When Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed landed in the pages of the New York Times this week, it did not just spark a diplomatic controversy. It revived a term that has haunted Jews for nearly a thousand years: blood libel.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar issued a joint statement Thursday announcing Israel will sue the New York Times over the column, which alleged “a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children” committed by soldiers, settlers, Shin Bet interrogators, and prison guards.

Netanyahu called it “one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press.” He later posted on X: “They defamed the soldiers of Israel and perpetuated a blood libel about rape, trying to create a false symmetry between the genocidal terrorists of Hamas and Israel’s valiant soldiers. We will fight these lies in the court of public opinion and in the court of law. Truth will prevail.”

The medieval blood libels — false accusations that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood for Passover rituals — sent entire Jewish communities to the sword. 

The protesters gathered Thursday outside the Times‘ Manhattan headquarters understood this lineage. One demonstrator held a sign reading “J’accuse” beside the Times logo — a direct reference to the Dreyfus Affair, in which false accusations nearly destroyed an innocent Jewish officer. Another shouted, “Hamas abuse covered up! Nick Kristof made stuff up!” Around 200 demonstrators chanted, “New York Times, shame on you,” and “Stop the libels, stop the hate.”

The credibility problems with Kristof’s column are extensive and documented. Israel’s Foreign Ministry noted that the column relied heavily on the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor — an organization whose leaders have been photographed alongside senior Hamas terrorists. Israel’s Prison Service called the allegations “false and entirely unfounded.” 

Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert — no ally of Netanyahu, and a man who freely accuses the current government of wrongdoing in foreign interviews — issued a statement saying his quote was misrepresented. Kristof had positioned Olmert’s words so they appeared to validate the column’s most extreme claims. “I did not validate these claims,” Olmert said flatly. “I have no knowledge supporting these claims as I said to Mr. Kristof. Therefore, the positioning of my quote after pages of such allegations misrepresents my views.” 

The column’s most lurid claim — that Israeli forces deployed specially trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners — has been widely dismissed by experts as implausible. The Times, for its part, has doubled down in statement after statement, praising Kristof as “a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist” and calling the threatened lawsuit “part of a well-worn political playbook.”

Israel’s Foreign Ministry also alleged that the Times deliberately timed publication of Kristof’s column to run immediately before the release of an independent Israeli report documenting Hamas’s systematic use of sexual violence on October 7, 2023 — a report the ministry says was shared with the Times “months ago.” The Times denied this. The ministry is not backing down.

The protest outside Times headquarters reflected something broader than outrage at a single column. Naya Lekht, founder of Stop Antizionism, drew a direct line to history: “What was happening for those eight years?” she said, referring to the period between Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and the mass killings beginning in 1941. “A cycle of libels. We are in the cycle of libels. Blood libels right now that dress themselves up as politics.” Adam Louis-Klein of the Movement Against Antizionism called the Kristof piece “the most lurid possible libel, the most bestializing depiction of Israelis yet.” Protesters also raised prior Times failures on Gaza coverage — including the Al-Ahli hospital explosion in October 2023, which the Times initially reported as an Israeli strike before it was determined to be a misfired Palestinian rocket.

The Times called the lawsuit threat “without merit.” Netanyahu has directed his legal advisers to pursue “the harshest legal action.” The legal battle will unfold in American courts. But the battle over truth — emet versus sheker — is one the Jewish people have been fighting for millennia, and they are not inclined to stop now.