Refusing Demonization and Denial

Friday, May 15, 2026 – כ״ח אִיָּיר תשפ”ו

There is a dangerous instinct that has been emerging in the Jewish world right now and increasing in intensity over the past few years: the belief that we must choose between defending Israel and defending moral clarity. This belief claims that if one acknowledges the horrors committed against Israelis on October 7, one cannot also confront allegations of abuse carried out in Israel’s name. Or conversely, that if one speaks honestly about Palestinian suffering, one must abandon the legitimacy of Jewish power and sovereignty altogether.

That binary is a false choice and represents a collapse of both moral seriousness and Jewish integrity.

This week, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published a deeply disturbing column detailing allegations of sexual abuse and torture against Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons and detention facilities. The reactions were immediate and predictable. Some treated the reporting as undeniable truth beyond scrutiny. Others dismissed it wholesale as blood libel before grappling with a single allegation. And a still more nuanced response saw the real need to scrutinize the sources quoted, various reports, and testimonies, while acknowledging that there is a real necessity for further investigation and exposure of whatever real and horrific behavior has and is occurring in the Israeli prison system.

As Jews, we do not get to avert our eyes simply because the conversation is painful, politically inconvenient, or weaponized by those who seek Israel’s destruction.

Nor do we get to surrender our critical faculties and abandon standards of evidence because the allegations confirm our prior assumptions and fears.

The Jewish task is harder than that, because two things can be true at the same time.

There is, undeniably, a massive, global, coordinated effort to demonize Israel, beyond the critique of particular policies or governments, and to erode the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty itself. We see this in the selective outrage, the persistent double standards, the immediate inversion of victim vs. aggressor after October 7, and the normalization of hateful and vengeful slogans that would be unimaginable if directed at any other nation. There are anti-Israel movements, institutions, influencers, and even governments for which the issue is not where Israel ends its borders, but whether and how Israel should.

We are not paranoid for recognizing this reality. We are historically literate and facing the world with our eyes open and our backs stiffened.

On top of all that, at precisely the moment when we are recoiling from the NYT piece, another report was released this week that should shake every person of conscience to their core: “Silenced No More”, the most comprehensive documentation to date[1] of the systematic sexual violence committed by Hamas against Israelis on October 7 and during the subsequent captivity of 251 others. Based on more than 430 testimonies, thousands of visual records, and years of investigation, the report details rape, torture, mutilation, forced nudity, and sexualized brutality carried out deliberately and systematically as a weapon of war against the Jewish People and State.

The content is horrifying. And so is the timing.

The juxtaposition of these conversations reveals a deeply broken public discourse. Jews are being asked, once again, to hold unbearable truths while much of the world chooses selective moral outrage against Israel. The same international ecosystem that spent months dismissing, minimizing, and denying outright the sexual violence committed by Hamas against Israelis on October 7 suddenly rediscovers the language of human rights when the accused are Israelis. That moral hypocrisy is real. That moral asymmetry is real. And Jews are not wrong to feel gaslit by it.

But the obvious moral inconsistency in the world towards Israel does not absolve us of our own Jewish moral responsibility.

There is another truth that liberal Zionists ignore at our peril: there is a documented pattern of abuses against Palestinians — some isolated, others systemic — that have too often been minimized, excused, normalized, and defended by sectors of Israeli society, by State institutions, and by many Diaspora Jewish defenders of Israel. We have to discern that not every accusation is true. Not every claim is beyond dispute. But neither can every awful and morally repugnant revelation simply be dismissed as antisemitic propaganda or treated as an unfortunate exception detached from larger realities of occupation, war, rage/revenge, trauma, and dehumanization.

Our people’s commitment to a covenant forged at Mount Sinai and evolved over the millennia cannot lose our capacity for moral self-scrutiny.

This week, we begin reading the book of BaMidbar. The Israelites are counted tribe by tribe, family by family, each person (well, each male adult) seen and accounted for. But the deeper message of BaMidbar is embedded in its name itself: wilderness. Judaism is born not in certainty, but in the wilderness between redemption and promise, between slavery and sovereignty, between powerlessness and power, between exile and living in our ancestral Homeland.

