Rothman loses defamation suit against reporter on controversial Oct. 7 comment

A Jerusalem judge on Wednesday ruled against MK Simcha Rothman in a defamation suit the lawmaker filed over a 2023 report according to which he seemed to imply that the lives lost in a West Bank terror attack were of more value than the lives lost during Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel.

According to the Channel 12 report by correspondent Guy Peleg, Rothman told security officials in a closed-door meeting, just weeks after the Hamas terror onslaught, that “the blood of brothers Hallel and Yagel Yaniv who were murdered in Huwara is redder than the blood of those murdered on October 7.”

The comments attributed to Rothman referred to the victims of a Palestinian terror attack in the village of Huwara in February 2023. The Hebrew idiom he used is drawn from a Talmudic dictum — “Who is to say that your blood is redder than his?” — and is meant to rebut valuing one person’s life over another’s.

According to the original report, Rothman retracted his statement after it “shocked” those present. The report did not include context for the statement.

Rothman, who was seeking NIS 1.1 million ($357,000) in damages, claimed to have communicated the opposite. According to his lawyers, he “said the blood of those murdered in past terror attacks should have justified a change in policies as their blood was also red — the exact opposite of what [Peleg] claimed.”

Several officials who were present at the meeting testified in court that Rothman indeed said the words attributed to him, then — as the original report had said — retracted them.

The remarks in question occurred amid a charged debate about the state’s response to Palestinian incitement. Rothman was arguing that if the Shin Bet had acted more forcefully on the issue, the attack in which the Yanivs were killed could have been prevented.

Lilach Wagner, who was present at the meeting, testified: “If the question is whether he said the things attributed to him, then yes. He said them. Maybe not in those exact words, or similar ones, but they’re indeed the things he said.”

“I’m sure that he didn’t mean for his words to come out like that. But in a situation where the discussion was, again, in raised voices and [including] very harsh criticism, those things were said,” she continued.

Keren Roth, another lawyer who was there, told the court: “It was maybe seconds, and he went back and explained himself, and it was very clear that this was a sort of slip of the tongue, uttered amid the heat of the discussion itself. It was very, very, very clear. And then the discussion continued, and that was it.”

In addition to Peleg, Rothman filed his suit against seven other people, some of them journalists and some private citizens who shared the report on social media. Judge Oren Silberman of the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court accepted the defendants’ claim that reposting an article is not an endorsement of its content, and also noted the argument that hundreds of other people — some with much larger followings — had shared the report, suggesting the lawsuit was filed selectively.

Despite ruling against Rothman, the judge did not order him to repay the plaintiff’s legal fees. Silberman wrote that all parties involved in the case had conducted themselves in a way that prolonged it unnecessarily.