Israel as Protest Habit, Sudan as Broken News
Old suspicion, new dress: anti-Jewish reflexes prime public zeal
There is a famine in Sudan and a famine of attention in the West. Cities are sacked, civilians butchered, children starved; the evidence piles up like rubble. Yet the boulevards that heave with righteous tumult over Israel fall strangely quiet when the killers are Sudanese and the victims have no marquee role in our domestic psychodramas. This is not an accident of geography. It is a failure of character. A culture that congratulates itself on its compassion has learned to spend its emotions where it flatters the self and to hoard them where it does not.
Consider the difference. Israel, for much of the Western public sphere, is not merely a country but a screen for every appetence and anxiety. It can be sloganized, monetized, and retweeted. Most enticing of all, it is close enough to Western policy that denunciation feels like leverage. In Sudan, there is no such narcotic, no tidy narrative, no reward for the pose. The cameras struggle to reach the atrocity, and algorithms cannot feed on what they cannot see. Hence the great humanitarian law of our time: if a massacre does not trend, it might as well not happen.
The double standard is not explained away by access problems or the usual talk of ‘complexity’. Many Western audiences adore complexity when it can be turned into a morality play with a familiar villain and a purifying chorus. Israel obliges them. Sudan does not. Conscience, it turns out, is not a muscle we exercise but a costume we wear. Where the script is prepared, the part is played to ovations. Where there is no script, there is silence.
There is also, let us admit it, an old poison decanted into new bottles. The only Jewish state is invited to bear a singular burden of evil. Its crimes, real or alleged, are treated as uniquely instructive, uniquely contagious, uniquely resonant with every tyranny on earth. The implication need not be shouted. It hums beneath the slogans, training the eye to grade Jewish self-defense as presumptively illicit and Jewish power as inherently suspect. The result is an ethical exchange rate in which the same dead child is priced differently depending on who fired the shot and which myth the onlooker prefers.
Those who insist that ‘all lives matter’ in the abstract might begin to act as though Sudanese lives matter in the concrete. Start with the elementary duties of a serious civilization. Name the perpetrators. Demand humanitarian access as a first principle. Fund the clinics and convoys before drafting the next statement. Read famine classifications as sirens. If a university can devote weeks to emergency debates, boycotts and tribunals about Israel, it can spare a fraction of its lungs and purses for those now starving in cities few of its graduates can find on a map.
The argument here is not that Israel deserves immunity from reproach. The claim is that reproach deserves a conscience. An ethic that detonates at the mention of Jerusalem and falls mute at the mention of El-Fasher is not an ethic at all. It is a rehearsal for wider cowardice. Selective indignation corrodes the faculties that guard liberty. If we learn to care only when there is applause, we forget how to care when there is merely suffering.
There is one further obscenity. The Sudanese who brave the void to testify, and the doctors and aid workers who smuggle out numbers that are really names, are punished twice: by the men with guns, and by the indifference of spectators, merely occupied elsewhere. The West loves to accuse. It loathes to attend. But attending is what adulthood demands. If outrage is to mean anything, it must be transferable.
Call things by their proper names. Ethnic murder in Darfur is ethnic murder. Starvation engineered by siege is a crime. Civilians pulverized by bombardment are not statistical noise. If one can chant against Israel weekly, one can find a voice for Sudan. If one cannot, then let us retire the grand talk of universal values and admit what too many already practice: indignation as fashion and compassion as prop.
The alternative is stark and simple. Either we widen the circle of our concern, or we shrink the circle of our honesty. Sudan will not be saved by our rhetoric. It may, however, be damned by our apathy. Choose.
