From Darfur to Gaza: Which Atrocities Get to Be a Cause?

Why do some atrocities get to be a cause, and others not?

Some context before the argument: I am Jewish, I lived for a period on a kibbutz near the Lebanese border, and in 1971 I found an unexploded Katyusha rocket in the banana fields there — the border was not an abstraction. I have also spent decades working across Africa's Muslim-majority world — Somalia, Sudan, Mali, Tunisia, Morocco, Pakistan, Indonesia — with two working trips to Egypt. I studied Arabic and Hebrew, and my in-laws are Muslim. I have believed in a two-state solution since I was a teenager and think it more necessary now than ever, even as it seemingly grows further away by the day than at any point in my lifetime. I say all this not to inoculate the argument that follows, but because a piece about selective moral attention should be transparent about where its author actually stands.

One moment from that life stayed with me for fifty years. On October 6, 1973, I was in the synagogue in Rabat, Morocco, when a government delegation filed in mid-service. The room went silent. They sat, listened, and left — and the silence repeated itself on their way out. Only later that day did word reach the congregation: Egypt and Syria had just attacked Israel. It was called the Yom Kippur War. Fear was palpable.

The next day, in the bustling Rabat marketplace, a young Moroccan man looked at me with open contempt and spat a slur — "Jewish dog," in Arabic — the only time in my life anyone has uttered such a thing to my face; one day, one person, one regional shock. I don't offer it as a verdict on Morocco, a beautiful country with very hospitable people that I came to know with real affection. I offer it because it is a small, vivid instance of how quickly a political and military crisis can curdle, for some people, into contempt and ethnic profiling of Jews as such, independent of any individual's actual political views or actions.

That reflex isn't confined to one marketplace or one decade, and it travels further than you'd expect. Years later, scoping my dissertation project in Sudan, I offered my services to the Jonglei Canal Commission, a massive colonial-era hydraulic project designed to reroute the Nile through Sudan's Sudd swamp. The head of the commission refused my proposal on the spot, suggesting that no one would really want to work with the Nuer and Dinka in that inhospitable swampland unless they were an Israeli spy. We both chuckled with ambiguity. The accusation was absurd. But it was also telling: the reflex to read Israel into places it has nothing to do with isn't confined to Western commentary or to moments of acute regional crisis. It travels on its own, long after the original spark has gone cold.

That slippage — from criticism of a state to suspicion of a people — is the subject of this piece. Not because criticism of Israel is illegitimate. It isn't. But because the pattern of attention itself, across prestige media and influential commentary, has a way of making one conflict carry a symbolic weight that no other conflict is asked to carry. This imbalance creates the conditions in which anti-Israel arguments can metastasize into something else. It's one thing to despise Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Ben-Gvir; plenty of Israelis and many in worldwide Jewry share this sentiment. It's another thing entirely to let that despise collapse into the "river to the sea" narrative that has quickly evolved into an actionable framework that, ironically, gathered force right after the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel. It has since spread across university campuses, online communities, and advocacy groups worldwide — a framework that isn't a critique of three men's policies but a vision in which no Jewish state exists between the river and the sea under any leadership. The first is politics. The second has a name, and it isn't policy disagreement.

The asymmetry is not subtle

Start with the numbers, because they are not really in dispute. A Protection of Civilians Trends report found that at the start of 2024, Sudan — long one of the countries I care most deeply about — was drawing roughly 600 news articles a month while Gaza and Ukraine each cleared 100,000. That is not a close call; it is a difference of more than two orders of magnitude for a Sudanese war that, by most casualty and displacement estimates, is comparable in scale to either of the conflicts dominating global attention. Sudan's civil war, now in its third year, has killed an estimated 400,000 people and displaced roughly 12 million — more people displaced than in Gaza, and approaching the toll of Ukraine's longer war. This is some 20 years after the first Darfur genocide. The disparity has only sharpened with time, not eased. Reporting in early 2026 quotes Tom Perriello, the former U.S. special envoy to Sudan, calling the gap between the scale of Sudanese suffering and the scale of its coverage among the widest he has ever seen. One Sudanese journalist who has covered the war for Arabic satellite television estimates that no more than a tenth of the war's actual events have ever reached any news report at all. Polling tells the same story from the audience side: three-quarters of Americans surveyed in October 2023 said they understood the Sudan conflict "not very well" or "not at all," and in the UK, only five percent of adults identified Sudan, rather than Gaza or Ukraine, as the world's largest humanitarian crisis, even though by most measures it is.

