In the torrent of protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, a familiar refrain echoes from defenders of the Jewish state: “If these activists truly cared about the loss of life, why aren’t they protesting the wars in Myanmar, Sudan, the Congo, the Maghreb, Haiti?” Clearly, their selective outrage betrays antisemitic bias, right? And there’s some truth to that. But this response, while intuitively satisfying, walks into a rhetorical trap laid by the very people it seeks to expose.
It’s not hypocritical for these protesters to focus on Israel instead of civil wars, ethnic cleansings or failed-state carnage elsewhere. It is strategic. The comparison isn’t their blind spot. It’s their entire point.
The bloody conflicts in places like Myanmar, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are driven by sectarian hatred, militias, warlords and totalitarian regimes. Antisemites would love for you to draw comparisons to Israel’s war in Gaza. But why would you?
Israel is engaged in a defensive war against a genocidal terrorist organization. Hamas, embedded within Gaza’s civilian population, openly calls for the destruction of the Jewish people and has repeatedly shown its commitment to that mission through murder, rape, hostage-taking and indiscriminate rocket fire.
There is a world of difference between a democratic state defending its citizens from a fanatical, foreign-funded death cult and armed groups slaughtering civilians in a bid for power or tribal supremacy. Lumping them together does not serve the cause of peace or human rights. It serves the narrative that seeks to demonize and delegitimize Israel.
That is where the trap lies.
The moment defenders of Israel argue, “Why don’t they care about Sudan or the Congo?” In doing so, they’re inadvertently accepting the comparison. They’re granting the idea that Israel’s actions belong in the same category as these other conflicts. They’re treating Israel like just another troubled nation caught in a violent mess of its own making. But Israel is not just another country. The war it is fighting is not just another civil war. And acknowledging that is not racism. It’s truth-telling.
When protesters chant against Israel with fury and singular obsession, they’re not just condemning collateral damage or expressing concern for Palestinian civilians. They are insisting that Israel is not a country with the right to self-defense but rather an imperialist aggressor, a rogue regime like what Bashar Assad recently ran in Syria or the Janjaweed militias in Darfur. They want the world to see Israel not as a nation under attack but as the attacker itself. In other words, the moral equivalence is not the flaw in their logic, it is their very mission.
By shouting only about Gaza, they are sending a message: Israel is the problem. Not Hamas. Not Hezbollah. Not Iran. Not Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces. Not Myanmar’s junta. Only Israel. Only the Jewish state.
The goal is not justice but isolation. And all too often, well-meaning people play right into that trap by allowing the conversation to focus on comparisons, rather than confronting the lie at the heart of the accusation.
No country is above criticism, and no military action should be beyond scrutiny. But it’s not about the war in Gaza or checkpoints in the West Bank. Even when there’s calm in Israel, the anti-Zionist mob finds ways to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state. It’s not a matter of whether Israel is taking excessive measures to defend itself. It’s whether Israel has the right to defend itself—in other words, the right to exist.
When you compare Gaza to Sudan, you’re not just slandering Israel. You’re flattening the moral universe. You’re erasing the difference between democracy and dictatorship, between defense and aggression, between law and terror.
We must not take the bait. The question is not: “Why aren’t they protesting Sudan, too?” The question is: “Why are they treating Israel as if it were Sudan?” That inversion is the heart of the injustice. And it is why these protests, far from being merely biased, are blatant expressions of antisemitism.
Because if you convince the world that the Jewish state belongs in the same category or even the same sentence as the world’s worst actors, then you’ve already won the battle to delegitimize it. And that, not the death toll or the suffering, is the true goal of the protesters’ rage.