Believe Victims, Unless They’re Jewish
The world has not learned to believe victims. It has learned to believe accusations against Israel, regardless of evidence or common sense.
Why are accusations of sexual violence against Israel so readily accepted and made viral, often without substantial evidence, while documented evidence of sexual atrocities committed against Jews is ignored, minimised or treated with suspicion?
When Hamas terrorists invaded Israel on 7 October, they did not merely murder civilians. They committed atrocities designed to humiliate, dehumanise and terrorise. The evidence of sexual violence has come from witnesses, first responders, released hostages, forensic experts, video material, international investigators and painstaking documentation by civil society groups. It takes wilful ignorance to reject the fact that Hamas, Gazan civilians and other jihadist groups committed mass, brutal and systematic sexual violence against Israelis on and after 7 October.
Yet, for much of the media, the United Nations, South Africa’s political class and the activist ecosystem, none of this was enough.
Israeli victims were doubted. Their suffering was contextualised and even considered justified by the most hateful segments of the anti-Israeli lobby. Their dead bodies were put on trial. Every gap in the evidence, often caused by the fact that the victims had been murdered, was treated as an excuse for denial.
But when Israel is accused, the standards suddenly disappear.
Anonymous testimony becomes proof. Activist reports become verdicts. Rumour becomes revelation. And the most lurid allegation, no matter how contested, can be laundered through respectable newspapers and human rights language into an indictment of the Jewish state.
This is not concern for victims of sexual violence. It is selective outrage masquerading as compassion.
Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times column alleging widespread sexual abuse of Palestinians by Israel has become the latest example of this grotesque double standard. Its defenders argue that the allegations cannot be dismissed, that Palestinians have testified to mistreatment, and that abuse in detention must be investigated. On that narrow point, they are right.
But this is precisely where the double standard becomes visible. The issue is not whether credible allegations should be investigated. They should be. The issue is the leap from allegation to certainty. From individual claims to national indictment. From the possibility of abuse to the assertion that Israel is a systematic perpetrator of sexual violence. That leap has not been earned.
In South Africa, the Media Review Network has echoed this framing through Iqbal Jassat, who insists that allegations of rape against Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons “cannot be dismissed as conspiracy”. On its own, that claim may sound reasonable. But in context, it reflects a familiar pattern. Allegations alone against Israel are treated as proof. Doubt becomes denial. Scrutiny becomes cruelty. Anyone who asks whether the evidence is credible is accused of excusing Palestinian suffering.
The same activists who demanded impossible proof from Israeli victims of 7 October now demand instant belief when Israel is the accused.
The MRN’s framing also obscures the weakness of the evidence base by pretending that all sources are equally credible. They are not. Kristof relied, in part, on Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a highly politicised anti-Israel organisation whose credibility has been repeatedly challenged.
NGO Monitor argues that Euro-Med’s leadership has a history of advocating for Hamas in Europe, and notes that Euro-Med had already promoted the lurid allegation that Israel used dogs to rape prisoners before Kristof elevated it into the pages of the New York Times. Euro-Med’s own report from June 2024 claimed that Israeli army dogs were used to “sexually assault prisoners and detainees” and repeated the allegation of dogs being used to rape detainees. That is not independent corroboration. It is the laundering of an activist claim through a prestigious newspaper.
No credible allegation of abuse should be ignored. If Israeli soldiers, prison guards, interrogators or officials have abused detainees, they should be investigated and punished. No civilised society should tolerate sexual abuse, torture or humiliation by agents of the state. And the Israeli government and society do not tolerate these crimes, even if committed by their own soldiers or personnel.
While Israel investigates and prosecutes its people who commit crimes, Hamas celebrated and broadcast atrocities committed against Israelis. But that is not the issue.
The issue is the leap from allegation to certainty. From individual claims to national indictment. From the possibility of abuse to the assertion that Israel is a systematic perpetrator of sexual violence. That leap has not been earned.
