The question we seem afraid to ask! Why is Gaza treated so differently?

I start with something that shouldn’t need saying. Palestinian civilians have suffered terribly. Whatever one’s views of Israel, Hamas, Benjamin Netanyahu or the wider Middle East conflict, yes, there is suffering among innocent Palestinians. Children have been killed, families displaced, homes destroyed, and a civilian population has endured appalling hardship.

Acknowledging that suffering does not, however, require us to suspend our critical faculties.

And there is one extraordinarily important part of the story which seems to disappear from much political and media discussion. Hamas is not simply a Palestinian political organization that Israel happens to disagree with. Hamas is a terrorist organization proscribed by the United Kingdom and many other countries. The UK Government states explicitly that Hamas commits, participates in, prepares for, promotes and encourages terrorism, and identifies the destruction of Israel among its aims.

That is not an Israeli propaganda claim. It is the position of the British Government and many others in the world. So why does this fact so often seem to become little more than a footnote when the Gaza conflict is discussed?

The uncomfortable question

Imagine, for a moment, a country whose neighbor was controlled by an organization which had carried out a murderous attack on its civilians, taken hundreds of hostages and openly regarded the destruction of that country as part of its political objective. Would we really expect that country simply to shrug its shoulders and say: “Ah, never mind. We must concentrate exclusively on the consequences of our response”? Of course not.

The Hamas-led attack of 7 October 2023 was not an unfortunate misunderstanding. Around 1,200 people were killed, and hundreds were taken hostage, as so many need to be reminded of. Yahya Sinwar, subsequently Hamas’s overall leader, was fully identified as one of the principal architects of the attack. Neither has Hamas suddenly, in the meantime, become a liberal, democratic movement committed to coexistence. And that matters, and should be central, to any debate or argument.

It matters because any serious discussion of Gaza has to address not merely what Israel has done, but why Israel is fighting Hamas in the first place, what Hamas has said and done, and what Hamas would do if it were left in a position to repeat the attack.

Hamas leaders have repeatedly presented the conflict as a continuing struggle. In 2024, for example, senior Hamas figure Khaled Meshaal spoke of the organization rising again despite the devastation inflicted upon it. The big question therefore becomes unavoidable. If Hamas remains committed to armed struggle and capable of rebuilding, what exactly is Israel supposed to do? Sit there and accept being rocketed almost daily?

That does not give Israel a license to do whatever it wants. It does not excuse civilian casualties. It does not make every Israeli military action legitimate. It does not mean that every criticism of Israel is antisemitic. But it does mean that the Hamas factor cannot simply be removed from the equation.

Why the extraordinary imbalance in attention?

This leads to a broader question. Why has Gaza generated such an extraordinary political, cultural and activist mobilization in Britain compared with other humanitarian catastrophes, many if not most far more serious in terms of human numbers alone? Look at Nigeria.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom has repeatedly documented severe religious-freedom problems in Nigeria, including attacks on Christian communities, churches and clergy. Its 2026 reporting describes continuing attacks, kidnappings and killings affecting Christians and other religious communities. The destruction of churches and the looting of personal property. This is not imaginary persecution invented by somebody on social media. It is documented by an independent US governmental commission.

Yet where are the comparable marches, the enormous university campaigns or the political parties in Christian (yes, OK, it may be multicultural) Britain making Nigerian Christian persecution a central component of their foreign-policy platforms? Where are the endless celebrity statements, the school campaigns or the equivalent level of British political activism?

And Nigeria is only one example. What about the people of Sudan, the Rohingya, the Uyghurs facing severe repression in China, women living under the Taliban, the persecution of religious minorities in parts of the Middle East and Africa, the extraordinary suffering inflicted upon civilians in Yemen?

These causes matter too. The point is not to suggest that because somebody campaigns for Palestinians they must therefore campaign for everybody else. That would be absurd.

The point is to ask why one particular conflict has generated a degree of political and cultural mobilization so vastly greater than many other catastrophes involving comparable, or as has been the case, such greater human suffering. That is a 100% legitimate question.

And then there is Israel

Israel presents another complication that is frequently brushed aside. Israel is not a conventional Western power fighting a powerless population for territory. It is a small state surrounded by a complicated history of hostile movements and states, and it has faced repeated wars, terrorism, rocket attacks and attempts to destroy it. None of that makes Israel automatically right. But neither does Palestinian suffering automatically make Israel wrong. Two things can be true simultaneously, namely Palestinian civilians can be innocent victims, and Hamas can be a terrorist organization whose ideology and actions represent a genuine threat to Israel and Jews.

The refusal to hold those two propositions in one’s head simultaneously is one of the great failures of contemporary political debate.

