jewish philosophy place

Nicholas Kristof’s recent, incendiary op-ed about mass rape committed against Palestinians is now a confusing case in point about the political and moral morass that is Israel under Netanyahu after October 7. There is, in fact, reliable reporting about the systemic abuse, including a pattern of sexual abuse and rape, suffered by Palestinians at the hand of the Israel Prison Service. Kristof’s op-ed builds off that reporting. What begs belief is the sourcing behind the malicious claim by Kristof that Israel has trained dogs to rape Palestinians and the imputation that the government of Israel, in the mirror image of Hamas and worse, pursues a policy of systematic, mass rape. That the New York Times is no longer a reliable source of information and analysis on Palestine and Israel is its own professional responsibility –while the government of Israel has only itself to blame for the moral and political confusion and morass with which it has surrounded the country.

On its own, the op-ed by Kristof is a mix of truth and lies. There is every reason to believe as reported by Kristof the accounts told by victims of alleged rape and other acts of sexual violence at the hands of Israeli authorities. But when you break the op-ed into component parts, you begin to see how the larger takeaway does not hang together. Because for whatever reason, Kristof chose to rely heavily on Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Hamas-linked NGO based in Geneva, to frame this narrative about Palestine and Israel. About Euro-Med you can read here more at the rightwing site NGO Monitor. That Kristof did nothing in the op-ed to identify Euro-Med and the controversy about it makes for dishonest opinion, at the very least.

The op-ed follows a point-by-point logic:

[1] Kristof writes, “There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes.”

[2] Kristof continues, “But in recent years they have built a security apparatus where sexual violence has become, as a United Nations report put it last year, one of Israel’s “standard operating procedures” and “a major element in the ill treatment of Palestinians.” A report out last month, from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based advocacy group often critical of Israel, concludes that Israel employs “systematic sexual violence” that is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy” (emphasis added). Kristof goes on to compare this sexual violence with alleged accounts relating to the extraordinary scale of organized mass rape in the Tigray conflict in Ethiopia and in Sudan.

[3] Kristof concedes, “It’s impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are.”

[4] At this point, the analysis goes off the rails. After terrible stories by credible Palestinian witnesses is the claim that Israel is using trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners. This unhinged and impossible story has gotten the lion’s share of critical attention drawing attention away from grave and confirmed allegations about the ill-treatment of Palestinians under Israeli authority. Then, the final word of the op-ed compares the pattern of abuse in Israel with the mass scale of sexual assault by Palestinians against Israeli civilians on and after October 7. Again to draw a moral equivalence, Kristof claims that, “The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day” after having just said that it is impossible to know how common these assaults are.

How, then, to explain this garble on the part of a distinguished journalist? Absent the decision to allow Euro-Med to frame the analysis, Kristof’s op-ed would have more than held up based on the interviews alone; and the allegations would have not been so easy to dismiss by Israeli government officials and others acting in bad faith. If one were to hazard a guess, it is that, between Palestine and Israel, Kristof wants to maintain something by way of moral balance; and gets lost in the radicalized politics of the region. This is a sign of the times. To balance the ethno-religious fascism of an Israeli government hellbent on war crimes, Kristof goes to a Hamas front cum European NGO. But there is no balance to be had. Between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea, the entire region running through Israel and Lebanon and Palestine and Syria has gone helter-skelter after October 7.

As recognized by Kristof, the problem is that “The Israeli government rejects suggestions that it sexually abuses Palestinians, just as Hamas denied raping Israeli women.” Both claims are unbelievable. But the op-ed is also unbelievable, not in whole, but in some large and significant part. Introduced is a third element in the story, this one about Nicholas Kristof himself and reporting at the New York Times, responsibility for which lies on him and his editors.

By way of establishing moral equivalence, Kristof wants to establish a single narrative throughline. But, per here by Haviv Rettig-Gur, there are, in fact, two separate stories now surrounding the op-ed. . One is the election of the unhinged government of Netanyahu in November 2022 and the systemic abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, including grave instances of sexual assault, the destruction of Gaza, and galloping annexation in the occupied West Bank after October 7, 2023. The other story is the assault on Israel by the Iran-backed Axis of Resistance and, with it, the systematic demonization of Israel, and a tsunami of anti-Semitism, also after October 7, now based on narratives shaped in mainstream media by members of the so-called human rights community in synch with Hamas style talking points.

