International Ire, Please

In January, while the Israeli military was ravaging Gaza, and much of the world was engaged in its favorite past-time, condemning Israel (though not without cause), I was focused on a parallel war going on across the continent. The Sri Lankan military was in the final stages of once-and-for-all wiping out the Tamil Tigers, a minority insurgent group that had been battling the island nation's majority for more than two decades

Civilians were dying by the truckload, both sides were to blame, but the outrage was confined to polite diplospeak in the backrooms of the world's peacekeeping institutions. No massive demonstrations at the UN, no heated exchanges at emergency community meetings, no angry Facebook posts, nor biting tweets and no nonsensical petitions making their way to my inbox.

The Sri Lankan military now has the last holdouts to deal with, slowed down only by the rudimentary booby traps they come across. Two hundred thousand civilians have escaped; 13,500 didn't. More will die in the days and weeks ahead.

Given the global reaction to the 1,000 civilian deaths caused by Israel's myopic act of political expedience, with how much force should the world respond to Sri Lanka's lack of concern for the civilians caught in their war zone? It's hard to imagine what 13.5 times more anger might look like. Or do 13,500 people on an island off the Indian subcontinent not mean as much as 1,000 people in the Fertile Crescent?

If we are to deal with Israel in a more "even handed" fashion, as the many critics of U.S. policy call for, it means more than just removing the sacrosanct political cover that policy affords Israel. It also means ending the equivalent special treatment afforded to Palestinian nationhood, which for more than six decades has been put ahead of others' dreams of a place to call their own.

Such a reassessment, of course, is highly unlikely. On the geopolitcal level, the Israel-Palestinian conflict contains a global dynamic that compels prioritization. On the popular level, it would require the enablers of victimization, who from the extremes whip up the irrational rage of the masses of ill informed, to recognize the hypocrisy in their logic.