What the spotlight hides: Israel, Gaza and the wars we don’t see

Another war

It was one of the swiftest military reversals of the twenty-first century. Ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Nagorno-Karabakh had been a point of often violent contention between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Its population was mostly ethnic Armenians, yet it lay inside Azerbaijan surrounded by areas with Azeri majorities. The two nations had fought wars over the area from 1988 to 1994, briefly in 2016, and then again in 2020, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths. An Azerbaijani blockade then pushed the region to the brink of famine.

Surprisingly, given that it was such a long-running conflict, its end was very rapid. The Azerbaijani offensive that began on the 19^th September 2023 was so crushingly successful that by the 20^th September, Armenian forces in Nagorno-Karabakh were routed and the Armenian led regional government had dissolved itself.

What followed was a humanitarian catastrophe. Fearing a pogrom, virtually all the Armenians in the region, some 100,000 people, hastily crammed all the possessions they could into their cars and drove to Armenia. A community with routes in the area stretching back before the time of Christ was suddenly caste out. This Armenian Nakba was made all the more bitter because the system of international humanitarian law designed to prevent this kind of thing arguably has its origins in a 1915 genocide directed against Armenians.

However, neither this historical baggage, nor the scale of the suffering, nor the way that the war impinged on significant powers like Turkey or Armenia seemed to bring it much attention in the UK. Indeed, I spent time trying to make a graph on Google Trends to illustrate how little covered it was. The problem is that when you compare the line to almost anything else Britons might search for, the line showing searches related to Nagorno-Karabakh are indistinguishable from the x-axis.

I can’t really take the moral high ground here. At the time, I thought “that’s a shame” and didn’t think about it any further. Which to be fair is about all the international community managed. Turkey is an important ally of Azerbaijan and acting against Azerbaijan would have led to tension with Ankara. Given that the US and EU want Turkish co-operation with everything from getting grain out of Ukraine to stopping refugees reaching Europe, that wasn’t going to happen. While, Moscow had appointed itself as the guardian of the Armenians, it was too consumed fighting a war it justified as preventing an entirely made up genocide of Russians in Ukraine to do anything about the very real ethnic cleansing of Armenians. Hence, the speed of Azerbaijan’s victory was matched only by the inertia of the international response.

Hence, the already minimal coverage faded fast and I didn’t think much about it until a friend posted an Instagram story about the war in the Gaza. “We cannot be silent during a genocide” they stridently proclaimed. Funny, I thought. I’m almost positive you managed it back in September.[1]

On spotlights

One of the few books I’ve ever read that manages to be truly counterintuitive and convincing at the same time is Against Empathyby Canadian psychologist Paul Bloom. Though empathy is often viewed as an uncomplicated positive. Bloom argues it is not a straightforward booster of human connection. Instead it actually functions like a spotlight: what falls within its circle is illuminated, vivid and obvious. Outside of it though, things (and even people) are obscured, sometimes practically invisible. Indeed, if the spotlight falls on one group of people but not another, it can actually help us justify cruelty by the latter against the former.

The war in Gaza has put the question of empathetic spotlights back on my mind. Within the UK, there are large vocal contingents of people supporting either Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ or the ‘liberation’ of Palestine. They seem to disagree on virtually everything. However, they share a conviction that we as Britons must pay attention to what is happening in the Israel-Gaza conflict.

On one level, this is not only understandable, but obvious. The suffering of Israeli civilians in the massacres on October 7^th was genuinely horrific. Then in the military action that followed Gazan civilians have faced death, destruction and deprivation on even larger scale. It’s natural to desperately want this to stop. It would be inhuman not to wish this war was over.

But why this war? Why do the other wars happening in the world – Wikipedia’s entry on “ongoing armed conflicts” lists 21 – not merit the same attention? Many have higher casualty counts and have involved even more widespread atrocities than the Israel-Gaza war. Yet as we shall see, we simply do not engage to the same extent.

Now you may have reasonable question: even if the amount of attention and concern we give to Israel-Gaza is in some sense an outlier relative to other conflicts, is that actually a problem? After all, isn’t it better to care about something rather than nothing? That’s often true but a singular focus can be harmful.

Here I think Bloom’s warning is worth heading. If we shine our empathetic spotlight too brightly on Israel, Palestine, or Israel-Palestine, there’s a real danger that the rest of the world, or at least certain parts of it disappear. That can lead us to decisions that are irrational or even outright destructive. Sadly, I think the way we are talking about foreign policy within the UK at the moment is demonstrating why this is the case.

