In more than two dozen years of national community relations work, I have learned to listen not only to what people say about Israel, but to what they never say about anyone else. That silence is public. It is a tell.
A person can march on campus and storm city councils over Israel and still be unable to name, with the same heat, the massacre at El Fasher, Sudan’s 12 million displaced, Russia’s war in Ukraine, Myanmar’s junta, or the kafala system that binds Gulf migrant workers. That is not moral refinement. It is ignorance of the world, or a special rule for Jews. No third option survives the record.
Start with the present. Sudan is the largest displacement crisis on Earth. Famine has been confirmed in Darfur. When El Fasher fell, the reporting described mass murder that should have emptied Western streets. It did not. Ukraine is Europe’s largest interstate war since 1945. Battle deaths run into the hundreds of thousands. The outrage exists. It does not, in most liberal spaces, own the words “genocide,” “apartheid,” or “from the river to the sea.” Myanmar, Yemen, Syria’s prisons, the Uyghur camps, Iran’s hangings, Congo’s massacres — the files are public. So is the Islamic slaughter of Nigerian Christians.
This is not a brief for Israeli perfection. Israel is at war. Its government can and should be argued with. Civilian deaths demand scrutiny, as in every war. Jews do not need a morality exemption. However, we need one standard.
What marks this moment is not criticism of Israeli policy. Democracies absorb that. It is the conversion of criticism into a unique moral language. Israel is “apartheid” even as Arab citizens vote, sit in the Knesset, and serve on the Supreme Court — while hereditary bondage continues in Mauritania, migrant auctions have been filmed in Libya, and a Gaza neighborhood has long been known, locally, as the slaves’ quarter. Israel is “genocide” as a first reflex. Sudan barely moves a campus calendar. Israel is the only state whose right to exist is a seminar topic.
I have sat with pastors, imams, campus presidents, and city officials who could recite Gaza Health Ministry talking points as gospel without any review of fact or fiction. Some were not haters. They were trained to treat one conflict as the entire moral universe. That ignorance is cultivated. Once cultivated, it is useful to people who hate Jews.
Stop treating this as tone. Selective outrage is a public act: what gets a teach-in and what gets a shrug. Which dead children become a brand? Which country’s existence is conditional? Apply a test. Same words, same urgency, same remedies for Sudan, Syria, China, Iran, and Russia — or not? If the boycott list has one Jewish democracy on it and a blank space where slave systems, anti-LBGT, and ethnic-cleansing militias belong, this is not “global affairs.” It is a massive double standard that feels very antisemitic.
Sometimes that standard is laziness dressed as virtue: the loudest script on a feed, no famine file, no idea that Hamas was never a civil-rights movement, and many talking points against Israel have been proven false. Undereducated is how libels travel. Sometimes it is older than the hashtag: the move from “this one act was wrong” to “this country is illegitimate.” That is antisemitism. Say the word.
MAMDANI’S NEW YORK WANTS JEWS TO SHUT UP. WE CHOOSE DEFIANCE
The two travel together. Ignorance supplies the crowd. Antisemitism supplies the theory. That is how “apartheid Israel” becomes settled language while actual bondage next door stays a whisper. Allies who refuse one standard are not allies. Classrooms that teach Israel as original sin are not educating. Newsrooms that bury larger body counts are training the public, not informing it.
Jews cannot cure this alone. The hated cannot cure the hate. Learn the rest of the map. Hold every government — including Israel’s — to the same law. When a movement finds only one villain in a world on fire, do not call it compassion. They have not done the work. Or they have, and they chose the oldest target. Say so plainly, or the slur becomes the air. It already has.
Evan R. Bernstein is CEO of B’nai B’rith International. He previously led community relations at Jewish Federations of North America and served as CEO of Community Security Service and in leadership roles at the ADL and AIPAC.