Responding to the Kristof op-ed, Hen Mazzig notes here that the New York Times has not had on staff a public editor since 2017. The public editor is an internal ombudsman position meant to ensure fair, accurate, and transparent reporting. You can read more about the decision here and here as reported at the New York Times itself, and wonder about the impact on the publication. Removing this layer of journalistic accounting sheds further light upon coverage and analysis of Israel and Palestine, now at a moment of radical crisis. Responding to the digital age, the decision by Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. was based on the assumption that “readers and social media followers collectively serve as a modern watchdog.”  Those of us who want to understand better about physical and moral injury and politics in Palestine and Israel are caught between a rock and a hard place in this challenging digital environment, assessing the difference between a truth and a lie, and the way they fold into each other with such stunning ease.

Religion is the beating heart of the rot in Israel today, but Netanyahu and Israeli society are ultimately responsible for activating and tolerating this dangerous mutation in Judaism

Ihab Hassan @IhabHassane:

Israeli settlers exhumed the body of Hussein Mahmoud Asasa, an 80-year-old Palestinian man, and dug up his grave because it was near an illegal settlement — most likely built on land stolen from him and his family — in the West Bank. Even dead Palestinians are not spared from settler terrorism.

Ihab Hassan is too polite to mention the deep religious rot inundating Israel and Israeli society under Netanyahu and his Kahanist government. There is not much more depth to the depravity of state and army sanctioned anti-Palestinian religious-Jewish terrorism in the occupied West Bank, in complete violation of the image of God in this human person and a desecration of the divine Name.

You can find more information about this story and others here at Times of Israel.

Dr. Jordan Loewen-Colón presented this very sharp and critical talk at Syracuse about the intersection of AI, the world of business, tech and society, and the Humanities before a large and rapt crowd. Colleagues should invite him to campus and learn more about the now-future of humanistic study and culture.

Dr. Loewen-Colón wrote his dissertation in the Department of Religion at Syracuse on VR and religion, and digital dualism. He is cofounder of the AI Alt Lab and adjunct assistant professor of AI Ethics and Policy at Queen’s University’s Smith School of Business in Ontario, Canada

A letter from the liberal-left London Initiative against the unprecedented wave of state-sponsored Jewish terror against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank

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List of Signatories

March 2026

Dear President Herzog,

In a letter from Diaspora Jewry to Prime Minister Netanyahu dated 7^th August 2025, over 6,300 members of world Jewry from 20 countries implored the Prime Minister to “Enforce the law in the West Bank, where the frequency and intensity of deadly violence by Jewish extremists is unprecedented”.

Facilitated by The London Initiative and signed by many prominent Diaspora leaders with lifelong commitments to Israel, the letter urged The Prime Minister  “to prevent attacks by settlers and their supporters and ensure arrests and prosecutions of those responsible”.

Since then, the situation has only deteriorated, reaching a new nadir during the war with Iran. On Wednesday 18^th March, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir issued his own stark condemnation. He described attacks by Jewish extremists against Palestinian civilians and IDF soldiers in the West Bank as “morally and ethically unacceptable” and a major strategic threat to Israel’s security and future.

Israel’s security forces are clearly better able to protect Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, living under different levels of Israeli military and civil control, from Jewish terror. That they do not act decisively suggests a lack of directives from the government.

Mr. President, the terror, death and destruction inflicted by Jewish-Israeli extremists against innocent Palestinians across the West Bank is an abomination.

It is not only morally shameful but a strategic threat to the future of Israel. It damages world Jewry and the relationship of future generations with Israel. Sadly, based on events and on the statements of the most extreme coalition partners it can be concluded that the violence now engulfing the West Bank is not only condoned by the government but is in fact policy.

Our commitment to Israel as the national home of the Jewish People is unwavering. It is grounded in the Jewish and democratic values enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence – values of mature liberal democracy, fairness for all citizens, and a striving to live in secure peace with Israel’s neighbors, including the Palestinian People.

It is a commitment to the dignified partnership between Diaspora Jewry, all citizens of Israel and the State of Israel of which you frequently speak.