The wars we don’t see

Researchers at Ghent University suggest that as many as 600,000 people may have died in a civil war in Ethiopia fought mainly between the Ethiopian and Eritrean government on the one hand and the regional Tigrayan Defence Force on the other. A joint report by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch found that “new administrators in the Western Tigray zone, as well as regional officials and security forces from Ethiopia’s Amhara region, are responsible for a campaign of ethnic cleansing, carried out through crimes against humanity and war crimes, targeting Tigrayan civilians in Western Tigray since the war began in November 2020 … [This included the use of] murder, torture, forcible transfer, rape, sexual slavery and other forms of sexual violence, persecution, enforced disappearances, widespread pillage, imprisonment, possible extermination, and other inhumane acts as part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Tigrayan civilian population.”

If we shift our attention to Myanmar, we see repeated, extreme campaigns of extreme violence by the countries military authorities and their allies. The people most severely affected by this are the Rohingya, members of a Muslim ethnic minority mostly residing in the state of Rakhine. Or rather previously mostly residing in Rakhine. Throughout 2015, 2016 and 2017 the military systematically burnt them from their villages. Tens of thousands were killed and hundreds of thousands fled. Such was the extent of this ethnic cleansing that the majority of the Rohingya now live not in Myanmar but as refugees in Bangladesh.

However, the Burmese military’s violence is not limited to the Rohingya. It has been at war with some of Myanmar’s other ethnic minorities for decades. Indeed, the war between the Burmese state and the Karen guerillas may be the longest running conflict in the world, stretching back beyond the origins of the current Burmese state to a proxy fight during World War II between British and Japanese backed forces. The ethnic majority Bamar have not been spared either. In 2021, the military staged a coup against the democratically elected government led by Aung Sung Suu Kyi. This plunged the entire country into a state of war. The anti-junta rebels having little outside support and are in many cases armed only with homemade weapons, whereas Russia and China have armed the junta with combat drones, helicopter gunships, and fighter jets that are used to attack amongst other targets schools and hospitals. Despite this the rebels have been gaining territory and the fall of the junta appears a real possibility.

We might also note the disturbing fact that there has recently been an upsurge in fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the site of what may well have been the deadliest conflicts since World War II.

What’s happened in Xinjiang, a region in north-west China bordering Russia and Afghanistan,  doesn’t count as a war. It’s too one sided for that. Nonetheless, the “Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism” directed by the Chinese regime against the Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim ethnic minority largely residing in the western province of Xinjiang, is considered by some observers to represent genocide. Its stated aim is to root out terrorism and extremism, but it has systematically victimised Uyghurs for their religion, language and cultural practices. As Human Right Watch recorded, over a million Uyghurs were forced into “vocational training centres” that functioned as concentration camps, where inmates, including young children, were separated from their families, forced to perform forced labour, in cramped conditions, subjected to frequent beatings for offences including speaking the Uyghur language. In order to avoid being sent to camps, Uyghurs are forced to disown their culture and Islam. For example, civil servants of Uyghur origin have reportedly been forced to eat pork and drink alcohol. Many women were apparently forced to make a choice between being sent to the camps and being sterilised. Meanwhile mosques and other traditional Turkic buildings have been raised to the ground. Xinjiang is subjected to some of the most intense surveillance and control of anywhere on earth. Uyghurs are subjected to a level of political indoctrination and control by local party cadres more reminiscent of the Mao era than post-reform China. They are prevented from travelling. Uyghurs abroad who speak out find their relatives in China harassed or even arrested. In a genuinely Orwellian development, areas with large Uyghur populations have been blanketed with video surveillance systems including some equipped with facial recognition and  automatically racially profile Uyghurs. Though Gaza is often described as the ‘world’s largest open-air prison’, Xinjiang, which covers an area larger than South Africa, must surely hold that grim title.

What we focus on

As we can see the Israel-Palestianian conflict is, sadly, very far from unique. But is almost unique in the attention we in the UK give to it. Since October 7, events from the Middle East have regularly led news bulletins and featured on newspaper front pages. There have been massive protests in support of the Palestinians in London and much smaller but still sizeable demonstrations with apparently pro-Israeli messages. Data from Google Trends also suggests that Britons search for terms related to the Israel-Gaza war far more than any of the other conflicts we’ve discussed.

Now in the interests of fairness, I should acknowledge that since the start of the Israel-Gaza war, it has probably resulted in more casualties per day than any other conflict. Therefore, there’s some argument for saying at this particular moment, a particular focus on Gaza is justified. However, that’s only a very partial explanation. The much higher daily death tolls in Ethiopia when that war was at its height didn’t yield Israel-Gaza level coverage. And it’s not like the somewhat higher daily death tolls in Gaza than say Sudan or Myanmar have been yielding only somewhat higher attention in the UK. It’s a whole different order of magnitude.

