on. A Lancet letter claiming hundreds of thousands of deaths spread like wildfire, mostly because (a) nobody actually read or understood what it claimed and (b) nobody cared enough to check if it was remotely plausible. Then, just in case anyone forgot Lancet, came the claim by UN rapporteurs of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children -- 380,000 infants under five allegedly died, more than the entire population of infants in Gaza. Stupid, right? But it was repeated again and again by activists and protestors. No one checks, no costs are exacted for the never-ending barrage of fakery. Because why would they? A wild religious frenzy has taken hold. Hatred of Israel is now definitional to the left, and to parts of the right. Greta Thunberg has forgotten all about climate change. An enemy of humanity has been identified just in time to unleash all the pent-up religious rage that this troubled secular age won't allow against anyone else. And by complete and utter coincidence, that enemy you're suddenly allowed to hate is vaguely associated with the Jews. Yes, alas, it really is that simple. But also, dear friends -- bear with me -- it isn't. All the above is true. They're fucking liars and bigots. They marched in their millions, again and again and again, for weeks and months and years -- marches completely unprecedented in their size, regularity and duration in all the history of the West, in all the history of war, larger by orders of magnitude than all other marches for all other conflicts and wars and suffering combined, even those caused by their own governments. And no serious person pretends that anything similar could ever have coalesced or will ever coalesce again unless Israel is involved. "But we fund you," shouts the American activist to explain this mind-numbing selectivity. Then why did one-third of the city of Amsterdam march? Or millions of Spaniards, Brazilians and Indonesians? It was unprecedented and it was everywhere. And Kristof has joined the new religion. Not by being concerned about abuse, but by not caring one whit whether he's trafficking in truths or lies. Only the Jews will ask to distinguish between the two. He just needs to throw it all on the page, and his membership in the glorious crusade is assured. Alas, the Jews are correct about the nature of this moment. Some things are so big and fundamental, so assumed and widespread, that they become hard to see. Fish don't notice the water. Activists who can only ever march against Jews are convinced they are merely righteous people enraged by war, without ever pausing to wonder why the only war that ever enraged them or ever made its way to their phones was one particular war, and not larger and deadlier wars also conducted with Western weapons and money. And so the Jew is made fearful once more. Throughout Christendom and Islam, he is being returned to his proper place in the social hierarchies of old, complete with anxious conversos and ideological purity tests. And yet, still, despite it all, their lies aren't the end of the story. Their lies are a separate story. A campaign of lies that constitutes a return to the mean for the Jewish condition in the West. A campaign meant to justify brutality against us, not to end war or suffering. And despite all of it, dear Jews, there really is abuse. It's nowhere near as much as the psychotic claims of these fantasists. Not by orders of magnitude. If it was, they wouldn't need to lie so much. But it's there nonetheless. Many dozens of cases at least, probably in the low hundreds by now, most of them without any sexual aspect, but still wanton violence. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but the army gave a few estimates to the courts a couple of times over the past three years. There have been many indictments filed against soldiers, serious ones. I know something about a handful of those cases. I know that the problem is real. It's there, it's real, and it doesn't seem to be stopping. And if it isn't stopped with an iron will and uncompromising hand, it will continue to fester and grow. And it must be said: neither Ben Gvir nor Netanyahu are interested in fixing it. Nobody at the top cares about the rights of prisoners. Let me be clear: For the first time in my life, I support a death penalty. No one who crossed over the border to massacre and kidnap on October 7 should be left