How pro-Israel trolls exploit the people of Sudan and the DRC

“How pro-Israel trolls exploit the people of Sudan and the DRC Submitted by Barry Malone on Wed, 05/27/2026 - 14:22 While it is right to call out a lack of attention on forgotten conflicts, bad faith arguments reduce African victims to pawns in a propaganda war Protesters at a rally for Gaza hold signs urging global attention on Palestine and other conflicts in New York City on 31 May 2024 (Gina M Randazzo/Zuma Press Wire via Reuters) Off Those who defend Israel’s genocide in Gaza have a script. If you spend any time online, watching TV news debates, or listening to both Israeli and western politicians, you will be familiar with much of it. “They use civilians as human shields in Gaza” is a common line. “The Palestinians shouldn’t have started a war they couldn’t win” is another. “The Israeli military is the most moral army in the world” is among the most absurd. There are questions, too: “Do you condemn Hamas?” “Do you defend what happened on 7 October?” “Does Israel have a right to exist?” They are all traps. Here is one, though, that is a little newer and centres on events happening far from Gaza and the occupied West Bank. It’s this: “What about Sudan and Congo?” The implication is clear. You only attend protest marches about what is going on in Gaza because you want to blame Israel. The accusation is often accompanied by the refrain: “No Jews, no news.” And that’s what is at the heart of the charge. If you don’t protest against the conflicts in Sudan or the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), you are antisemitic , and you are only moved to care about the Palestinian people because it serves your anti-western agenda. I’m going to go out on a limb here and contend that the people who make that argument couldn’t care less about the conflicts in Sudan or the DRC. Searches of their posts on social media almost uniformly reveal that they have never mentioned either place, unless it is to score disingenuous points against the pro-Palestine movement. Africans exploited They want to summon the people of Sudan and the DRC so they can exploit them to attack their political opponents, then dismiss them once their purpose has been served. They view the hundreds of thousands of people killed in those countries as mere pawns. Inadvertently, there is an important point buried beneath their cynical attacks, which is that the horrors in Sudan and the DRC - or in Yemen , Ethiopia, Haiti or Myanmar - do not get the same level of attention that Israel’s two-and-a-half-year destruction of Gaza does. But that is not the fault of those who pour into the streets of London and New York to hold their governments accountable for backing the Gaza genocide . 'What about Sudan and Congo?' is not a plea for equal attention to victims of war. It is an attempt to strip solidarity of political meaning African wars, and those in the Middle East that do not cleanly and overtly involve an Anglo-American antagonist, have been habitually ignored by western media for at least a century. As I’ve written in these pages before , there are many reasons for that, not least an implicit racism that believes some lives are worth more than others. Protests, though, are not apolitical expressions of compassion. The hundreds of thousands of people who take part in anti-genocide demonstrations in western capitals are holding their governments to account for inherently political decisions. In the US , they are standing against an administration without which the ethnic extermination in Gaza would not be possible. They are demanding that their government stop providing Israel with the weapons it uses to wipe out Palestinian women and children. When demonstrators throng the streets of London, they are calling on Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government to stop exporting F-35 fighter jet components to Israel. They want an explanation as to why Royal Air Force spy planes flew over Gaza for more than two years. What protesters in Britain, the US and elsewhere are demanding is that their governments stop diplomatically and materially supporting a genocide in their name. Western hypocrisy Those who invoke Sudan and the DRC want that to be ignored. They want to scrub politics from the movement, and they want to render Gaza a tragedy with no cause. The demands activists could make of their governments around the wars in Sudan and the DRC are less clear. It’s not that there is no western influence at all (it’s hard to name a conflict without it), but it’s opaque, and it doesn’t make international headlines. Unlike Gaza, there aren’t hundreds of explainers, podcasts and books to help people fully understand what is going on and how their governments are involved. In Sudan, as reported in Middle East Eye , British military equipment used by the Rapid Support Forces, and supplied by the paramilitary group’s chief backer, the United Arab Emirates , also a close US ally, has been found on the battlefield. And while it imposed sanctions on several M23 leaders and Rwandan army officials for fuelling the war, the European Union, at the same time, shrugged off pressure to cancel a minerals deal with Kigali to fuel Europe’s tech, electric vehicle and microchip industries. President Donald Trump, too, has cast himself as a peacemaker between Rwanda and the DRC - but Washington has also moved to secure a strategic minerals partnership with Kinshasa, giving the US increased access to the country’s critical resources. New generation It’s easy to see why much of this detail slips under the radar with the general public - even among those who have been driven to activism for the first time over Gaza. But in a twist the pro-Israel bad-faith actors didn’t see coming, they appear to have partly provoked a good-faith response. Placards now appear at anti-genocide marches proclaiming: “Free Palestine. Free Sudan. Free Congo.” While it is not necessarily helpful in the long term to flatten these three inherently different conflicts with different causes and different impacts, it’s a real start. The genocide in Gaza has lifted a veil for many in the West, who now understand that their governments are not the “good guys”, that international law has only ever existed for some and not others, and that media organisations they once trusted are complicit. While there aren’t large marches calling for an end to the wars in Sudan and the DRC, there is growing awareness, and a generation of new activists is now more conscious of the nefarious actions of their governments in many different parts of the world. “What about Sudan and Congo?” is not a plea for equal attention to victims of war. It is an attempt to strip solidarity of political meaning; to apply a moral test you can’t pass. And, above all else, it is an attempt to stigmatise criticism of Israel. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye. Israel's genocide in Gaza Opinion Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0

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