Perhaps even more notable than the mismatch in the attention on the conflicts themselves is the unique way that, as Jeremiah Johnson of Infinite Scroll describes from an American perspective, discussion of the war in Gaza swallows “virtually everything around it, and become a sort of ur-discourse, a controversy-swallowing force into which all other topics will be subsumed.” He notes how controversy over the war rapidly transmuted into fights over free speech on campuses, positive discrimination, and even academic plagiarism. We saw something similar in the UK, where the issue at hand transmogrified into a proxy fight over the Metropolitan Police’s attitude to policing protests.

I’m not sure if it’s a cause or a consequence, but if one is politically engaged, one’s stance on Israel-Palestine seems to become deeply connected to your broader political identity. This is most obvious in Belfast, where unionist and nationalist neighbourhoods will identify themselves as such, in part, by flying either the Israeli or Palestinian flag. This is extreme, as many things in Northern Irish politics are, but honestly the rest of the UK does it. If you tell me a Brit’s views on the Gaza War I’ll have a good bash at guessing what they think about taxes, small boats, or nationalising utilities. However, the same correlation just wouldn’t exist say the civil wars in Ethiopia and Myanmar. Even a heavy news consumer would be unlikely to have a firm views. And if they did they wouldn’t necessarily reveal their broader political tribe. And yet when it comes to Israel-Palestine, the correlation is not only there it’s apparently growing. For example, the previously strong “Arabist” tendency within the Conservative Party is basically marginal and even rarer amongst more right-wing Tories.

Which to me begs the question: why?

I know that a lot of the people who read this blog, who are predominantly people I also know offline, are deeply engaged with the Gaza war and disturbed by what we have seen. And frankly, I mostly don’t see the same investment from my friends directed at other conflicts.

I don’t believe they believe that the suffering of an Ethiopian, Armenian or Burmese person is less significant than that of an Israeli or a Palestinian. Yet they don’t march for those countries or people, nor do they reshare multiple social media posts a day related to those conflicts, and they certainly don’t judge British politicians in large measure by the stances they take on them. It’s only Israel-Palestine that gets spotlighted in this way.

I don’t understand this apparent imbalance. Yet there’s is clearly the majority position and I am not someone who enjoys taking contrarian positions. If most people disagree with me, that does raise for me the genuine question of whether they appreciate something I don’t.

So, if you are someone who is invested in a particular position on the Israeli-Palestinian question and have been prioritising it for your attention. I’d really appreciate it if you could share with me some of your thinking: What’s your motivation? Is it a conscious choice or something more instinctive? Do you feel conflicted about it or is it something you’re at peace with?

A lot of caveats

• The Russian invasion of Ukraine is an obvious exception to a lot of what I’ve written. I’ll get to that in a second.
• I am a British person in Britain writing primarily for other Brits. If you are in Israel, Palestine or a neighbouring country, or you have family or friends who do, or if you are from that region, or operate in a professional or official capacity focused on the middle east, then I recognise that your situation is different and I’m not really asking this question of you.
• I am absolutely not trying to invalidate your concern, nay your horror, at the situation. The situation is horrific. Many, many people have died, often in horrible ways, and absent an end to the fighting that seems likely to continue. As we’ll come to later in the post, I think there are risks on focusing some much on Israel-Gaza. But I obviously don’t think your concern reflects badly on you and would not want you to feel I’m suggesting that.
• Nor am I judging you if you do focus your attention on particular conflicts rather than others. As you’ll see I think there can be good reasons to do so. It’s more that, to the extent I have a normative argument, it’s that I think one ought to be intentional about how one directs one attention. Though even by that standard I’m far from perfect. You’ll notice how short the sections on the Congo and Ethiopia have been and how little of my own writing I used. That reflects the fact that my own knowledge of those conflicts is not what it should be.
• I’m specifically avoiding expressing a particular view on the merits of the Israeli military action in Gaza here. I’m sure most of you will be smart enough to read between the lines and deduce where I stand if you wish. But I have concerns about spotlighting either support for Israel or Palestine and I want to address both of them. That said because pro-Palestinian views are more common in my social circle. Therefore, my emphasis is tilted more towards addressing those set of arguments.
• As a result of that you will notice that the sections on spotlighting the Palestinian cause are somewhat anecdotal. A lot of the arguments I’m grappling with are ones I’ve personally encountered through conversations, group chats, or friend’s social media. Therefore, I’ll often be telling you what I remember rather than linking to where you can find an argument for yourself. Again, I’m asking you to trust me as a broadly reliable witness. However, if you think you were the one who expressed or shared something and I’ve not remembered it correctly, please feel free to get in touch and I’ll see about a clarification.

