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 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.