May 15, 2026
Reading testimony after testimony this week from Palestinian detainees describing sexual abuse and torture by Israeli soldiers, prison guards, and interrogators — as reported diligently by Nick Kristof — broke my heart and turned my stomach. But as a rabbi, I am also deeply disturbed by the dismissive and defamatory responses of many mainstream American Jewish leaders and organizations, including voices that have rightly demanded justice for Jewish survivors of sexual assault on October 7.
From the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s conspiracist deflections to the former antisemitism envoy Deborah Lipstadt’s sharing a graphic calling for Nick Kristof to face Nuremberg-style trial and execution, the mainstream Jewish response was a refusal to take the accusations at face value and an insistence that the words of a credible and respected journalist could only be slander born of Jew-hatred. The AJC characterized the piece as “amplifying inflammatory narratives” and described a specific allegation as “modern-day blood libel.”
Even more painful for me personally are the number of rabbis in my community—whose Torah I regularly teach, whose holy words I have shared in drashot and around my Shabbos table for years—echoing these same sentiments, slandering courageous survivors as “perpetrators of blood libel” and even going so far as to mock their testimonies. This moral failure is a tragic result of decades of putting defending the State of Israel’s reputation ahead of Torah and our deepest values.
Sexual violence is horrific and unacceptable. This is so basic an assertion, so fundamental to every ethical tradition and person of faith, that it feels absurd for me to even cite a Jewish source. Front of mind for me is decades of reciting “Eleh Azkarah/These I Will Remember,” the piece of the Yom Kippur liturgy that recounts the horrific torture and murder of ten holy leaders of the Jewish people. Their cries, according to the midrash, shook the very foundations of the earth. Those cries do not just shake the world because the victims are Jewish or tzaddikim, but because torture is abhorrent. Kavod habriyos, human dignity, sits at the center of Torah values and we dishonour ourselves and our ancestors when we lose sight of that.
Since the moment reports of sexual violence and rape of Israelis surfaced on October 7th, our community has rallied around survivors. As former hostages shared testimony of their experiences of survival and resilience in the face of sexual torture by their captors, I saw messages of validation, support, and solidarity echo across the Jewish communal landscape. The public support for survivors is not only a powerful sign of solidarity and care, it can help create an environment where other survivors know they will be supported if they come forward. Even when the details of a few cases reported by Israeli officials turned out to be false, our community rightly stood by survivors’ testimonies of their experiences.
Those who condemned sexual violence on October 7th but cannot find it in themselves to condemn sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners are guilty of more than just hypocrisy. Their past activism on behalf of survivors is recast as crassly using survivor’s experiences to further their political agenda. Standing against war crimes is not about scoring nationalist points against some imagined “other side,” it is about the basic core of who we are and Torah values. To demand less for Palestinian survivors than for Jews who have suffered sexual violence would be an intolerable hypocrisy. The only Jewish course of action is to take Palestinians’ testimony seriously and for there to be an impartial investigation of these heinous acts, so the perpetrators can face justice.
I understand the desire to disbelieve the dozens of accounts of sexual violence. I want nothing more than for none of this to be true, and for the Israeli state to have lived up to the ethical demands of our Torah. Sadly, the evidence exists, and it is growing. This is not just about one article; dozens of former detainees and survivors have come forward with personal accounts that demand serious moral and legal scrutiny.
For those who have taken to slandering survivors and denying these terrible sins—and even for those of us who believe the reports but still struggle with kneejerk defensiveness—I want to share two pieces of Torah that have helped me work through my own defensiveness in the past.
Rabbenu Yonah, in his classic work Shaarei Teshuvah writes “…there are many people for which the light of repentance is obstructed. For since they are innocent and pure in their eyes, they do not try to repair their actions, as it appears to them that they are [already] rectified, when in actuality they sin greatly to God…And behold they are like a sick person who does not feel his sickness, so he does not think of a cure. So his sickness constantly gets worse, until he is not able to be healed…” The reduction of survivors’ stories to a challenge of hasbara is a moral sickness within our community. If we deny the evidence of our eyes and ears, we will only become sicker.
The Aish Kodesh, Rav Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, taught that “the worst of evils is self-justification, such that one be righteous in his own eyes.” Communities, no less than individuals, are capable of this kind of moral self-deception. We must face reality, support survivors, and stand up for what we know is right by not applying a double standard. There is no other way out of the ethical abyss except the light of teshuva.
Human rights organizations have spent months petitioning for meaningful independent access to Israeli detention facilities. Limited inspections that exclude prisoner testimony are not enough. If these allegations, along with the many other accounts by survivors and human rights organizations, are false, an impartial investigation is necessary to establish that (needless to say, such an investigation could not be conducted by anyone in the Israeli military prison system). If they are true, survivors deserve justice and those responsible must be held accountable.
Jewish ethics do not permit us to excuse torture or sexual violence when committed by those acting in our name. When Israeli authorities commit such acts, or when Jews dismiss credible allegations out of hand, it becomes not only a human tragedy but a chillul Hashem — a desecration of G!d’s holy name. The only path forward is truth, accountability, and teshuvah.
Rabbi Jonah Winer is the Director of Learning at T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights.