What about Sudan? The new talking point to distract from Israel's Gaza horrors
Less than a month into Israel’s war on Gaza, pro-Israel social media accounts, some of them based in India and since suspended, suddenly decided they were very concerned by what was happening in Sudan.
Why, these accounts asked, did the world not care about a war that had been raging since April 2023?
On the Telegram channel of Hananya Naftali, who has been working for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his digital team, the right-wing influencer declared that “there is zero interest in civilians murdered in Sudan”.
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"It’s clear now – the outcry for Palestinians often masks a deeper hatred for Jews. No Jews, no news," Naftali wrote.
At other times, pro-Israel accounts have claimed a direct link between the armed movements fighting Israel in Gaza and Lebanon, and Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which is at war with the Sudanese army and has been widely accused of carrying out an ongoing genocide against “non-Arab groups” in Darfur.
"Massacre in Sudan: Innocent civilians fall victim to a terror militia linked with Hamas and Hezbollah," one India-based account posted.
The US-based Israel War Room account (tagline: “Israel’s enemies do not sleep. Neither do we”), in a since deleted tweet, boosted the same argument, posting that the Sudanese “terror militia” was “allied with Hamas and Hezbollah”.
Desperate defenders
These arguments, of course, are specious. The "terror militia" concerned – the RSF – is not connected to Hamas or Hezbollah.
What's more, people across the western world are disproportionately horrified by what Israel is doing because their governments are acting against their wishes by providing Israel with weapons, military support and endless diplomatic cover.
This is not the case in Sudan, where western responses have been marked by confusion and failure, as US diplomatic efforts flounder and the UK attempts to shield the United Arab Emirates, the main patron of the RSF.
We might expect this distinctly unsubtle level of argument from the social media accounts of assorted right-wing Israelis and India-based bots.
But as Israel drags the whole of the Middle East into its war, and the genocidal campaign in Gaza grows even more brutal, these arguments have migrated to liberals in the West. For Israel's desperate defenders, pointing to other unspeakably awful situations – first among them the war in Sudan – becomes an irresistible last resort.
Chief among them is the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, who deployed the same tactic of deflection in a recent article headlined, "Sudan is the world’s gravest humanitarian disaster - but almost nobody cares."
Freedland, once described by the New York Times as a “leading British liberal Zionist”, waded into a topic he had never written about by asserting that the war in Sudan, now almost 18-months-old, is barely covered by the media and that “activists and progressives” are not interested in it.
"There are no mass demonstrations on the streets," he writes, though in fact there have been demonstrations and vigils, including ones organised in conjunction with the British Palestinian movement.
There are "no hashtags on social media", Freedland continues, though just the Keep Eyes on Sudan hashtag reached 18 million people in the seven days around the publication of his article.
Despite the mention of “a few honourable exceptions”, the columnist continues under the assumption that the world’s largest humanitarian crisis is getting barely any media coverage, though it is very much there if you look for it – including in his own paper.
Not enough attention
This element of the article was amplified by other famous British figures sympathetic to Israel. "Let’s see if Sudan’s catastrophe gets any attention at all with, say, the London Review of Books or New York Review of Books,” tweeted celebrity historian Simon Schama.
No doubt Israel’s liberal defenders are experiencing some level of distress right now. The state they defend has killed tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza
Both publications have covered Sudan in detail, while Schama has mentioned it three times on Twitter, twice to complain that it is not getting enough attention.
Freedland goes on to argue that for "today’s left", who have been "so lethargic" on Sudan, the world is divided into neat categories – "There are the oppressed and there are the oppressors, there are the colonised and the colonisers" – and that in Sudan "western progressives" do not know who to "root for".
"The very same people who took to the streets when George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis," he writes, "have barely raised a murmur at the organised murder of tens of thousands of Black men, and women, in Sudan."
Freedland concludes that the "crude ‘anti colonialism’" of the left has seen it divide the world into "goodies and baddies", meaning that it is confused when it comes to Sudan and stridently partisan when it comes to Israel-Palestine, which he sees as a clash of "two just causes".
It's hard not to discern a certain amount of projection at work in these accusations.
Right-wing propaganda
It is true that what is happening in Sudan is complex; a civil war that turned into a proxy war.
The war’s two main sides – the army and the RSF – are both military entities. Before they turned on each other, they worked together to enact a coup against Sudan’s civilian government and to violently suppress the country’s revolutionary movement.
It is that revolutionary movement - one that has shown enormous solidarity with the Palestinians - and the nationwide activist network of resistance committees (RCs) fighting for Sudan’s future that have the support of the international left.
Some members of these groups, including the perfectly named Anger Without Borders, have been fighting alongside the Sudanese army, deciding that for now it is the lesser of two evils.
But for those of us in the West, the issue to take up with our governments is not active complicity, as it is with Israel, but confused inaction.
That is not going to bring people out onto the streets of London in their hundreds of thousands, particularly when you factor in Britain’s consistent, ongoing support for Israel as opposed to its historic – but now not hugely active – involvement with Sudan.
No doubt Israel’s liberal defenders are experiencing some level of distress right now. The state they defend has killed tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza. Its snipers have shot children in the head. Palestinians are burning alive in tents.
British author Howard Jacobson’s recent Observer article linking media coverage of dead Palestinian children to the antisemitic "blood libel" canard of the 13th century revealed a desperate man flailing about, searching for anything to deflect from what Israel is doing this very moment in cold blood.
But all this is simply right-wing Israeli propaganda with a bit of intellectual make-up slapped onto it.
If these august commentators could engage openly and honestly with what Israel is doing, then we might have something worth reading.
If they could write about Sudan, they’d write about Sudan. Until then, their phony concern says much more about them than it does about anything else.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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