Less than a month into Israel’s war on Gaza, pro-Israel social media accounts, some of them based in India and since suspended, suddenly decided they were very concerned by what was happening in Sudan.

As Israel drags the whole of the Middle East into its war, and the genocidal campaign in Gaza grows even more brutal, these arguments have migrated to liberals in the West. For Israel’s desperate defenders, pointing to other unspeakably awful situations – first among them the war in Sudan – becomes an irresistible last resort.

Chief among them is the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, who deployed the same tactic of deflection in a recent article headlined, “Sudan is the world’s gravest humanitarian disaster - but almost nobody cares.”

Freedland, once described by the New York Times as a “leading British liberal Zionist”, waded into a topic he had never written about by asserting that the war in Sudan, now almost 18-months-old, is barely covered by the media and that “activists and progressives” are not interested in it.

Freedland goes on to argue that for “today’s left”, who have been “so lethargic” on Sudan, the world is divided into neat categories – “There are the oppressed and there are the oppressors, there are the colonised and the colonisers” – and that in Sudan “western progressives” do not know who to “root for”.

“The very same people who took to the streets when George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis,” he writes, “have barely raised a murmur at the organised murder of tens of thousands of Black men, and women, in Sudan.”

Freedland concludes that the “crude ‘anti colonialism’” of the left has seen it divide the world into “goodies and baddies”, meaning that it is confused when it comes to Sudan and stridently partisan when it comes to Israel-Palestine, which he sees as a clash of “two just causes”.

It’s hard not to discern a certain amount of projection at work in these accusations. But for those of us in the West, the issue to take up with our governments is not active complicity, as it is with Israel, but confused inaction.

That is not going to bring people out onto the streets of London in their hundreds of thousands, particularly when you factor in Britain’s consistent, ongoing support for Israel as opposed to its historic – but now not hugely active – involvement with Sudan.