None of this is a claim that Gaza coverage is undeserved. It plainly is — the human toll is abhorrent and the story matters. The claim is narrower and harder to dismiss: when one catastrophe receives 100,000 articles a month and a comparably lethal one receives 600, the discrepancy is not a neutral by-product of "newsworthiness." It is itself a kind of argument, made silently, about whose suffering counts as central to the moral life of the world and whose does not. The same report found that across the world's conflicts, the median number of articles published per death in high-income countries was roughly 1,663 — nearly a hundred times the 17.4 articles per death recorded in low-income countries. That ratio holds even after accounting for the fact that some wars genuinely kill more people than others; it is a statement about whose deaths get narrated, not just how many deaths occur. Researchers studying Sudan's invisibility have pointed to exactly this dynamic — what one media scholar at the Arab American University in Ramallah has called a "hierarchy of visibility" in which Sudan exists in a kind of liminal space, never quite achieving the news status of conflicts the world has preemptively decided matter most.

Prestige confers more than visibility

The asymmetry is compounded by who gets rewarded for covering which war. Reuters and The New York Times both received 2024 Pulitzer Prizes for their coverage of the Gaza war. That recognition is earned. War photography under fire is dangerous, skilled work few will take on. But it also has a feedback effect — prestige attention begets more prestige attention. At the same time, Sudanese correspondents, operating without safety corridors, evacuation routes, or institutional backing, work in something closer to true obscurity. Reporters Without Borders ranks Sudan 156th out of 180 countries for press freedom, and Sudanese journalist associations estimate that of roughly 1,500 working journalists before the war, only 70 or so are still reporting from inside conflict zones today.

The contrast with twenty years ago is instructive. During the initial Darfur crisis of the early 2000s, Sudan's atrocities were front-page news, the subject of a National Mall rally with George Clooney and Elie Wiesel, and the target of direct presidential advocacy at the UN General Assembly. A solid majority of Americans polled at the time supported using U.S. military assets to protect Darfur's civilians. That same country, suffering a war many specialists consider at least as severe today, now struggles to clear a tenth of that attention. The raw facts on the ground did not become less newsworthy; the world's appetite for the story did. Clooney himself never actually left: his investigative initiative The Sentry still tracks Sudan's war economy, his foundation's Docket project still gathers evidence for prosecutions against Sudanese militia leaders, and he co-wrote a TIME op-ed on the current conflict as recently as 2025. The infrastructure of attention he helped build in 2006 is still running. It simply doesn't draw a fraction of the coverage or cultural weight it once did, even from the same advocate working the same cause. The people sounding the alarm haven't gone anywhere. The audience moved on to higher profile tragedies.

Where one writer's archive becomes a case study, not a verdict

This pattern of asymmetrical news coverage shows up not only in institutional coverage decisions but in the work of individual commentators with real reach and moral authority — and it's worth looking at one example closely, not to render a verdict on a person, but to see the mechanism in miniature. Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former war correspondent, and his Substack carries the credibility that comes with that record (he has over 200,000 subscribers). Since October 7, 2023, his visible archive contains at least fifteen distinct pieces centered on Gaza, beginning within forty-eight hours of the Hamas attack and continuing in an unbroken line through early 2026 — titles like "Israel's Final Solution for the Palestinians," "Extermination Works. At First.," "Genocidal Scorecard," and "The Last Chapter of the Genocide." That is not an occasional preoccupation. It is closer to a sustained beat, returned to roughly once every six to eight weeks for more than two years, almost always in the most absolute register political language allows.

