Outrage at Israel is selective, disproportionate

Mark Patinkin, Columnist, The Providence Journal, USA Today Network

Transcribed from the clipping

“I understand where the righteous anger at Israel comes from. The images out of Gaza are heartbreaking. Yes, Hamas started the worst of it, firing thousands of missiles.

If Cuba had done that to Florida, we’d have doubtlessly responded with a heavy hand, and plenty of civilian casualties, because that’s what happens when an enemy is cynical enough to launch missiles from neighborhoods. But the Gaza death toll is higher, more than 220, compared to a dozen in Israel. So I get the outrage.

But there’s something I don’t get. Let me pose it as a question. Less than 200 miles from Gaza, in Syria, there has been an unspeakably one-sided slaughter by the dictator there, Bashar al-Assad. Almost 400,000 have been killed in his long war to crush any resistance, even critics.

Al-Assad has also committed appalling human rights violations, with torture, mass arrests and disappearances. It has been a dreadful human tragedy upon Arab civilians. Even if you add all the Palestinian deaths in the last decade of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, same time as the Syrian war, it’s 400,000 deaths versus a few thousand.

And it’s not as if al-Assad’s slaughter is over. The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) says there have been about 2,000 deaths since 2020. Where’s the righteous anger over that? Where are the demonstrations, social media posts and speeches from U.S. representatives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib?

I happen to admire AOC, and think it’s a point of pride to have a congresswoman of Palestinian descent like Tlaib. But the selective outrage is blatant. The media is certainly one reason. Most recent Syrian coverage I found comes from news outlets abroad, many non-mainstream. But social media is a telling insight into grassroots outrage.

One example: SNHR, the Syrian rights group, has about 23,000 followers on Instagram. This week, it posted about the total tragedies there – almost 400,000 killed in the civil war, mostly civilians, and another 34,000 ‘forcibly disappeared’ by the dictatorship. That post got two ‘likes’ by outraged followers. Two.

By contrast, a recent post on an Instagram site called ‘Let’s Talk Palestine’ calling for boycotts of companies that do business in Israel got 162,322 likes. ‘Let’s Talk Palestine’ has 10 times the followers – 230,000 – of SNHR, but their anti-Israel post got 80,000 times more likes.

And a Google search revealed no organized effort to boycott Syria, whereas there are calls everywhere to boycott Israel. I do understand that Israel is held to a higher standard, the price of being the only true democracy in the region. But Syria isn’t the only country that reflects disproportionate outrage against Israel.

A civil war in South Sudan has also killed more than 400,000 people in the last eight years. Many of course have raised alarms over it, but there’s been nowhere near the righteous anger you see this week alone against Israel. Then there’s the war by Ethiopia against the regional government and people of its Tigray province.

Opposition parties in Tigray claim 50,000 have been killed. The UN says it’s at least many thousands, with rape and murder of women a common weapon of war, and millions cut off from desperately needed aid.

Here’s what the World Health Organization’s director-general said about the Tigray disaster on Monday: ‘The situation in Tigray, Ethiopia, is, if I use one word, horrific. Very horrific.’ But you won’t find a big audience who cares. Had Israel employed the same tactics as Syria’s al-Assad, almost all of Gaza would be rubble.

It would be similar if it acted like the aggressors in Ethiopia and South Sudan. Instead, despite tragic civilian deaths, its goal is to surgically stop terrorists there from firing missiles against Israeli cities. For that, Israel draws immensely more righteous anger than countries doing a thousand times worse.

I don’t disagree that Israel’s response appears disproportionate. But not as much as that of its critics.”

Context added by this archive

A local columnist carried by a national chain, arguing that the attention is the thing out of proportion rather than the deaths. The column measures the argument in Instagram likes and names two American congresswomen.

Above it runs a photograph of a destroyed building in Gaza City, taken by a Palestinian photographer for the Associated Press, and the death toll it cites — more than 220 against a dozen — is in its fifth paragraph.

Cite this item

"Outrage at Israel is selective, disproportionate," The Providence Journal, 20 May 2021. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2021-009. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2021-009