Jon Skolnick

Much has been written about @NickKristof's latest NYT opinion column over the past 24 hours, most of it focusing on the specific claims and their sourcing, but what I think deserves most attention is something broader: how this kind of journalism, whatever its intentions, ultimately makes accountability harder to achieve rather than easier, and harms the very people it claims to champion. The principle that Israeli abuses should be investigated and condemned is not in dispute, and nobody serious is arguing otherwise. Israel is not above scrutiny, and in fact it operates under more intense international scrutiny than almost any country on earth, routinely held to standards applied nowhere else. The problem here is something different entirely: the complete collapse of evidentiary standards the moment Israel is the subject. This piece reads less like rigorous reporting and more like a catalogue of hearsay, unverifiable allegations, and activist claims stitched together into a sweeping moral indictment. Its sourcing leans heavily on Euro Med Human Rights Monitor, an organisation repeatedly criticised over extremist ties, disinformation, and deeply questionable methodology, yet treated throughout as a credible authority while its leadership openly engages in pro Hamas propaganda on X. Worse, the same ecosystem of activists and self appointed “experts” that amplifies Euro Med’s claims online increasingly feeds narratives into more established organisations and media outlets, laundering deeply contested allegations into the appearance of institutional credibility. The most severe claims are anonymous, uncorroborated, and presented in the emotional register of established fact rather than allegation, despite lacking meaningful evidentiary backing. Yet Kristof largely adopts them without serious scrutiny, publishing the piece in the Opinion section because even the already diminished evidentiary standards often applied to reporting on the Israeli Palestinian conflict would likely not suffice for it to pass as straight news reporting. This approach doesn't strengthen accountability, it actively destroys it. When every allegation is immediately inflated into systematic rape and "standard operating procedure" before any serious verification, genuine investigation becomes harder rather than easier. Real abuses, if they occurred, get buried beneath maximalist narratives so extreme that large portions of the public simply stop trusting any of it, and the people who actually suffered pay that price. It also alienates the vast majority of Israelis and Jews worldwide, including the many who are perfectly capable of criticising Israeli policy and supporting investigations into misconduct, but who understandably recoil when accusations begin resembling modernised blood libels dressed up as human rights reporting. The framing matters enormously, and so does proportionality, and so does evidence. Nor does any of this serve Palestinians. Atrocity inflation entrenches both sides deeper into defensive tribalism, and every dubious claim amplified by a prestigious outlet makes legitimate criticism easier to dismiss when it actually matters. The timing compounds everything. On a day when documented reporting on Hamas sexual violence was again circulating, the NYT chose to run an opinion column built substantially on unverifiable anonymous testimony asserting that Israelis are conducting systemic rape campaigns, not as a rigorously evidenced investigative report but as an opinion piece with the imprimatur of the paper of record. Kristof is not a naive bystander in any of this. In 2014 he used the full credibility of the NYT to repeatedly platform Somaly Mam, a Cambodian anti-trafficking activist whose harrowing personal story he championed across multiple columns, until it emerged that her backstory was substantially fabricated and he was forced to issue a public correction. When challenged this time around on his sourcing, corroboration, and methodology, he defaulted to bad faith engagement on social media rather than addressing the underlying concerns seriously. It is the same pattern, playing out again in a different context. Real journalism requires skepticism, corroboration, and restraint applied consistently regardless of the subject, and when those standards disappear the moment Israel is involved, what remains is not human rights reporting but narrative activism wearing a journalist's costume that does far more harm than good to everyone it claims to serve.