What makes this more than a complaint about word choice is what the same archive does not contain. Twice since 2023, Hedges gestures at other atrocities in passing — one 2026 post on the Gaza flotillas observes that the same global system carries out genocides in Sudan and the Congo too, and a 2025 piece lists "Gaza, Sudan, the Congo, Myanmar" together as sites of comparable horror. Both lines concede the comparison directly: he knows Sudan and Congo are there, knows the word "genocide" could apply, and says so. Neither comparison becomes a piece. Sudan's civil war — by most estimates more lethal and more decisively under-covered than Gaza — has never received the kind of standalone, titled, sustained treatment that Gaza receives roughly every six weeks. The Congo, where armed conflict has displaced millions for decades and been indirectly responsible for over 6 million deaths, fares the same. The asymmetry isn't a failure to notice; on his own evidence, it's a choice about which acknowledged atrocity gets the sustained moral attention and which gets a clause in passing.

I want to be careful about what this does and doesn't show. It does not prove that Hedges is antisemitic, and I don't believe that's a fair or supportable charge against him personally. What it does show, vividly, is the asymmetry-of-attention problem operating inside a single writer's body of work. The writer's own words establish that this asymmetry is not accidental. One conflict is treated as the era's defining moral emergency, returned to again and again in the most maximal vocabulary available. Comparably catastrophic ones he has explicitly acknowledged go unmentioned again, until the next passing aside. This feels more akin to journalistic selectivity than objective reporting on the array of global atrocities. Multiply that pattern across enough widely-read commentators, and you get something larger than any one writer's bias — you get a public discourse in which Israel is positioned, again and again, as the explanation for the world's disorder in a way no other state, including states whose conduct is by any measure at least as "bad," is ever asked to bear.

That is where the danger lives — not in any single critical sentence about Israeli policy, but in the cumulative effect of one country being made to carry, over and over, the full weight of accusations — colonialism, genocide, civilizational corruption — that, distributed across the many conflicts that might also deserve them, would look like ordinary, contestable political argument. Concentrated onto one target alone, they start to look like something else.

Post-October 7 antisemitic incident data in both the U.S. and UK suggests this slippage from political critique to ethnic suspicion is not a theoretical risk. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) recorded over 10,000 incidents in the U.S. in the year following the attack, the highest total in the organization's 45 years of tracking. In Britain, the Community Security Trust recorded 4,103 antisemitic incidents in 2023, a 147 percent jump from the year before, and logged 5,583 incidents in the twelve months following October 7 — the highest tally in any single year since CST began counting in 1984. This is already visible in hard incident data, not just in rhetoric.

To be direct about where I stand on the underlying policy questions, since vagueness here would be its own form of evasion: none of this requires defending Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, or the Israeli settler movement's more radical wing. I think parts of Israeli policy in Gaza and the West Bank have been beyond reckless and indefensible, and I think the word "genocide" is a real legal and political category that serious people are entitled to debate in good faith rather than have waved away as illegitimate by definition. A government, a military campaign, an occupation, a coalition, a people, and a civilization are six different things, and serious commentary keeps them separate. Much of what circulates today does not.

What a clean genocide narrative has to leave out

There is a second mechanism alongside attention asymmetry, and it shows up in the same archive. A narrative that frames one side as simply committing genocide, full stop, can only stay clean by leaving out everything that complicates it — and Hedges's body of work leaves out a great deal that any honest accounting of this conflict would have to include.

Start with the land itself. Serious historians and archaeologists document a continuous Jewish presence and religious attachment to what became Judea and Samaria reaching back nearly three thousand years, through exile, return, and exile again. Whether that history translates into a modern indigeneity claim under the same framework used for other displaced peoples is a real and contested question — international law's indigeneity framework was built for living communities displaced by recent colonization, not for return after two millennia, and applying it here is itself disputed. But it is a serious question, asked by serious people, and it gets essentially zero airtime in the dominant framing. A reader fluent in indigenous-rights discourse who has never once heard this case made is not encountering a settled consensus; they are encountering a story with a chapter removed.

