to wonder why the Gaza conflict DOES get so much more publicity than other atrocities in the Middle East?

[alAswad]

First of all I would like to make absolutely clear that this isn't an Israel-apologist thread, before anyone has a go at me. I've stated elsewhere that I find the actions of the Israeli government indefensible and I'm not interested in making excuses for them.

It's been raised a few times on the Israel-Palestine threads though that there are other atrocities happening in the region, some on a far bigger scale (the displacement and death toll from ISIS is enormous, including 40,000 members of a religious minority in Iraq currently under siege who will probably die in a matter of days without humanitarian assistance), that are only getting a fraction of the coverage that Gaza is. The response is generally that the Israel threads aren't the place to discuss those issues, which is fair enough, but I do think the disproportionate response is interesting and I'm curious as to where it comes from.

I've heard people explain it as anti-Semitism, which I'm sure some of it may well be, but my hunch is that it's to do with anti-Muslim/Arab feelings as well - people can shrug it off because they feel like it's 'typical' behaviour from Arabs, or that they can deal with their own conflicts and it doesn't concern us. I think maybe people see Israelis as more like 'us' in the West, perhaps because many are of European origin, and so hold them to higher standards. I don't have any evidence for that though, so I'd be interested to hear what other people think.

Uk supplied billions worth of arms to Assad. And nerve gas.

Still who wants to talk about boring old Syria? 150,000 dead in two years. Over 200 children this month.

Babbas, it feels like a situation we can influence and change- maybe that's right. But why wouldn't you think that about Syria and Iraq too?

crescentmoon I agree, the apocalypse stuff is fascinating

What many don't know about the Christian fundamentalists is that yes they support Israel, because they need it to exist for the end of days -- but when the world does end, all the Jews will die, along with all the other nonbelievers.

So a bit of a mixed blessing, really.

it feels like a situation we can influence and change- maybe that's right. But why wouldn't you think that about Syria and Iraq too?

Good question. Clearly we can affect policy on Syria, as evidenced by the public pressure on the government last year NOT to intervene after Assad used chemical weapons on his own people. That one attack killed nearly as many people as have died in Gaza in the last month. Yet people were adamant that we not get involved and the government backed down.

Maybe it gets coverage because we are the supplier of some of the arms that are killing people.

You're saying that Gaza and the plight of the Palestinians is getting a lot of media attention and public discussion, and you right, it is. But that's only started happening very recently. It's not true to say that there has been media coverage and public interest for as long as the problem has existed, because it has been ignored for ages.

The Palestinians have been suffering at the hands of Israel for decades and no one has paid it any attention.

I find it staggering that their voice is finally starting to be heard, and the response from some is almost like 'why should we worry about them when there are other people suffering too?'

The support for the killing and oppression from the UK and US governments is what makes the situation in Gaza and the West Bank different.

To make a real difference in Syria or Iraq we would have to use our own military, which bring up spear ate questions of its own. We don't need to do that to help the Palestinians because enough pressure can be put on Israel to make it change without it.

I think another factor is that it is seen as war between 2 states. There seems to be this mindset that killing your own people is not as bad as killing your neighbours. Keep your conflict within you own borders and we'll pretend we can't see it, kind of thing. Saddam Hussein was an evil murdering bastard but no action was taken until he invaded Kuwait. Same as Russia desperately trying to appear like they're not involved in Ukraine.

we [in countries like the UK] rightly or wrongly apply different standards to countries depending on how [for want of a better word] rich they are & how much they try to portray themselves off as civilised places.

crudely speaking, it'd be a bit daft to expect all that much [in terms of free & fair elections & so on] of a country like Syria with an annual GDP per capita of a couple of thousand dollars per person. but Israel is very nearly as rich as most western European countries & we shoudl expect far more of it.

it's very obviously not an 'anti isrel thing'. we also weight casualties very differently by nationality, e.g. 9/11 deaths were about 3,000, palestinian deaths in this latest fiasco are already close to 2,000, it wouldn't be too shocking to see the 9/11 figure overtaken, but the media coverage isn't remotely comparable because, I suppose, Palestinians aren't really 'people like us'. I suppose that in Syria, neither victims nor perpetrators are anything at all 'like us' :(

I disagree WooWoo, I think the Palestinians have received a lot of attention worldwide since at least the 1980s. There were the very high-profile PLO hijackings and such that drew attention and then the first intifada. In the 1990s you had a very high-profile peace process, and then the second intifada and the horrible violence there. It has been a huge issue for a long time. I think today it's reaching some new audiences as a result of new activist currents, but that doesn't mean it hasn't been a big deal for a long time.

I don't think anyone is arguing that people shouldn't pay attention to it and care about it. It's just curious and sometimes depressing that people don't seem to care about other conflicts as well.

why the Gaza conflict DOES get so much more publicity than other atrocities in the Middle East
Anti-Semitism at base, basically. It's like a nasty insidious virus.

Can you not identify any distinction between anti-semitism and opposition to the actions of the Israeli government?

I don't think the Israeli government speaks for every Jewish person in the world. Or even for every Jewish person in Israel.

