The arguments for Israel's warfare in Gaza are becoming increasingly desperate. The latest trend is to question why other conflicts in the world do not arouse the same commitment, as Sudan. It's called hypocrisy.
Words are running out to describe Israel's destruction of Gaza. The country's decision-makers cross new borders every day: tent camps are bombed and patients are burned to death, the health care system is knocked out and civilians are mass buried under demolished buildings.
The UN Secretary General is declared persona non grata and UN peacekeeping troops are fired upon in Lebanon , independent press is banned and journalists are killed , ministers are inciting to drive out Palestinians and build new illegal settlements.
Yet there remains an increasingly ludicrous group that upholds the righteousness of the Israeli military's actions. Which, with reference to October 7, can't seem to hold Israel accountable for either actions or methods – no matter how extreme.
As the war crimes accumulate, their arguments become more desperate. The latest trend is to point to other conflicts and question why they do not arouse the same commitment. Often from writers and thinkers who themselves have never before shown interest in said conflicts.
Their texts all have the same point. For example: in Sudan, perhaps the world's worst humanitarian crisis is ongoing with over 10 million refugees and 25 million in urgent need of food, but still "no one" cares. Instead of giving an in-depth picture of the situation, a text follows that lands in insinuations that the devastation in Gaza is getting an undeserved amount of attention. Insinuations that the outside world is reacting, not because children are being killed at a record pace, but because Israel is responsible for the killing.
The texts are worth half a point. It is true that Sudan is forgotten, or even actively ignored. It is also true that the nature of the conflict makes it more difficult to overview. There is no foreign invasion here. Only the leaders of the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – former allies in preventing the democratization process after the 2019 Sudanese revolution, now mortal enemies over who will get to rule as despot. Foreign stakeholders are mainly powers—Russia, Iran, Ethiopia, the United Arab Emirates—that are eager to claim Sudan's natural resources.
There are no Western editorial writers who argue that the Sudanese air force is right to bomb markets full of civilians because the enemy is hiding nearby.
Here, too, there is no demarcation that easily divides combatants into good or bad, victims or perpetrators. In Sudan, RSF is responsible for the worst abuses, but both parties to the war have killed civilians, blocked aid shipments and committed crimes against humanity.
But another difference, which these writers and thinkers leave out, and which contributes to the lack of the same commitment, is that there are no Western politicians who support the obvious war crimes being committed.
There are no Western editorial writers who argue that the Sudanese air force is right to bomb markets full of civilians because the enemy is hiding nearby. Or who give their tacit approval to the use of starvation as a weapon. The West does not send rockets that enable the destruction. There is also no Swedish minister who calls the massacres "proportionate".
It is not a wild thought that more Swedes would react if images of the Sudanese suffering were broadcast at the same time as our government struggled to convince us that everything is in order. The international institutions and aid organizations that need to be empowered to assist the people of Sudan are the same entities whose mandates are eroded when parts of the West blindly defend Israel's derailed warfare.
Those of us who have tried to draw attention to humanitarian disasters in Tigray , in the Democratic Republic of the Congo , in Haiti , in Sudan , naturally welcome more eyes on these and other tragedies. But it becomes stale when it is done in poorly disguised attempts to nullify support for the Palestinian civilian population who are humiliated, starved, maimed, orphaned, displaced and murdered every day.
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
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