It is a certain truth that power changes a people.

For two thousand years, Jews knew what it meant to fear the knock on the door at night, the prison guard, the unchecked cruelty of authorities. Zionism emerged because Jews understood that moral aspiration without agency leaves Jews vulnerable to the worst of the human condition. But attaining sovereignty for the first time in two thousand years carries its own immense moral and political tests. The question is no longer only whether Jews survive. It is what Jews become when we possess power.

Israelis and Diaspora Jews often misunderstand one another because our two historic experiences were shaped by different historical traumas. At the risk of generalization, Israelis were heavily influenced by the conviction that Jews can never again depend on the goodwill of others for survival. The mentality of many Diaspora Jews was shaped by the minority condition and by attentiveness to how Jews are perceived morally by the societies around them, and therefore how we must behave and identify as a minority population.

Both instincts and orientations to the world around us are reality-based.

A Judaism concerned only with survival can eventually lose its soul. A Judaism concerned only with moral performance eventually can lose its ability to survive.

The challenge is holding both truths simultaneously.

That means acknowledging that some of the allegations now emerging may indeed reflect real abuses that demand investigation, accountability, and moral reckoning. Israel is not exempt from the corrupting dangers of war, occupation, rage, vengeance, trauma, and dehumanization of the “other.” No army is. No nation is. Certainly not one that has lived in the anxiety-producing state of perpetual existential emergency and war.

It also means that we must resist the flattening language that increasingly dominates discourse about Israel. We have to be astutely aware that hateful language, anti-Israel, and anti-Zionist impulses that transform complexity into caricature and turn Israelis into metaphysical embodiments of evil are essentially antisemitic. When every accusation immediately becomes proof of the Jewish people’s civilizational depravity, when nuance itself is treated as moral weakness, truth becomes impossible to pursue.

Israel risks not merely losing political battles but losing its democratic and moral center. The pro-democracy protests were not about courts or legislation alone. They were about the fear that a traumatized society can slowly normalize extremism, cruelty, and the abandonment of restraint. When that happens, the democratic and Jewish character of the State of Israel are compromised.

That warning matters now more than ever.

The real danger to Israel is not criticism. Israel has always survived criticism. We Jews and Israelis are known to be the best self-critics. However, the danger is the erosion of the moral vocabulary that allows Israelis and Jews to be unable to distinguish between necessary force and moral nihilism.

There are voices today insisting that any Jewish self-critique strengthens Israel’s enemies. I understand that fear. We live in a world where Hamas atrocities were denied almost instantly, where antisemitism mutates effortlessly into anti-Zionism and back again, and where accusations against Israel are often held to standards applied nowhere else in the world.

But Jewish ethics has never depended on whether the nations of the world are fair.

The Torah does not command us to pursue justice only when the media framing is balanced or the activists are consistent.

Nor, however, can Jews afford the luxury of naiveté. There are those who will seize upon every proven and unproven allegation to dismantle the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty. Jews know the history of blood libels precisely because we have lived through them.

And yet history also teaches another lesson: the inability to confront wrongdoing within one’s own camp is the beginning of moral collapse.

BaMidbar reminds us that the wilderness is disorienting. There are no easy maps there. Only competing fears, truths, and moral obligations. The Israelites in the desert are constantly oscillating between panic and purpose, tribalism and covenant.

So are we.

The task of liberal Zionism today is not to become prosecutors of Israel nor defense attorneys for every action committed in its name or by those in its employ. It is to insist that Jewish power must remain tethered to Jewish moral responsibility. That loving Israel means refusing both demonization and denial. That our covenant did not end the moment Jews acquired an army and a State.

If anything, it became harder to fulfill it.

[1] The Commission’s findings are grounded in an unprecedented body of reviewed documentation:

• Over 10,000 photographs and video segments
• More than 1,800 hours of visual material
• 430+ testimonies and interviews with survivors, witnesses, released hostages, experts, and family members
• Victims from 52 nationalities, in addition to Israeli victims