But what about Ukraine?

As I mentioned, there clearly there is an ongoing conflict which has drawn at least as much attention in the UK as that in Gaza: Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Nonetheless, I don’t think this invalidates the point about a disproportionate amount of focus being given to Israel-Gaza.

For starters, the scale of the Russo-Ukrainian war is much greater. Ukraine’s population is twenty times greater than Gaza’s. Even combined, Israel and the Occupied Territories have fewer residents than the city of Moscow alone. These are countries able to support large and highly armed militaries and for two years they’ve been pummelling each other. As one might expect this has made for truly shocking death tolls. The fatality estimates for both conflicts vary widely, it does seem fairly clear that many more people have been killed in fighting between Ukraine and Russia than Israel and Hamas. Indeed, it seems a grim possibility that the Russian invasion has claimed more lives in the past two years than the entire history of the Israel-Palestine conflict stretching back to 1948.

I would also submit that it matters that the aggressor in the Russo-Ukrainian war is a global superpower with a permanent seat on the UN security council and the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons.

We could also note, given the focus on the accusations that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute a genocide, the much stronger case that Putin’s regime is not only to trying to eliminate the Ukrainian state but also the Ukrainian identity of its citizens. This could see them physically eliminated, for example in the massacres at Bucha, or intentionally alienated from their culture. The latter is not as systematic as the Chinese government’s efforts in Xinjiang. Nonetheless, historic Ukrainian artefacts and memorials have been looted or destroyed, schools in occupied territory now teach the Russian school curriculum and students are punished for speaking Ukrainian. Perhaps most disturbingly, Ukrainian children have been abducted from their families, so they can be raised in Russia as Russians.

A point I’d make but more tentatively than the previous ones is that it’s clearer what Britain can do with regards to Ukraine. The provision of British weaponry – anti-tank NLAWs, Storm Shadow cruise missiles, and Challenger tanks – have been important both in their direct impact on the battlefield and in catalysing other NATO countries to share their arsenals with Ukraine. There are conflicts where, by contrast, there are few tangible steps we can take to improve the situation. Given China’s power, it is pretty insulated from anything the UK might do to try to discourage the abuse of the Uyghurs. There are also situations like the civil war in Sudan where you have to contend with none of the belligerents sharing British values, all of them having committed war crimes, and none of them trusting the UK. In that case, our realistic options are limited. I’m not sure which category the Gaza war fits into. There was a time when Britain was the main power in the Middle East. We occupied and administered Palestine for an extended period of time when we held the League of Nations mandate over it following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. But those days are long gone. I’d be curious what the case is that the UK has tools to meaningfully change the behaviour of either the Israeli government or Hamas. Frankly, it’s not a good sign that this is not more discussed. It might be we have more influence than I think. But my suspicion is that we are now more or less an irrelevance.  

Strikingly, given all of this, the Israel-Gaza war, has since its start, mostly eclipsed coverage of the war in Ukraine. Indeed, as we can from the chart below neither the Ukrainian counteroffensive nor the attempted Wagner generated the kind of search interest that October 7^th and the Gaza war did.

It does seem that for all the focus on Ukraine, we are still less interested in Ukrainian lives than Israeli or Palestinian lives.

[Side note: I’m not sure it affects the argument at all but in case you’re curious about the big green spike, it seems to have been a surge in searches Ukraine confined to a single day, September 9^th. I’ll leave you to guess what about the day’s news triggered that flurry of interest.]

Turning the spotlight on Israel

For the purposes of this argument, a singular focus on the Israeli case is not defined by believing that Israel has a right to defend itself and that this justifies its current military action, which should be supported by international allies. Rather, it elevates the significance of the Israel’s right to defend itself above that of other states and gives it a special claim upon its allies support.

Now in all honesty, I was unsure whether to include a section on this. Though there are plenty of supporters of Israel’s actions in the UK, they tend to view it as part of a wider network of alliances. Nonetheless, it is instructive to see where this logic can lead. Therefore, let us look to the US, where politicians privileging of Israel as an ally is much more conspicuous.

Take House Speaker Mike Johnson as an example. He is vocal about supporting Israel and opposing Palestinian statehood. He’s appeared at a conference alongside speakers proclaiming: “Israel today, Israel tomorrow, Israel forever.” Almost immediately after the October 7^th attacks, Johnson rallied his congressional caucus to pass a multi-billion dollar military aid package for Israel.

