Israel, the Palestinians, and a Curious Case of Selective Outrage
"Our 'higher nature' allows us to be profoundly altruistic, but altruism is mostly aimed at members of our groups."
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“I’m in the mall the other day. I went by that store, Lululemon. I walk by and in the window of every Lululemon, there’s a sign that says, ‘We don’t support racism, sexism, discrimination, or hate.’ And I’m like, ‘Who gives a fuck?’ You’re just selling yoga pants. I don’t need your yoga pants politics.”
This is an excerpt from Chris Rock’s standup comedy special for Netflix last year.
“I’m all for social justice,” added Rock, a Black American. “I’m all for marginalized people getting their rights. The thing I have a problem with is the selective outrage.”
Selective outrage, indeed.
Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been slaughtered in the Yemeni civil war, and more than 10 million Yemeni children are starving right now, yet there are no pro-Yemeni protestors purposely stopping traffic at busy junctions in Western capitals.
“Everyone is silent about Yemen,” said Yemeni activist Luai Ahmed, “yet everyone is a humans rights activist about Gaza.”1
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a federal government body, recommended that India be put on the list of countries “of particular concern” (a suggestion ignored by the U.S. State Department) alongside China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. But you don’t see any demonstrations in the West demanding more theological liberties for Indians.
In 2016, a terrorist attacked a crowd in Nice, France and killed 84 people, prompting #PrayForNice to trend on Twitter. Yet after twin bombings at a crowded market in Baghdad left almost 300 dead, there was no real international reaction and not nearly enough #PrayforBaghdad tweets to make it trend.
Organizations are also guilty of “selective outrage.” After another terror attack that year in Beirut, Facebook didn’t allow people in Lebanon to check in as “safe” on its platform, like it did for those in France. And eight years ago, then-U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry gave words to what Israelis had been feeling for decades, as he criticized the United Nations for its “obsession with Israel.” True to form, the organization has issued 14 condemnations of the Jewish state this year — double the rest of the world, combined.
Then there’s the media’s addiction to overindulging in the Jewish state. For example, one article in 2014 from The New Yorker, as Israel and Hamas were ensnared in another skirmish, described the world’s events by dedicating one sentence each to the horrors in Nigeria and Ukraine, four sentences to the crazed genocides of ISIS, and the rest of the article — 30 sentences total — to Israel and Gaza.
“Selective outrage,” which can be described as one act of violence or upheaval in the world receiving disproportionate attention than similar, concurrent acts, has become a matter of routine. And it originates, at least in part, from what writer David Graham called an “empathy gap.”
“People tend to perk up when they see themselves in the victims,” wrote Graham, which is another way of saying: People tend to ignore events that do not relate to their ill-informed identity politics. (More on this below.)2
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt described it differently, but with a similar interpretation: “Our ‘higher nature’ allows us to be profoundly altruistic, but altruism is mostly aimed at members of our groups.”3
According to Haidt, human nature is not just intrinsically moral; it’s also intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental. This enabled human beings — but no other animals — to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship. At the same time, moral psychology virtually guarantees that our cooperative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife, of which selective outrage is an outgrowth.
It’s easy to understand that an incident in your hometown is likely to hit you harder than one in a random city, even if it takes place in your country. There is also “brand name” recognition: The world is more likely to empathize with, say, Paris because of its international status, than they are with Baghdad because it is far less familiar to many people.
But what about the world’s “selective outrage” over the current Israel-Hamas war and people’s predominant concern for Hamas’ quasi-military fortress, also known as the Gaza Strip? After all, Gaza doesn’t pass the aforementioned familiarity test, and many people taking Hamas’ side (both implicitly and explicitly) are neither Gazan nor Palestinian. So why so much selective outrage?
There are a few explanations, starting with “identity politics” — the tendency for people to form exclusive political alliances based on who they perceive themselves to be, a move away from traditional broad-based party politics. More specifically, many people who identify with marginalized groups equate the historical and/or current hardships of their group with those of the Palestinians, irrespective of context and history. A textbook case of misguided conflation.
All that matters to these people is that both groups — theirs and the Palestinians — are suffering, and therefore they must all be victims, oppressed by some so-called ruling elite, despite the more nuanced reality which suggests otherwise. Their overly simplified narrative is “a victim is a victim is a victim.” Period. End of story. All these people want to know is where to send their exhaustive list of grievances and how to redeem their retribution.
Let’s use African Americans, for example, since the Black Lives Matter movement has been overwhelmingly supportive of the world’s fifth-most active terror group (you know, Hamas). Not all but many African Americans decide to side with the Palestinians as if the Palestinian struggle is their struggle, as if the Palestinians were one-time slaves of the Jews who shipped them against their will across an ocean to provide Jewish capitalists with free labor.
But Ritchie Torres, a U.S. congressman who knows better than to conflate two disparate peoples, reminded us why he is so aligned with the Jewish state: “I feel no need to be balanced between Israel and Hamas. One is a democratic ally of the U.S. The other is a genocidal terrorist organization oppressing both Israelis and Palestinians. Better to be right than to be balanced.”4
Another reason for so much selective outrage about Gaza is the classic saying: “No Jews, no news.” In the West, and certainly across other regions of the world, there is an inherent media bias not just against Israel, the Jewish state, but against the Jews.
For example, “America’s most important newspaper,” the New York Times, consistently placed major stories about the Nazi treatment of European Jews on back pages alongside “the soap and shoe polish ads” according to journalism professor Laurel Leff, who wrote a book on the subject called “Buried by the Times.”