Kristof’s most sensational claim, involving an alleged sexual assault using a dog, is a case study in how propaganda works. It is not enough to say that a claim is horrifying. Horror is not evidence. It is not enough to say that the complainant repeated the story elsewhere. Repetition is not corroboration. It is not enough to say that similar abuses have happened in other countries or other wars. Possibility is not proof.
To add to this, canine experts have reported that there is no documented evidence of dogs being trained or used to commit sexual assaults against humans. Some veterinarians and scientists have gone further, describing the allegation as “medically and scientifically impossible”. At the very least, this should have triggered extreme caution from any responsible journalist. Instead, the claim spread widely, revealing less about Israeli abuse than about the sick minds of the anti-Israel lobby.
The more inflammatory the allegation, the more careful the verification must be. That is the standard Israeli victims were told to meet. That is the standard Palestinian allegations against Israel must also meet.
The same applies to claims about Palestinian prisoners. There have been serious allegations of abuse in Israeli detention. Some have been investigated. Some may yet lead to consequences. But even where abuse is real, a distinction must be maintained between criminal misconduct and state policy. Between a prison scandal and a national campaign of sexual violence.
If allegations of sexual abuse in detention are enough to brand a country as a systematic perpetrator of rape, then Iran, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United States, Britain, Australia and Canada must all be indicted under the same standard. But they are not. The standard is applied with special venom to Israel. Abuse in Israeli detention should be investigated and punished where proven. But it should not be inflated into a blood libel by people who have spent years ignoring or excusing far better-documented sexual violence by Hamas and by the dictatorships they so often romanticise.
“Investigate this” is a responsible demand. “Israel is a regime of mass rape” is a propaganda conclusion.
That conclusion has also been encouraged by claims from flotilla activists who alleged sexual abuse after detention by Israel. These claims have been denied by Israeli authorities and, at the time of reporting, could not be independently verified. They may deserve investigation. They do not deserve instant belief merely because the accused is Israel.
Yet this is precisely how the anti-Israel narrative machine operates. Every allegation against Israel is treated as a moral emergency. Every atrocity committed against Israelis is treated as complicated. This was never how 7 October was treated.
The UN’s own special representative, Pramila Patten, found reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the 7 October attacks, and clear and convincing information that hostages had been subjected to sexual violence in captivity. The Civil Commission’s report, Silenced No More, has since documented patterns of sexual and gender-based violence using witness accounts, survivor testimony, expert analysis and an enormous archive of evidence.
This evidence was produced under horrific conditions. Many victims could never testify because they were murdered. Many bodies were burned, mutilated or recovered in chaotic conditions. First responders were dealing with an active massacre, not a laboratory investigation. And still, the evidence accumulated.
But for many activists, it was never enough.
They demanded forensic perfection from the dead. They demanded sworn testimony from victims who could no longer speak. They dismissed witnesses. They sneered at Israeli sources. They treated Jewish pain as propaganda until proven otherwise and then treated the proof as propaganda too.
South Africa should understand how obscene this is. We live in a country where sexual violence is endemic, where victims are doubted, where ideology and ethnic loyalty often matter more than truth. Yet too many South Africans have exported our worst instincts into foreign policy. They doubt Jewish victims while embracing every accusation against Israel with fanatical enthusiasm.
That is not solidarity with Palestinians. It is moral corruption.
None of this requires silence about Palestinian suffering. Palestinians can be victims. Israelis can commit crimes. Abuse in Israeli detention should be exposed and punished where proven. And it is.
But a just society does not believe claims based on the identity of the accused. It does not demand impossible evidence from one group of victims while accepting rumours against another as fact. It does not pretend to care about rape while using sexual violence allegations as weapons in an ideological war.
The world has not learned to believe victims. It has learned to believe accusations against Israel, regardless of evidence or common sense.
And a movement that doubts every Jewish victim while believing every allegation against the Jewish state has not discovered compassion. It has merely rediscovered an old hatred in the language of human rights.
Nicholas Woode-Smith is the Managing Editor of the Rational Standard. He writes in his personal capacity.