At the same time, Speaker Johnson has been using his party’s majority in the house of representatives to block passage of a new military aid package for Ukraine. Making it clear that he is willing to support aid to Ukraine not as a goal in its own right but as something that can be traded for his desired goal of greater spending on security along the US/Mexico border. For example, saying: “When you couple Ukraine and the border that makes sense to people … If we’re going to protect Ukraine’s border … we have to take care of our own border first.”

You will note the same logic is not applied to providing support for Israel. That is not made conditional on extracting other policy concessions. It makes sense to help Israel protect its borders, even if, in Speaker Johnson’s judgement, America’s borders are not properly defended. Indeed, virtually any criticism of the US aiding Ukraine could apply with equal or greater force to aiding Israel:

• It’s too costly: the US has given about $75 billion in support to Ukraine but $300 billion to Israel over the years.
• It carries a risk of escalation: We’ve had two years of Russia huffing and puffing combined with no willingness to directly challenge NATO. By contrast, aligning itself with Israel has now resulted in American soldiers killing and being killed by Iranian proxies.
• It’s taking too long: Ukraine has been fighting Russia or Russian backed forces since the Crimea in 2014. They may have failed to make a decisive breakthrough during last summer’s counteroffensive but since February 2020, Ukrainian forces have recaptured thousands of square miles of territory and driven the Russian navy out of the Black Sea. By contrast, Israeli has been locked into confrontation with the Palestinians since its foundation in 1948 with no obvious route to a sustainable peace.
• There’s democratic erosion: There has been a strange insistence from some US politicians that Ukraine cannot be considered a true democracy because President Zelensky refuses to defy the Ukrainian constitution’s ban on holding elections during wartime. By contrast, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s attempt to exempt the government from all judicial checks and balances, to say nothing of the systematic deprivation of democratic rights of Arabs living in the Occupied Territories, have apparently not raised the same questions for Speaker Johnson and his allies about Israel’s democracy. 

It is also worth noting that everything Hamas visited on Israel on October 7^th has been inflicted on Ukrainians by the Russian military. We saw the horrific executions of civilians in Bucha, rockets have been fired at civilian targets over and over again, and Russian soldiers appear to be committing acts of sexual violence on a large scale.

While it is true Hamas is constitutionally committed to eliminating the Israeli state, it clearly lacks the wherewithal to do so. Israel is in no immediate danger of losing its military superiority over its enemies. By contrast, Russia very much does have the means to make good on its threat to attempt to swallow the Ukrainian nation. Outside aid is crucial to the maintenance of Ukrainian independence, Ukrainian democracy, and sparing Ukrainians from genocidal atrocities. In short, it seems clear that if a prioritisation has to be made in allocating military support, there is no rational basis for privileging Israel over Ukraine. Nonetheless, there is a significant political coalition, perhaps even a decisive one, that argues “Israel Now, Israel Tomorrow, Israel Forever”, whilst seeing Ukraine and Ukrainians as disposable.

The final irony is that it’s not even clear that prioritising Israel as an American ally necessarily helps Israel. The US’s withdrawal from its nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018 was opposed by London, Paris and Berlin, but supported by Tel Aviv. The Netanyahu government hoped the reimposition of American financial sanctions would limit Tehran’s ability to sponsor militias around the region. Instead, it caused Iran to draw closer to Russia and China, whilst the regime’s proxy forces in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen grew stronger than ever. The Houthis in Yemen have shown they can effectively close the Red Sea and even military action by the US and UK cannot stop them. It has also successfully used repression to ride out a wave of domestic unrest over its treatment of women. All the while, the regime steps closer to building nuclear weapons. If you accept the premise that Tehran is a major threat to Israel then this is a disaster for Israeli security. And it could have been avoided if the US administration at the time had not ignored the views of its European allies in favour of that of the Israeli government.

Turning the spotlight on Palestine

Mirroring what I said above about a singular focus on Israel’s interests, a disproportionate focus on the Palestinian cause is not about believing in Palestinian statehood or wanting an immediate end to Israeli military action in Gaza. It occurs when instead of placing Palestinians in a category with Uyghurs, Rohingyas, Ukrainians, Papuans, Kashmiris, and Kurds, Palestinians become the exemplary case of oppression, of suffering, of the denial of statehood by a more powerful neighbour. I find that rhetorically, such oppressed peoples will often be grouped together. Yet the interest in the Palestinian cause will frequently overshadow the others. Huge protests can be mobilised to oppose the Israeli occupation and interest in the other causes often depends on the ability to connect them to the Palestinian cause. Concern with events in Gaza and the West Bank are taken to be mainstream concerns, whereas similar issues in other parts of the world are understood to be niche issues.

