The Kafkaesque Trial Facing Israel and Its Supporters

By Benjamin Kerstein

Friday, May 22, 2026

 

It is quite common for defenders of Israel to preface their statements with the phrase, “Israel isn’t a perfect country,” which is true, as far as it goes, but rather misses the point. Given the blizzard of defamation and demonization that surrounds the Jewish state, the issue is not whether Israel is perfect, but whether it is as imperfect as its enemies claim.

 

The answer is self-evident, because no country could be as imperfect as Israel’s enemies claim. Even Nazi Germany, perhaps the one completely uncomplicated case of an outright demonic regime, was only charged (rightly) with wanting to take over the world, whereas Israel is regularly charged with having already taken over the world. Demonization can only be taken so far before it takes on a distinct quality of the ludicrous.

 

This simple fact was demonstrated once again last week when the New York Times published Nicholas Kristof’s impossibly long opinion column (tellingly, it was not published in the news section), charging that Israel systemically sexually abuses Palestinian prisoners, including through the physical impossibility of trained rape dogs.

 

Regarding the piece itself, Israeli journalist Amit Segal has made short work of it. Kristof’s column draws on 14 unverified accounts, each of which lacks “details that would allow for investigation, verification, or refutation, to claim that systemic sexual abuse is widespread throughout the Israeli prison system,” Segal reports, referencing a Hebrew-language analysis by Israeli academic Danny Orbach. For comparison, in 2020, “approximately 16,000 complaints of sexual assault and harassment by guards against prisoners were recorded in the United States, with only a tiny fraction proven to be based on real incidents.”

 

Kristof’s column also relies on several testimonies provided by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a nongovernmental organization that Israel accuses of having links to Hamas. The NGO has a history of trafficking in unverified anti-Israel conspiracy theories, including “suspicions” that the Israeli military harvests the organs of Palestinians and invented a weapon that “evaporates” its victims’ bodies. Euro-Med’s chairman, Ramy Abdu, expressed support for Hamas’ October 7, 2023, massacre, and its board chairman, Richard Falk, has long flirted with 9/11 “truther” conspiracy theories, hinting that the attacks may have been an inside job led by American neoconservatives. In the presence of such witnesses, skepticism, at the very least, is warranted.

 

Yet there was apparently no scrutiny of Euro-Med’s claims on the part of Kristof or the New York Times. There are many reasons for this. The Times has become increasingly anti-Zionist and arguably antisemitic in recent years. For example, it published a Peter Beinart column calling for Israel’s dissolution and replacement with a vaguely defined binational state, was heavily criticized for running a remarkable quantity of stories hostile to New York’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, and has been accused of whitewashing New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s antisemitism. It is not impossible that its staff either wanted to believe Kristof’s story or did not believe it but printed it anyway for political purposes.

 

As for Kristof, he is a professional moralist—not always wrongly—tackling such topics as human trafficking, mass slaughter in Darfur, the dangers of pornography, and similar issues. As worthwhile as some of his other work may be, however, Kristof could not possibly have passed up the chance to once again play the denunciatory prophet. This predilection has gotten Kristof into trouble before, as when he hailed nurse Greg Mortenson for building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, only to see Mortenson exposed as a fraud. Under such circumstances, the phrase “don’t bother me with the facts” is an apt one.

 

Indeed, in this regard, it is important to acknowledge that not everything in Kristof’s article may be untrue. Certainly, the self-evidently mad charge that Israel trains dogs to rape prisoners is telling, but abuses happen in every prison system, and some of the claims made may be at least vaguely accurate. The point, however, is that, given the provenance of the reporting and the biases of the venue, there is no compelling and certainly no coercive reason to believe that any of it is accurate. This means that, contrary to the intentions of the accusers, the accusations, in and of themselves, bear no evidentiary or moral weight whatsoever.

 

In many ways, however, the accuracy or inaccuracy of the article itself is not the central issue. It is important, to be sure, but the purpose of such attacks is not to prove or disprove anything. It is to bury the reader beneath an avalanche of accusations, leaving critics to spend hours and months trying to unpack and disprove each one. Meanwhile, TikTok and similar platforms have transformed the dubious into the factual within milliseconds.

 

All of this underscores the ease with which guilt by accusation can be asserted in today’s media landscape. It is this landscape that is all-important in regard to Israel, because it constitutes something like a mechanism, an enormous engine whose sole purpose is to manufacture and disseminate the most barbarous and defamatory lies with the ultimate goal of delegitimizing and destroying the Jewish state.

 

Segal himself notes how this is done, writing, “[Kristof’s] interviewees, of course, were not found or selected by chance. This raises the question: who was Kristof’s ‘fixer’? Reporters who do not know the language almost always rely on local fixers, and Kristof claims he found the interviewees through ‘human rights organizations,’ which Orbach suggests points to a preplanned direction by Euro-Med or its ilk.”

