WHY ISRAEL, AND NOT SUDAN, IS SINGLED OUT
Author(s): CHARLES JACOBS   Date: October 5, 2002

Harvard President Lawrence Summers recently criticized those on his campus who speak in the name of human rights but selectively censure Israel while ignoring much greater problems in the Middle East. He described the divestment campaign against Israel on his campus as anti-Semitic ''in effect if not intent.'' But human rights (and media) attention is often disproportionate to the severity or urgency of human conflicts. What determines their focus is not mainly anti-Semitism. Nor is it the level of horror. It is the racial, religious, and cultural character of the perpetrators, not the victims, that determines the response of Westerners.

An instructive case is Sudan. Atrocities there exceed every other world horror. For 10 years the blacks of South Sudan have been victims of an onslaught that has taken more than 2 million lives. Colin Powell calls it ''the worst human rights nightmare on the planet.''. In Khartoum, a Muslim regime is waging a self-declared jihad on African Christians and followers of tribal faiths in South Sudan. Khartoum's onslaught has rekindled the trade in black slaves by storming African villages, kill the men, and enslave the women and children.

The media cover the deaths and enslavement in Sudan only occasionally. Do rights activists and editorialists care more for Palestinians than for blacks? Surely not. It is the nature of the conflict, I propose, not the level of horror, that determines the response of Westerners. It is hard to explain why victims of slavery and slaughter are virtually ignored by American progressives. Neither has there been a concerted effort by the press to pressure American administrations to intervene. What is this silence about?

My hypothesis is this: to predict what the human rights community (and the media) focus on, look not at the oppressed; look instead at the party seen as the oppressor. Imagine the media coverage and the rights groups' reaction if it were ''whites'' enslaving blacks in Sudan. Having the ''right'' oppressor would change everything.

Alternatively, imagine the ''wrong'' oppressor: Suppose that Arabs, not Jews, shot Palestinians in revolt. In 1970 (''Black September''), Jordan murdered tens of thousands of Palestinians in two days, yet we saw no divestment campaigns, and we wouldn't today. This selectivity (at least in the United States, does not come from the hatred of Jews. It is ''a human rights complex '' - and is not hard to understand. The human rights community, composed mostly of compassionate white people, feels a special duty to protest evil done by those who are like ''us.'' ''Not in my name'' is the worthy response of moral people. South African whites could not be allowed to represent ''us.'' But when we see evil done by ''others,'' we tend to shy away. Though we claim to have a single standard for all human conduct, we don't. We fear the charge of hypocrisy: We Westerners after all, had slaves. We napalmed Vietnam. We live on Native American land. Who are we to judge ''others?'' And so we don't stand for all of humanity.

Seeking expiation instead of universal justice means ignoring the sufferings of these victims of non-Western aggression and making relatively more of the suffering of those caught in confrontation with people like ''us.'' If the Israelis are being ''profiled'' because they are like ''us,'' the slaves of Sudan are ignored because their masters' behavior has nothing to do with us.

In the United States it is not predominantly anti-Semitism that causes the human rights community to single Israel out for criticism. It is rather our failure to apply to all nations the standards to which we hold ourselves. The effect, as Summers correctly said, is anti-Semitic. But it is also the abandonment of those around the world in the worst of circumstances whose oppressions we find beside the point.

Charles Jacobs is president of the American Anti-Slavery Group.