The End of Our Illusions

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, May 12, 2026

 

We try to avoid imagining that our ideological opponents are morally inferior. But it can be just as dangerous to convince ourselves that our declared antagonists want the same things we want and hold to values that approximate our own.

 

That is part of the reason for the pained reaction to Nick Kristof’s opinion column yesterday, in which he claimed (without evidence, obviously) that Israel has instituted a state policy of militaristized bestiality.

 

Today, a meticulous, harrowing report was released on Hamas’s systematic rape and sexual violence toward Israelis on and after October 7. The commission that undertook this investigation “has examined over 10,000 photographs and videos of the attack totaling more than 1,800 hours of visual analysis.”

 

We want to believe that Nick Kristof and all the people who defended and shared his article are just like us—believers in honesty, men and women of integrity, a community of truth-seekers with a baseline sense of human decency. We want to believe this in part because of that very sense of human decency.

 

But we are making a massive error. Kristof’s named sources not only provided no evidence for his lurid bestiality fantasies but themselves were also people with massive credibility deficits.

 

Conversely, the documentation of sexual violence by Palestinians who invaded Israel on October 7, 2023—the total number of infiltrators was several thousand that day—took years, even though we all watched videos of Palestinians dragging the unclothed bodies of Israeli women through the streets of Gaza, and even though Hamas documented many of their crimes, and even though Hamas members admitted to raping women that day. All of that is what is known as evidence—apologies to Kristof and his readers for using such technical, obscure SAT words—and evidence needs to be compiled, examined, analyzed, and used as the jumping-off point for additional investigation.

 

That is what Israeli officials did, and that is what those who support the Jewish state’s existence did, and what they called for others to do, because that is what is done when the goal is to obtain the truth. To the anti-Zionist collective, the truth is to be avoided like the plague, and therefore what is rewarded is not evidence but creativity and imagination.

 

And that is what was on display in the New York Times. We want Kristof and his defenders to be like us. But they are not like us—and they punish us for our good faith.

 

Serious allegations—and there are few allegations more serious than the ones being alleged here—deserve heaps of evidence and careful scrutiny. The report delivered by the Israeli commission is a model of such investigation. The Times’s rumor mill is the opposite.

 

There is another reason the timing is important. The Times’s evidence-free allegations against Israelis dulled outrage about the evidence-packed report of sexual violence perpetrated by Gazans against Israelis. The only beneficiaries of this timing are the Hamas foot soldiers who raped and tortured innocent civilians. Only the very worst people in the world have gained.

 

And there’s another reason we want to believe that Israel’s critics are morally intact. Plenty of them are. Those are probably the ones we don’t hear from. Unfortunately, the ones we keep hearing from don’t believe this conflict has anything to do with where Palestinians live but rather that Israelis live at all.

 

And that is depressing, because we’d all like to believe that the conflict can be solved. But for that to happen, we’re going to have to be more honest with ourselves. We’re going to have to learn to treat the rumor-mongers differently than those who possess a shred of honesty, decency, and good faith. We’re going to have to draw a line and be wholly unsentimental about who belongs on which side of it.