Among the serious problems pervading the Gaza activist movement, none is more insidious than the selective outrage exhibited toward human suffering, even among different groups within the Middle East. It is selective outrage when the death of a Gazan child provokes mass protests and strikes, but the death of a Yemeni or Sudanese child hardly elicits a reaction. The lives of children in Gaza, Sudan, and Yemen are equally valuable, yet the politics of Israel and Palestine has led activists to be far more concerned about the former than the latter.
Gaza activists consider themselves the ideological vanguard of a movement oriented not just toward Palestinian self-determination, but more broadly toward the dismantling of what they see as the Western imperialist order. At the same time, they fashion themselves as pure-hearted humanitarians. They employ emotional rhetoric and humanitarian concern to bring attention to Gaza, proclaiming that any good human would condemn the war in Gaza and demand a ceasefire as soon as possible. These two perspectives—one of peaceful altruism and the other of violent rebellion against “neocolonialism”—are ultimately contradictory. Yet despite this ideological dissonance, Gaza activists deploy both to achieve their goals.
A harrowing example of this is the reaction, or lack thereof, toward Yemen and the tyrannical rule of the Houthis. For the past ten years, Yemen has been embroiled in a bloody civil war between multiple warring factions, including the Houthis—an Iran-backed terrorist organization whose attacks on international shipping have been praised as justified resistance against Israel by Gaza activists. While the Houthis devote resources to acquiring advanced weapons for attacks on shipping through the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb, the population they govern in Yemen starves. A microcosm of this crisis is the ongoing siege of Taiz, a city of one million, imposed by the Houthis. While Gaza activists in America and Europe lament the horrors in Gaza, they simultaneously have nothing but praise for the terror organization responsible for starving Yemen.
Yemen isn’t the only conflict deliberately ignored by the Gaza crowd. UN agencies have described the conflict in Sudan as the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian disaster. Millions face famine, and tens of thousands of children have already died of starvation, with millions more at risk. The United States has concluded that the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have committed genocide in Darfur and other regions. It is currently the world’s most brutal conflict, yet no one in the Gaza activist crowd cares because it does nothing for their anti-Western political agenda. Sudan has very little direct Western involvement, whereas countries like the UAE and Iran use the conflict as a strategic proxy war, funneling weapons and aid to their respective allies. Due to the lack of Western involvement, the world’s bloodiest conflict and worst humanitarian disaster will continue with no protests, encampments, or strikes drawing attention to it. The Yemenis and Sudanese, as Arab Muslims, are not so far from the Palestinians, and yet it is only the Palestinians whose plight garners international recognition.
But these activists aren’t perpetually indifferent; if it helps their political agenda, they’ll praise the indiscriminate massacre of civilians while simultaneously victim-blaming. On October 7th itself, rather than condemning the killing and kidnapping of innocent Israeli civilians, activists poured into the streets of Western cities, celebrating the terror attack as a just assault on the “Zionist entity.” At the same time, many immediately started beating the drum of unjust retaliation when Israel struck Hamas in the wake of those attacks. The just thing to do would have been to condemn the attacks, but it has never been about being just.
To psychoanalyze this activist movement, we must examine how they break the boundaries of neutrality and fairness, switching between three main postures: humanitarian outrage, violent rhetoric, and silent indifference. They become outraged at horrifying incidents in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank. They spew violent rhetoric toward Israeli civilians and the entire Western world. And finally, they sit in indifference when they hear about a humanitarian disaster they can’t exploit for political reasons, like Yemen or Sudan. A real humanitarian activist movement would, in no uncertain terms, condemn the Houthis, the RSF, and other actors regardless of their enmity with the United States and the Western world. But this brings us to the crux of the activist movement and what it truly wants. It’s not about dead Gazans, and not about occupation; it’s about upholding the concept of the West as the source of all woes in the Arab world—at all costs, even if it means ignoring millions dead, starving, or displaced.
But not all activists reduce human suffering to agenda-based nonsense. It is certainly possible to be a major critic of the war in Gaza and of the Netanyahu government while also virulently opposing Hamas. There are reasonable people in the West and the Middle East, Israelis and Arabs alike, advocating for a two-state solution that rids the Palestinian Territories of terrorist organizations and brings about a new future for both peoples in peace.
The bottom line is this: if the Gaza activists wish to commit themselves to the dismantling of the West, then they must commit to that rather than attempting to play a rhetorical game that places them in two worlds. Either the conflict in Gaza is ultimately about securing peace for Israelis and Arabs to live in relative harmony, or it is about the ever-pressing need for a global revolution against the West. It cannot be both. Until then, the faux-humanitarianism and selective outrage of Gaza activists remain a political game played to strengthen the position of horrific actors like Hamas and the Houthis. True humanitarianism would never ask whether a life was Gazan, Yemeni, or Sudanese; it would only ask whether the life was human.
