When the guns fell silent over the Gaza Strip less than 3 weeks ago and the Trump Peace Agreement with Israel was declared, the atmosphere on the UC Berkeley campus shifted in a way that felt instantaneous: The same areas that had been filled with shouts of “liberation” and “justice” were quieter, silent now. The signs that had covered Sproul Plaza just days earlier were being rolled up, the megaphones no longer carried the sound of outrage and grief and the tents — encampments whose occupants had absconded, which had once symbolized unwavering solidarity — now stood vacant. It wasn’t just that a protest had ended. Something had been revealed in its silence: a hierarchy of suffering.
What I found troubling was not only the absence of protest but the absence of reflection. In the days that followed, there was little public mention of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where residents of villages were being slaughtered. No talk of the silent misery of Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar, now crowded in Bangladesh. No cry for persecuted Hindus in Pakistan or butchered Christians in Nigeria. There was no “freedom for all” chorus here. There was silence. And the silence, to me, speaks louder than the loudest protest.
“Selective activism” is nothing new. It is the practice of calling out only certain crises and not others of comparable severity. It is when movements such as National Students for Justice in Palestine, which claim and endorse universalism — “freedom for all” and “justice for all,” — implicitly exclude certain lives from the scope of their visible moral universe.
I would like to presume that this exclusion is rarely deliberate, in the crude sense. It is subtle, more often framed in terms of strategic priority, ideological consistency or historic continuity. But the effect is the same: It implies that certain struggles and lives are deserving of protest, and others are not.
At UC Berkeley, this trend has been stark. The turnout for Palestine protests was huge, habitually commandeering our campus since 2023. Yet in the midst of this, conversations about other atrocities were barely raised above a whisper. This selective activism reveals a broader cultural trend: Protests on campus have a tendency to coalesce around high-visibility, ideologically “popular” causes rather than lesser-known or politically unpopular ones. It is not just activism; it is visibility-, popularity- and identity-alignment-driven activism.
There are unintentional and intentional reasons why Palestine occupies such a front seat in Western protest movements, particularly on campuses like our own. First, inadvertently, Palestine has been at the top of global agendas for decades owing to determining factors such as media, visibility and longevity of the conflict itself. It is one of the most televised and recorded conflicts of contemporary times, with a consistent place in global headlines and a highly established rhetoric of occupation and resistance — as such, there have been a total of 173 times that Israel has been condemned at the General Assembly of the U.N. in its resolutions, compared with China, where there is a detailed record of genocide against the Uyghurs, or Iran, where women are killed because of their refusal to comply with religious headgear mandates. Palestine’s exposure has created a shared vocabulary and a kind of emotional shorthand that is available to all. Unlike crises in Congo or Myanmar, which are intermittently reported, the Israel-Palestine conflict has been continually narrated, debated and symbolized for generations. Digital media amplifies this even further. Social media algorithms give more prominence to content that is already in vogue. As a result, we do not see the incremental, invisible and less narratively “marketable” suffering taking place elsewhere in the world.
More sinister still, however, are the intentional forces at play. Palestine, to some, is not just a humanitarian crisis but also a dumping ground for political and ideological projection. Among certain activist groups, anti-Israel activism has at times merged with older currents of antisemitism — unaware but not nonexistent in the framing, rhetoric or choice of targets. What begins as criticism of a state can, for some, bleed into hatred of a people, making the cause not only politically contentious but morally compromised.
The Israel-Palestine conflict has also been at the center of broader political initiatives that view the conflict as a symbolic pivot for opposing Western hierarchies of power, American foreign policy or presumed imperialism. It has indeed been used as a platform for expansionism. That kind of intentional enlargement gives it the kind of audience that most other humanitarian crises simply do not have.
With this intensified focus, the moral landscape becomes skewed: Some causes are elevated to near-sacrosanct levels, and others are pushed into the margins, not so much because they are less urgent but because they are less useful for a particular narrative.
