On Israeli Extremism

And the Responsibility of the Connected Critic

Nicholas Kristof’s column this week in The New York Times alleges widespread sexual abuse of Palestinians by Israeli guards, soldiers, and settlers. The allegations as Kristof presents them are not proven, and the column reporting them is unreliable. But the broader rot they gesture at is real: settler violence, ministers who dehumanize detainees from the floor of the cabinet, the assault on Israel’s institutions of accountability. A serious society handles both at once. It demands transparent investigation of every credible allegation, regardless of who is accused. And it refuses to abandon the moral standards that distinguish a Jewish and democratic state from its enemies, however hated those enemies may be. On both counts, Israel should be the loudest voice in the room. Anything less concedes the ground to bad reporting and bad actors alike.

The reporting

Kristof’s piece does not meet the bar these allegations demand. It rests on anonymous testimony with no independent corroboration. It treats advocacy NGOs with documented anti-Israel records as if they were neutral observers. It includes claims — dogs trained to rape prisoners, among others — that don’t pass basic sense checks and have no corroboration from anyone else. This is not how a serious paper builds a case for crimes of this gravity. It is how propaganda gets laundered into print. And allegations published this way do precisely what they claim to expose: they demonize Israelis and feed the antisemitic tropes a serious paper should be undoing.

None of this means nothing happened. The problem is real, just far smaller than the column makes it look. There are bad actors in Israel, and they are abusing power. They are not all of Israeli society, and conflating them with it is exactly the slip this framing invites. Worse still is the symmetry Kristof draws between Israeli bad actors and Hamas. October 7 was rape as a weapon — planned, ordered, filmed, celebrated by an organization that calls it resistance. What Kristof describes is rape as institutional rot. Both are wrong. They are not the same wrong. The category collapse is itself a moral failure worth naming.

The rot

But the broader phenomenon is not a matter of one columnist’s sources. Settler mobs assault Palestinian villagers. Citizens and politicians stormed a military facility to defend soldiers accused of grievous abuse. A national security minister calls detainees “scum” and “Nazis” and brags about making their conditions harsher. The night-shift guard doesn’t invent that script. He picks it up from the top. Behind all of this, the Supreme Court, the Attorney General’s office, the State Prosecutor, the oversight bodies — the entire architecture meant to hold a state to its own laws — have been under sustained assault from the same coalition that now defends accused abusers. The result is vigilantism: citizens, settlers, even politicians taking enforcement into their own hands. A democracy cannot survive the breakdown of its contract with its citizens. You cannot dismantle the brakes and then act surprised when the car will not stop.

The line we don’t cross

This should be said clearly: Hamas’s terrorists — the men who burned, raped, mutilated, and broadcast their atrocities on October 7 — deserve no empathy. None. We can hate them with the full force of our hearts. We still don’t get to rape them in our custody. That isn’t weakness. It is the line between us and them. A Jewish and democratic state that puts its detainees through courts — charges, tries, holds them under law — is doing something fundamentally different from what Hamas did on October 7. A guard who rapes a prisoner hasn’t avenged anything. He has erased the difference that gives Israel a moral case at all.

Two wrong answers

For Jews outside Israel, all of this poses a hard question. How do you speak honestly and responsibly about Israeli wrongdoing? Two responses dominate the Jewish conversation right now, and both fail.

The first treats every accusation against Israel as a blood libel and every Jewish critic as a useful idiot or antisemite. This is the defensive crouch: bad faith dressed up as loyalty. It makes the rot worse by ensuring nothing has to change.

The second says the project itself is the problem. Zionism is racism. Israel was born in sin. Rejection of both is the honest move. This is what a growing number of young liberal Americans, and American Jews, are being offered as their only alternative to the first.

The connected critic

But there is a third position. Professor Michael Walzer called it the connected critic: someone who criticizes from within, shares the community’s fate, and is sharper precisely because they refuse to leave.

“Not in our name” is the line of someone who wants the moral credit of objection without the burden of belonging. The connected critic says the opposite: yes, in our name. With our taxes, our flag, our soldiers, and therefore on our hands to fix.

This is the Zionism young Jews most need — not the ethnonationalism of Israel’s fanatics, not the antizionists’ resignation letter, but a Jewish nationalism proud to hold itself to higher standards than its enemies do.

The responsibility

In practice, this means Israel should be the loudest voice calling for transparent inquiry into every credible allegation, regardless of who is accused. Bad reporting and reflexive denial are not opposites. They are co-conspirators. Each makes the other easier. The connected critic refuses both.

I know how this essay will be misused. Honest writing about Israeli wrongdoing becomes fuel for those who would burn the project of Jewish self-determination to the ground. That is not a reason to stay silent. It is the reason to be precise. Israel’s enemies aren’t made stronger by Jews who clean their own house. They are made stronger by Jews who refuse to.

And here is the asymmetry that should weigh on Jews outside Israel. We can walk away. Israelis can’t. They live there, vote there, raise their kids there. They don’t get an exit. When we declare “not in our name” from across an ocean, we don’t escape the problem. We leave Israelis alone with their fanatics.

A demanding Zionism is more exacting than uncritical Zionism, because it insists on standards. It is much more responsible than antizionism, because it insists on staying. Israel is worth criticizing because Israel is worth saving. That is the entire argument.