 

None of this is new. There was the notorious “Jenin massacre” scandal of 2002, in which Palestinians and their supporters charged that Israel had killed hundreds of civilians in an operation in the West Bank city of Jenin during Operation Defensive Shield. Widely reported as true at the time, the charge was so conclusively debunked that even the United Nations, despite its longstanding hostility to the Jewish state, was forced to admit it was a lie.

 

More recently, there was the 2023 Al-Ahli Hospital bombing, the result of a misfired Palestinian rocket that was, initially, blamed on Israel by the Times and the global media as a whole. This is not even to speak of the “genocide” blood libel now parroted by the likes of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, which began when Israeli military operations had barely started in 2023. Such libels stretch back to the beginning of Israeli history, indeed to the origins of Zionism itself, with the endlessly repeated charge that a Jewish liberation movement was, in fact, a “colonialist,” “imperialist,” “racist,” and “genocidal” endeavor.

 

Another cause for concern is the timing of Kristof’s article, which was published a day before the release of a meticulously documented Israeli report on Hamas’ rampant sexual violence during the October 7 massacre. This was not a coincidence. The goal was very likely to distract attention from the report, thus exonerating Hamas by default, and then to prove that, at the very least, Israel is as bad as Hamas.

 

Kristof was not subtle in this regard. Throughout his piece, he compares the alleged Israeli abuses to Hamas’ proven atrocities, implying equivalence if not the greater infamy of the former. He ends with the peroration: “Think of it this way: The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day.” There is little to be said about such a statement, except that, even if everything Kristof claims is true, it is a monstrous thing to say. All atrocities are, after all, incommensurable. But Kristof not only rejects this axiom, he also elevates one atrocity at the expense of the other and the alleged at the expense of the proven.

 

The mechanism that generated all this and more puts one in mind of Josef K.’s statement to the court in Franz Kafka’s The Trial: “There can be no doubt that behind all the pronouncements of this court, and in my case, behind the arrest and today’s inquiry, there exists an extensive organization.”

 

Today, the trial is conducted by a global tribunal, composed of media outlets like the New York Times as well as Muslim organizations, progressive “activists,” prominent NGOs, international institutions of all kinds, and innumerable social and cultural influencers. As in the case of Kristof’s article, these forces manufacture lies, gather the “evidence” to “prove” those lies, corral and coach “witnesses,” collate the “proof,” funnel it to journalists either gullible or malicious, and then disseminate the defamation worldwide. There is a reason, after all, why stories like Kristof’s, and numerous others like the “Jenin massacre” and the Al-Ahli bombing, only go in one direction.

 

This mechanism is not a conspiracy because it does not require conspiracy. It is simply a pervasive culture of hate, neither secret nor occluded, that acts in tandem because all who are party to it agree on the most essential point, which is the demonic nature of Israel and the Jews and the necessity of marginalizing and ghettoizing both.

 

For Israelis and Jews, this has terrible results. As in Kafka’s novel, our trial is for an infinite crime and it has no end. The result is a constant and psychologically exhausting atmosphere of defamation. We feel the world closing in around us, threatening to bury us under the sheer force of its hate, and we know that, out of the mechanism’s industrial-level incitement, violence will come. We remember the killing of Israeli embassy workers Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim; the firebombing murder of pro-Israel protester Karen Diamond in Boulder, Colorado; the horrific Bondi Beach shooting that killed 15 people; and too many similar atrocities to live under any illusions.

 

I have no doubt that, because of Kristof’s article, there will be more politicians bloviating against Israel and the Jews, more hate rallies outside synagogues, more assaults on individual Jews and Jewish communities, and ultimately, more terrorism and more murder.

 

There is also the terrible wrong done to those who object to the defamation. We are charged with unfairly attacking good and honest people because those people “criticize Israeli policies.” The anguish this causes can hardly be exaggerated. First, it effectively charges us all with arguing in bad faith and outright lying for craven political reasons. Second, it gaslights and isolates us, because while Jews may be ignorant of many things, one thing we do know, with terrible intimacy, is antisemitism. Finally, because guilt is always presumed by accusation, it seeks to force us to “defend the indefensible,” even when the “indefensible” is a damnable lie.

 

All of this takes a terrible emotional toll. I have seen Jews rage in frustration, weep in anguish, and at times simply sit in despair at the constant barrage of hate to which the mechanism subjects us. One friend said to me, “I don’t know how to live in this world anymore.” We wonder not only whether the world can be wrong and the Jews right, but whether the world is, in some essential way, evil. This is a terrible burden to carry, and yet the mechanism presumes, in its arrogance, that we should carry it forever.

 

I do not think that we will consent to carry it forever. Sooner or later, the Jews will not stand for it. In a hopeful sign, a protest was recently held outside the New York Times building in response to Kristof’s article. It was attended by only a few hundred people, but it was passionate, strident, and uncompromising. I hope that protest is the seed of something larger, a movement of denunciation and dissent that will, at long last, stop up the gears of the mechanism and bring some relief to its beleaguered victims.