There is something particularly appalling about atrocities carried out by States, using the apparatus of the State, and funded, to the tune of billions, by the world's largest superpower.

That's fairly distinctive.

There is a major difference between criticism of this and anti-semitism.

The anti-semitism thing is wearing majorly thin. It needs retiring from the Hasbara phrase book, methinks.

Public sympathy for the people of Gaza has NOTHING to do with anti semitism. Nothing at all, and I actually think it's quite disgusting to suggest that.

If anything, Europeans today who are completely removed from these conflicts seem to have considerable sympathy for Jewish people as a whole because we have all been educated about the holocaust.

I don't think the argument is that public sympathy is due to anti-Semitism -- it's natural for people to be horrified by atrocities.

I think it's an interesting question why people seem more horrified and spurred to action by what Israel does than by what other states do, even when other states kill far more people.

I personally don't think anti-Semitism is the main explanation, although it may be a factor for some people.

I think a lot of the other explanations offered on this thread are much more illuminating.

But you're not speaking for me, dreaming.

On a thread about Israel I will tend to talk about Israel. You simply won't know how I feel about Syria, by the ongoing genocide in the Sudan, or what's happened in Sri Lanka. Or Congo and Zimbabwe. (Hint: horrified.)

I'm labouring this because recently I've seen endless loops of Whataboutery:
you're not allowed to talk about Russia because what about Israel;
you're not allowed to talk about Israel because what about ISIS;
you're not allowed to talk about ISIS because what about US/UK interference in the ME;
you're not allowed to talk about UK overseas actions because what about entryist Islamic extremists in the UK...

It's all deflection.

And the truth is, we have to talk about ALL of these things, or we are deeply, deeply fucked. In fact I suspect we're fucked anyway. I fear we've reached a tipping point of instability and anger.

I am very afraid for the world.

The OP was about why the focus on Gaza to the exclusion of other, arguably just as/more horrific situations. I think part of the answer is anti-Semitism, on which much European thought for 2000 years has been based. It's so deeply embedded we don't notice it: it's sort of "normal."

Er... who said I was speaking for you? I don't even know you.

I agree, we need to talk about ALL these things. And yet we aren't. As has been noted, there have been many threads on here about Israel/Gaza and virtually none on the other conflicts you mention.

I think that's a valid question to raise. I think some people use whataboutery as a deflection but I think many of us are genuinely curious as to this discrepancy.

UptheChimney are Jewish people who critisise Israel anti-Semitic too? Gideon Levy? Naomi Wolf? The organisation Jews for Palestinian Right of Return? Rabbi Alissa Wise?

I've just Advance Searched MN threads with "Syria" in the title over the last 12 months.

It returned more than 500 threads (max can be shown).

That's not "virtually none".

BTW, I think there is something worth investigating in the OP, but it starts with whether there's disproportionate coverage, not the assumption that there is.

There might well be. But the BBC audit was a cautionary tale.

Surely that is not quite correct, I think

If you search only for thread titles that include Syria, there are only 20 in the last year.

The more than 500 refers to individual posts, I think.

If this is right, I think only 20 threads started about one of the worst wars in modern times is not that impressive.

Oh I'll check. I meant to search thread titles, but sometimes do it wrong.

Wow, that's a lot of responses! It's a really interesting debate, thanks everyone.

A couple of people are making the point that Gaza has only been getting a lot of coverage recently, which is true to some extent, but I'm not sure people were completely unaware of the plight of the Palestinians before July. It might just be because I tend to move in lefty academic circles but the vast majority of people I know had some kind of an opinion one way or the other on the Israel-Palestine issue, even if it wasn't a hugely informed one, whereas when it came to things like the civil war in Syria people were aware of what was happening but didn't feel they knew enough about it to have an opinion. Even as a young child in the 90s I remember being very aware of the fact that there was 'trouble in Israel' (iirc most of the news back then was focusing on Palestinian suicide bombings) and I'd heard phrases like 'the roadmap to peace' before I was fully aware of which countries were even in the Middle East.

I'm quite sceptical about it being to do with US/UK funding of Israel - as has been pointed out, we also supplied chemical weapons to Assad, and we have a lot of involvement in the region as a whole, so I don't think you can pin it down to just that. Although it's true that support for Israel from the West is a lot more vocal than our funding of other regimes.

The point about it being easier for journalists to cover Gaza is a good one - I suppose more people are more likely to have internet access and possibly smartphones etc there as well, so it's easier to make people aware of what's going on. Perhaps there's an element of it feeding off itself as well - if the Israel-Palestine threads (here and elsewhere) are fast-moving then people are going to read them more regularly, which is going to lead to more contributions and so on.

I completely agree with Wannabe about being surprised that people think the Gaza conflict is a bigger threat to stability than ISIS as well - they're taking over large swathes of the Middle East and even threatening Jordan, which has (at least in recent decades) been mostly peaceful, economically and politically stable and secular (in terms of government). I could be wrong but IMO the Israel-Palestine issue is by far the more likely of the two to stay 'internal' to the Middle East.

Surely, I agree that the 'whataboutery' is misplaced on threads about individual topics, that's why I started this one, as a place specifically for that conversation