alive; they came to kidnap children precisely because they sought the release of mass murderers kept alive in our prisons. Hamas, as always, in its totalizing brutality, forces the choice: If their murderers live, our children may die. I choose our children. And those who came for our children cannot be deterred, reformed or deradicalized. They murder their own to clear a path to murdering ours. And so I believe they must die. We must try, convict and destroy them. And even I, radicalized in this narrow, specific way, say we cannot collapse into torture or abuse. That's not justice. It isn't even vengeance. It is participation in Hamas's way of war. Nor do our leaders seem to care about the simple breakdown of discipline that these abuses represent, the kind of breakdown we saw again and again with the incidents of looting in Gaza and in the early cases of prisoner abuse that came to light. No, dogs aren't being trained to systematically rape prisoners, you nattering halfwits. And no, Hamas propaganda operatives are not reliable sources on the question of Israeli crimes. The vast, vast majority of soldiers are honorable men who walked into fire so our families may live. The whole world may turn on them; I will stand with them, grateful for their sacrifice. And Kristof, a willing purveyor of propaganda happily feigning that he can't see the water and thrilling to a moral crusade engineered by would-be genocidaires he pretends not to understand -- is no messenger of moral reckoning. But friends, so fucking what. Let the narcissistic guttersnipes strut their moral emotions before the world, let the UN publish endless reports that don't hold up to basic scrutiny, let the NGOs dream their rabid, sick dreams that no journalist ever fact-checks -- yes, they're lying. But so fucking what. We still, for ourselves -- because fuck them -- must see that it isn't all fake. The problem is real. It's far smaller than they claim, but real nonetheless. And when discipline and morality break down, it can only get worse. We either crack down now or we watch it fester and grow. And our own Ben Gvirs are stubbornly refusing to fix what is actually broken, the real thing in the real world. And so we are caught in a strange sort of vise, the same vise we find ourselves in with the genocide lie: A vast propaganda machine that seeks to destroy us -- countless activists too high on their own self-regard to see the irony of raging against a "genocide" while calling for the erasure of a people -- all while our own incompetent, venal, self-absorbed political class insist in their mindless chatter on confirming every claim of our enemies for sheer, bald egomania. I'm sick of it all. I know you're all sick of it too. And that, in a nutshell, is what I think about this. Just because they're lying, just because a vast perfidious campaign has overwhelmed global elites in a bid to clear the way for our removal, just because they're still, after two millennia, building their visions of redemption on The Evil Jew -- doesn't mean there isn't also, separately, a problem on the ground. So what do we do now? Simple. We see it, we acknowledge it's happening, we bring our rage to our inept leaders until they bend to our will and act to stop the breakdown... And we soldier on. We soldier on because the enemy really is coming to murder us. Because Hamas must still go if Gaza is ever to rise to a new day. Because Hezbollah will yet destroy Lebanon on the altar of destroying us. Because the ayatollahs built their whole damn religion on the extermination of our children. We fix the broken things within us as if the pogromists and their simpering Kristofs don't exist. We owe no answers to the propagandists who seek to clear a path to our deaths. But we do owe answers to ourselves. Let the screaming mob rage and churn like so much sea-foam. Despite that raging mob, despite the enemy who still seeks our destruction, and yes, despite feckless incompetents like Ben Gvir, our minister of prisons, who claim to lead us -- we remain the strongest, freest Jews who ever lived, more capable and committed than our self-destructive enemies ever imagined. And the task is still before us, yet to be completed, the sacred duty given to our generation to ensure our children don't have to face the genocidaires who now surround us. We do not waver, we do not stumble. We soldier on. Because fuck them all.

