You Don’t Care About "Palestine"
Part 1
You don’t care about Palestine.
How do I know?
One Word. Sudan.
CNN has just published a detailed, months-long investigation documenting ethnically targeted mass killings carried out by Sudan’s army and its allied militias. The reporting describes civilians being executed, bodies dumped into canals, and mass graves concealed until satellite imagery revealed wrapped corpses surfacing as the water receded. Investigators traced responsibility back to senior levels of command.
The scale is absolutely staggering. More than 150,000 civilians are believed to have been killed. Nearly 12 million people have been displaced. Entire regions are facing famine. Non-Arab communities have been targeted at checkpoints, driven from their villages, and in some cases wiped out entirely. Women interviewed by investigators described watching their children executed. Weeks later, bodies were still being carried downstream by the canals. A UN investigator quoted by CNN described the campaign as a “targeted extermination of people.”
If concern for civilian life were really the driving force behind today’s activism, Sudan would be impossible to ignore. Yet there are no campus encampments demanding action, no mass ceasefire marches, no viral influencer monologues, and no celebrities posting flags or slogans.
The usual explanation is that Israel is different because the United States supports it militarily, and that protests are really about American complicity rather than the tragedy itself. I don’t buy it. If mass killing only matters when it can be blamed on your own country, that is a deeply self-centered way of engaging with human suffering.
These same voices regularly insist that silence is complicity and that there is always something one must do, even when the odds of success are low. That principle is suddenly abandoned when Sudan comes up.
No one genuinely believes that protesting Israel under a Trump administration is likely to change Israeli policy. People protest anyway because they believe public expression itself has moral value. That logic does not disappear because the victims are Sudanese, yet it is treated as if it does.
There is also a tendency to pretend that the United States is simply powerless in Sudan, which is not true. This is not an argument for American troops on the ground, and it is reasonable to oppose that idea. But the United States is the most powerful military and diplomatic actor on the planet. If it wanted to exert serious pressure, coordinate large-scale evacuations, isolate leadership, enforce consequences, or push negotiations using the full weight of its influence, it could. Even short of military action, there are many tools available.
The reality is not that nothing can be done. It is that no one wants to do anything. Sudan does not offer the emotional payoff or political symbolism that Israel does. It does not fit neatly into Western ideological narratives, and it does not allow people to perform virtue without cost.
Sudan has everything people claim to care about: ethnic cleansing, mass graves, famine, millions of refugees, and overwhelming evidence documented by satellite imagery, whistleblowers, and international investigators. Even CNN could not soften what it found.
And still, there is silence.
That silence says far more than the slogans ever did. Your outrage is not humanitarian. It is selective, ideological, and narrowly focused on one country, while far worse atrocities are treated as background noise.
You don’t care about Palestine.
You care only about the tragedy you can blame on the Jews.