Eurovision entrant for Israel Eden Golan photographed at last year's contest. Courtesy of Getty Images On May 11, as the Eurovision Song Contest was opening its 2026 edition in Vienna, The New York Times published two major pieces about Israel in a single day. The first, a page A1 investigation headlined “In Eurovision, Israel Used Soft Power to Burnish Its Ailing Image,” alleged that the Israeli government had spent over $1 million coordinating a campaign to influence Eurovision voting.
It was a finding the paper’s own reporting ultimately undermined, however as the piece acknowledged no rules had been broken, no bots deployed, no votes manipulated. The online headline was, “How Israel ‘Co-opted’ Eurovision — and Nearly Broke the World’s Biggest Song Contest.” That was quietly changed to “How Israel Turned Eurovision’s Stage Into a Soft Power Tool.”
The second piece, an opinion column by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof, was harder to dismiss as a slow news day. Headlined “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” it alleged a pattern of systematic sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners by Israeli soldiers, settlers and prison guards — including the claim, sourced to an advocacy group, Euro-Med Monitor, whose leadership has been criticized for being sympathetic to Hamas’ aims — that Israeli guards had trained dogs to rape detainees.
Kristof acknowledged in the piece that there was “no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes.” Following its publication, the Israeli Foreign Ministry called it “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press” and former U.S. Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt asked publicly whether the Times had “no sense of decency and journalistic responsibility.” The paper has stood by Kristof and its comms team issued a statement saying there was “no truth” to the idea that the column would be retracted.
Both pieces landed the same day a 300-page report — “Silenced No More” — was released documenting Hamas’s sexual violence on October 7, based on 430 interviews and more than 10,000 photographs and videos. The Times did not cover it.
Hen Mazzig is an Israeli author, activist and founder of the Tel Aviv Institute, which tracks antisemitism and anti-Israel disinformation. He spoke with The Hollywood Reporter the day the pieces published.
The Eurovision investigation ran on the front page of the Times and its website. What did you make of it?
They had to soften the title. I think that’s the story, really, because papers don’t change headlines on pieces they’re fully confident in. And if you read the piece itself, you see that throughout, they’re trying to find any evidence of Israel violating the rules and they can’t find any. There wasn’t any evidence of bots. Even the head of Eurovision himself, Martin Green, said that Israel’s campaign was a bit excessive but that no rules were violated.
The piece found Israel spent about $1 million promoting its entries over several years. That’s the big number they lead with. Does that strike you as scandalous?
Every country uses Eurovision for exactly that. Sweden is doing it. France is doing it. The UK has spent millions of dollars on Eurovision. Ukraine, especially in 2022, invested so much. It’s only when Israel is doing it that there must be something shady. And the Times itself, even in the article, mentions that Malta and Greece and Albania and Poland and France all ran similar campaigns — with no scrutiny. So what really was the goal here? I think many readers were left dumbfounded, not understanding why this was a front page article.
The word “hasbara” appears in the piece, described as a euphemism for overseas propaganda. How does that land?
Hasbara just means a public relations campaign that Israel is doing — just like every other country, like the U.S. and France and Qatar. So many countries are investing in it. The fixation is really bizarre.
Both pieces ran the same day. Do you think that’s a coincidence?
I don’t want to use the term media bias, especially when speaking to other members of the media, because I think there is justified scrutiny and Israel should be held to account when it does things that are wrong. But it’s extremely bizarre to see the Eurovision article and then the Kristof article alleging that Israel sponsored mass rape of Palestinian prisoners — both coming out a day before Israel releases a report about sexual assaults on Israelis on October 7th that is actually based on evidence, on testimonies, on medical examinations, on facts. It leaves me with questions. The New York Times really needs to conduct some serious reckoning.
On the Kristof piece — does it hold water?
Were there cases of sexual assaults of Palestinian prisoners? I’m pretty confident there were, and I think that’s something everyone in Israel is probably aware of. But there wasn’t any institutionalized order to conduct rapes. And if you read the article itself, it’s based on testimonies from a Hamas-affiliated European organization. From someone like Kristof, who is a serious journalist, who has won Pulitzer Prizes and conducted incredible investigative reports — to see his article, I couldn’t find any evidence other than that Hamas-affiliated organization. And then there was this bizarre claim about dogs being trained to rape prisoners, which is medically and scientifically not possible.
The Times has defended Kristof and his piece. Is that the last they will address this? And if so, what now?
The Times has very rarely apologized for Israel coverage. The institutional pattern is quite resistant to correction. They changed the headline on the Eurovision piece — they didn’t apologize. It doesn’t seem like they’re going to retract the Kristof piece either, partly because it was filed under opinion, so there’s much more freedom there.
But the damage is already done. I know that if they want to restore their credibility — and Jewish readers have been a big and loyal part of this newspaper for generations, and it’s really heartbreaking — the Times needs to ask itself this question: Do they want to do something to restore their standing, or just give up? Because right now it’s not heading anywhere good.
THR Newsletters
Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day
Subscribe Sign Up