Mr. President, you have consistently affirmed our conviction that as Diaspora Jews it is both our right and obligation to speak up and speak out. In this regard we will continue to support citizens of Israel of all backgrounds working courageously to protect the safety, dignity and freedom of innocent Palestinians and uphold the rule of law.

We note with deep regret the absence of such a commitment from this government and call on you to share our profound concerns as here set out with The Prime Minister, members of the government, its ambassadors and members of the Knesset.

Mr. President, Pesach is upon us. As we have for millennia, Jews everywhere will reflect on the promise of freedom and responsibilities of power. We call on you to use your position to implore the government to put an end to the abomination of Jewish-extremist terror and the era of impunity for its perpetrators.

Should this scourge remain unchecked it will undermine the promise of the Jewish People’s freedom, security and sovereignty.

Yours Sincerely and Chag Sameach,

Hebrew Translation

Arabic Translation

The following is a summary of personal impressions followed by a few critical comments of my own a week after the second conference of Smol Emuni held two Sundays ago at Congregation Bnei Jeshurun in Manhattan. , My own thoughts about Judaism as an elementary and protean form of power were only sharpened at the conference. About this more below, but in relation to the poison-politics of Isael and Palestine, I would see religion as a dyadic power –a profound source of moral and political culture, and a negative force and source of violence deeply structured into the life of a people.

Smol Emuni (Faithful Left) is the American sister branch of Ha’Smol Ha’Emuni in Israel. Smol Emuni is a Jewish religious left movement organizing opposition to the right and the religious right and in support of peace and justice in Israel and Palestine. Open to a diverse array of voices, Smol Emuni in the United Stats is dominated by voices on the progressive Zionist left. At least that was my impression at the conference, understanding that others might not have seen it that way. All of the plenary speakers, including Palestinian Americans, whose opposition to Zionism runs deep in their bones, avowed deep and open connection to the place and to all the people who live there, not disengagement.

The conference met two+ years after October 7 and the destruction of Gaza, a year into Trump’s second term of office, in the midst of an uptick of Jewish settler terrorism in the occupied West Bank, a day or so after the outbreak of war against Iran. In his words of welcome to the conference, Rabbi Roli Matalon of Congregation Bnei Jeshurun identified as chaos the overwhelming reality of our current moral and political moment. In her opening remarks, Rachel Landsberg (co-founder of Smol Emuni USA and its program director) defined the moment in terms of fear and uncertainty. In the face of radical chaos, fear, and uncertainty, Smol Emuni understands that the future of Israel and Palestine is bound up together with each other and with Judaism. Against the grain, the work of Smol Emuni was described by Landsberg in terms of human connection and critical reflection, and openness to new perspectives.

The central point made by professor of Jewish history David Myers who opened the morning plenary was to locate the critical work of Smol Emuni in relation to power and sovereign power. At the crux of the chaos today, not just in Israel but across the globe, power was described as a source of evil. Per Myers, the starting point for any discussion of Israel and Zionism today, the problem of state-sovereign power is basic to the work of the Jewish left. But what about religion? I cannot recall if Myers mentioned Judaism in this or any critical context. Also at the morning plenary, it was Greg Khalil (the president and co-founder of the Telos Group, a Washington-based peacemaking nonprofit that specializes in engaging with communities of faith) who described Zionism as a religion, i.e. bound up with ritual, community and identity, and perceived as being beyond critique.

I think it was journalist Amira Hass at the morning plenary who used the word “mutation” to describe Israel today. To my ear, her choice of the word echoes acid remarks made awhile back online by philosopher Asa Kasher to describe the radicalized and alien form of Judaism that today is consuming Israeli political life. As a historian, Myers wasasked when he thought this mutation of politics and Jewish religion first began to take shape. Various answers were suggested –1967, 1948, the Holocaust, or, per Dr. Eman Ansari at the afternoon plenary, at the very origin of the Zionist movement at the turn of the last century.

Unable to make it out of the country with the outbreak of the war with Iran, Mikhael Manekin, founder of Ha’Smol Ha’emuni in Israel, spoke on Zoom from Jerusalem. Manekin also addressed power, namely the enormity of history, and high-level scales of complexity and calculations which ordinary citizens are powerless to control. In the face of that, Manekin evoked the importance of grassroots work with Palestinians in the occupied West Bank in terms of small scale “moments and movements.” Not without critical pushback from his fellow panelists, Manekin described the problem of Israel and Zionism and state violence and settler colonialism in the West Bank as a “theological problem.”

