A dangerous instinct is on the rise in the Jewish world right now: the belief that we must choose between defending Israel and defending moral clarity.

This belief claims that if one acknowledges the horrors committed against Israelis on Oct. 7, one cannot also confront allegations of abuse carried out in Israel’s name. Or conversely, that if one speaks honestly about Palestinian suffering, one must abandon the legitimacy of Jewish power and sovereignty altogether.

That binary is a false choice and represents a collapse of both moral seriousness and Jewish integrity.

This week, The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published a deeply disturbing column detailing allegations of sexual abuse and torture against Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons and detention facilities. The reactions were immediate and predictable. Some treated the reporting as undeniable truth beyond scrutiny. Others dismissed it as wholesale as blood libel before grappling with a single allegation. And still others offered a more nuanced response, recognizing the need to scrutinize the sources quoted, various reports, and testimonies, while acknowledging the very real possibility of a broader need for further investigation and exposure of very real and horrific behavior in the Israeli prison system.

But we, as Jews, do not get to avert our eyes simply because the conversation is painful, politically inconvenient, or weaponized by those who seek Israel’s destruction.

Nor do we get to surrender our critical faculties and abandon standards of evidence because the allegations confirm our prior assumptions.

The Jewish task is harder than that. Because two things can be true at the same time.

There is, undeniably, a massive, global, coordinated effort to demonize Israel, beyond the mere critique of policies or governments, and to erode the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty itself. We see it in the selective outrage, the persistent double standards, the immediate inversion of victim vs. aggressor after Oct. 7, and the normalization of slogans that would be unimaginable if directed at any other nation.........

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