Center of Attention

"A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth."— Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

Name one news story out of Sudan this year.

Sudan is the largest humanitarian catastrophe on Earth, in the words of the World Health Organization: 13.6 million people driven from their homes, "the largest displacement crisis in the world," 33.7 million in need of aid. Famine has been formally declared — the first such declaration in more than seven years. The United States has determined that a genocide is being committed there. When the city of El Fasher fell in late 2025, the UN documented more than 6,000 killings in the first three days, including a massacre of more than 460 patients inside a maternity hospital.

Now name a news story about Israel. You didn't have to think about that one.

That asymmetry is not in your head, and it is not an accident of your social feed. It is the single most measurable fact about the world's media.

Israel is a country of 10 million people. It holds 0.12% of humanity on a territory smaller than New Jersey. And in 9 of the last 10 years, it has been the subject of more international news coverage per capita than any other country on Earth — double to quadruple the rate of any Western democracy, 7 to 16 times more than Canada, 50 - 137x more than Brazil, 200- 600x more than India. In 2024, 1 out of every 50 news articles published anywhere on the planet, by outlets outside Israel, was primarily about Israel — and in absolute terms only the United States, a country 34x its size and the world's hegemon, was the subject of more.

Whether there is any validity to the accusations against Israel is a different question — one I examined in The Invisible Weapon, which traces the anti-Israel narrative to its manufacturers and shows why its assertions are false. This piece asks a different question.

Why does a country the size of a mid-tier metropolis command a fixed, permanent, disproportionate share of the entire world's attention, decade after decade, mostly in a negative register — while catastrophes 10 and 100 times larger pass in silence? The size of the spotlight, its persistence, and its tone are facts. They can be measured. And once you measure them, only one class of explanation survives: the spotlight is not a response to events. The spotlight is the operation — aimed at making Israel the thing you think about, and the thing you think badly of. What follows is the measurement, and then the question of who is pointing the spotlight.

My methods

Everything in this piece that reads like a statistic is either my own computation from public data or a quoted, linked source. For my own numbers: I sampled 14.7 million news articles from the GDELT Project — the largest open index of the world's news, spanning outlets in 65 languages — evenly across every year from 2017 - August 2026, and counted, for every country on Earth, the international articles about it (its own domestic press excluded; every country treated identically). For TV, I measured broadcast content directly: the share of airtime on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and BBC News whose closed captions mention each country, using GDELT's processing of the Internet Archive's TV recordings. And as a check on the article sample, I ran a second, fully independent count of the articles — a complete census of GDELT's keyword index — and the two methods agree with a correlation of 0.958. Population figures come from the World Bank. Conflict deaths are from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program's deliberately conservative event-verified counts. Every query, script, raw file, and known limitation — including the ways the method is deliberately biased against Israel's count, such as excluding Israel-focused foreign outlets from Israel's total — is published on the methodology page.

The most propagandized country on Earth

Start with a year in which nothing happened. In 2019 there was no war in Israel. No invasion, no intifada, no October 7. 83 people died in the conflict that year — a toll on the order of a month or two of homicides in Chicago.

In that quiet year, 1 of every 112 news articles on Earth — from all the world's outlets minus Israel's — was primarily about Israel. By strict keyword census, 1.8 million international articles mentioned it. Israel ranked 7th in the world — ahead of Japan, India, Canada, Brazil, Australia, Mexico, Spain and Italy — with a population smaller than metropolitan Paris's. Per capita, it ranked #1, as it did in 2017, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026.

Per capita is the honest measurement. Averaged over the decade, the world wrote about Israel 2.4x the runner-up, 71x Brazil, 86x China, 283x India. Scaled to the world's full output, 2019 produced roughly one story about Israel for every seven Israelis. One about Brazil for every 340 Brazilians. One about India for every 1,550 Indians.

In 2024, one in 50 of the world's articles was primarily about Israel and one in 26 mentioned it. The world published more than twice as many stories about Israel as about all 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined — 1.3 billion people. More than about the entire Arab League. More than about all of South Asia — two billion people. On American cable news, Israel was the most-mentioned country — ahead of Iran, Russia, Ukraine, China. On the BBC's news channel, one broadcast minute in every 17 mentioned Israel.

Now, who is writing all of this? In quiet years: mostly Israel's enemies. In 2019, 69% of the world's stories about Israel were published by outlets based in Muslim-majority countries — and more than half of the world total came from the Palestinian territories alone, led by WAFA, the Palestinian Authority's official news agency. The Western press wrote 24%. Then a war starts and the composition flips: in 2024, 60% of the world's Israel stories were Western. The data shows a permanent drumbeat of the Muslim world's state-dominated media and saturated coverage by the West whenever Israel fights.

Rank countries by stories per dollar of GDP: Israel is first. Per conflict death, as we will see, the disproportion becomes obscene. And none of this is new: peer-reviewed research on global news flows found Israel and "Palestine" ranked fifth and sixth among all polities on Earth in world news salience. The researchers wrote plainly: "Surely, it cannot be explained by their size, population, or economic power."

