The Palestinian Cause: Who Benefits, Who Pays?

Why Gaza dominates, while Sudan suffers in silence.

Two wars began in 2023. Both are catastrophic. Only one has captivated the world.

Sudan’s civil war, now in its third year, has killed somewhere between 150,000 and 400,000 people depending on whose count you trust. Thirteen million people have been displaced. Nearly 20 million face acute food insecurity. More than 33 million need humanitarian assistance. The World Food Program is right now cutting emergency food for 800,000 people while most of the remaining recipients receive barely half their minimum caloric needs. The agency urgently needs US$426 million to sustain operations through early 2027.

Gaza’s death toll stands at over 74,000. Approximately 1.9 million people have been displaced. Around 1.4 million face acute food insecurity. About 2.1 million require humanitarian assistance.

To be clear: the suffering in Gaza is real, it is severe, and it demands serious attention. But the comparison is arresting. Sudan has roughly seven times the displaced population, fourteen times the number facing acute hunger, and sixteen times the number needing humanitarian assistance. Its death toll, even on conservative estimates, is roughly twice Gaza’s; on more comprehensive estimates, it is several times higher.

Now look at how the world has responded.

UN-coordinated humanitarian funding in 2026 amounts to about US$42 per person needing assistance in Sudan, and about US$705 per person in Gaza. For every dollar of appeal funding per person that Sudan attracts, Gaza attracts seventeen. Sudan’s 2023 UN appeal drew under half its requested funding. Gaza’s was fully met.

The media picture looks even more skewed. An analysis of English-language news coverage during equivalent three-month periods following the start of each conflict found 172,000 news items on Sudan and 2.3 million on Gaza: thirteen items on Gaza for every single item on Sudan. Social media tells the same story in larger numbers. Researchers tracked roughly 1.08 billion posts, reposts and comments about the Israel-Palestine conflict across major platforms in the first three months alone. A separate study of Sudan-related posts across a full year yielded around 4.16 million.

This is not a marginal disparity in attention. It is a different order of magnitude.

Why?

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is genuinely important. I write about it extensively, and I am not about to argue otherwise. But its importance does not come close to explaining this gap. Something else is happening.

The conflict serves the interests of a remarkable range of actors in ways that Sudan, with its messy, unglamorous war between two deeply unpopular military factions, simply does not.

For decades, Arab governments have found Palestinian grievance a useful deflection from domestic failure and regional rivalry; the humiliating defeats of 1948 and 1967 made Israel a focal point for mobilizing nationalist sentiment across the region.

The Soviet Union invested heavily in framing Zionism as settler colonialism, and that framing survived the Cold War to become the organizing logic of today’s activist left.

Iran and its proxies draw ideological legitimacy from the Palestinian cause while pursuing their own strategic interests in Israel’s destruction.

The UN Human Rights Council maintains a unique permanent agenda item singling out Israel for scrutiny that no other country faces, sustained by Arab-Islamic and Non-Aligned voting blocs. In 2025 Israel attracted 15 UN critical resolutions compared to 11 for the rest of the world. UNRWA, with its unique mandate perpetuating refugee status across generations, has institutional interests in Palestinian statelessness that are rarely examined honestly.

Hamas, for its part, has made a calculated strategy out of civilian suffering. NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence documented in 2019 how Hamas’s human-shield tactics, public relations operations and lawfare campaigns are designed to generate international pressure against Israel by maximizing the visibility of Palestinian civilian harm. Gaza’s constant social media presence is not incidental; it is partly engineered.

Sudan has no such infrastructure. No faction in Khartoum has the sophistication, global diaspora connections, or ideological allies to turn its catastrophe into political leverage.

And the media? Conflict generates audiences. Outrage sustains engagement. Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood have played various roles, including channeling US$ billions to influence Western universities, politicians, and the media via Al Jazeera to help create a simplified moral narrative. A clear oppressor and a clear oppressed victim are far more compelling than the muddy reality of two brutal Sudanese military factions fighting over power and resources. Sudan offers no satisfying global story. Hamas ensured Gaza provides a ready-made story to plug into a bigger story … at the expense of its own population.

Israel’s own contribution to the information war

There is, however, a dimension to the narrative gap that honest analysis cannot ignore: Israel’s own government has repeatedly made its situation worse. This is not a matter of blaming victims; it is a matter of strategic failure piled on top of adversarial propaganda.

