The human suffering protesters write off

Several million people around the world have participated in pro-Hamas demonstrations since the Islamist organisation’s atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Nearly every major city has been the location of one or more of these “From the river to the sea” spectacles.

There can be no doubt: The cause of Palestine has seized the world’s imagination with an intensity that has surpassed other major conflicts in recent memory, like Vietnam or Iraq. Palestine is a cause with which most of them have no direct connection—for example, through family members, friends and work colleagues, or because their own country’s troops are on the ground. Still, in downtown neighbourhoods from Los Angeles to London, from Milan to Dhaka, from Cape Town to Kuala Lumpur and from Toronto to Sydney, protesters come in droves, banging drums, draped in keffiyehs and brandishing Palestinian flags alongside elaborate banners and scrawled homemade signs muttering darkly about “Zionist” influence.

With the war in Gaza entering what may be its most difficult phase, there is little reason to believe that the clamour in the streets, echoing discordantly throughout the media and in the halls of government, will quiet down.

The reasons for this present state of affairs are debated endlessly, and with increasing anxiety among Jews as we witness the rising tide of hatred lapping at our communities. But that debate is not going to be my focus here.

These days, we rarely discuss the impact of our Gaza-centric culture on the wars, humanitarian crises and heartbreaking atrocities taking place outside the coastal enclave. The lack of attention, lack of interest and lack of empathy when it comes to those human-made disasters are the collateral damage of the world’s fixation upon Palestine.

In Syria, the Kurdish factions that bravely allied with the United States to defeat ISIS are being squeezed by the new regime of Ahmad al-Sharaa, which was bolstered last week by the military accord signed with Turkey. Using the war in Gaza as cover, the authoritarian regime of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has stepped up its attacks on the Kurds. And yet, the outside world remains largely unmoved by his neo-Ottoman imperial foreign policy.

In Sudan—without question the world’s most pressing humanitarian crisis—more than 100,000 people have been killed and 15 million displaced as the civil war there approaches its second anniversary. Cholera has spread. Amid all the coverage of the breakdown of the aid delivery system in Gaza, few have noticed that only 10% of the funds for the U.N.’s $4 billion relief plan in Sudan are in place, resulting in brutal cuts to programs ranging from children’s education to support for local farmers.

The fighting between the central government and the rebel Rapid Support Forces has led to serious atrocities targeting civilians, including executions and mass rapes. At the Zamzam camp for displaced persons in Darfur, an RSF fighter who arrived moments before an appalling massacre last April screamed, “Come out, falangayat [slaves]!”—a racist barb directed against the camp’s African inhabitants. Then the bullets started flying, striking women, children and men indiscriminately.

“To refuse to hear is a shame,” the French writer Bernard Henri-Levy asserted in The Wall Street Journal following a recent visit to Sudan. “To open one’s eyes is a duty.”

That message is not restricted to Sudan alone. One of the most harrowing aspects of the ongoing Russian aggression against Ukraine has been the abduction of at least 20,000 Ukrainian children (many believe that number may be much higher) by Russian forces. According to Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab, around half of them are being held at 57 different facilities, mostly in Russia, along with a few in Belarus, its neighbour aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

If the concern for Palestine were truly based on universal principles of justice, then the plight of these children would surely have sparked international demonstrations of a similar size. After all, Russia’s actions have been monstrous; in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Luhansk, the authorities have gone as far as creating a database advertising more than 300 Ukrainian children for “adoption,” providing descriptions of their physical appearances and highlighting such character traits as “obedient” and “respectful to adults.” As Mykola Kuleba, CEO of the Save Ukraine organisation, told the New York Post: “This is not adoption. This is not care. This is digital child trafficking, masked as bureaucracy.”

Other advocates have noted that the online marketing of these children is a gift to pedophiles and other abusers. Certainly, the testimonies of the small number of youngsters who have managed to return to their families in Ukraine bear this out. Ksenia Koldin, an 18-year-old who in a decent world would be a household name, told the London Times about her recent journey to Russia, where, against all odds, she managed to rescue her 11-year-old brother Serhiy, who has now returned home to Kyiv. “I wanted to hug him, but he moved away as if didn’t know me, tugging at his clothes and acting as if I was a scary monster,” Ksenia said of their first encounter. “I realized he was brainwashed.”

Why such indifference to all the ongoing suffering outside of Gaza’s borders? In the case of Sudan, it’s key to remember that the Western left long ago abandoned any commitment to human rights in the post-colonial world. To do so would be an act of neo-colonialism, an attempt to impose Western values and policy imperatives upon non-Western nations. It would also mean shifting attention away from the true enemies: American imperialism, Zionism and the potential expansion of the NATO Alliance. Unlike the Sudanese, the Kurds and the Ukrainians, the Palestinians tick all the ideological boxes here.

This should prompt a good deal of soul-searching, among Palestinians, above all. No rational person could deny that there is immense suffering in Gaza right now; saying so is not a concession to Hamas, but rather, recognition that eternal misery for Gaza is part of the terror group’s war strategy. Nor is it a concession to Hamas’s Western cheerleaders, who are only animated when they have an opportunity to attack Israel, which is why they remained silent when Hamas thugs crushed protests in the Gaza Strip supporting the release of the Israeli hostages to speed up an end to the war. A handful of Palestinians are asking these difficult questions of their leadership and their international supporters, resentful of their status as mere props in an ideological war.

Encouraging and guiding those discussions would be a worthy implementation of the principle of “common humanity” that so many of Hamas’s useful idiots are fond of citing. A reckoning with Hamas—and the broader discourse of “Palestinianism” spawned by the Oct. 7 massacre—would also help reset the world’s moral compass, so that humanitarian disasters are addressed on the basis of need, and not by the revolutionary fantasies of Western performative leftists.