Israel can survive criticism. But can we survive silencing our moral responsibility in the face of moral inconsistency?

A dangerous instinct is on the rise in the Jewish world right now: 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 Oct. 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, The 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 as wholesale as blood libel before grappling with a single allegation. And still others offered a more nuanced response, recognizing the need to scrutinize the sources quoted, various reports, and testimonies, while acknowledging the very real possibility of a broader need for further investigation and exposure of very real and horrific behavior in the Israeli prison system.

But we, as Jews, 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.

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 mere critique of policies or governments, and to erode the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty itself. We see it in the selective outrage, the persistent double standards, the immediate inversion of victim vs. aggressor after Oct. 7, and the normalization of slogans that would be unimaginable if directed at any other nation. There are movements, institutions, influencers and even governments for whom the issue is not where Israel ends its borders, but whether and how Israel should end.

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

And on top of that, at precisely the moment when we are recoiling from The New York Times 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 of the sexual violence committed by Hamas on Oct. 7 and during subsequent captivity. 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.

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. The same international ecosystem that spent months dismissing, minimizing or denying outright the sexual violence of Oct. 7 suddenly rediscovers the language of human rights when the accused are Israelis. That hypocrisy is real. That asymmetry is real. And Jews are not wrong to feel gaslit by it.

But moral inconsistency in the world does not absolve us of our own moral responsibility.

There is another truth that liberal Zionists ignore at our peril: A documented pattern of abuses against Palestinians — some isolated, others systemic — have too often been minimized, excused, normalized or defended by sectors of Israeli society and by state institutions themselves. Not every accusation is true. Not every claim is beyond dispute. But neither can every 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.

People committed to covenant cannot lose the capacity for moral self-scrutiny.

For 2,000 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 history. But sovereignty carries its own 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 they were shaped by different historical traumas. At the risk of generalization, Israelis were formed 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.

Both instincts are essential.

A Judaism concerned only with survival eventually loses its soul. A Judaism concerned only with moral performance eventually loses 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, trauma, and dehumanization. No army is. No nation is. Certainly not one that has lived in an anxiety-producing state of perpetual existential emergency.

And it also means resisting the flattening language that increasingly dominates discourse about Israel. Language that transforms complexity into caricature and turns Israelis into metaphysical embodiments of evil. When every accusation immediately becomes proof of 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 more than courts and legislation. They were about the fear that a traumatized society can slowly normalize extremism, cruelty, and the abandonment of restraint.

That warning matters now more than ever.

The real danger to Israel is not criticism. Israel has always survived criticism. The danger is the erosion of the moral vocabulary that allows Israelis and Jews 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.

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 or unproven allegation to dismantle the very 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.

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 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.

serves as the vice president of the Union for Reform Judaism for Israel and Reform Zionism and is the executive director of the Association of Reform Zionists of America.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.