The story that never ends

Coverage volume is half the phenomenon. The other half is time.

News attention is a decay function. A story erupts, peaks, and dies; the world moves on. This is so reliable it can be plotted. So I did — daily television coverage on American cable, for every major eruption of the last five years, from event day to 2 years out.

Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021 and consumed 27% of all cable news airtime. 90 days later, Afghanistan was at 2% of its peak. A year later it barely registered. 20 years of war, gone from the screen in a season.

Sudan's war began in April 2023. Its coverage peak — 1.5% of airtime for a few days — was the week American citizens were evacuated. The war itself never made the cut: in the following 18 months, Sudan cleared even 1% of daily airtime on 8 days. The genocide determination, the famine declarations, El Fasher — none of it moved the needle.

The expulsion of 100,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023 — an entire ancient community erased in a week, which the European Parliament called ethnic cleansing — never reached 1/10 of 1% of airtime. The Tigray war in Ethiopia, the deadliest war of this decade anywhere on Earth, never reached 1/20 of 1%. 1/1,000 of Israel's.

Israel, after October 7, averaged 5.65% of all American cable news airtime for a full year — higher than even Ukraine's first-year average after the invasion — and 12 months in was still running at 27x its pre-war baseline. Ethiopia's coverage was flat through its own war — its deadliest year was its least-covered of the three. Sudan's war nudged its share of world news from 0.18% to 0.32% for one year, then back down while the war grew worse. Myanmar's coup bump halved within a year. In print, Israel coverage has accelerated over the 3 years since October 7th (2.9%, 3.8%, 3.1%, 3.6%). No decay — a total anomaly compared to the normal lifespan of a news story. Its floor — the share it holds in years when nothing happens — is a level every other small country on Earth touches only in the single worst week of its history.

Every story ends. Kabul ended. Karabakh ended before it began. Sudan was never allowed to start. But one story never ends. That is not how news works; that is how something else works.

What the world was not looking at

The spotlight's size only means something against the darkness around it.

While Israel filled the world's front pages these past 3 years: Sudan's genocide killed at a scale still being counted — a Lancet-published study found 60,000 dead in Khartoum state alone with more than 90% unrecorded, and estimates run to 150,000 and beyond. Ethiopia's Tigray war had just ended — a war that PRIO noted produced "over 100,000 battle-related deaths in 2022, even more than Russia's invasion of Ukraine," and that the African Union's own mediator put at around 600,000 dead; population surveys later indicated roughly 1 in 10 Tigrayan women was raped. As the Guardian put it in a rare moment of self-awareness: "Though it is far deadlier than the war in Ukraine, the western media have mostly ignored it." In Congo, displacement hit 7.8 million — the highest ever recorded — and the UN reported that in the year's first 2 months a child was raped every half an hour. Yemen's war had already killed 377,000 by the UN's estimate. Syria's had killed 306,887 civilians by the UN's directly-documented count. Myanmar's military committed what the United States formally determined to be genocide. China put upwards of a million Uyghurs through camps — also a determined genocide, also ongoing.

The people who run the world's emergency response say it out loud. The UN's relief chief, Martin Griffiths:

"Sudan is completely in the shadows... There's no justice in a world where you see such contrasts."

The register

So Israel is covered more than anyone, forever. Covered how?

Like a war zone, even at peace. My sample scores every article's tone. In quiet 2019, the language of Israel's international coverage averaged −2.3 on GDELT's scale, with half of all articles scoring below −2 — statistically the neighborhood of Lebanon, Venezuela, Iraq, Syria and Iran that year — while Canada, Switzerland, Sweden, Germany and Japan sat between −0.1 and −1.0. 61% of the stories about Israel carried conflict themes — killing, terror, armed conflict — the same share as Iran; for its Western peers the figure was 1 in 4. Switzerland is a country that occasionally has a news story. Israel is covered as a conflict that happens to contain a country. And this is not the Arab press dragging the average: in 2024, Western outlets' stories about Israel averaged −4.4, with 78% negative — a harsher register than the same outlets applied that year to Russia, to Iran, or to Syria. In the year of Bucha's aftermath and Iran's missile barrages, the Western press wrote about the Jewish state in darker language than about any of them.

And the raw material inputs of that coverage — the numbers repeated in every one of those millions of stories? A study of 1,378 articles in major English-language outlets found that 98% cited the casualty figures of the Gaza Ministry of Health — an organ of Hamas, not only a terrorist organization but also a combatant in the war — while 5% cited Israeli figures; 84% drew no distinction between combatant and civilian deaths; and "fewer than 1 in every 50 articles mentioned that the figures provided by the MoH were unverifiable or controversial." A statistical analysis of the ministry's early casualty releases concluded the reported women-and-children ratios were "statistically impossible." Nobody can verify these numbers, and virtually nobody who repeats them says so. The most-repeated casualty figures on Earth are the least verified — sourced from one of the belligerents, laundered daily through 5 million articles. A machine that behaves this way is not informing you. It is dosing you.

