Marty Levine
May 12, 2026
On Sunday, May 10, The New York Times gave Democratic Representative Josh Gottheimer the opportunity to share with its readers his views about criticism of Israel in an op-ed entitled “I’m a Democrat. My Party Has a Double Standard on Antisemitism.” It was a response that mirrored the criticism of other Israel right wringers as challenges to Israel have become louder and stronger, challenging its racism and supporting a change in our nation’s policy toward Israel.
And then I read Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed, The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians, and knew that all of that criticism of Israel was so on target.
Kristof based his writing on interviews with Palestinians, including residents of Gaza and of the West Bank, who shared horrific tales of sexual abuse while in Israeli detention. Detention is a state of extrajudicial incarceration used by the Israeli government to keep thousands of men, women, and children in prison without the need for actual charges or any legal protections.
Here’s what Kristoff found.
There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes. But in recent years they have built a security apparatus where sexual violence has become, as a United Nations report put it last year, one of Israel’s “standard operating procedures” and “a major element in the ill treatment of Palestinians.” A report out last month, from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based advocacy group often critical of Israel, concludes that Israel employs “systematic sexual violence” that is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy…”
Save the Children commissioned a survey last year of children ages 12 to 17 who had been in Israeli detention; more than half reported witnessing or experiencing sexual violence. Save the Children said that the true figure was probably higher because stigma left some unwilling to acknowledge what had happened to them…
Israeli settlers are not an official arm of the state in the same way that the prison system is, but the Israel Defense Forces increasingly protect settlers as they attack Palestinian villagers and use sexual violence to drive Palestinians to flee. “Sexualized violence is used to pressure communities” to leave their land, according to a new report by the West Bank Protection Consortium, a coalition of international aid groups led by the Norwegian Refugee Council.…our American tax dollars subsidize the Israeli security establishment, so this is sexual violence in which the United States is complicit.
That’s the conclusion of someone who has not been a frequent critic of Israel or a strong voice for Palestinian liberation. It is based on his interviews and his review of reports issued by Israeli and non-Israeli human rights organizations.
And Kristof goes further by asking a former Israeli Prime Minister to tell him if what he is hearing from his Palestinian sources is what it seems to be.
To try to make sense of what I found, I called up Ehud Olmert, who was prime minister from 2006 to 2009. Olmert told me he didn’t know much about sexual violence against Palestinians but was not surprised by the accounts I had heard.
“Do I believe it happens?” he asked. “Definitely.”
“There are war crimes committed every day in the territories,” he added.
Yes, Ehud Olmert believes that war crimes are happening every day!
Representative Gottheimer tells us “…today, too many Democrats are noticeably and shamefully silent when antisemitism comes from the far left — at a moment when the Anti-Defamation League is reporting a surge of antisemitic incidents in the past three years. It’s a glaring double standard.”
This matters because he goes on to equate criticism of Israel and support of Palestinian rights as evidence of that antisemitism.
At their recent party convention, Michigan Democrats nominated a candidate to run for a seat on the University of Michigan’s Board of Regents who had shared a social media post praising the former leader of Hezbollah as a martyr and another post that invoked age-old antisemitic tropes by referring to Israelis as “demons” who “lie, steal, cheat, murder and blackmail.”
Last month, most Senate Democrats voted for two measures that would have blocked sales of military equipment to Israel, with some arguing that among the reasons for their votes was their assessment of Israel’s human rights record. Is this turnabout a legitimate departure from decades of American foreign policy? Or — more likely — is it a politically convenient stance that coincides with a small but vocal and growing segment of the political left making opposition to support for Israel a new litmus test?
His arguments are regular features of the current defense of Israel. Ignore what Israel has and is doing, and criticize anyone who demands they be held accountable. Ignore the kind of documentation that Kristof offers because to acknowledge it means validating what critics are saying and turning a blind eye to what Olmert tells are regular war crimes.
