Over the past weeks, Iran has witnessed one of the bloodiest crackdowns in its contemporary history. Reports – contested and difficult to verify amid severe state repression – suggest that thousands of protesters may have been killed, many shot by security forces as entire cities were sealed off and a sweeping internet blackout imposed to conceal events.

Young women have been dragged through streets, beaten, imprisoned, and killed for removing a piece of cloth. Troops were mobilized nationwide to crush dissent, erasing evidence as best they could.

Sudan and Yemen, meanwhile, are no strangers to humanitarian catastrophe. Sudan’s civil conflict, driven by rival militias and complex power struggles, has displaced millions and unleashed horrific violence against civilians – Muslims killing Muslims in numbers that dwarf most contemporary conflicts.

Yemen has endured years of war that have produced famine-like conditions, indiscriminate bombing, and a collapsed health system, leaving its children to starve slowly, off-camera. And yet, unlike Gaza, Western and Arab streets alike have not filled with sustained protest. No mass mobilization. No tents, no slogans, no moral theatre.

The uncomfortable truth is that suffering alone does not generate solidarity. Narrative does. And the narrative that mobilizes Western crowds today is not “Muslims are dying” or even “injustice is happening.” It is a far narrower script: a story that requires a specific kind of perpetrator, a specific kind of victim, and a specific ideological payoff. Palestine fits this script perfectly. Iran, Sudan, and Yemen do not.

A colonizer versus colonized?

The Palestinian cause, particularly since the latest escalation of the Gaza conflict, has been reframed in Western public discourse not as a regional conflict with specific historical roots, but as a global moral axis: oppressor versus oppressed, colonial power versus dispossessed people. Media ecosystems – especially social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram – have amplified visual narratives of civilian suffering, circulating them under universal hashtags such as #Palestine and #FreePalestine, generating billions of views.

Palestine has thus become a symbolic site onto which activists project broader critiques of imperialism, racism, and domination. Support for the cause is no longer only about Palestinian rights; it functions as a marker of political identity, a way to signal moral enlightenment and political radicalism within Western liberal democracies.

Movements grow when they are able to anchor themselves in shared narratives of injustice and collective identity. The Palestinian cause has cohered around a dense symbolic repertoire – the olive tree, Jerusalem, Gaza, the key of return, checkpoints and walls, refugee camps, and the keffiyeh – as well as........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)