Gaza did not begin in 1948

Nor should history begin whenever it becomes politically convenient. Gaza has an extraordinarily long history. Jewish communities existed there for thousands of years and during later periods, including a documented Jewish presence during the medieval period. But that does not mean that Gaza is somehow “Jewish territory” today.

It means simply that the historical relationship between Jews and Gaza is considerably older and more complicated than some modern narratives suggest. Likewise, Palestinian national identity did not simply spring into existence in 1964 because Yasser Arafat decided to invent it. That would be historically simplistic.

Arafat himself was born in Cairo, and the Palestinian national movement had developed well before the creation of the PLO in 1964. History is rarely as tidy as the slogans painted on placards. And that is precisely the problem.

So is it antisemitism?

Here is where the argument becomes genuinely uncomfortable. Is the extraordinary focus on Israel evidence of antisemitism? Sometimes, undoubtedly, it can be. Antisemitism exists on the political left, the political right and within Islamist extremist movements. Jews have experienced the consequences of it for centuries, and pretending that it has somehow disappeared because we are living in the twenty-first century is ridiculous.

But it would also be intellectually lazy to conclude that everybody who criticizes Israel is an antisemite. Many people genuinely care about Palestinian civilians, and that Israel’s military conduct may have at times been excessive. Many oppose the policies of the Israeli government without harboring the slightest hostility towards Jews. Those positions are legitimate.

The harder question is whether some people who insist they are motivated exclusively by concern for Palestinian human rights apply an extraordinary double standard to Israel.

If the suffering of civilians is the principle, why is the principle applied with such intensity to Israel but with dramatically less intensity elsewhere? If opposition to terrorism is the principle, why is Hamas’s terrorism so often treated as a footnote?

If the rights of women are the principle, why is there so little sustained campaigning about women living under regimes that systematically restrict their rights? If religious freedom is the principle, why does the persecution of Christians and other minorities in countries such as Nigeria receive such comparatively little popular attention? And if the principle is simply opposition to injustice, why does Israel so frequently appear to occupy a category of its own?

Those are not antisemitic questions. They are questions about simple consistency.

The “what has Gaza ever done for us?” argument

There is another argument which, yes, has to be treated with caution to avoid it becoming a Monty Python comedy sketch. But it is sorely tempting to ask, “what has Gaza ever done for Britain?”

Has Gaza provided Britain with intelligence and protected British citizens? Has it developed medical or technological discoveries for Britain? Has it protected LGBT people? Does it pay for the cost to the UK of policing for its never-ending support marches?

But cynicism aside, ultimately that is the wrong test. Humanitarian concern should not be a transaction. A starving child does not have to provide Britain with a technological innovation before that child deserves compassion. Neither does it have to be equated with a watermelon. The genuine question is different.

Why does British (and other world) compassion appear to be so dramatically selective?

That is a much more difficult question to answer. Britain can care about Gaza. But if it is to be balanced, Britain must also care about Christians in Nigeria, about Sudan, Ukraine, the Rohingya, the Uyghurs, Iranian and Afghan women and about Christians persecuted for their faith. And Britain can and should also care about Israelis murdered by Hamas.

There is no contradiction whatsoever in doing all of those things. The contradiction arises when one humanitarian cause becomes an all-consuming political obsession while other victims barely register.

Perhaps the real issue is not Gaza at all

Perhaps the question we should be asking is not, “Why do you support Israel?” or “Why do you support Palestine?” Perhaps it needs to be the far more honest question, “Do you apply the same moral standards to everybody?” If the answer is “yes”, then let us all see those standards applied consistently.

Condemn Hamas, terrorism, murder of Israeli civilians, antisemitism, attacks on Palestinian civilians, excessive or unlawful Israeli military action, the persecution of Christians in Nigeria, the oppression of women in Afghanistan and Iran and that of the Rohingya and Uyghurs and the atrocities in Sudan. Condemn all of it. That would be genuine universalism.

But if our compassion becomes selective, our outrage becomes tribal and our moral standards change according to who is committing the offense, then perhaps we should stop congratulating ourselves on our magnificent virtue. Perhaps the uncomfortable truth is that some people are not actually applying a universal moral principle at all. They have simply chosen their side irrespective of history, or more importantly, “truth and proof”.

And when the side they have chosen is Israel’s enemy, they sometimes find themselves making excuses for minimizing or simply forgetting things they would never tolerate from anybody else.

That does not prove that every critic of Israel is motivated by Jew-hatred. But neither should we be frightened of asking whether, in some cases, antisemitism is hiding in plain sight behind the language of human rights.