Then there is the twentieth century itself. In July 1938, delegates from thirty-two nations met at Évian to discuss the Jewish refugee crisis radiating out of Nazi Germany. Only the Dominican Republic agreed to accept significant numbers. The following year, the United States turned away more than nine hundred Jewish refugees aboard the St. Louis, sending the ship back to Europe; roughly a quarter of its passengers would later die in the Holocaust. Chaim Weizmann, who would become Israel's first president, summarized the era bluntly: the world had divided into countries that did not want Jews and countries that would not let them in. After 1948, in the other direction, some 850,000 Jews were expelled or fled in fear from Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Morocco, and other Arab states over the following two decades — communities with roots predating Islam, stripped of citizenship and property in what one British parliamentary committee has called "the forgotten refugees."

None of this is an argument that the extent of the killing in Gaza, or increasingly in the West Bank, is justified. It plainly is not — the scale of civilian death is real, horrifying, and demands accounting, by Israelis and by anyone who cares about Palestinian lives. The point is narrower and more important for understanding where this discourse is heading: a framing this incomplete doesn't just misinform, it forecloses the possibility of holding two things at once, that Israeli government conduct deserves serious criticism and that the conflict has a history too layered for "genocide, full stop" to carry. Strip out the complexity, and what's left fits neatly into the "river to the sea" framework, which much like the radical wings of the Israeli settler movement, envisions only one state. That framework, amplified by commentators who never have to reckon with the parts of the story that complicate it, doesn't just radicalize opinion about Israeli policy — it normalizes treating the Jewish state's existence itself as the problem to be solved. That, too, is how criticism slides into something closer to its opposite — and it is a slide Hedges's readers are never equipped to notice, because the chapters that would let them see it have already been cut.

What gets lost when one story swallows the room

The thinning isn't only about Israel and Palestine specifically — it's about which countries get held to a standard of moral scrutiny at all. Russia's war in Ukraine draws sustained, sophisticated coverage, but it is covered as a war of aggression with a clear aggressor; it rarely gets subjected to the kind of totalizing civilizational indictment Israel receives. China's mass internment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, Saudi and Emirati arms flows into Sudan's civil war, the Syrian and Yemeni governments' own records, and the conduct of Hamas itself rarely generate a fraction of the sustained, maximal-register commentary that Gaza generates on a six-week cycle. It is the same asymmetry that turns Russia's invasion into a legal case, China's repression in Tibet and Xinjiang into a human-rights footnote, and Sudanese killing Sudanese into regional "instability," while Gaza becomes a rolling civilizational trial. Western nations in the former conflicts seem to have a clear consensus on who is in the wrong, making them less “worthy” of coverage — on the other hand, Gaza is mired with a littering of extreme perspectives perpetually capable of stimulating public attention. None of this is proof that Israel's conduct is acceptable. It is proof that something other than a consistent moral standard is doing the sorting.

It also restores context that gets discarded when one conflict is asked to function as the world's central morality play. UNRWA was built as a dedicated Palestinian refugee agency, separate from UNHCR's global mandate — the only such arrangement for any displaced population on earth, a fact debated by UNRWA's own defenders and critics but rarely mentioned at all in casual discourse. The modern map of the Levant was drawn by British and French mandate administration after the Ottoman collapse, not as an excuse for anything that followed, but as a fact that explains a great deal about why the borders in dispute today were never drawn with any side's full consent. It restores the complexity that a clean morality play, in either direction, cannot survive.