The first casualty of war

This has some pernicious effects. Witness the anger at the ‘mainstream media’ for ignoring Palestinian suffering and Israeli cruelty. For example, there was an online campaign scolding the BBC for not showing lawyers for the South African government making their case to the International Court of Justice that Israel was committing genocide. In true BBC form, the corporation put out a statement patiently explaining that it had in fact covered both South Africa’s case and Israel’s response. But often the case is a simpler one, that scale of the death and destruction in Gaza is not reflected in the willingness of the BBC and other outlets to cover Palestinian pain. Respectfully to those who feel this way, this is a belief one can only maintain by being myopic. In relative terms, there is an ocean of coverage of Gaza, whilst media coverage of Ethiopia, Myanmar, the DRC, and Armenia barely fills a single bathtub.

If you consider all the ongoing conflicts we’ve already mentioned, the mainstream media seems to be elevating Gaza not burying it.   

The upshot of deciding that the “mainstream media” is broken and biased is to turn towards alternative sources. The best case scenario here, a broadcaster based in Qatar and partially funded by its Emir. More concerningly, every time I log into Instagram, I see friends liberally reposting content from random accounts with no institutional affiliation that pump out highly emotive material that has been verified only by their own confirmation bias: bloodied children, Israeli soldiers laughing at atrocities, and even the bizarre, wildly implausible claim that Israel was showing adverts promoting tourism in Gaza whilst Palestinians are being killed. A lot of these may be accurate, but at least some of it is bound to be toxic lies designed to pray on their empathy.

The sad irony for me is that a lot of the people who are indulging this stuff can so easily recognise it in others. They’d never fall for a story made up by Macedonian teenagers about Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump or the confections of American culture warriors about schools installing litter boxes for children who identify as cats. Yet the conviction that Gaza is being ignored, fed by the sense that is the war rather than a war, is helping to prize them away from the epistemic guardrail provided by the likes of the BBC.

Seeing Red Sea

There’s also a real danger that spotlighting Palestine can lead those who do it to seeing the whole middle east in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict, rather than the Israel-Palestine conflict in the context of the wider middle east.

Witness how in just 18 months, progressive opinion in the UK has gone from being, rightly, appalled that the World Cup was being held in Qatar despite it being ruled by an absolute monarchy that abused migrant labourers on a massive scale, criminalised same-sex relationships, and imprisoned journalists, to treating a broadcaster backed by the same monarchy as the most reliable source of news on the region, simply because its coverage is reliably critical of Israel.

Or alternatively, take perceptions of the Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. Though these are justified by the group in terms as an attempt to stop the war in Gaza, only a small minority of the ships targeted have had anything to do with Israel, let alone the Israeli military. The typical targets have been civilian cargo freighters and oil, many from the US or UK, but also from countries including Norway, Singapore and Switzerland. At the risk of the stating the obvious, these civilian vessels have civilian crews, who are predominantly working-class people from the Global South. For example, at the point the tanker Central Park was targeted with a ballistic missile, its crew included Bulgarian, Georgian, Indian, Filipino, Russian, Turkish and Vietnamese sailors. Plus, by essentially closing the Suez Canal and disrupting global shipping, the attacks will impact the livelihoods of people everywhere. In light of this it should be pretty clear that these are not valid military targets. Launching missiles at a British civilian shipping is not only an act of war against the UK, but a war crime.

Despite all this, some of those who identify themselves as peace activists and opponents of the Israeli attacks on civilian targets in Gaza take a surprisingly indulgent attitudes to the Houthis own military activities against civilians. One friend reshared a video of a contributor on an American current affairs discussion show dunking on her fellow panellists, who expressed alarm at the Houthis strikes by mockingly reducing their position to concern that their “Amazon parcels might be delayed”. Multiple friends shared the same clip of Stop the War founder and former Corbyn advisor Andrew Murray depreciating the British and American government for caring about the Houthi attacks whilst the death toll in Gaza rose. The fact that none of the Houthis’ strikes have killed anyone so far became evidence of the movement’s humanity and compassion rather than a reflection of a massive effort by the British and American navies to shoot down their missiles and drones before they could hit their targets, to say nothing of most shipping just avoiding the region. It’s definitely a minority position but there have also been some Britons going further and praising the missile attacks as acts of solidarity with the Palestinians. This reflects a topsy turvy string of moral reasoning: a willingness to downplay or even condone the targeting of civilians in a manner liable to spread the war in Gaza because those doing so justified it in terms of stopping that war.

