I don’t think I’ve ever seen as big of a disconnect between the scale of a crisis and the scale of media coverage in my life. … And that is both because the scale of the suffering in Sudan is so high and because the [media] coverage is abominably low.
~Tom Perriello, the Biden administration’s special envoy to Sudan.

A student interrupted one of my lectures to deliver a passionate speech on what she called “digital apartheid” as practised by Israel. The lecture—at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs—was about how the use of smart data for city planning might negatively impact low-income people of colour in America. While the company providing the data I used was American, it had begun as an Israeli startup and many of the employees mentioned in the class readings had Jewish-sounding names.

I allowed interested students to have their say about this issue then tried to steer discussion back to the assigned readings, noting that those who wished to discuss digital apartheid could do so at any number of school events on Israel and Palestine. But some students were adamant that anyone unwilling to use lecture time to discuss the topic was complicit in Israeli apartheid, genocide, and other crimes. The atmosphere grew awkward. Most students remained prudently silent.

Eventually, a black student intervened. She had come to class to discuss the assigned readings, she told us. If these students had the moral right to commandeer the class to discuss Israel, she added, why didn’t she have the right to demand a discussion of oppression in Africa? It was a good question.

The war in Sudan has produced what the United Nations has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—a violent Arab supremacist group funded and armed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—have been accused of ethnic cleansing and genocide against the local black population, according to an organisation—Human Rights Watch—that has made similar accusations against Israel in Gaza. Members of Congress like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who have accused Israel of genocide, have also accused the RSF of genocide in Sudan and demanded the United States cease arms sales to the UAE.