On Deflection and Documentation: A Reader Exchange
Exploring the Comfort of Looking Away
The response to yesterday’s piece on exhaustion and Israeli state violence included a comment that crystallizes something essential about how we process documented horror. When I shared the post on Instagram, a reader wrote to say they were pushed “over the edge” not by the torture I described but by my failure to mention Hamas while describing it. The exchange that followed illuminates the cognitive mechanisms that make sustained witness so exhausting.
The reader’s comment:
“What pushes me over the edge is that with all your intellectual understanding of the situation, you never mention Hamas. It’s as if Israel is the only aggressor in the story. It’s as if Hamas doesn’t exist. All that exists from your writing (or the writing I’ve seen here at least) is Israel the aggressor and innocent Palestinian civilians.”
My response:
Thank you for this comment, which represents a common response to any sustained examination of Israeli state violence. The demand to mention Hamas whenever documenting Israeli torture of Palestinian prisoners reveals a particular understanding of how moral responsibility works, one that insists every discussion of power must be “balanced” by mentioning resistance to it, no matter how asymmetric the relationship.
Your claim that I “never mention Hamas” and write as though “Hamas doesn’t exist” suggests you’ve engaged with my work selectively at best. I’ve spent years covering this region from Cairo to Gaza, from the revolutionary movements of the Arab Spring to the intricate dynamics of Palestinian political factions. I’ve written extensively about the failures of Palestinian leadership, the corruption of the Palestinian Authority, the strategic miscalculations of various resistance movements, and the complex internal politics that have fractured Palestinian society.
To reduce my body of work to “Israel the aggressor and innocent Palestinian civilians” reveals either profound unfamiliarity with what I’ve actually written or a deliberate choice to mischaracterize it because this particular piece makes you uncomfortable. When I write about Israeli soldiers gang raping a bound Palestinian prisoner at Sde Teiman, what exactly would mentioning Hamas accomplish? Would it make the rape less severe? Would the ruptured organs heal? Would the torture become more acceptable? The insistence that Hamas must be invoked whenever Israeli violence is documented suggests that Palestinian suffering only becomes real or worthy of attention when properly contextualized within a framework that distributes blame equally between occupier and occupied.
This reflexive demand for “balance” functions as a sophisticated form of denial. It transforms every specific incident of documented torture into an abstract debate about competing narratives. A Palestinian child dies in an Israeli prison, and we’re expected to pause and provide historical context about rocket attacks. A bound prisoner is raped by soldiers, and we must immediately pivot to discussing October 7th. The machinery of justification demands that every Palestinian body broken by Israeli violence be weighed against Israeli security concerns, as though suffering requires this kind of moral arithmetic.
The power asymmetry here is not a matter of opinion but documented fact. Israel maintains one of the world’s most advanced militaries, controls all borders, airspace, and seas around Palestinian territories, operates a vast surveillance apparatus, and has imprisoned three-quarters of a million Palestinians since 1967. This is not a conflict between equal forces requiring balanced coverage but a relationship between occupier and occupied, between a nuclear-armed state and a stateless population living under military law. My years of reporting from the region have consistently documented this reality while also examining the failures, violence, and political disasters on all sides.
Your comment suggests that acknowledging this reality means ignoring Palestinian violence or treating all Palestinians as innocent. Neither is true. What it means is refusing to pretend that mentioning Hamas somehow provides necessary context for understanding why Israeli soldiers vote on whether to rape or enslave a teenage Bedouin girl, as happened in the Nirim affair of 1949, years before Hamas existed. It means recognizing that the systematic torture documented in Israeli prisons represents choices made by a powerful state, not inevitable responses to security threats.
The intellectual understanding you reference requires precisely this ability to examine power without false equivalencies. When B’Tselem, Israel’s own human rights organization, describes Israeli prisons as a “network of torture camps,” they don’t include a disclaimer about Hamas because the torture would occur regardless. The administrative detention without trial, the 90 percent conviction rate in military courts, the systematic abuse of children in custody - none of this represents a response to Hamas but rather the architecture of occupation itself.
What truly pushes me over the edge is not your comment but what it represents: the exhausting demand that every documentation of Israeli violence be transformed into a “both sides” discussion that ultimately obscures the specific horror being examined. You read about soldiers concealing their gang rape of a prisoner behind riot shields and your response is to ask why I didn’t mention Hamas.
This response itself demonstrates how effectively the machinery of justification operates, training audiences to immediately deflect from documented atrocities toward abstract debates about balance. The suffering I document is not theoretical but embodied in specific Palestinian lives destroyed by specific Israeli policies. These policies predate Hamas, continue regardless of Hamas, and will persist after Hamas unless the fundamental structure of occupation changes. My extensive writing on the region’s history, from the buried alternatives of Jewish diaspora nationalism to the current manifestations of state violence, has consistently shown how these structures operate independently of whatever Palestinian political formation happens to exist at any given moment.
Your frustration with my writing stems from its refusal to participate in this ritualized deflection. That refusal is not oversight but choice, grounded in years of reporting that have shown me how these deflections serve to obscure rather than illuminate. When you see the accused soldiers in their balaclavas holding press conferences like heroes while their victim remains nameless in a hospital bed, the last thing needed is another rehearsal of talking points about Hamas. What’s needed is the moral clarity to name torture as torture, rape as rape, and to resist the exhausting demands that we pretend otherwise.
If you want to engage with the full scope of my work on Palestinian political failures, internal corruption, and violence, that archive exists. But demanding that every piece about Israeli state torture include perfunctory mentions of Hamas reveals an intellectual laziness that refuses to grapple with the specific horror being documented. This piece is about the machinery that enables Israeli soldiers to rape Palestinian prisoners while Israeli society celebrates them as heroes. That machinery deserves examination on its own terms, without the comfort of deflection that invoking Hamas provides.
The exchange captures something I’ve been thinking about often lately. The comment doesn’t actually dispute any facts I documented. It doesn’t claim the torture didn’t happen or the rape wasn’t real or the Palestinian prisoners deserved their treatment. Instead, it demands a different conversation entirely, one where every specific Israeli atrocity gets dissolved into general discussions about “both sides.”
This deflection has become so reflexive that some people genuinely cannot process documentation of Israeli violence without immediately seeking the comfort of contextualizing it within Palestinian violence. The result is that we never actually reckon with what it means that Israeli soldiers filmed themselves raping a prisoner, that their society largely defended them, and that the person who exposed this crime faced harsher consequences than the perpetrators.
These exchanges exhaust me precisely because they reveal how effectively certain audiences have been trained to avoid witnessing what’s directly in front of them. But sharing them feels necessary, because understanding these mechanisms of deflection helps explain why the horror continues with such impunity. When torture becomes just another topic for “balanced” debate, we’ve already surrendered the moral ground necessary for change.