I would suggest that it was easier for many to fall into this fallacy because Yemen had been out of their spotlight and only entered it because they did something linked to the Palestinians. The Houthi military’s conduct during Yemen’s civil war was despicable. They attacked civilian targets including schools and hospitals, recruited thousands of child soldiers, and not only cutting off the water to a city of half a million people but planted landmines around the facilities necessary to restore it. We can debate whether it was more despicable than what their opponents did. Nonetheless, not recognising the Houthi track record of war crimes, made it more difficult to recognise the Red Sea as the latest example of it.

Indeed, the wider our framing, the harder it is to kid ourselves that the Houthi leadership has any general interest in the wellbeing of oppressed Muslims. Despite the genocide of the Uyghurs, the Houthi movement has offered guarantees of safe passage to Chinese vessels going through the Red Sea and the proportion of Chinese-affiliated shipping going through the Suez Canal has risen from 13% to 28%. More fundamentally, the movement forms part of the Iranian sponsored “axis of resistance” that also encompasses the Syrian government, Hamas, Hizballah and various Shia militias in Iraq. The axis has its routes not in a desire to defend Palestinians but Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad. He, of course, did so in the bloodiest fashion possible: choosing to burn Syria rather than let anyone else have it. Whole cities, notably Aleppo, were destroyed. His security services tortured people on a huge scale. At one point, the majority of Syrians were refugees. Tehran responded to this by sending thousands of its own soldiers and even more fighters from its militia allies to participate in this carnage. None of this has prevented the Houthis from taking extensive support from the Iranians.

Bad intentions

Indeed, one of the problems that viewing the Palestinians as the world’s primary oppressed people in need of liberation, and by extension Israelis as the world’s primary oppressors, is that it renders all other oppression secondary. Which is rather useful for the world’s most egregious autocrats, human rights violators and aggressors. If you spotlight Palestinian suffering, then you can look at the support for Israel from the US and other Western democracies and conclude they are the ones sponsoring oppression.

This isn’t theoretical. Iran, Russia, and China have been using their state media apparatuses to spread disinformation about Gaza in attempt not only to discredit Israel, but by extension the US and other western democracies.

If you are angry with the British, American or European governments over Gaza, then I’m not going to deny the legitimacy of your grounds to be. But we should be under no illusions that this does not make Beijing, Moscow or Tehran the good guys in the Middle East or even moral equivalents.

As I’ve said less about it so far, let me turn to Russia’s behaviour in the region. As well as using the Wagner Group to help prop up the Assad regime, its air force carried out airstrikes on rebel held territory which may have resulted in 20,000+ civilian casualties. It also prolonged Libya’s civil war in an apparent attempt to remove a competitor in the European natural gas market. Middle Eastern and North African countries were also some of the largest exporters of Ukrainian grains, so suffered some of the worst increases in hunger and poverty when the Russian invasion disrupted these supply chains.

It’s hard to tell how many people in Britain can’t see through the use of the Palestinian cause to present autocrats as occupying the moral high ground. Probably not many. But there are definitely some. Witness the bizarre spectacle of the University and Colleges Union passing a motion calling for the UK to stop arming Ukraine. It cited some comments by President Zelensky about wishing Ukraine could have the kind of security guarantees from the US Israel has to argue that “Volodymyr Zelensky says he wants Ukraine to become a ‘big Israel’—an armed, illiberal outpost of US imperialism”.

Ukraine is 2,000 miles from Israel. Neither country is a belligerent in the other’s war. Ukraine does not occupy the territory of another nation – quite the opposite in fact. The two governments have a somewhat acrimonious relationship and Tel Aviv seems to be prioritising staying on good terms with Moscow. Yet somehow some Brits seem unable to look at the situation in the Ukraine without imagining Israel has cast a shadow over it. This isn’t just spotlighting. It’s a dangerous obsession.

Turning the spotlight on the war as whole

I also think there are problems that arise from people in the UK spotlighting the Israel-Gaza war, that don’t depend on the side they sympathise with:

1. If your goal is to actively campaign for a change in UK government policy that may make matters better, then focusing on the Gaza war will put you up against the law of diminishing marginal returns. For example, if your MP has received dozens of letters this week on Israel-Gaza, then one more from you will make a lot less of an impact on them than what’s likely to be the first and only letter they’ve had this month on Myanmar, Ethiopia or Armenia.

• The Gaza war preceded a troubling increase in hate crimes in the UK. These have targeted both the Jewish and Muslim communities. To be clear, even if the Israel-Palestine conflict was the only conflict in the world, holding British Jews or British Muslims responsible for it would still be objectionable and stupid. However, if we can keep in mind that there are many different conflicts in the world and that the ethnicity or faith we associate with the oppressors in one, we may associate with the victim in another, then that seems like a check on the kind of bigotry that leads to people throwing petrol cans at mosques or driving up to a synagogue so they can shout “Kill Jews” at worshippers.

