There’s a passage from a May 25 Michelle Goldberg New York Times op-ed I have not been able to stop thinking about. It’s about “what [Elon] Musk’s foray into politics accomplished,” namely huge cuts to US foreign aid:

“Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year.”

I had to read the passage several times to take in the enormity of these numbers. Musk only came on the political scene several months ago. “300,000 deaths, most of them of children.”

There is a long history of defenders of Israel responding to criticisms by asking, what about Sudan? What about Syria? As in, why does man-made disaster where Israel is not in any way implicated get less attention? I am not, here, in this article, addressing that line of argument. What I’m doing is trying to capture the unmooring experience of realizing I’m formulating an argument along those lines, but about my country of origin.

I find myself wondering the relative amounts of headspace taken up by Israel’s actions, as opposed to those of the United States government. The angst I am by no means alone in experiencing—see British-American Jewish writer Hadley Freeman’s brilliant The Times (UK) column on “hand-wringing liberal westerners” of whom she is one, and I am one. Why do I don’t-look-away myself when it comes to Gaza, most recently via Suzy Hansen’s New York magazine cover story, but receive this with the ‘well horrible things are always happening somewhere’ shrug?

I am American (and more recently, Canadian), but not Israeli. I work in Canadian Jewish media, not in pro-Israel activism. I think Israel’s military actions, even the ones I don’t see as just, come from a place or at the very least a pretext of fighting an existential threat,........

© Canadian Jewish News