On Saturday I gave a talk at First Presbyterian Church in San Anselmo called “The Debt I Owe to a Lie.” About a hundred people came. I am seventy-five and it was the first time I have told this story in public.
During the Q&A session after the talk, a man stood up and challenged me.
I want to start by giving him credit, because what he did was harder than what everyone else in that room did. Sitting in an audience that has just applauded me and saying out loud that he thinks I was wrong takes guts. Most people who disagreed with me that night said nothing and went home.
Here is what he said, as close to his words as I can manage. That what is happening in Gaza is not a genocide. That it is nowhere near as bad as Sudan, which nobody talks about, and that on the seventh of October, Hamas raped women, beheaded babies, and put them in ovens.
And here is what I did. I did not answer his arguments. I got angry, and I questioned his humanity.
He came up to me afterwards and told me I had treated him with disrespect. He was right. I have spent four years learning to give up my own best lines when they will not hold, and when a man stood in front of me and said things I could answer, I went at him instead of at his claims. I would like to speak with him properly. I don’t know his name. If he reads this, he knows how to find me.
So let me do now what I should have done then.
On Sudan. He is right that the war in Sudan is under-covered, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Far more people have been killed there, and most Americans could not tell you the names of the two forces fighting. But the under-coverage of one atrocity is not an argument about another. And there is a difference that matters: my government does not arm the factions in Sudan. It arms this one. That is why I speak about this one.
On the beheaded babies. This story is false, and I can tell you exactly how it was made. On 10 October 2023 a correspondent for the Israeli channel i24NEWS broadcast from Kfar Aza saying soldiers had told her they found babies with their heads cut off. Thirty-five minutes later she posted separately that soldiers believed forty babies and children had been killed. Two claims, minutes apart, fused into one sentence that travelled the world in a day. The IDF could not confirm it. CNN found nothing to support it. President Biden said he had seen photographs; the White House walked it back the same day, because there were none. Le Monde traced the rumour to its source, and the Israeli government press office told them plainly: there were never forty decapitated babies, not at Kfar Aza, not anywhere.
But I am not going to leave it there, because the correction is not the whole truth. Twenty-eight children were killed that day. One baby was murdered: Mila Cohen, ten months old, shot along with her father Ohad at Kibbutz Be’eri. She was real. Her death is documented. She does not need to be multiplied by forty and decapitated in order to matter — and the multiplication is exactly what lets someone wave the whole day away.
A word to people on my side of this, since I have watched them go wrong here. I said something on Saturday night that I want to correct: I told him there were no rapes. That was wrong. What is true is that forensic evidence is largely absent, which is not the same claim — and I know the difference, because I have spent four years insisting on it.
It is sometimes said the sexual violence allegations were all disproven. They were not. Specific accounts collapsed, and that collapse was news. But the United Nations mission led by Pramila Patten found reasonable grounds to believe conflict-related sexual violence, including rape, occurred that day, and released hostages have testified to abuse in captivity. Anyone telling you the whole category was invented is doing to those victims what the forty-babies story did to Mila Cohen.
On genocide. I don’t ask anyone to take my word. B’Tselem is an Israeli human rights organization, based in Jerusalem, staffed by Israelis. In July 2025 it published a report called Our Genocide. Read it and disagree with it if you can.
That is the answer I owed him on Saturday night and did not give.
The talk was recorded and I will post it here once I have it.