By Julio Levit Koldorf, JNS
Blaming Israel offers moral gratification with close to no existential discomfort. It is safe, culturally approved and symbolically rich.
There are epochs in which moral conviction becomes indistinguishable from choreography. Ours is such an age: a time in which public virtue is measured not by the suffering one alleviates, but by performative symbolism. The global landscape of outrage today resembles less a conscience than a stage—carefully lit, meticulously curated and strictly selective in the tragedies it chooses to acknowledge.
The revealing contrast is that, in Congo, children starve in what experts unanimously describe as one of the worst humanitarian collapses of the century. In Sudan, largely invisible to Western eyes, entire communities are exterminated, women are hanged from trees, and bodies litter the streets in scenes that evoke the most nightmarish chapters of history. Yet these horrors—real and meticulously documented—elicit almost no marches, no global media crusades, no impassioned campus revolutions. Not even the brief spasms of moral indignation that typically accompany viral images.
Meanwhile, a meticulously manufactured narrative of “genocide” and “famine” in Gaza—unsupported by demographic, forensic or historical evidence—ignited one of the most fervent moral spectacles of recent decades. It mobilized masses across continents, providing the raw material for slogans, manifestos and a new subgenre of fashionable political identity. The ease with which millions accepted a fiction while ignoring verifiable atrocities elsewhere is not merely a failure of information; it is a symptom of something deeper and culturally entrenched.
Sociologically, this selectivity is too consistent to be accidental; rather, it follows a pattern observable across Western history: the instinct to project moral anxiety onto a symbolically charged antagonist. For centuries, antisemitism has served precisely this function—not only as a prejudice, but as a cultural reflex. In contemporary discourse, this reflex disguises itself with the vocabulary of humanitarianism. Yet it retains its essential structure: the transformation of Jews, and their only country, into the preferred vessel for moral blame.
The logic is brutally simple. Condemning Sudan’s perpetrators demands confronting African political failures, militia violence and tribalistic massacres—realities that challenge Western narratives about post-colonial innocence. Highlighting starvation in the Congo requires recognizing the catastrophic consequences of global indifference toward African suffering, an indifference that has persisted for decades. In both cases, actual activism would require the genuine courage of confronting power vacuums, armed factions, geopolitical cynicism and the overwhelming complexity of neglected conflicts.
Blaming Israel, by contrast, offers moral gratification with close to no existential discomfort. It is safe, culturally approved, and, most importantly, symbolically rich. The Jew, whether embodied in the individual or in the state, has for centuries functioned as Western civilization’s most accessible metaphor for evil; and, at the same time, its most conveniently cathartic punching-bag. In the 21st century, that metaphor has been renewed and rebranded. It is now expressed in the language of “solidarity,” “decolonization” and “human rights.”
This is not merely hypocrisy. It is a sociological phenomenon that reveals the degree to which moral posturing in the modern West is governed by symbolic utility rather than empirical suffering. Where the Jewish state is concerned, suffering is amplified, dramatized and often invented. Where Africans suffer, it is minimized, normalized or erased. The moral lens is not calibrated to match reality, but to a narrative of convenience.
The moment that Israel withdraws from the scene, the theater evaporates. When Hamas resumed its routine abuses against Palestinians—executions, beatings, repression, the diversion of humanitarian aid—the global guardians of justice went silent. Not a single multinational protest emerged to denounce Hamas’s violence against its own population. The victims instantly lose their symbolic value. They are, in essence, useless to “the cause.”
The silence surrounding Sudan or the Congo today is not an accident; it is a confession. It reveals the degree to which global activism has ceased to be about victims and has become about symbolism. It exposes a hierarchy of empathy dictated not by need but by ideological fashion. And it lays bare the most uncomfortable truth: Much of contemporary humanitarianism is a form of political consumerism, a way of acquiring identity without confronting the moral intricacy of reality.
The images emerging from Africa and other places of the Middle East should have the power to tear through illusions and force a reckoning. They reveal that those who shouted most loudly about justice were, in many cases, engaged in nothing but dramaturgy. They reveal that “solidarity” often functions as a mask, a performance that evaporates when the victims do not serve the ideological purpose.
The right side of history is rarely the fashionable one. It is never rewarded with applause. It is the position anchored in empirical suffering, rather than symbolic projection. And today, that suffering cries from famine-stricken, religious, racial and ethnically cleansed villages—places abandoned not by fate but by the world’s carefully curated conscience.
For two years now, millions allowed themselves to be conscripted into a morality play where they blindly repeated slogans supplied by political entrepreneurs. They purposely replaced ethical clarity with moral theatrics. But history is indifferent to performance.
To stand on the right side of history today is not to repeat fashionable accusations against the only democracy in the Middle East. It is to confront the atrocities the world has chosen not to see, covered by the symbolic comfort of a simplistic narrative that has turned against the human beings who are suffering beyond the margins of global attention.
History remembers those who had courage. And it will forget those who preferred the applause of the crowd.
