The Death of Evidence: When the Accused is Israeli

On the Selective Suspension of Evidentiary Standards.

Let’s start with something basic. If you take seriously the idea that the worst crimes require the strongest proof, that principle doesn’t get suspended depending on who the accused happens to be. It isn’t a pro-Israel position. It isn’t a pro-Palestinian position. It’s the minimum requirement for a functioning civilization. And it applies to everyone, on every side, without exception.

Nicholas Kristof’s recent column in The New York Times, “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” doesn’t seem to know this. In a sprawling piece that mistakes emotional intensity for evidentiary weight, Kristof accuses Israel of running a detention system where sexual violence is “standard operating procedure” — a systematic, state-sanctioned campaign of rape. He then goes further, arguing that American taxpayers are complicit.

That is about as serious an accusation as you can level at a country. So where’s the evidence?

There isn’t any. Not a photograph. Not a video. Not a named perpetrator. Not a single medical report. Kristof admits, right there in the text, that “it’s impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are.” His reporting rests on conversations with 14 people he found by “asking around among lawyers, human rights groups, [and] aid workers” — a pre-selected pool of sources already embedded in activist networks. When he tries to corroborate their accounts, he does so by talking to people those same individuals had confided in. That’s hearsay corroborating hearsay. In a courtroom, it wouldn’t survive the first morning. In the pages of The New York Times, it gets treated as a bombshell investigation.

Two of his sources specifically mention cameras. One claims guards were photographing the abuse. Another says he heard someone say “don’t take photos” in Hebrew. If those cameras existed, where are the photos? Kristof doesn’t have them. The one piece of actual photographic evidence in the entire piece is a settler-posted image of a man in his underwear. It doesn’t depict rape. The one video he cites involves a case where charges were dropped — which Kristof, without apparent irony, presents as evidence of impunity rather than evidence that the case couldn’t be proven.

It is also worth pausing to ask why this particular accusation. The Palestinian leadership and its advocates are not naive. They understand Western media as well as anyone. They know which charges generate the most outrage with the least demand for proof. Accuse Israel of poor prison conditions and you get a policy debate. Accuse Israel of torture and you get a human rights report. Accuse Israel of rape and you get something different entirely. Rape carries a unique moral weight in Western culture. It is visceral, intimate, and almost impossible to discuss without triggering an emotional response that overrides analytical thinking. It is, short of killing, the worst thing you can do to a person in captivity. The advocates who brought these stories to Kristof know that. They chose this accusation deliberately, knowing that the charge itself would do most of the work, and that the demand for evidence would be muted by the horror of the allegation. That is not the behavior of people pursuing justice. It is the behavior of people pursuing a narrative.

Then there’s Ehud Olmert. Kristof calls on the former Prime Minister, a convicted felon who has spent years as a vocal critic of the current government, to weigh in on whether he believes these abuses are happening. Olmert says “definitely” and then, in the very next breath, acknowledges he doesn’t actually know much about it. This is Kristof’s expert witness. A disgraced political opponent who admits he has no firsthand knowledge. The whole exercise would be funny if the subject weren’t so grave.

Now. Here is where intellectual honesty requires a turn.

The same standard that demolishes Kristof’s column has to be applied with equal force to those who speak in Israel’s name. And when you apply it honestly, the results are not flattering.

Rami Davidian became one of the most prominent voices describing what happened at the Nova music festival on October 7. He appeared in Sheryl Sandberg’s documentary “Screams Before Silence,” which was screened at the Biden White House and promoted as essential viewing. In it, he described, with the composure of a man reporting facts, what he claimed to have seen with his own eyes: girls tied to trees, legs spread, raped and murdered, objects inserted into their bodies. “Over 30 girls were murdered and raped here,” he said, pointing at the ground. He was honored as a torch-lighter at Israel’s 76th Independence Day ceremony. The selection passed through multiple government ministries and security services.

