Gaza to Sudan: Moral consistency as a colonial alibi

[John Ashworth]

Gaza to Sudan: Moral consistency as a colonial alibi

These are not competing tragedies but linked sites of racial
capitalism, militarism, and abandonment.

Gert Van Hecken
The New Humanitarian
12 January 2026

ANTWERP, Belgium

There is something dangerously soothing about moral distance. It
allows scholars, commentators, and policymakers to pass judgment
without ever risking involvement; to treat global violence as a
thought experiment rather than a structure they inhabit. It also
produces the now-familiar, misleading, and frankly infuriating
question: Why do protesters flood the streets for Gaza but not for
Sudan? A question that does not illuminate injustice, but disciplines
how solidarity is allowed to appear.

What is framed as “moral inconsistency” reveals far more about those
posing the question than about the movements it targets. The
comparison rests on a gaze shaped by Europe’s colonial histories and
racial hierarchies; a gaze that fragments struggles, isolates
suffering, and demands that solidarity be rendered legible,
proportional, and politically harmless. This gaze is not a neutral act
of observation or a simple act of seeing, but an active ordering of
the world: the racial production of the visible that determines in
advance what can register as injustice and what is rendered invisible.
From within this logic, empathy appears as a scarce resource to be
evenly distributed, as if protest were an accounting exercise rather
than a political practice.

But solidarity is not a mood, nor a form of moral self-expression. It
is forged through long histories of struggle: through shared analyses,
material connections, and repeated acts of collective alignment across
time and place. These histories are precisely what the white, colonial
gaze erases. Adopting a distant, God’s-eye view from which struggles
are weighed and judged rather than understood, it makes solidarities
appear fragmented and incoherent. What this gaze ultimately polices is
not inconsistency, but connection: the capacity of struggles to
recognise each other, overlap, and refuse the boundaries imposed by
colonial ways of seeing.

The coloniality of responsibility – Gaza, Sudan, and Europe’s entanglement

Europe’s relationship to both Gaza and Sudan is not incidental, nor
morally neutral. It is structural, though not symmetrical.

In Gaza, European states supply weapons, political cover, and dense
networks of economic and academic cooperation, sustaining a system the
UN has described as apartheid and alleged genocide. The visibility of
this entanglement did not emerge through institutional transparency,
but through decades of organising by Palestinian and transnational
grassroots movements that forced these structures into public view.

Sudan’s entanglement with Europe is less easily contained within
dominant narratives, but no less colonial. From British imperial rule
to Cold War geopolitics, from extractive development schemes to
decades of technocratic aid and peacebuilding interventions, Europe
has remained deeply embedded in Sudan’s political economy of violence.
Arms routed through Gulf allies, outsourced migration control, and
strategic silence around the United Arab Emirates’ arming of the Rapid
Support Forces all point to Europe’s ongoing role in Sudan’s
devastation.

That mass mobilisation in Europe has been more visible for Gaza than
for Sudan does not reflect indifference among grassroots movements.
Many of the same activists mobilising for Gaza have long stood in
solidarity with Sudan, drawing on transnational anti-colonial networks
and shared analyses of militarism, racial capitalism, and impunity.
Solidarity here is not a tally of attention, but of tracing and acting
upon these overlapping structures of violence.

From outside these movements, such connections are often missed or
misrecognised. Protests framed as “about Gaza” are in fact embedded in
wider infrastructures of solidarity linking Palestine, Sudan, the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, migrant justice struggles, and
climate justice movements. These relationships are made tangible
through banners, chants, coordinated campaigns, and the active
carrying of historical memory into present action. Student encampments
exemplify this convergence, not as an additive list of causes, but as
spaces where solidarities are enacted rather than itemised.

That these connections remain marginal in mainstream discourse does
not indicate their absence. It signals how responsibility is routinely
displaced, and how Europe’s own implication in multiple sites of
violence is kept analytically and politically out of focus.

Whataboutism as a technology of inaction

It is at this point that whataboutism enters; not as a
misunderstanding, but as a political manoeuvre. By insisting that
solidarity must be proportional – “more for Gaza means less for Sudan”
– political responsibility is transformed into a zero-sum moral
calculation. The logic is deceptively simple: “If we can’t fix
everything, we shouldn’t fix anything.” This is the colonial politics
of inaction masquerading as moral universality.

