Mick Hartley

From Yuki Zeman at Quillette – Nicholas Kristof and the Pornography of Accusation:

Since 7 October, the distribution of belief has been one of the most revealing features of public discourse. The sexual atrocities committed by Gazans on that terrible day have been carefully documented using autopsy information, forensic evidence, the testimony of survivors and first responders, and the perpetrators’ own recordings and confessions. Despite the wealth of accumulated evidence, many anti-Israel activists and international officials still responded with suspicion, denial, euphemism, and demands for unchallengeable proof. Activists insisted on incontrovertible evidence, they warned of propaganda, they spoke about the importance of context, they carefully parsed testimony, and they treated Israeli suffering as a field of possible manipulation. The dead were cross-examined before their blood was dry.

However, the most tawdry and dubious accusations against Israel are now being received by those same activists with a striking generosity, despite their reliance on anonymous witnesses, politically interested intermediaries, and organisations embedded in an anti-Israel advocacy ecosystem. Anonymity has become understandable, inconsistency has become evidence of trauma, political contamination has become social context, and advocacy reports have become documentation. Those who treated Israeli testimony as suspect now treat accusations against Israel as morally self-authenticating. This is how the politics of defilement works. And in a hierarchy of credulity, Israeli victims must pass through a tribunal of suspicion while accusations against Israel, no matter how far-fetched or poorly supported, enter the public imagination half-canonised.

And let’s not forget Francesca Albanese.

Kristof’s column depends on this kind of drift from caveat to heinous accusation. Individual accounts become a pattern; the pattern becomes a structure; the structure becomes a national indictment. By the end of the essay, readers are no longer asked to consider whether or not instances of abuse have occurred in Israeli detention facilities, they are invited to condemn Israel tout court. The Times transforms unresolved, poorly corroborated, and politically mediated claims into a totalising moral portrait of a nation.

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, exemplifies this posture. Repeatedly criticised for casting doubt on evidence of Hamas’s sexual violence while treating accusations against Israel as proof of guilt, Albanese belongs to a wider class of international functionaries who speak the language of law while they direct suspicion in one direction only. The Albanese method, as it now appears in practice, is simple: disbelieve and seek to discredit every instance in which the Jew is a victim; believe and promote every instance that makes the Jew look obscene. The formulation is harsh because the double-standard is not simply a matter of tone; it is one of the routes by which antisemitism enters respectable discourse in humanitarian drag.

Zeman also reminds us of the 2007 effort by an anti-Zionist scholar by the name of Tal Nitzan to probe the use of rape by the Israelis against Palestinian prisoners. She could find no instances, however, so bravely concluded that this was because the Israelis were simply too racist to rape Palestinian women: “The lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences — just as organized military rape would have done.” Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

This was not an official report. It was an academic attempt to explain why Israeli wartime rape is statistically rare compared to other theatres of conflict. And even here, the evidence was twisted to indict Israeli dehumanisation of Arabs. Today, Kristof and others perform the opposite manoeuvre. Israel is guilty not because its soldiers do not rape Palestinians, but because accusations of sexual abuse ratify a verdict that has already been decided. The conclusion is stable. Only the argument changes. Evidence is simply the surrounding scenery.