As I argued in a previous post on this blog, “Netanyahu’s Unanswered Security Questions,” October 2026, Hamas’s use of human shields, public relations and lawfare to undermine Israel was well documented long before October 7, including by Charles Dunlap (2014, 2023) and NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence (2019). Yet the Netanyahu government was poorly prepared to counter these strategies. Its dysfunctional Public Diplomacy Ministry collapsed after the minister resigned on 12 October 2023 and was abolished ten days later.

Meanwhile, inflammatory and undisciplined rhetoric from Netanyahu and senior ministers provided ready ammunition for accusations of genocide and reinforced the international narrative of Palestinian victims and Israeli oppressors. Once that narrative was established, it became almost impossible to counter. The government failed to anticipate a well-documented information-war strategy, and then compounded the diplomatic damage through its own conduct.

This matters here because it adds a further layer to the gap between Gaza’s global salience and Sudan’s invisibility. Gaza’s saturation coverage is driven partly by Hamas’s strategic media operation and partly by Israel’s failure to mount a credible counter-narrative. Sudan has neither a propaganda machine generating footage for international consumption nor a powerful opposing state generating the kind of inflammatory responses that keep a conflict on front pages. The result is a double asymmetry: Gaza is over-present in the information space, and Sudan is entirely absent from it.

I call the resulting system an evolved anti-Israel metastructure. Several significant contributors have shaped it over decades. It is more diffuse and, in some ways, more troubling: a collection of incentives, narratives, organisations and institutional interests that have evolved together and now reinforce one another. Hamas understood this and plugged in. Iran also understands it – hence the media blackout while it massacred thousands of protesters, yet it welcomes media coverage blaming the US and Israel for increased petrol prices.

The danger is that maintaining the Palestinian cause becomes more politically rewarding than actually resolving Palestinian suffering.

Whether intentional or simply negligent, this is shocking!

Who pays?

Palestinians pay. They remain trapped between genuine grievances, failed and corrupt leadership, the predatory violence of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and an international narrative that rewards continued victimhood. Parts of the international community, sometimes explicitly, encourage violent “resistance” while offering Palestinians no realistic pathway to the sovereignty and security that a demilitarized, peaceful Palestinian state alongside Israel could provide.

Israelis pay. Continuing threats, diplomatic isolation and a global information environment saturated with decontextualized outrage make it harder, not easier, to build domestic political support for the compromises that a durable settlement would require.

And Sudanese pay the most, because they are invisible. Their catastrophe is not politically useful to anyone with a platform and a megaphone. They do not fit a global narrative. They do not have a diaspora large enough or strategically positioned enough to move institutions. They bleed, are abused and starve without the world noticing, because noticing them offers no one a political or overt moral dividend.

Two vicious cycles run in parallel: political and media amplification that prolongs the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by making it serve agendas beyond the region, and political and media invisibility that compounds Sudan’s suffering by placing it beyond the world’s attention. Neither cycle serves humanity. Both are, at least in principle, breakable.

What responsible engagement looks like

It starts with honesty about incentives: journalists, researchers, diplomats and institutional leaders need to ask not just what is happening, but who benefits from the story being told in this particular way.

Reporting on Gaza that takes the need for a realistic, security-first pathway toward two states seriously would scrutinise Hamas’s ideology and tactics, Iranian interference, Palestinian rejectionism and the absence of credible Palestinian leadership alongside Israeli settlement expansion, ministerial extremism, settler violence and policies that undermine separation.

If pro-Palestinian organizations weren’t obsessed with being anti-Israel, they would support groups like Commanders for Israel’s Security. CIS advocates halting settlement expansion, strengthening the Palestinian Authority as part of a Civil Separation approach which leaves the door open for a possible pathway to a two-state solution. It deserves at least as much coverage as the loudest voices on either extreme.

Humanitarian funding must reflect human need, not political utility. The case for redirecting attention and resources toward Sudan is not an argument against caring about Gaza; it is an argument for caring about suffering consistently.

As Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib from Realign For Palestine has said in many ways, the Palestinian cause must serve Palestinians: their security, their freedom, their genuine prospects for a state of their own. It cannot go on serving the agendas of governments that have never offered Palestinians citizenship, of movements that use Palestinian suffering as a symbol, or of organizations whose institutional survival depends on the conflict’s continuation.

Sudanese lives, meanwhile, cannot be contingent on becoming politically useful to someone with a seat at the table.

If a retired Australian in Perth, reading publicly available reports, can identify these patterns, then the foreign ministers, senior UN officials, journalists and editors of major news organizations, who have access to far more detailed information, have no excuse for not raising them consistently, loudly, and with the urgency the numbers demand.

The question remaining is whether they will.