Breakout sessions after the morning plenary varied. There was panels on Immigration & ICE, the One Homeland-Two States  confederation idea, a theology of strangers, Israel education curricula in Jewish schools, history and contemporary trends in Haredi communities relating to Zionism and nationalism, a screening of the film Children No More, and an experiential session based on teachings of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov

At the afternoon plenary, moderator Rivka Press Schwarts returned to the work to be done, as did Acting Chief Executive officer of the New Israel Fund Mickey Gitzin. Dr. Ansari described her own experience as a Palestinian woman growing up in Saudi Arabia and overcoming culturally imbedded assumptions and her own forging bonds of human connections with Jews in the face of the profound hurt and injustice that Zionism manifests at the heart of Palestinian life. Esther Sperber (Executive Director of Smol Emuni) concluded the conference with words about a Torah of justice, truth, and peace, about clarity, the imperative not to be silent, and the urgent need to amplify voices in Jewish tradition that seek repair and forgiveness, acknowledgment of harm done to others, and the need to start with uncertainty and honesty.

What I took from the conference about Judaism in Israel and the religious left:

About Judaism and religion, I would want to say that the spirit of the conference lacked a direct and critical sharpness. If anything, Rabbi of Bnei Jeshurun Roli Matalon’s brief words of welcome reflected the inverse of what needs to be said much more honesty on the Jewish left and on the Jewish religious left. For Matalon, malevolent political actors leading the State of Israel today are “using” Judaism to promote a rightwing political agenda. I would argue that this line of critique signals a basic confusion. It is easy for liberals and progressives to set themselves against Religious Zionism and state sponsored religious-settler terrorism. But American Jews have a hard time getting their mind around the deeper problem and painful reckoning. In Israel, the primary agent of chaos today is “Judaism,” not Zionism.

The desire at Smol Emuni to cultivate from the ground up a Judaism of morality and justice obscures the “root” of religion in power. Missing from the analysis at Smol Emuni and across the Jewish religious left is that Torah constitutes a complex source of power. As a protean force, Judaism lies at the heart of the abuse of power, an animating source of religious fascism in Israel. About protean power, the rabbis in the Babylonian Talmud understood things very well. Without fear of heaven, religion is toxic. The Bavli understands that Torah itself is a dyadic force, either a drug of life (sam ḥayyim) or a drug of death (sam mitah) that Moses put (sam) before the children of Israel (Yoma 72b).

I am old enough to remember when Israel was secular. On the whole, Israelis used to say they were Israeli first, and then Jewish. It seems to me that the mutation of Judaism currently transforming Israel and Israeli politics began during Oslo and in the wake of the Second Intifada. Two years after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by religious Zionism, it was 1997 when Netanyahu whispered with calculated wickedness in the ears of an aged Kabbalist that the left forgot what it is to be Jewish. It was around this time that the poison of Jewish ethno-religion begin to mark hegemonic power in Israeli political life. Once upon a time, the storied Jewish parties in Israel were organized under ideological rubrics marked by names like Mapai, Mapam, Alignment, Herut, Likud, Mizrachi, the National Religious Party. In the wake of the Second Intifada, new parties with weird names began to mushroom on the political scene — Israel Our Home Party, The Jewish Home Party, Blue and White, and, finally at the very bottom of the fetid barrel, Jewish Power. These were the political parties that were buoyed by and that carried the transformation in the discourse towards more Judaism in public and political life. Religious Zionism is the spearhead of extremism in Israeli society, including in the army. Religious Zionism is the sector most invested in annexing the occupied Palestinian West Bank. Religious Zionism was behind the judicial putsch. Abandoning the hostages to their fate, Religious Zionism extended the war in Gaza at the expense of Palestinian life. Backed up by the state, Jewish terrorism against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank is dati. Today, it is religion that poisons secular Zionism and Israeli democracy, not vice-versa.

