The War in Gaza

The war in Sudan. The Ethiopian civil war. The Maghreb insurgency. The Somali civil war. The Myanmar civil war. The Democratic Forces insurgency in Congo and Uganda. The Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger and Chad. The Yemeni Civil War. 

Gaza.

Editor Commentary

Some of these conflicts go back decades or even longer, but all of them have also suffered significant loss of life in 2023.

And yet, in all of the above conflicts — which are but a snapshot of the wars taking place on Earth — there are two stark differences between all of them and one particular outlier.

Gaza.

There are two very glaring differences between the war in Gaza and wars taking place elsewhere in the Muslim world: 1) The war in Gaza is against the Jewish state of Israel, and 2) the war dominates public interest in the West in a way that no other Islamist-involved conflict has.

This is not anecdotal. If you look at the first 6 weeks of data of the Israel-Gaza war in terms of Google search interest and compare it to the first 6 weeks of conflict of literally any other war mentioned above, it’s not even close. The difference in search volume is exponentially higher for Gaza. You could literally lump the data on the rest of the conflicts together and the Gaza war still dwarfs them all. 

And that begs the question: why?

Why is it that Americans — largely on the left side of the political aisle — appear to only care about the death of Muslims when it’s this particular conflict?

It’s certainly not the body count. Syrian non-combatant fatalities are well over 300,000, — more than 30,000 children — according to the United Nations Human Rights Office. More than 350,000 non-combatant deaths due to the Yemeni civil war. The Somali war — dragging on for decades — has seen as many as a million dead, and the displacement of as many as 3.8 million refugees. Myanmar — where the internal conflicts stretch back to 1948, the same year Israel declared independence — recorded 14,000 conflict deaths in 2023 alone — and well over 200,000 since the start of hostilities (by contrast, the number of casualties in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict are less than one-fifth of that dating back to 1948).

The actual non-combatant death count in Gaza since Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7 is unknown. The only reports coming out are being provided by the Gaza Health Ministry, which is governed by Hamas. And Hamas isn’t separating combatants from non-combatants in their reports. Regardless, whatever the number is, it doesn’t come close to the number of fatalities from any of the other wars mentioned above.

And yet, there is an undeniable fascination with the Gaza war from the West — to the point where it has lit a firestorm of antisemitism and Islamophobia. Americans who often have nothing other than shared DNA with the combatants a world away face an unending cycle of derision, hate, and violence on U.S. shores. And these acts are being perpetuated by a largely privileged populace — certainly privileged relative to those in the line of fire in the Levant — who have decided to center themselves in a conflict between two entities a world away. A populace, I might add, with little-to-no education on any of the above conflicts.

But here in the West, we don’t waste time with education or nuance. There’s only good and bad, cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, Jedi and Sith. And where we land appears to depend largely on who’s got the catchier slogan.