Kristoff offers his prescription for action; the very kind of response Gottheimer wants us to believe is antisemitic!
If the Trump administration insisted on a resumption of Red Cross visits to prisoners, if the U.S. ambassador visited rape survivors with cameras in tow, if we conditioned arms transfers on an end to sexual assault, we could send a moral and practical message that sexual violence is unacceptable no matter the identity of the victim. For starters, the ambassador could ensure that those Palestinians who dared to speak for this article are not brutalized again for their courage.
The blunt reality is that when there are no consequences, we humans are capable of immense depravity toward those we are taught to scorn as subhuman.
The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day. It persists because of silence, indifference and the failure of American and Israeli officials alike to answer Netanyahu’s query: Where the hell are you?
I was going to end this piece right here and let my readers decide which side of history they want to be on.
But in the days following Kristoff’s piece being published the volume of criticism it has received from the Israeli Government and from Israel’s supporters cannot be ignored.
From the Times of Israel, in an article titled “‘Blood libel’: Israel rejects NYT column alleging widespread rape of Palestinian inmates,” tells us how the Israeli government is reacting.
Israeli authorities on Monday denounced as a “blood libel” a New York Times opinion story alleging widespread rape of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, noting that it relied on sources that have alleged ties to the Hamas terror group or have praised it.
“Today, The New York Times chose to publish one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement, referring to the column.
“In an unfathomable inversion of reality, and through an endless stream of baseless lies, propagandist Nicholas Kristoff turns the victim into the accused,” it said, noting the Hamas terror group’s sexual crimes against Israelis on October 7, 2023, and against hostages abducted during that attack throughout their subsequent captivity.
The ministry also claimed Kristof’s column was “part of a false and well-orchestrated anti-Israel campaign aimed at placing Israel on the UN Secretary-General’s blacklist.” UN chief Antonio Guterres in August placed Hamas — and put Israel “on notice” of being placed — on the UN’s “blacklist” of countries and groups credibly suspected of committing patterns of sexual violence in armed conflict.
Others who joined this scrum of opposition were The American Jewish Committee (AJC), The New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, The National Review, The Jewish Insider and the Jerusalem Post.
The volume criticism of Kristof and his temerity in speaking of Israel as he has cannot be ignored. It says too much about how much depravity they are willing to ignore to avoid recognizing that their dream of Israel as a bastion of Democracy and human rights has crumbled into something starkly evil.
Before you dismiss Kristof’s reporting and my defense of it as ill-informed, or worse as biased and bigoted, remember that beginning October 8, 2023, as Israel’s response to the horrors of the day before rained down on Gaza, Israel denied the reports of how many men, women, and children were being wounded and killed as just Hamas propaganda. As the numbers grew over two years, the denials continued in the same language as Mr. Kristof now faces. And then In January of this year, as reported by Haaretz,
IDF (Israel Defense Forces) Accepts Gaza Health Ministry Death Toll of Over 71,000 Palestinians Killed During the War. Although many international experts have accepted the Health Ministry’s data as reliable, and even conservative relative to the true death toll, Israel had refused to accept the Health Ministry’s count until now.
Kristof ends his piece with this call to action.
If the Trump administration insisted on a resumption of Red Cross visits to prisoners, if the U.S. ambassador visited rape survivors with cameras in tow, if we conditioned arms transfers on an end to sexual assault, we could send a moral and practical message that sexual violence is unacceptable no matter the identity of the victim. For starters, the ambassador could ensure that those Palestinians who dared to speak for this article are not brutalized again for their courage.
The blunt reality is that when there are no consequences, we humans are capable of immense depravity toward those we are taught to scorn as subhuman.
The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day. It persists because of silence, indifference and the failure of American and Israeli officials alike to answer Netanyahu’s query: Where the hell are you?
I think it is a good beginning.
And each of us as citizens of this country needs to look inward and ask ourselves Where the hell am I?
