Among the many tragedies of Gaza is how it has consumed the bandwidth of activists and protesters in the West.
In many ways they’ve done their job, handsomely aided by Binyamin Netanyahu himself. A grievously suffering Gaza is front and centre of almost every news report. Israel is now a pariah. The streets of Israeli cities are crammed with protesters against Netanyahu and his government. Day after day writers in Haaretz (Israel’s longest-running newspaper) eviscerate him and the extremist thugs who keep him in power. On Tuesday a columnist urged top defence officials to save Israel by refusing to obey the prime minister’s orders. Last week author Eyal Megged called on President Yitzhak Herzog to take a stand against Netanyahu: “Are you still buying his tongue-clucking, his hollow words, the deceit and the fraud that come to conceal the one and only essential fact – that the only consideration guiding everything he does is the pay-off for preserving and entrenching his rule? ... Any chance to end the war, he systematically dismisses. Any sign that heralds a possibility of an agreement, he kills off early on”. Megged, once close to Netanyahu, now stands with many national respected Israeli figures such as Ehud Barak, a former prime minister whose grandparents were murdered in the Holocaust, and the Nobel Prize laureate Prof Aaron Ciechanover.
Meanwhile the world’s eye has been distracted from countless other warmongering thugs wreaking agony on their own people, aided by cynical outside actors. Sudan is now the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian crisis. The power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has killed, conservative estimates suggest, 15,000 people, although some put the figure as high as 150,000, displaced nearly seven million and left almost half the population in dire need of humanitarian assistance. Although the United Arab Emirates has denied providing military support to the RSF, a UN report in January found the accusations to be credible.
Ethiopia’s violation of Somalia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity threatens to escalate into a catastrophic wider war and global trade chaos through the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.
Russia’s targeting of the Kyiv Sea dam with a cruise missile, threatening millions of lives downstream, was hardly noticed in hundreds of strikes launched on Israel on Monday, all largely enabled by Iran and its ubiquitous malignant bloody footprint.
A few weeks ago Iran’s “morality” police shot and paralysed a 31-year-old woman Arezoo Badri, the mother of two small children, for showing her hair. The 87 (at least) people executed since the presidential elections in June according to Human Rights Watch included Reza Rasaei, a Kurdish protester. The 2023 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, serving 13 years and 154 lashes in Evin prison, was struck several times by security guards while protesting against Rasaei’s execution and collapsed in the yard.
Meanwhile public rage over the rape and murder of a trainee doctor inside an Indian public hospital two weeks ago echoed a similar outcry in 2012 when a 23-year-old physiotherapy student on a bus home was gang-raped and assaulted so viciously with an iron rod that she died from internal injuries. Nearly 45,000 rape cases were investigated in India in 2022. There were just over 5,000 convictions.
And last week women and their voices were erased entirely from public life under Afghanistan’s new morality laws, to “promote virtue and prevent vice”. Women must not sing, recite or read aloud in public nor look at men. They are banned from visiting parks or travelling without a male guardian. Their bodies, faces, hair, necks and hands must be fully concealed in a thick, voluminous robe. They are expressly forbidden to wear perfume or make-up or to imitate the dress styles of non-Muslim women. They cannot participate in politics. In successive decrees, the Taliban has banned second- and third-level education for girls and women. Their clueless education minister has just challenged all Muslim scholars to provide an Islamic justification for girls’ education.
Some call this gender apartheid. It is plain old apartheid.
Such is the Taliban’s economic wizardry the economy has shrunk by nearly 27 per cent since their takeover, international funding which once covered over half of public spending has been severed, millions more Afghans now live in poverty.
The big question is what kind of global mindset allows these preposterous, insecure little men in Sudan, Israel, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia and elsewhere to cock their legs on their own populations and the wider world. Afghan women watch appalled as the Taliban are normalised and their smallest concession to talks – which exclude women of course – rewarded with high-profile glitzy platforms instead of an obscure back room. Yet fully two-thirds of Afghans support women’s rights, according to a new study from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and half of those do not support Taliban control. This seems like fertile territory on which western protesters and all free Muslims could plant their flags. It would require courage and infinite patience and the kind of passion and solidarity evident in pro-Palestinian protests. The absence of an obvious western target such as the US would make it more challenging of course. But what is the alternative?