This article was published in Aeon.
In 2013, the German geographer Benjamin Hennig produced a series of maps depicting the size of countries in terms of the number of articles about them in The Guardian in any particular year. The maps depicted a swollen, obese United States, an emaciated Latin America, massively enlarged European countries, and shockingly small African and Asian ones. The Arab Middle East, however, loomed large and, despite the uprisings and civil wars throughout the region, Israel was among the largest.
Hennig has not produced more recent iterations of this map, but it’s safe to say that Israel would feature at least as prominently, if not more so, if the map were released today. Why does Israel attract so much attention, and, even more important, why does it elicit such passion? Even now, when Israeli forces have killed scores of thousands of people in Gaza and thousands in Lebanon, the answer is not obvious. At no time in history have Americans, especially those on elite university campuses, been so exercised about a conflict in which American youth were not being sent to die. The last major wave of campus protests – against South Africa’s apartheid regime during the 1970s and ’80s – pales in comparison with the current moment.
The question I am asking – why Israel? – is valid and important, but only if approached with honesty and an open mind. All too often this question is employed by Israel’s supporters as a rhetorical tool known as tu quoque, or, in simple English, ‘what about?’ What about millions of deaths in Ethiopia, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one might ask. Or mass killing and destruction of cities in Syria? Or widespread Russian atrocities in Ukraine? What about mass incarcerations in China’s Xinjiang Province, and the ongoing Sinicisation of Tibet? Why didn’t students disrupt classes, occupy and vandalise buildings, and set up encampments when US forces killed hundreds of thousands of civilians during the Persian Gulf War?
These are fair questions but, when employed as a form of advocacy, ‘what about’ is in fact a hostile riposte, a means of suppressing criticism. When raised in connection with Israel, it commonly invokes antisemitism as the ultimate explanation for global ire against the Jewish state.