The problem with answering, Owen, is that it's long. Because you aren't a little wrong, but spectacularly wrong in kind of evil ways. But you told me not to evade. So let's do it. 1. “No protests in British history have been bigger than opposition to the American and British slaughter of Arabs in Iraq, so what now?” Let's let the twitterati judge. February 15, 2003, London. Police estimate of 750,000 participants in anti-Iraq War protest. Organizers claim as many as 2 million. The biggest one-off protest ever held in London. But here's what I said: "The slaughter of Arabs has never triggered anything remotely similar in scale and regularity and consistency in the history of British marches." Because there were literally *millions* who marched over Gaza, cumulatively, week in and week out, across the entirety of the UK. And many millions more throughout the West. It was everywhere. ACLED recorded 48,000–51,000 protests from October 2023 through 2025 over Gaza, across 130 countries. A third of the city of Amsterdam marched. Hundreds of thousands in Toronto and New York. A million in Pakistan, a million in Algiers, hundreds of thousands in Rabat and Jakarta. Countries that have no connection whatsoever to Israel, aren’t allies of Israel and don’t arm Israel saw the identical phenomenon. And still your best analysis is “you’re a WESTERN ALLY?” Just as an analyst, you really think that encompasses the phenomenon? And even that’s not the truly remarkable part. The remarkable part was the repetitiveness itself, the regularity, the duration and stamina of weekly protests for months and then years. There’s never been anything like it, not for any war, not in the history of Britain. Not even close. That’s a simple fact. Denying that fact is therefore a bad strategy on your part. A better strategy would be to try to explain it. Maybe it’s not nefarious antisemitism – or at least not *just* an obsession with Jews embedded deep in progressive and Muslim-world politics and identity. Maybe it’s because people could see the victims on their TikTok feeds, something they’d never seen at that scale from any previous war. Maybe. I suppose we’ll know in the next war if this is a profound shift in consciousness inaugurated by changes in how we consume information – which would be a beautiful discovery, because it would mean it isn't a surge in antisemitism, and it would also mean that it will be harder to fight wars in future, because everyone everywhere will see the pain of war up close. That would be a beautiful and redemptive outcome, a huge silver lining flowing from the catastrophic tragedy of Gaza. Or maybe none of that will happen, the only images that will ever flood anyone's feed will be of Jewish criminality, and it really is in the end just a new version of the old civilization-organizing bigotry it was of old, once again, like it always does, masquerading as righteousness. 2. “No British columnist has written more about the Saudi war on Yemen.” Holy shit, Owen, it isn’t about you. What a strange and irrelevant claim. Coverage and exposure for Gaza was and remains orders of magnitude – multiple orders of magnitude – larger than it ever was for Yemen or Sudan or Syria or all other conflicts underway everywhere put together in the last three years. It’s vastly greater than Yemen ever got in the darkest moments of that conflict. Even when tens of thousands of children were dying of hunger. Not three-fold or five-fold, not even 100-fold. We're talking 1000-fold and more. 3. “There has not been a Western facilitated war on the very right of Yemenis to exist as a people going back GENERATIONS” You think you're helping the cause of Gaza here, but you're just minimizing the evils of the Yemen war. There has not, in fact, ever been a Yemeni campaign to erase Saudi Arabia. You notice? Nor a pan-Arab and Iranian campaign that launched multiple annihilationist wars and built vast and sophisticated terrorist movements to destroy the entire Saudi people – which might have led the Saudis to take seriously a Houthi commitment to annihilate them. I voted repeatedly for a Palestinian state. My own politics didn’t destroy those attempts. It was the annihilationists on the other side that did that. Up till now you’re just hedging and wriggling and telling half-truths. Here you get kinda evil. And ironically, over the very thing you think gives you moral weight: Yemen’s suffering. 4. “the thousands slaughtered by Saudi bombs over many years in a Yemeni civil war with multiple armed actors is a) a hideous crime b) not even approaching the number of Palestinians slaughtered either in absolute or proportionate numbers, and certainly not in the time scale of Gaza. About 9,000 Yemeni civilians were killed Saudi air strikes in the space of 7 years." Jesus Christ, Owen. The famine. The fucking man-made famine, Owen. Once again, it isn’t about you. You know there are 377,000 dead from that war and you cherry-pick the sliver of statistics that will downplay that into nothingness just to win an argument on twitter. Tell me again how much you cared about Yemen. Just the deaths from military action were over 150,000. And the blockade wasn’t carried out with Western military hardware? It was, dear Owen. “Do you agree that’s a terrible crime?” Yes, you man-child. One of the greatest ever committed. “(Let’s see if you even do or if you supported the Saudi war - spit it out!)” I’m a big fan of bombing the shit of out the totalitarian, slavery-legalizing Houthis. But the famine, holy shit, man. The famine should have shaken the foundations of the world. It never did. Because Jews weren’t involved. Ball's in your court, buddy.