Accusations of “selective outrage” are rarely made in good faith. They
operate as a disingenuous rhetorical move, depoliticising protest by
reducing solidarity to personal virtue and evacuating responsibility
from institutions. Collective anger is recoded as emotional excess;
political struggle becomes a moral performance. The demand for
“perfect consistency” – which mirrors the demand for perfect
victimhood – is not a call for justice but for paralysis. It is a
familiar colonial move: replacing responsibility with introspection,
and structural violence with philosophical debate.

In practice, this accusation functions instrumentally. It reframes
solidarity with Palestine as morally suspect while leaving intact and
invisible the common racialised structures that render Sudanese and
Palestinian suffering selectively legible. Sudan’s suffering is
invoked not to mobilise action, but to delegitimise mass protest for
Gaza – particularly when that protest threatens to expose and disrupt
European and Israeli complicity. In doing so, it reproduces the racial
logics that determine whose suffering is grievable, whose resistance
is dangerous, and which struggles must remain disconnected.

Policing protest, domesticating dissent

The same gaze that moralises protest also works to domesticate it.
Having condemned movements for their supposed inconsistency, it then
seeks to confine dissent within sanitised forms of acceptability:
symbolic marches, polite petitions, rituals that disrupt nothing and
demand nothing. The moment protest interrupts supply chains,
institutions, or the smooth functioning of power, it is reclassified
as “extreme,” “irrational,” or “dangerous” – and, increasingly,
treated as a matter for criminal law rather than democratic
contestation.

This logic mirrors the structure of international law itself. The past
two years have laid bare, with unprecedented clarity, how a supposedly
universal legal order reliably mobilises to defend white life while
retreating into procedural ambiguity when confronted with racialised
state violence. As legal scholar Noura Erakat has shown, this is not a
malfunction but a design feature: International law has long served
entrenched power, determining whose rights are urgent and whose rights
can be indefinitely deferred.

None of this is new. Students occupying universities, dockworkers
blocking weapons shipments, climate activists disrupting extractive
infrastructure – and protesters now framed as security threats or
terrorist actors for directly intervening in arms supply chains – are
not breaking with democratic norms, but returning to what protest has
always been: the interruption of systems that refuse to change
themselves. As generations of anti-colonial struggles have shown, no
major expansion of justice has ever been granted through institutional
goodwill; it has always been forced through collective struggle.

People are not rejecting law or process. They are responding to the
collapse of institutions – from universities to international courts –
that have repeatedly failed to confront racialised violence. Expecting
protest to remain morally pure, perfectly consistent, and politely
delivered under these conditions is not moderation; it is abdication.

Gaza, Sudan, and the indivisibility of justice

Against the white gaze’s obsession with comparison, movements for Gaza
and Sudan emerge from shared analyses and infrastructures of struggle.
These are not competing tragedies but linked sites of racial
capitalism, militarism, and abandonment. From London to El Fasher,
from Brussels to Goma, from Berlin to Gaza, the same supply chains of
weapons, financing, and extraction shape the violence people are
resisting.

Sudan is not eclipsed by Gaza. Sudan and Gaza illuminate each other.

What critics dismiss as selective outrage is, in fact, a refusal of
fragmented politics. Solidarity is system-focused: It connects
struggles and targets the structures that bind them. Movements grasp
what institutions continue to deny: Justice cannot be
compartmentalised. Anti-racism that ignores anti-Arab racism is
incomplete; feminism unmoved by occupation and militarised borders is
hollow; climate politics without anti-colonial struggle is empty. No
democracy can coexist with apartheid – anywhere.

People took to the streets for Gaza not because they cared “more”, but
because Gaza exposed the architecture of global injustice with brutal
clarity – and the urgency of dismantling it.

Solidarity is not only a feeling; it is a refusal: a refusal of
hierarchies of humanity, a refusal to let institutions outsource
responsibility to those they fail to protect.

Refusing the white gaze, then, is not a matter of better perception,
but of political rupture: a refusal of the colonial device that
fragments struggles, polices solidarity, and shields empire from
accountability. It is, above all, a decision to act – together, across
borders, and against the grain of the system that demands our moral
quiet.

https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/2026/01/12/gaza-sudan-moral-consistency-colonial-alibi

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______________________
John Ashworth

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