Leff found that, during the period September 1939 to May 1945, the New York Times published more than 23,000 front-page articles, half of which were about World War II, but very few stories about Jewish victims made the newspaper’s front page. “The story of the Holocaust — meaning articles that focused on the discrimination, deportation, and destruction of the Jews — made the Times front page just 26 times, and only in six of those stories were Jews identified on the front as the primary victims,” she wrote.
Leff also pointed out that the New York Times often used a more generic term, such as refugee or nationality, to refer to Nazi victims who were Jewish.
“More shocking even than the chronic burying of articles with the word ‘Jew’ in them is how often that word was rubbed out of articles that specifically dealt with the Jewish condition,” wrote Gal Beckerman, a news editor. “It’s almost surreal at times. How could you possibly tell the story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising without mentioning Jews? But The Times did, describing how ‘500,000 persons ... were herded into less than seven percent of Warsaw’s buildings,’ and how ‘400,000 persons were deported’ to their deaths at Treblinka.”
As Leff put it, the New York Times “ran front-page stories, described refugees seeking shelter, Frenchmen facing confiscation, or civilians dying in German camps, without making clear the refugees, Frenchmen, and civilians were mostly Jews.”
Various motivations — some of which are linked to the Times’ publisher at the time, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who was Jewish — have been attributed to the outlet’s decisions to bury and minimize the Holocaust, which the Times admitted to underplaying to in 1996. Some claim that Sulzberger feared the Times, if it gave more prominent coverage to the Holocaust, would be “viewed as ‘a special pleader for the Jews’” at a time when antisemitism was relatively common in the United States.
In today’s day and age, and certainly against the backdrop of the Israel-Hamas war, the term “Jew” has been replaced with “Israeli” — but much of the media’s anti-Jewish sentiments are largely the same. Uglier characteristics of Palestinian politics and society are mostly untouched by the international press because they would disrupt the “Israel story,” a story of Jewish moral failure.
The news media’s editorial approach, predominantly, is that the conflict is Israel’s fault, and the Palestinians and the Arab world are blameless. Most news consumers of the “Israel story” don’t understand how this narrative is manufactured, but Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organizations do, seizing it to legitimize a Palestinian cause that is largely constructed not by honoring Palestinian culture and history, but by delegitimizing Israel.
To add insult to injury, social media amplifies these sentiments and creates echo chambers whereby users are fed increasingly more “pro-Palestinian” content at the expense of “pro-Israel” variations. Of course, social media rarely offers a glimpse of reality, such as the number of Israeli Arabs who said they “feel part” of Israel, which jumped from 48 percent to 70 percent after the October 7th attacks.5
Nevertheless, as media pundits sit in lavish studios far away from the Middle East, and as social media companies hire “attention engineers” to make their platforms more addictive, the “empathy gap” will only continue to grow. And make no trivial mistake: It has serious consequences.
Since populism is an inevitable part of politics, and with game-changing countries like the United States set to hold presidential elections this year, one has to wonder how the anti-Israel media and social media biases will affect the outcomes of the Israel-Hamas war.
This week, U.S. President Joe Biden was interrupted by “ceasefire” protest chants while speaking at a historic South Carolina church. Addressing the chants, Biden said he understood protesters’ passion and that he has been “quietly working” with Israel to “get out of Gaza” — a bizarre choice of words for a president whose administration was initially so supportive of Israel’s aim to eradicate Hamas from Gaza, after the terror group’s October 7th massacre in Israel.
But Biden’s diction pales in comparison to the fact that “pro-Palestinian” demonstrators are increasingly becoming more intrusive, obstructive, and dangerous — a sign that “selective outrage” is venturing beyond the realm of explainable psychology, to behaviors that could soon damage integral institutions, social norms, and civil obedience.
Many of these “pro-Palestinian” demonstrators will argue that there is too much happening in the world for everyone to react to everything. And, for those in the crowd whose intellectual laziness leads to intellectual dishonesty, it is much easier to sort the world into a clash of oppressors versus oppressed — where innocent deaths on one side are more deserving of “thoughts and prayers” than innocent deaths on the other.
There are also those who claim that everybody is “entitled” to their own opinion. Along these lines, my opinion — to borrow a line from Chris Rock’s Netflix comedy special — is: “Everybody’s full of shit.”
Hayder Alasadi, an Iraqi and self-described “ex-Muslim,” was even more blunt:
“Don’t tell me you give a damn about ‘civilians,’ otherwise you all would have protested about every single soul being killed in all of our Arab countries.”
“What you are doing is simply Jew-hating and Israel-hating, using ‘innocent Palestinians’ as a card to demote Israel, to make Jews look ‘evil,’ to push for boycotts against this beautiful country, to have the ‘right’ to attack everything Jewish, from innocent students in universities, to Jewish-owned stores, to anybody who wears the Star of David or simply holds the Israeli flag.”
“You are not protesters. You are hate-filled, uneducated, and uncivilized, and represent nobody except your hateful mind.”6
Luai Ahmed on X
“The Empathy Gap Between Paris and Beirut.” The Atlantic.
Haidt, Jonathan. “The Righteous Mind.” Vintage. 2013.
Ritchie Torres on X
“Flash Survey: Israelis support immediate negotiations to release the hostages while fighting continues.” The Israel Democracy Institute.
Hayder Alasadi on X
There is clearly a stealth like insidious plan in place! Just terrifying for the Jewish people and all who support them!
Excellent! There is a clear presence of “compassion” that simply masks hatred that goes unacknowledged and unrecognized. Social justice, and justice per se became selective - empathy is now conditional and old-fashioned hate is fashionable and widely acceptable.