The West’s Racialized Morality Problem
Since the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas began this past month after two years of war, global media has increased coverage of the long-overlooked genocide in Sudan which has claimed over 150,000 lives, 40% higher than the 60,000 casualties Hamas has attributed to the IDF within the same timeframe. Despite the Gaza war’s relatively low civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio for a conflict involving urban warfare, much of the world has pointed to the fatality count to accuse Israel of “genocide”, a term coined to describe the widespread murder of Jews during World War II. Moreover, the term “apartheid” has also been appropriated from former segregation in South Africa to describe Israel’s relationship with the Palestinian Arabs, despite no actual segregation laws in Israel proper. Even the term “antisemitism” has been increasingly portrayed as referring to hate against Arabs as well as Jews, based solely on the fact that Arabic is a Semitic language. The application of all of these terms to Israel-Palestine illustrates the sophisticated degree of gaslighting used by guilt-ridden Westerners and Islamists alike.
While the West claims anti-Zionism/anti-Israel sentiment takes the spotlight due to Western funding of the alleged genocide in Gaza, this view takes Hamas’s casualty counts at face value, despite the numbers being solely reported by Hamas which was recently found to be relocating Israeli hostage corpses as well as executing the same Gazan civilians about whom the West claims to care. If Hamas is capable of this level of brutality and dishonesty, one wonders what else they could be covering up. As far as funding, despite claims that Israel owns the US in both a military and financial context, Turkey was actually the latest largest recipient of US weapons and Japan the largest investor in the US. Furthermore, is it really about Western support of Israel when the US also heavily arms Saudi Arabia which routinely bombs Yemeni civilians and supports UAE which funds the genocide in Sudan through support of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) currently slaughtering Sudanese civilians? In fact, even an internet search on news coverage containing “Gaza genocide” for the past year as of November 6, 2025, shows 166,000 results, while “Sudan genocide” returns only 18,100 results.
If we’re going to compare conflicts and related terminology, let’s be consistent. Or are Saudi Arabia and UAE too “brown” to be held accountable, while Israel and Jews are largely “white”? This is a common bogus justification based on diaspora shaming of Jews whose ancestors underwent forced diaspora in Europe. Indeed, it’s almost as if the Soviets predicted the white guilt that would sweep the West and suddenly claimed Jews as their own once modern Israel was established as a Jewish safe haven, hence the KGB’s propaganda framing Ashkenazim as indigenous to Europe. This “Jews as majority white” argument has been used by Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas and other anti-Zionist entities.
Thus, much of this conundrum boils down to “white versus non-white” optics tied to a binary view of morality. Conflicts that do not feature any “white” players are therefore deemed unworthy of the spotlight or perhaps even actively avoided and put off as “just their culture” – a highly problematic viewpoint that divorces from all agency any peoples seen as “brown”. By contrast, Russia’s war on Ukraine is considered a “white-on-white” conflict due to both countries being European, allowing more to see beyond the simplistic race-based moral superiority complex to context logistics such as who attacked first. In reality, every conflict should be assessed based on aggressor origination. However, this would pose an inconvenient truth for the anti-Israel narrative, given Arab-on-Jewish violence predates the formation of Jewish militant defense groups like Lehi and Irgun which are often used as a major talking point in the “It didn’t start on October 7th or even the 1948 Nakba” argument – rather than fabricated infantilizing and frankly racist delusions of morality.
These discussions of power paradigms return us to the age-old antisemitic trope of “Jewish power”. Specifically, now that today’s zeitgeist has deemed whiteness and power as the root of all evil, portrayal of the Jewish state and even diaspora Jews as ultra powerful becomes yet another opportunity for Judeophobia. The association of Ashkenazi Jews in particular with whiteness serves to deprive much of world Jewry of attachment to their Middle Eastern roots, even sometimes going as far as pitting Ashkenazim against non-Ashkenazim to sow intra-communal rifts. In this way, Jews can resist this association with power by continuing to speak out on atrocities committed by entities like Russia as well as “non-white” entities to help elucidate the need to hold all perpetrators accountable.
