I recently saw an ad for an anti-Israel protest in Christchurch, New Zealand. Alongside a picture of the Palestinian flag, it proclaimed: ‘Come flag wave with us at the Blackcaps vs Pakistan game!’

I shared this ad on the Twitter, noting:

‘New Zealand is soon to play Pakistan, a country with a poor human rights record that is currently trying to deport almost 2 million Afghan refugees back to live under the tyrannical Taliban, so of course come along and protest Israel.’

Predictably – both because Twitter is not exactly the Lyceum and I am all too familiar with the rhetorical flourishes of the swivel-eyed anti-Israel mob – I was accused of whataboutery.

Whataboutery, also known as whataboutism, is (as the name suggests) a mode of argumentation when someone responds to an accusation by deflection, through raising a counter-accusation or a different issue.

It can be a valid and instructive charge. My critics would have had a point if Israel had instead been playing cricket, and I responded to a proposed protest against it by saying, ‘But what about Pakistan?’ But, as I noted in a vain attempt to reason with them, Israel was not playing.

So, there was indeed whataboutery in play. But, like the best Shane Warne googly, it went in the other direction. It revealed a monomaniacal fixation on Israel that makes no room for anything else. This fixation is just not cricket. It is everywhere, and while it is not new, like a Glenn Maxwell ‘six’ it has reached new heights since October 7. Those who feverishly hashtag, protest, and sign self-aggrandising open letters against Israel, are silent about the alarming numbers of Iranian dissidents being executed, Sudanese displaced, Yemeni starved, Kurds persecuted, and Christian Nigerians killed and kidnapped.

It is as if they believe there is a finite supply of oppression oxygen, and ventilating any of those crises will leave the Palestinian cause gasping for air.

Arguably the ultimate whataboutery, which has led directly to October 7 and the ensuing war, is that which has allowed Hamas, since it took control of Gaza in 2007, to brutally oppress its residents, immiserate them by spending their aid on building a monstrous terrorist infrastructure, and fire rockets indiscriminately at Israel, without any meaningful censure or accountability. If that happened, what about Israel?

The whataboutery that targets Israel has been institutionalised at the United Nations. Of the General Assembly’s 21 resolutions for 2023, a typical year, 14 were against Israel. None were against Turkey, China, Qatar, Pakistan – or Hamas. At the Human Rights Council, there is only one state to which a permanent agenda item is dedicated, while current members like China, Algeria, Qatar, and Sudan are legitimised and sit in judgment.

Under the title The West Needs to Show it Values all Human Life, Mark Malloch-Brown, the president of the Open Society Foundations and a former deputy secretary-general of the UN, wrote for Foreign Policy on January 17 that: ‘Sudan’s crisis has gone woefully under-discussed, like many others that for various circumstantial, political, or geographic reasons seem to matter less to the international community.’ He notes that in 2022, more than 200,000 people died in state-based conflicts globally. The number of displaced people globally is now a record 114 million.

Whatever else Israel may be said to occupy, it undoubtedly occupies an outsize space in the consciousness of the Western left that belies its tiny geographical area. Highlighting the double standard that heaps opprobrium on one state for its misdemeanours (real or imagined) while others enjoy impunity for comparable or worse, and their victims remain unprotected, cannot be dismissed as whataboutery. If we want a principled rules-based ordering of our world that values life equally, or as Malloch-Brown calls it, ‘humanitarian universalism’, it is diagnostically important to examine.

Of course, it is possible that such opprobrium is commensurate with the unique evilness of Israel, and it is purely coincidental that it is the sovereign state of the people who have been plagued with that charge for millennia, and home to almost half of them.

But even if it’s not pure coincidence, and, as Israel’s political philosopher Jacob Talmon said ‘the state of the Jews has become the Jew of the states’, antisemitic animus is an incomplete explanation.

While the Soviet Union is no more, its anti-Zionist propaganda remains entrenched in the Western left. Israel is seen as an outpost of the wealthy powerful West imposed on those who are not. It has become the bogeyman for the perceived sins of the West, and there is no greater sin, an original ineradicable sin, than ‘settler colonialism’. Israel is the archetypal settler colonialist state, despite being a nation-state of refugees fleeing persecution from around the world, particularly the Middle East and North Africa, and reclaiming their ancestral homeland. There are those who shoehorn the conflict into the prism of critical race theory, portraying it as white oppressing brown (despite the fact that, in that theory’s parlance, a significant majority of Israel, including its 20 per cent Arab population, are ‘people of colour’). And power (by whatever metric such calculations are undertaken, but noting that Israel has perhaps less than rational observers might have thought before October 7, and than conspiracists imagine) has become a proxy for immorality, especially when wielded against the world’s most vaunted victims.

There’s an infantilising exceptionalism that confers on Palestinians an inherited refugee status, their own self-perpetuating refugee agency (for now, anyway) while all the world’s other refugees have one agency, billions in squandered aid, and inoculation from the consequences of their leaders’ repeatedly poor decisions and the vagaries of history.

We could also add, in a neat trick of backward projection, alleviation of guilt for enabling, or failing to stop, the Holocaust. What a relief to be able to weaponise the Holocaust against its victims by claiming they’re doing the same thing, wiping away the last vestiges of its moral stain!

All of these factors, and no doubt more, contribute to a moral myopia that disproportionately targets Israel and ignores victims of wars and humanitarian crises around the world. It is not whataboutery to address this. If we want to even up the playing field for human rights and value all lives equally, it is an issue that must not go through to the keeper.