When Israel’s Defenders Sound Like October 7 Deniers

Political tribalism has destroyed our collective moral judgment on Israel and Palestine

by Ben Cohen

I’ve noticed that if you ask most Brits about the Irish Republican Army (or IRA), they’ll tell you that the organization was unequivocally evil. They bombed innocent civilians, caused terror throughout the UK, and were led by some of the most sinister characters you could imagine.

I’ve also noticed that if you ask those same people about the British conquest and rule of Ireland that dispossessed Irish landowners, suppressed Irish political autonomy, privileged Protestant settlers, and restricted Catholic rights, they’ll argue it wasn’t really that bad, that it was a long time ago, and that it doesn’t excuse the IRA’s terrorism.

The same goes for many Africans when you bring up slavery on the African continent. It wasn’t really that bad, chattel slavery was much worse, and they were really forced into it by the Europeans.

Defending your own tribe is a natural human instinct and completely understandable. It pains me when people bring up all of the terrible things the Brits did around the world because I am British. It pains me when people talk about the horrible things the state of Israel does, because Israel is the Jewish state, and I am of Jewish descent. It is hard to look in the mirror and much easier to propagandize for your own side.

When Israeli women were subjected to appalling sexual violence on October 7th, I was dismayed by the left’s response to it. Hamas was a freedom fighting organization. They were fighting for a noble cause and they would never do what the barbaric Israelis do to Palestinians. Israelis are the evil colonizers, Palestinians are the noble victims. Jewish women were making it up. Israel was lying about it to garner sympathy and create a justification for more violence against the Palestinians.

The left’s reaction to the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is one of the main reasons I became so skeptical of the media’s reporting and framing of the war in Gaza. It wasn’t that Israel was above criticism. It was that so many people on the left seemed incapable of acknowledging Jewish suffering without immediately minimizing it, doubting it, or turning the conversation back to Israel’s crimes. The veil came off for me. I began to see how deeply reflexive anti-Israel thinking had become on parts of the left, and how easily it could turn into antisemitism. To many parts of the left, Hamas’s brutal assault on innocent kids at a music festival has been minimized or in many cases completely forgotten. Israel attacked Gaza for no reason and inflicted suffering on millions of Palestinians because Israel is an evil colonizing white supremacist state.

To me, this was a clear case of political tribalism gone mad. The logic is uncompromising: if you are pro-Palestinian, you must condone everything Palestinians do and condemn everything Israelis do. There is no room for moral complexity. There is one grand narrative where your chosen heroes can do no wrong, while the enemy can do no right.

But this logic works in reverse too, as we are now seeing in the furious response to Nicholas Kristof’s latest piece in The New York Times about allegations of sexual violence against Palestinians in Israeli detention. Kristof is not a fringe anti-Israel activist or a tribalist propagandist. He is one of the most establishment liberal columnists in America, and his piece draws on testimony, human rights reporting, and a broader body of evidence that has been building for some time. The allegations are horrific: rape, sexual humiliation, threats of sexual assault, violence against prisoners’ genitals, and the use of sexual abuse as a tool of domination and degradation.

The response from many pro-Israel voices has been almost identical to the reaction we saw from parts of the left after October 7th. The story is fake. The witnesses are lying. It is blood-libel. The New York Times is corrupt and antisemitic. The timing is suspicious. It is pro-Hamas propaganda designed to make Israel look bad.

Or in other words: let’s not bother examining the evidence seriously because the conclusion has already been reached. Our side would never do that. Their side always lies.

When Hamas committed atrocities against Israeli civilians, too many people on the left could not bring themselves to say, without qualification, that Jewish women had been brutalized. Now that Palestinians are alleging sexual violence at the hands of Israeli soldiers and prison authorities, many pro-Israel commentators cannot bring themselves to say that Palestinian victims deserve to be heard and that the allegations must be investigated seriously.

None of this requires anyone to side with Hamas, or pretend that all claims are automatically true. Just as allegations of sexual violence against Israeli women deserved to be investigated and taken seriously, so too do the allegations made by Palestinians cited in Kristof’s piece.

This is the sad trap that has swallowed so much of the debate over Israel and Palestine. The conflict has become a vehicle for political identity, and it has destroyed our collective moral judgment. Every atrocity is either proof of the enemy’s inherent evil, or an inconvenience to be explained away, minimized, or denied outright. Victims are either sacred or suspect, depending entirely on which flag they are standing under.

The result is a deeply toxic climate in which people who rightly condemned the denial of October 7th atrocities now find themselves denying, minimizing, or explaining away atrocities committed against Palestinians.

This really should not be difficult: sexual violence is evil whoever commits it, and victims do not become less credible because they belong to the wrong tribe. If your first instinct is to investigate when the victim is Israeli but dismiss when the victim is Palestinian, you are not defending truth. You are defending a team, and you are in danger of losing your moral compass.

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