I was sipping a rather uninspired flat white at a café in Aspen when the latest reports crossed my desk. The accounts from human rights organizations and whistleblowers regarding the treatment of Palestinian detainees in Israeli military prisons like Sde Teiman are, by any objective measure, completely horrifying. We are reading corroborated, first-hand accounts of systemic sexual violence, unchecked physical torture, and an environment of absolute, unrestrained power wielded against populations held indefinitely without charge.
The details are grim. They challenge our moral conscience. But as I set down my coffee and looked out over the Rockies, I found myself paralyzed by a far more terrifying thought: what if someone on a college campus uses this clear, documented evidence of systemic war crimes to make a broad, unnuanced point about the people committing them?
We live in a deeply polarized age. The modern attention span demands absolute moral clarity, treating geopolitical conflict as though it were a simple battle between good and evil. When young people read detailed medical reports of prisoners being sexually assaulted with metal rods, they immediately rush to label the perpetrators as "bad." But statecraft is not a children's movie. It is a complex, agonizing ecosystem of competing tragic choices, and it is deeply irresponsible to let the systemic sexual abuse of thousands of prisoners distract us from the real issue: the troubling, divisive rhetoric of the activists pointing it out.
Just last week, I was speaking with a remarkably articulate Uber driver in Washington—a former defense contractor, as it turns out—who reminded me that no nation has a perfect record on managing captive populations. This sentiment was echoed later that evening at a dinner party hosted by a prominent think-tank director in Georgetown. As the sea bass was served, we all agreed the reports of systemic sexual violence were "troubling," but we also unanimously agreed that it would be a catastrophic mistake to let this highly organized, state-sanctioned torture fracture our commitment to shared democratic values.
Do you have any idea how exhausting it is to be a centrist columnist right now? Every time I sit down at my oak desk to write a sweeping, thousand-word testament to the enduring moral bond between the United States and our most vital ally in the Middle East, another humanitarian agency drops a sixty-page dossier detailing rampant, unchecked atrocities. It is incredibly inconsiderate to those of us trying to maintain a posture of enlightened neutrality. The sheer, unrelenting volume of the human rights violations is making my both-sides rhetorical structure completely unsustainable. I am rapidly running out of synonyms for "complicated."
Critics of the Israeli prison system point to the fact that these abuses are not isolated incidents, but rather a systemic feature of the detention apparatus. They point to the recent events where far-right lawmakers and civilian mobs actively stormed military bases to fiercely defend the right of soldiers to sexually abuse detainees. Alarmists call this the terrifying collapse of a society into violent fascism. I prefer to view it as a vibrant, messy democracy in action. Where else in the Middle East would you see citizens so passionately, actively engaged in the judicial oversight of their own military police? It is a testament to a highly participatory civil society.
We understand that international observers are fixated on the phrase "systemic sexual torture," but we prefer to view it as an unauthorized, highly localized failure of our otherwise pristine bureaucratic paperwork.
Furthermore, if we are to have an honest conversation about accountability, we must ask the difficult questions of the Palestinian leadership. What have they done to foster an environment where Israeli soldiers feel they have no choice but to systematically sexually abuse detainees? If civil society in Gaza and the West Bank were more robust, perhaps the detention centers wouldn't need to be so crowded. Peace requires compromise from all parties. One side must recognize the right of the other to exist, and the other side must recognize the right of the first side to occasionally engage in unrestrained systemic abuse without being hauled in front of the Hague.
We must look at the bigger geopolitical picture. If we allow the systemic sexual abuse of prisoners to fracture the US-Israel relationship, who wins? Iran. Do we really want to hand Tehran a massive strategic victory just because of a few thousand corroborated instances of horrific sexual violence? We have to weigh the moral cost of the torture against the strategic value of having an ally who occasionally buys our fighter jets and uses them to bomb refugee camps. It is a delicate, agonizing balance, and one that requires the steady hand of experienced foreign policy professionals, not the emotional outbursts of human rights lawyers.
At a panel discussion I moderated recently at the Aspen Ideas Festival, titled "Security and Sensibility: Navigating the Post-Oct 7 World," a former Secretary of State leaned over to me and whispered something profound. He said that the true test of a democracy is not whether it occasionally commits horrific abuses, but whether it is capable of forming a blue-ribbon committee to quietly investigate those abuses for three years until the news cycle moves on. That is the kind of institutional resilience we should be celebrating.
So the next time you see a report about the horrors of Sde Teiman, or read a harrowing first-hand account of the unrestrained violence occurring in the dark corners of the military detention system, I urge you to take a deep breath. Resist the urge to view the situation in black and white. Remember that the Middle East is a complicated neighborhood. And please, spare a thought for those of us who have to find a way to write twelve hundred words defending it by Thursday.