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Yitzhak Laor, Israeli poet, novelist, playwright, political “commentator,” and on-and-off academic, is now at the center of a scandal. Hamakor, an investigative program of Israel’s Channel 10 TV, has aired testimony that Laor is a serial sexual harasser of women—and worse.

As summarized in the left-wing daily Haaretz—where Laor has also worked as an editor, and to which he contributes venomously Israel-bashing op-eds—“Laor verbally and sometimes physically harassed women students he taught at Tel Aviv University and at the Sam Spiegel School of Film and Television in Jerusalem. He also allegedly sexually harassed female employees at Haaretz….”

A former female Haaretz coworker of Laor’s in the 1980s, 20 at the time, told Hamakor that one day he shouted at her, “Are you wearing panties?” Other women working there, she said, “came to comfort me and said I wasn’t the only one [to be harassed by him].” A former student of Laor’s at the Sam Spiegel School, while Laor was teaching there in the 1990s, said that “when she expressed anger at his sexual comments, he made an explicit sexual remark to her in front of everyone in the class, accompanied by a gesture.” When Laor came back to the school in 2002 for another teaching stint, he “was fired a few months later following a complaint by a female student of unwanted sexual advances.”

As for Tel Aviv University, the versions clash. Former female students say Laor “habitually harassed” them there in the 1980s, and when they complained to the university management, Laor’s “employment was terminated.” But the university states: “Dr. Laor was employed as a non-tenured teacher during various periods, which were limited. The university is unaware of any complaints about sexual harassment, and the matter will continue to be investigated.”

Bad as all this alleged behavior was, the artist Eshkar Eldan Cohen says she had an encounter with Laor that was much worse. She told Hamakor that “she met Laor more than 20 years ago at left-wing demonstrations. One day in 1987 he came unannounced to her apartment, she said. ‘He pushed his foot in the door and forced his way in [as she wrote in an online article]. I know for certain that he raped me. From the moment he entered the house everything went dark. The next thing I remember he was lying next to me naked on the bed.’”

After the program aired, additional women came forth with complaints of harassment by Laor over the years, including one who said he “played with me some kind of game that was violent harassment.” Eshkar Eldan Cohen, for her part, has filed a complaint of rape with the police.

Laor’s alleged viciousness in this domain over the past three decades would be perfectly congruent with his viciousness in another domain during the same time period. As noted by the American Jewish scholar and commentator Edward Alexander in an article on Israeli anti-Semitism:

In 1984 a minor Israeli poet named Yitzhak Laor published a series of seven poems in a literary journal supported by the Arts Council of Israel, that is to say, by government funds. They dealt with the war in Lebanon from a leftist point of view, but with a virulence that went beyond garden-variety leftist effusions toward something distinctly reminiscent of the propaganda of Nazi Germany. General Rafael Eitan was called “a lead nose-ring in the snout of the State,” and [then-Prime Minister] Menachem Begin was described as a “greedy, grunting blood-sucker….”

Alexander goes on to cite Laor’s notorious characterization of the Gush Emunim settlement movement. In a poem called “A Hymn to the Gush,” Laor put into the mouths of young religious soldiers from that movement the Passover-derived words (as translated from Laor’s Hebrew): “They scorned us, but we shall celebrate this festival of our freedom, this feast of unleavened bread, with pious shakings, and holiness and with devotion, and in our matzot there will be the blood of Palestinian youth, for just the same it’s all a heathen slander.”

Clearly this well-known defamatory statement of Laor’s, which draws on the deepest and most sinister wellsprings of traditional anti-Semitism, never harmed his status as an editor at Haaretz or a lecturer at Tel Aviv University—no surprise in light of the fact that it’s not clear if his reported behavior toward women ever did, either.

But Laor hardly confines his anti-Jewish fulminations to his Hebrew writings or the Israeli press. In a 2004 article in the radical-Left, radically anti-Israeli online newsletter Counterpunch, Laor wrote that “Israel made every possible effort to turn the unrest of Fall 2000 into a bloodbath, to push the various factions to use arms, to turn this into the final stage of unwriting Oslo. That was the goal of [then-Prime Minister] Ehud Barak and his men….”

In reality, the fall of 2000 saw an outbreak of Palestinian terror against Israelis in the wake of Arafat’s hands-down rejection of Barak’s offer of Palestinian statehood that summer at Camp David; and it was only after a year and a half of suicide bombings that Israel began to fight the terror seriously in the spring of 2002. For Laor, of course, nothing that happens to Israelis could ever count as a “bloodbath”; for someone who engages in Nazi-like propaganda, Jews are always the aggressors and the avatars of evil on earth.

Indeed, in the same article Laor refers to an Israeli “massacre” in Jenin—an absolutely false, libelous statement, with even the United Nations having, by that time, long acknowledged that the Palestinian claims of such a massacre were fabrications. Laor goes on to rant about “Israeli racist citizenship laws, …Israeli draconic apartheid in the Occupied Territories, …the death toll of Arab babies in Israel compared with Jewish babies”—demented verbiage from someone who continues to be honored by his hated society as a poet (Laor won the Amichai Poetry Prize in 2007).

And Laor, when publishing his articles abroad, doesn’t confine himself to far-out ultra-Stalinist rags like Counterpunch. He also appears often in the London Review of Books, where in a typical article in 2006, dealing with the war in Lebanon, he called Israel a “lynch-mob culture,” said its aim was that “the Arabs must be crippled, socially and economically, and smashed militarily, and…must then appear to us in the degraded state to which we’ve reduced them”; and declared that “Israelis long ago ceased to be distressed by images of sobbing women in white scarves, searching for the remains of their homes in the rubble left by our soldiers. We think of them much as we think of chickens or cats….”

And on and on. Just last November Laor proclaimed in his old haven, Haaretz, that “Israel’s apartheid is worse than South Africa’s.” And in January—not content with slandering Israel in articles—his book The Myths of Liberal Zionism was brought out by Verso. About it the staid Publishers Weekly—no stronghold of Israeli nationalism—wrote:

These five long essays…focus not so much on liberal Zionism, a term Laor never defines, but on such subjects as Israeli leaders’ appropriation of the Holocaust to gain victim status and, Laor believes, to persecute Palestinians…. Laor himself subscribes to the anti-Zionist shibboleth that Zionism has no source of legitimization except the old colonial discourse. Meanwhile, the Palestinians are represented solely as victims, and his prose is often tendentious, as when he writes that the Israeli army’s pursuit of Palestinian terrorists in March 2004 marked a systematic expansion of the activity of its death squads…. Laor’s work lacks nuance and a sense of balance.

An understatement indeed!

Seemingly Laor, viewing Israel as he does, should follow the example of honorable Germans who fled Germany after the Nazi takeover; one would think he would want to leave his Nazi-like Israel rather than be complicit in its crimes. But no, it’s too comfortable for him here, too cozy playing the role of the “dissident,” the vicious bad-boy, and getting all the perks for it.

That is, until lately.

Joel Amitai is an independent researcher and filmmaker. Reach him at jamitai40@gmail.com.

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