• The strange interdependence of our views on the Israel-Palestine conflict and our domestic political divisions, can ironically mean that the more we talk about this conflict, the more we’re really talking about ourselves. If the conflict just becomes another vector through which to argue with other British people about the policing of protests, the leadership of the Labour Party or free speech at universities, then that’s not helping anyone in Israel or Gaza. Disentangling the war from our own political identities, might help us focus on solutions rather than on “owning” our domestic political opponents.

• The depressing reality is that after decades of the world getting more peaceful, war is becoming more common and bloody. 2022 saw the most deaths in armed conflict in a single year since 1994 and the most different armed conflicts since 1945. You will note that this trend predates the outbreak of the War in Gaza in 2023. It’s not a matter of the moral failings of either the Israelis or Palestinians, but of something global having changed. If we do not understand what that is, we are going to be at a substantial disadvantage in reversing it.

The answers I don’t think are right

I have put my question about the spotlight on the war in Gaza to several people. I got a range of answers. I think all of them have some truth to them but even taken together they fall short of a convincing explanation:

1. Racism: This would seem like an obvious, yet unpleasant, reason why we may be less troubled by deaths in Ethiopia or the DRC than Israel or Palestine. Yet I don’t think it can only be this. We seemed perfectly capable of ignoring the ethnic cleansing of a group of White Christians in Nagorno-Karabakh.

• Kinship: I’ve also heard it suggested that of course there’s disproportionate interest in Israel and Palestine because the UK’s Jewish and Muslim communities feel a pull towards solidarity with their co-religionists. This doesn’t feel all that convincing. Only 0.5% of the British public is Jewish, yet clearly support for Israel goes much wider than that. At the same time, it does seem that even amongst British Muslims, concern for the plight of Palestinians outstrips that for other predominantly Muslim peoples such at the Rohingya.

• Antisemitism: Israel is the only Jewish state in the world, and it clearly is a magnet for this kind of prejudice. Yet I know plenty of people who’ve marched for Palestine, who I’m sure are not antisemitic.

• Religion: The fact that Israel and Palestine cover what’s often known as “the Holy Land” clearly motivates some to imbue it with special, even apocalyptic significance. Yet many people who are deeply invested in the war are not religious at all. And if you are and you think, your faith commands you to determine the significance of a war not by its effect on people but on land and archaeological sites, may I gently suggest something has gone wrong along the way.

• The threat of escalation: This is a very good reason to be paying attention to the conflict. As I write, America is carrying out airstrikes on members of the “axis of resistance” in response to a series of attacks on its forces, bringing the prospect of a war between America and Iran closer. That said many of the other conflicts, we’ve discussed have the potential to escalate as well. For example, it’s not too difficult to construct a scenario, where a war between Azerbaijan and Armenia brings their Russian and Turkish allies into a conflict. More fundamentally, when I look at people campaigning for Israel or Palestine, I don’t see worry about a theoretical future war, I see distress about the already existing war with its already happening suffering.

So, for me at least, this is still an open question.

To sum up

I appreciate I am asking you to trust that I am asking that question in good faith. Hopefully, the fact this is mostly addressed to people who know me IRL helps in that regard.

Granted, I have mostly articulated what I’m writing in the form of an argument. And that probably doesn’t help me come across as genuinely open minded. But that’s mostly because I find people often need convincing there’s even a question to answer here. I’m very open to being convinced that there is a good answer to that question. I just haven’t seen it yet.

I’m certainly, not suggesting you can’t give a particular conflict the bulk of your attention. As will probably be clear from this post, I have paid more attention and feel more strongly about the Russian invasion of Ukraine than I do about the other ongoing wars in the world today. What is more, I think I have good reason for that. I’m curious what yours might be regarding Israel and Gaza.

What I do want to push back against is us putting our collective attentional spotlight on Israel and Gaza and putting the world’s other conflicts into relative darkness without even considering why. We should not come to unthinkingly accept that the lives, homes and freedoms of Ethiopians, Congolese, Ukrainians, Burmese or Armenians are a less worthy of our concern than those of Israelis or Palestinians.

Image credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Palestinian_Solidarity_Protesters_in_London_-3_-_High_Street_Kensington_(53255352534).jpg

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[1] I would not use the expression ‘genocide’ to describe the situation in either Gaza nor in Nagorno-Karabakh. However, if it applies in the former case then it transparently does in the later.