Echoing the realization from many years ago by religious gadfly Yeshayahu Leibowitz is to consider the distinction between religion and politics. On the one hand, Smol Emuni registers in the mirror of the rightwing Religious Zionism it opposes. This goes to show that infusing politics and the public sphere with religious meaning and purpose is dangerous at worst and naïve at best. Against the combination of religion and state is to see that the political is not the reshut of absolute value and that the power of religion is not itself political in any self-obvious direction. Instead, religion provides a critical vantage position from which to reflect on society and to contribute to its wellbeing from off to the side without, on the other hand, seeking to dominate it.

Smol Emuni is a home for the lonely person of faith, a home for the Jewish left. The great value of Smol Emuni, in cooperation with partners in Israel and Palestine, lies in changing points of view among American Jews about Zionism and Judaism and Israel on an alternative alignment of spiritual and human values.

You can confirm or disconfirm my impressions of the event at this livestream and read about the conference at Ha’aretz.

Our current international map is composed of tectonic layers of bad: Trump and Putin and Xi and fascism at home and abroad including Europe, the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI), Netanyahu and the Religious Right, Hamas and Hezbollah. The future of democracy in the U.S., Iran, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and Ukraine is caught in the middle between malevolent political actors.

Think what you want about the people over here and in Europe screaming non-stop about Israel for last 2+ years who, at best, say nothing about the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Iran-led Axis of Resistance, and the January Massacre in Iran.

The war with Iran is the war that Sinwar started on October 7, setting off a chain reaction toppling the Iran backed Axis of Resistance in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria leaving Iran completely exposed.

No, Netanyahu is not pushing the U.S. into war with Iran. It is a dumb take because Trump does what Trump wants and Netanyahu is subservient to him. Israel does not have the pull in Washington that critics think it once had, but never really had. People who say this are suffering from Israel brain rot that has more than a little to do with classical anti-Semitic canards about Jewish power

Iran is a nation of 90,000,000 people brutalized by a religious fascist regime and a clerical-military political system that has rotted out the entire country from the inside. 30,000 people were murdered by the regime in the January Massacres in Iran, accelerating the path to war.

The IRI refused to accept zero enrichment of uranium as demanded by the Trump Administration. About possible regime calculations (reported at NYT): “Avoiding war is indeed a high priority, but not at any cost,” said Sasan Karimi, a political scientist at the University of Tehran who served as the deputy vice president for strategy in Iran’s previous government. “At times, a political state — especially an ideological one — may weigh its place in history as heavily as, or even more heavily than, its immediate survival.”

These anti-war claims made by critics in the West may not be true: [1] increased economic and diplomatic pressure on the regime would “bring about a fundamental change in its foreign policy and/or spur defections in its ranks [2] Iran has extensive military capacities including proxy forces ready and able to draw the United States into a quagmire and wreak long-term havoc.

The statement from UK, France, and Germany speaks to the entire array of IRI malfeasance. France, Germany and the United Kingdom have consistently urged the Iranian regime to end Iran’s nuclear program, curb its ballistic missile program, refrain from its destabilizing activity in the region and our homelands, and to cease the appalling violence and repression against its own people. Oman and Qatar and also Saudi Arabia tried to get Trump to back down. IRI attacks against these and other Gulf States and also Cyprus re-enforce this point of view of Iran as a regional threat.

Regarding U.S. interest now: IRI is a U.S. enemy state going back to the hostage crisis and bombing or Marines in Beirut by Hezbollah, killing U.S. troops in Iraq by Iran backed militias. Question: U.S. is closing once and for all the Iran file and Iran nuke file at a moment after all redlines were crossed on October 7, the war in Gaza, after the IRI and its Axis have been critically weakened by Israel + another wave of mass domestic protests followed by and the January Massacre which will have left the IRI system forever marred. Russ Douthat observes, Trump attacks Iran now because it is weak, not strong.

George Will writes, “The at least 30,000 protesters who perished in Iran’s streets in early January did not die in vain.” This may not be true. It is still too early to tell whether or not they died or did not die in vain. At the end of the day, regime change might be an impossible reach and the Trump Administration will back down if the IRI does in fact bend on its nuclear, ballistic, and proxy ambitions. Democracy in Iran will depend on Iranian opposition to the IRI. Arash Azizi sheds more sober light here on a possible future.

After October 7 and the January Massacre, attention shifts. Iran is now firmly visible at the center of things.

There is no light at the end of this tunnel. Impossible to see right now –normalization of behavior and ties across the entire region is the only viable path forward, not endless war.