Israeli investigative journalists who looked into his account reached a blunt conclusion: his stories were “made up from beginning to end.” The detail about naked bodies tied to trees appears in no survivor testimony, no forensic report, no verified account from the site. His rescue claims are equally impossible. He says he personally evacuated between 700 and 750 people in 48 hours. The math is unforgiving: that would require 182 round trips covering over 7,000 kilometers, representing more than 334 hours of continuous driving under emergency conditions. When this was pointed out, he began revising his story to include other people he had supposedly “worked with.” In one video he disarmed five or six terrorists with a sewage pipe. In later tellings, the pipe is gone. His fabricated rape testimony found its way into a New York Times op-ed by Bret Stephens. When an Israeli television program was prepared to air an investigation into his claims, it was pulled before broadcast.

Eli Beer, founder of United Hatzalah, did similar damage from a different stage. Standing before the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, Beer described watching a pregnant woman’s stomach being cut open by Hamas terrorists, her baby stabbed in front of her. He presented this as something he had personally witnessed. People directly connected to Kibbutz Be’eri, the community where this allegedly occurred, said it never happened. A member of the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit who reviewed all footage from that day confirmed that the video Beer appeared to be referencing was not from October 7 at all. It was from Mexico. Beer also pushed the claim that babies had been placed into an oven and burned alive, a story that official investigations found no evidence to support. United Hatzalah’s own commemorative book, “Angels in Orange,” devotes an entire chapter to Beer’s Las Vegas speech. It contains no mention of any of these eyewitness accounts. When your own organization’s official record quietly omits what would be the most horrifying testimony your founder ever gave, that silence is its own verdict.

October 7 was horrific enough without any of this. Children were murdered. Families were killed in their homes. Kids at a music festival were hunted down. All of it documented, filmed, confirmed. To pile invented atrocities on top of real ones isn’t advocacy. It’s a gift to the people who want to argue that none of it happened. Every time one of these fabrications collapses, the skeptic doesn’t just stop believing the lie. He starts doubting everything around it. That is the real cost.

And the pattern extends beyond Israel’s borders. The recent federal trial of the Alexander brothers in the Southern District of New York followed the same logic as Kristof’s column: accusation as proof, hearsay as evidence, the absence of a police report, a toxicology screen, or a rape kit treated as irrelevant. The prosecution built its case on allegations that originated with one person, were picked up by another, and were then wielded to destroy three men’s lives. No physical evidence. No contemporaneous documentation. Just testimony, passed from mouth to mouth, in a legal culture that has decided certain defendants don’t deserve the same burden of proof as everyone else.

Then, near the close of its case, the government introduced what it called the ideological blueprint for the entire conspiracy: a blog. Not a confession. Not a financial record. Not a co-conspirator. A blog that the Alexanders didn’t write. The prosecution’s own evidence showed that Oren Alexander had forwarded a link to the blog in an email to his brother Alon. That’s it. One forwarded link, the 2009 equivalent of a retweet, dressed up in court as the premeditated design for a thirteen-year criminal enterprise. The judge compared the blog to jihadist literature. As for the third brother, Tal, there was no evidence presented that he had ever seen the blog at all. The government knew the Alexanders didn’t write it. They had subpoenaed Google for the blog’s subscriber information and interviewed the person they believed to be the actual author, Oren’s former college roommate. Their own interview notes recorded that the roommate said Oren knew of the blog but was not the one writing it. They introduced it anyway. That is not a crack in the government’s case. It is a confession about how the case was built.

That is the through-line connecting all of this. When the accused is Israeli, the rules change. The people who want to condemn Israel throw out the evidentiary rulebook entirely. And some of the people who want to defend it have shown they’re willing to fabricate the evidence themselves. Both are catastrophic failures. Both lead to the same place: a world where no one can tell what actually happened, where genuine atrocities get buried under invented ones, and where justice becomes impossible because truth has already been destroyed.

The truth is terrible enough. It doesn’t need any help. It just needs to be told.