There are clear geopolitical and cultural explanations for why Palestine occupies a high profile in Western protest. One of the most widely known humanitarian issues across the globe, it has accumulated decades of political iconography and widely familiar narratives of resistance and occupation. Palestine takes a strong and persistent presence in Western media, academia and politics, creating an emotional and moral lexicon that students find familiar enough to reclaim.
To many, Palestine has also become more than a cause; it’s an identity marker. It’s a means for individuals to signal their position in the moral landscape of world politics. To be pro-Palestine is not just to be opposed to a war; it’s to be identified with an ideological camp, one that tends to frame itself as morally self-evident and historically righteous. Palestine offers a kind of political clarity other conflicts do not.
One cannot help but ask why, despite all the scale of devastation, Congo or Myanmar do not inspire the same outrage here. Why are the plights of Nigerian Christians or Pakistani Hindus not being translated into marches and banners? Why are there no candlelight vigils for the Rohingyas? These are not rhetorical questions. They point to a moral economy of protest that insidiously establishes a hierarchy of importance of atrocities.
This silence does more than reveal preference. It positively undermines the credibility of the language used when “freedom for all” is proclaimed. When solidarity is selective, the term sounds empty. This is not a failure of empathy alone. It’s a structural failure: There are scant views of student organizations on this campus that are mobilizing for Congo, faculty making statements for Myanmar, media platforms for Nigeria and hunger strikes for Pakistan. Political discomfort rises when a cause doesn’t fit neatly within the current ideological paradigm, and silence is therefore the path of least resistance.
The result is a protest culture that is, at times, more performative than principled. Activism is subsequently a way of signaling political identity rather than a commitment to fixed moral principles. Students and professors organize around causes that are within their worldview, possibly less out of deep engagement with the suffering itself and more out of what each symbolically conveys. That is not to say that solidarity with Palestine is wrong. It is to say that solidarity which is with Palestine only, and not substantively with any other cause, isn’t complete.
True solidarity is messy. It means standing up for people whose stories are not easy to tell, whose oppressors are not neatly packaged and whose suffering does not trend on Twitter. It takes courage to be consistent when consistency is not marketable. And it takes fighting the temptation to make activism an accessory to identity rather than an articulation of universal moral obligations.
If people are going to be serious about the rhetoric of “freedom for all,” then people need to act like it. That means declining the co-opting of other causes into the Palestinian narrative, instead making room for each atrocity to have its own space. Student groups need to diversify their activism, holding panels, vigils and teach-ins for Congo, for the Rohingya people, for Nigerian Christians, for Pakistani Hindus, for anyone suffering en masse.
Members of the faculty can also do their share. If statements can be composed and disseminated for Palestine, they can be composed and disseminated for others as well. If institutional venues can be mobilized for a cause, they can be mobilized for all causes. Maybe it is time that this campus holds an annual humanitarian solidarity week, one that would reflect the inclusiveness of the world’s suffering rather than the exclusiveness of its ideological agendas.
Selective activism weakens the moral force of valid human rights activism. It conveys the message that even here, in a place that claims to possess moral clarity, some lives matter more than others.
This is not an image of villainy. This is an image of inconsistency. This is a mirror that does not show us hatred so much as indifference, not cruelty so much as hierarchy. And it is precisely this hierarchy that a campus like UC Berkeley must confront if it is to claim any moral high ground.
The silence that has ensued following the ceasefire is not an accident. It is the revealing moment after chants dissolve, after cameras leave and after students return to class. It is in the silence that we learn who is truly included in the phrase “freedom for all.”
If justice means anything, it must uphold a standard, not only where it is convenient. If solidarity is real, it must be universal. If Berkeley is to continue to be a place of political conscience, it must learn to make space for Congo as much as it does for Gaza, for the Rohingya as much as it does for Palestine, for the unseen as much as for the seen.
The question we must ask ourselves is simple but probing: If “freedom for all” is our slogan, why do some lives matter more on campus than others?