There is a stranger wrinkle here too, one that cuts against any side trying to use this argument too cleanly. The United Arab Emirates is, by multiple UN, US, and human rights investigations, the primary external sponsor keeping the Rapid Support Forces armed and funded in Sudan — the same RSF that grew directly out of the Janjaweed militia responsible for the Darfur genocide of the early 2000s, and which the United States formally determined in 2025 is committing genocide again, this time against Darfur's Masalit and other non-Arab communities. The UAE is also, simultaneously, one of Israel's closest formal allies under the Abraham Accords, with the two countries deepening trade, intelligence-sharing, and joint air-defense deployments even through the Gaza war — Israel rushed its Iron Dome and Iron Beam systems to defend the UAE from Iranian attack in April 2026. A commentator reaching reflexively for "genocide" to describe Israel's conduct, while saying nothing about the actual, US-designated genocide sustained in part by a country aligned with the very state he is condemning, is not applying a moral standard consistently. He is applying a label to the target that his readers already expect, and skipping past the one that would require him to indict an ally of convenience to no one in particular. That is not analysis; it is the discourse cherry-picking the villain in advance and building the case backward.

The pattern is broader than Sudan alone, and it's worth being precise about scale rather than treating every example as interchangeable. Some of these are mass-killing events that dwarf Gaza by any count: the wars in eastern Congo, fed by Rwandan-backed militias contesting the region's coltan and gold since the late 1990s, have killed an estimated six million people, mostly from disease and displacement rather than direct violence, in what the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's own tracking project lists as a live genocide concern. Yemen's war, substantially prosecuted through a Saudi-led blockade that UN experts have called collective punishment, has killed an estimated 377,000 people, the majority from blockade-induced starvation and lack of healthcare rather than bombs. Others are not mass-killing events but are credibly described as cultural genocide by the people living through them: a UN panel found in 2023 that roughly a million Tibetan children have been separated from their families and placed in residential schools designed to erase their language and identity, and Maasai pastoralists facing mass eviction from ancestral land in Tanzania, under the banner of wildlife conservation, have had their own human-rights lawyers call it exactly that. None of these are reported, debated, or organized around with anything close to the intensity Gaza receives, and that is true regardless of where you land on what's happening in Gaza itself.

If we're serious about these issues, the deeper question isn't only which word gets used — it's why moral attention concentrates so heavily on one story while comparable or worse ones go quiet, regardless of which word technically applies.

What explains the shift from Darfur to Gaza since the 2000s?

It's worth asking the question directly, because the honest answer is more interesting, and more damning, than any single explanation on its own. Twenty years ago, Darfur was the cause. In 2004, the U.S. Congress passed resolutions calling it genocide; the Holocaust Museum issued a formal genocide warning; Save Darfur grew into a coalition of some 190 organizations and raised over $80 million, with seventy to ninety thousand people rallying at the aforementioned National Mall. Sudan is now suffering a war that displaced more people, by a wide margin, than Darfur ever did — and the same Harvard scholars who study this professionally describe the silence as total. Alex de Waal, who has worked on Sudan for decades, put it simply: there is no international response at all.

Media sociology has a real, decades-old literature on why this happens, and it doesn't require inventing new theories. Researchers since Galtung and Ruge's foundational 1965 study have identified a consistent set of factors that predict which foreign conflicts get sustained coverage: elite-nation status of the countries involved, cultural and geographic proximity to Western audiences, existing news infrastructure and access, and what scholars call "compassion fatigue" — audiences and editors alike growing numb to a story the longer it runs, regardless of whether the underlying suffering has gotten worse. Every one of these factors cuts against Sudan and in favor of Gaza. Israel is a wealthy, Western-aligned, media-saturated state with an enormous resident foreign press corps; Sudan had, by 2024, only a few dozen journalists still reporting from inside the country at all. Darfur itself was, in part, a victim of its own duration — advocates and scholars who studied the movement's collapse note that two decades of the same unresolved story exhausted the very donor and activist networks that built it, even as the underlying suffering in Sudan did not improve and arguably worsened.

