Some op-eds leap off the newspaper page, informing and challenging us at the same time — posing difficult questions forcing us to reckon with flaws not in only in our politics but in ourselves.
I’m talking about this week’s important piece in the New York Times by Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. She writes about a war that is a “living hell,” where “famine is looming” and millions “have been forced from their homes in what has become the world’s largest internal displacement crisis.” Where “measles, cholera and other preventable diseases have spread”; and where “combatants on both sides of the war have undermined” efforts to provide humanitarian aid. Where war crimes are committed.
Perhaps it all sounds familiar — but it’s not. Greenfield isn’t writing about the about the war in Gaza, she’s reminding us about the civil war in Sudan. Let me repeat: reminding us. Because the battle between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces may be the most gruesome current war you’ve never heard of.
Greenfield sounds the alarm because too many of us have been all but deaf to the wailing. In late February, I read a detailed U.N. situation report about Sudan. It’s a chilling, barbaric litany of indiscriminate attacks on densely populated areas; the firing of missiles on public markets; the use of residential areas for military purposes; the attacks on hospitals and mosques; the displacement of 6.7 million people (half of whom are children); the killing of civilians; sexual and gender-based violence; abductions, kidnappings and arbitrary detentions; the recruitment of children to take up arms to “win the honour of defending the homeland”; and on and on.
Nearly a month has passed since the report’s release, and I’ve seen no visible eruption of moral outrage that holds even a flickering candle to the firestorm of protest against Israel. No massive protests over Sudan tying up streets and bridges in Western cities. No demonstrations erupting on our college campuses or professors refusing to teach unless the government of Sudan agrees to a cease fire. No chants along the lines of, “From the Nile River to the Red Sea, Sudan Will Be Free!” No actors at the Oscars wearing ribbons symbolizing their affinity with a cessation of hostilities in North Africa.
I’ve wondered why so many activists who froth at the mouth against Israel seem to yawn at atrocities in Sudan. Is it just not fashionable to gather all that energy and outrage when the war crimes are in North Africa? Not worth lifting a sharpie to placards, a megaphone to lips, banners to the wind? Do innocent Black lives in Sudan not matter as much?
And what about the right? Where are the fulminations on Fox News? The hair-trigger barrage if the president shows policy distance with the wobbly centers of authority in Sudan? Is the silence because the right-wing punditry finds less interest in a military conflagration that can’t be instantly weaponized against a Democrat?
To be clear, I’m deeply concerned about Israel’s operation in Gaza and the long-term consequences. I also understand clearly that the rationale, conduct and objectives that apply in one military theater cannot be evenly applied in another. The comparisons between the response to Israel and Sudan are by no means perfect, but they make a point.
Silence towards Sudan reveals a vulnerability, a softness in the hardline of the mass protests against Israel after it responded to the massacre of its citizens on Oct. 7. You can’t claim to be for universal human rights only when it’s about certain humans. You can’t relish in your moral absolutism while drawing squishy lines around conflicts that may have less cachet than others.
Sudan is burning. People are dying. Won’t any of the activists so eager to criticize Israel pay attention? Or will they continue to wave banners, not as signs of their support of human rights, but surrenders to hypocrisy?
Steve Israel represented New York in the U.S. House of Representatives over eight terms and was chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from 2011 to 2015. Follow him @RepSteveIsrael.