Should EAs Focus More on the Starvation and Human Rights Crisis in Gaza?

(I might delete this post later if it derails the thread, I’m not sure how useful or constructive it is—please let me know!)

I think this inadvertently highlights why an ‘EA’ (utilitarian) framing might downplay the badness of the conflict. I think the badness falls into five buckets (opinions follow; and not claiming that you do or don’t agree with these):

1. The direct number of deaths and ongoing suffering is high.
2. The systematic bombing and killing of civilians, coupled with the eradicationist rhetoric of the Israeli government, almost certainly constitutes a genocide. A genocide carries a quality of horror and depravity to it that, in my opinion, multiplies the harm of the deaths. Even a pure utilitarian may be able to see that a genocide causes fear and suffering well beyond the time, place, and people it affects (for example, Jewish people continue to suffer from the harms of the Holocaust today).
3. Such a genocide being paid for and propped up by Western governments greatly erodes global security and trust (last year alone, the U.S. paid for $17B in military aid to Israel; Israel’s military budget was $47B). It was already difficult, and will get more difficult, for smaller countries to trust that the West will honour their commitments to security, or intervene if attacked by the wrong country (we are already seeing this with Lebanon and Syria). But worse, they can’t trust that the West will not even stay out of it!
4. Similarly, the massive public support for non-intervention in Western countries contradicts the stances of their governments. Every time a democracy fails to produce a democratic outcome, it bends a little. I think it’s safe to say we have seen (U.S. 2024) and will continue to see (U.K. 2029) the electoral consequences of a pattern of these outcomes (but not to pin these results specifically on Gaza).
5. Consequentially, every time the West has behaved like this with another country, they have experienced significant blowback. By its nature, it’s hard to predict what the blowback will be this time, but it’s reasonable to assume that restraining Iran’s nuclear capabilities will now be permanently harder.

Many policy-minded EAs seem directly invested in (3, 4, 5). So I think the issue is tractability, but to be clear, the Western governments paying for this war are the ones with the power to end it. It is telling that non-U.S. Western governments have supported Gaza around the same time as developments in tariff negotiations; it seems pretty clear that the benefits of U.S. trade have been used as a cudgel against trading partners (especially when, in the U.K., France, and Australia, their left-wing leaders have historically supported Palestine up until forming government). I doubt that relationship can be changed by a well-placed EA policy organisation. Nor do I suspect that the U.S.’ relationship with Israel could similarly be changed, as any Democrat or Republican who openly supports Palestine instantly becomes a pariah and loses much of their standing with the party even if all of their other policies are indistinguishable from FDR (see: Zohran, Ilhan Omar).

I think the Sudanese civil war is a relevant comparison. I'd take the typical EA point to be something like:

"If Western diplomats spent as much time as they've (ineffectively) spent trying to avert famine / improve aid in Gaza as ending the war in Sudan, it seems like there would have been much more progress -- fewer dead, starving, maimed, irreparably emotionally harmed."

Or one level deeper, there are probably conflicts that are not yet happening that we could decrease the likelihood of and that are probably even more neglected. I'm thinking of Ethiopia and Tigray, which seems like it could flare up again. It's probably easier to avert a war than stop it, and fewer people are focused on it for normal reasons related to attention and incentives (preventing things that aren't naturally inevitable is always undersupplied because you rarely if ever get credit). 

To a broader formulation of the question: "Should more EAs be focusing on reducing conflicts given their role in causing suffering and sapping the potential of sentient life?" -- I am deeply sympathetic to this. But between conflicts I think we should still apply the prioritization lens. 

FWIW the latest estimate I heard from Gaza was 100,000 dead (many of which haven't been reported by Hamas) (sorry for the paywall) which is on the same order of magnitude - and as opposed to the Ukraine war, most of them aren't combatants. It's up to you what to make of that.

it's just smaller than other conflicts

It's odd to say this when you don't give a comparable casualty figure for Gaza, which would be 77,000 to 109,000 for May 2025, and when you estimate that, with a famine, casualties could reach 2,100,000.

FWIW my team, Sentinel, is indeed tracking Gaza in our weekly briefs.

You're right, I've untagged it. 

I think a single-digit karma score is right here -- I do not have a vote in either direction. The question is asked in good faith, but the post doesn't really move the discussion forward. That discussion was happened before, so I don't think the post as currently written adds much value for the median Forum user (which is a major purpose of karma).

As Brad mentioned, an analysis of a specific intervention that OP thinks might be effective would make the post more useful. The potential intervention wouldn't need to approach GiveWell levels to worth discussing if it included a plausible theory of impact that increased the impact of dollars already committed to this cause.

I also think someone reading about core EA principles would be able to guess some of the reasons this isn't talked about as much as one might think from the level of broader public interest -- lots of eyeballs / interest / resources already on the situation, questions about how tractable the situation is given the major actors at play, etc. So for a higher karma post, I'd like to see someone grapple with those reasons and explain why they aren't as convincing as they might first seem.