None of that is a complete explanation, and it would be its own kind of dishonesty to pretend the access-and-fatigue story fully accounts for the gap. The mechanisms that predict general neglect — elite status, proximity, fatigue — explain why Sudan, Yemen, the DRC, Tibet, and the Maasai all struggle for coverage relative to their scale. They don't, by themselves, explain why Gaza specifically receives the volume and moral intensity it does, well beyond what "elite-nation proximity" alone would predict for a small, non-Western, Middle Eastern population under bombardment. That excess — the gap between what ordinary news-value factors would predict and what Gaza actually receives — is the part that deserves its own honest accounting, and it has several candidate explanations that can all be true simultaneously: the conflict's place in American domestic politics and religious memory, the symbolic freight Israel carries for movements organized around colonialism and Western power generally, genuine and legitimate moral urgency about civilian deaths in a war financed substantially by American weapons and special interests, and, for some but not all of the people driving the coverage, something closer to the oldest story there is. I don't think it is possible, nor honest, to assign a single percentage to each of these. What is possible is to notice that a commentator applying "genocide" reflexively to Israel while saying nothing about Sudan, the DRC, or Yemen is not being guided by the magnitude of suffering, since by that measure several of these clear the bar more decisively than Gaza does. Something else is doing the sorting. Antisemitism is not the only candidate. But it is one of them, and a discourse that refuses to ask the question is not protecting anyone — it is just declining to look.

The actual conclusion

Selective agenda-setting around Israel and Gaza did not invent antisemitism, and writers like Hedges did not create the underlying dynamic. They are working within a media and attention economy that rewards maximal language about the conflicts it has already decided matter, while a war that has displaced more people than Gaza, in a country I've spent considerable time in myself, struggles to clear a few hundred articles a month. But that economy has consequences.

When one conflict is repeatedly asked to absorb the world's accumulated moral horror almost by itself, while comparably brutal conflicts in Sudan, and before that in Darfur, in Yemen, in eastern Congo, recede into near-silence, the distinction between legitimate political critique and something closer to ancient suspicion of Jews does not hold for long. And it clearly does little to help suffering peoples in some of the world's most ghastly humanitarian situations.

Anti-Zionism is not automatically antisemitism. But a discourse that concentrates every accusation onto one Jewish state, while the world's actual largest humanitarian catastrophe goes nearly unreported, is not a neutral arrangement. It is a choice, made collectively and mostly unconsciously, about whose suffering is allowed to matter — and it is a choice with consequences that, fifty years after a marketplace in Rabat, I still recognize when I see them.

Is this journalistic situation mendable? Probably, but only if outlets and commentators with real reach choose to apply the same standard everywhere, including to allies and to causes their own audience doesn't want to be overcomplicated. That's a choice too, and unlike Rabat, no one is forcing it.

A note on sourcing: The Hedges count above is drawn from a documented review of his Substack archive since October 7, 2023: "Palestinians Speak the Language of Violence Israel Taught Them" (10/7/23), "The Chris Hedges Report with Professor Norman Finkelstein on Israel's Genocidal Campaign in Gaza" (10/17/23), "Israel's Final Solution for the Palestinians" (11/2/23), "The Cost of Bearing Witness" (12/24/23), "The Chris Hedges Report with Craig Mokhiber...on the ICJ Ruling, U.N. Failures, and U.S. Complicity with Genocide" (1/26/24), "Let Them Eat Dirt" (2/7–8/24), "The Looming Catastrophe in the Middle East" (9/27/24), "Extermination Works. At First." (10/13/24), "Genocidal Scorecard" (10/30/24), "The Last Chapter of the Genocide" (3/22/25), "Gaza's Hunger Games" (6/29/25), "The Gaza Riviera" (7/26/25), "Israel's War on the U.N." (8/21/25), "Taking Power Amidst the Turbulence" (12/17/25), "The Flotillas to Gaza Are the World's Conscience" (1/14/26), and "Iran and Gaza are Only the Beginning" (3/27/26) — fifteen pieces, possibly sixteen depending on how read-aloud duplicates are counted. The two passing references to Sudan and the Congo appear in the January 2026 flotilla piece and the August 2025 "War on the U.N." piece, respectively.