MONDAY: Nicholas Kristof reports from the world!

MONDAY, MAY 11, 2026

Attention should be paid: Putting it mildly, the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof is in the middle of a very distinctive journalistic career.   

Routinely, he describes the world we actually live in. With apologies for what follows, so it is today.  Headline included, his essay starts as shown:

The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians   

It’s a simple proposition: Whatever our views of the Middle East conflict, we should be able to unite in condemning rape.

Supporters of Israel made that point after the brutal sexual assaults against Israeli women during the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Benjamin Netanyahu and many U.S. senators, including Marco Rubio, condemned that sexual violence, and Netanyahu rightly called on “all civilized leaders” to “speak up.”

And yet in wrenching interviews, Palestinians have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children—by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.  

There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes. 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.”  

That's the way today's essay starts. The testimony by victims, named and unnamed, begins after that. We suppose we should include some such material as this:

[Continuing directly from above]
What does this standard operating procedure look like? Sami al-Sai, 46, a freelance journalist, says that as he was being taken to a prison cell after his detention in 2024, a group of guards threw him to the ground.

“They were all hitting me, and one stepped on my head and neck,” he said. “Someone pulled my pants down. They pulled down my boxers.” And then one of the guards pulled out a rubber baton used to beat prisoners.

“They were trying to force it into my rectum, and I was bracing myself to prevent it, but I couldn’t,” he said, speaking with increasing anxiety. “It was so painful.” The guards were laughing at him, he said. “Then I heard someone say, ‘Give me the carrots,’” he recalled, adding that they then used a carrot. “It was extremely painful,” he said. “I was praying for death.”  

And so on at length from there. This too is part of the world.

We're reminded of a discussion we had with a person whose memory we treasure when we were both 17. The topic that day was this:  

If a person knows that suffering is happening around the world, doesn't that person have an obligation to go off into the world and try to address it?  

We didn't want the answer to be yes, but it seemed to us that it was.  

That was the spring of 1965. The eucalyptus trees would have been extremely fragrant. This next connection is much more recent:

Why have some young people, perhaps on college campuses, sometimes seemed to be less sympathetic to Israel (at least as Israel currently functions), and more "pro-Palestinian," than their elders may tend to be? 

Several years ago, we suggested a possible answer. It could be that the younger people know certain things about that endlessly tragic situation that their elders may not know.  

(Teach your parents well, the famous song suggested.)

The younger people may know things that their parents don't! That doesn't mean that the younger people will have perfect judgment concerning the things they know because, of course, they won't.

Nicholas Kristof is off in the world! Also, as we all know, reports like his long report today will almost always lead nowhere.