"If you aren't careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing."— Malcolm X, at the Audubon Ballroom, December 1964

What it does to people

In the 1970s, researchers proved that readers learn "how much importance to attach to [an] issue from the amount of information in a news story and its position." People judge how common and how important something is by how easily examples come to mind — and a classic study found the public's misjudgments of the causes of death precisely mirror the skew of newspaper coverage. Mere repetition makes claims feel true — even, as a 2015 study demonstrated, "when participants knew better."

Now run the experiment on a planetary scale: take one tiny country and give it several times the per-capita coverage of any nation on Earth, every year, for as long as anyone has been counting. Make the register war-zone negative even in peacetime, and in wartime darker than that of Iran, where dissidents are hanged to death by the regime from cranes in densely-populated city centers. Never let the story end. What does the theory predict? A world convinced, without ever deciding to be, that this one country is the most important moral question alive — and the guiltiest.

And this is precisely what we observe. Among Americans under 30, a Harvard poll found support for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza running 5 to 1 — while the same respondents ranked the issue near the bottom of their own priorities. Total opinionation, zero stakes: the fingerprint of manufactured salience. In Britain's 2024 election, Gaza was a motivating issue for 14% of voters under 25 — against 1% - 6% of every other age group — the generation raised on the platforms where, on the day of the October 7 massacre itself, X counted "more than 50 million posts" about Israel in two days. Over 100,000 Michigan Democrats voted "uncommitted" against their own president over a war on another continent. In a single year, Democrats' sympathies flipped to the Palestinian side for the first time in the poll's history.

And past a certain dose, the stimulus produces something stranger — a condition some call Israel Derangement Syndrome: the compulsion to insert Israel into places that have nothing to do with Israel, while the larger horrors of the age go unmentioned.

A YouTube educator for toddlers — beloved, apolitical — suddenly produced, in the words of a complaint filed with the US Attorney General, "over 50 times" more Gaza advocacy despite having "never previously engaged with the Israel-Palestinian conflict," and then vowed: "I would risk everything, and I will risk my career over and over to stand up for them." An ice-cream company declared a foreign policy — "inconsistent with our values for Ben & Jerry's ice cream to be sold in the Occupied Palestinian Territory" — litigated it against its own parent company for years, and its co-founder got himself arrested at a Senate hearing about health policy, shouting "Congress pays for bombs that kill children in Gaza"; his flavor-naming protest post drew 73,000 likes. In one American season, protesters glued their hands to Sixth Avenue to block the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, blocked the access roads to JFK and LAX during holiday travel, chained themselves inside pipes across the Golden Gate Bridge under a banner reading STOP THE WORLD FOR GAZA, smoke-bombed the Met Gala, forced the Museum of Modern Art to close — and picketed the memorial exhibition for the Nova festival dead with signs reading "Long live October 7th," an act so grotesque the White House issued a statement that "Antisemitism has no place in the United States."

The obsession runs through institutions that exist for other purposes entirely. Roughly 100 American city councils took up Gaza ceasefire resolutions within months — hearings running 6 - 8 hours, Chicago's passing only on the mayor's tie-breaking vote over an alderman's objection: "To pretend that we are international diplomats in this room..." Number of American city-council resolutions on Sudan's concurrent genocide: zero that I could find — and it is not because localities can't do foreign policy; during Darfur, 35 states divested. This time the entire municipal bandwidth of the United States went to the one conflict. Over New York's 2025 mayoral race — a municipal contest about housing and buses — Israel loomed from beginning to end: a country 5,700 miles from City Hall as a defining fault line of a city election. In May 2024 came the purest specimen the phenomenon will ever produce: the "Blockout", a mass campaign to punish celebrities — Kim Kardashian lost nearly 1 million followers in a month — not for anything they said about Israel, but for saying nothing. Silence about this one country, alone among all the world's causes, had become an offense.

The selectivity is measurable even inside single organizations. On X, a sampling of the largest advocacy accounts devoted to "Palestine" shows them posting about Israel every few hours, and about Sudan, Congo, or Myanmar every few weeks — and when Human Rights Watch posts about both from the same account, its Israel posts draw an order of magnitude more engagement than its South Sudan posts. When an atrocity elsewhere goes unnoticed, the complaint writes itself, as one observer put it about Lebanon: "If this was Gaza, everyone around the world would be marching... Because it's Lebanon, nobody cares."

This phenomenon is what decades of a pointed spotlight produce — Sam Harris observed that Israelis "have endured more worldwide public scrutiny than any other society has ever had to while defending itself," and Einat Wilf named the template: Israel gets equated with "the evil du jour," and the analogies "have nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with projections of domestic issues and animosities." The derangement is the output of the operation.

The counter-explanations, and why they fail

Every innocent explanation deserves to be heard at full strength, because none of them are stupid. They are just insufficient.

The Holy Land. Ethan Bronner, who ran the New York Times' Jerusalem bureau, put it best: "It is holy to the three great monotheistic religions... that's almost half the world so what happens there matters." True. And Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt share the same holy geography at 1/5, 1/12 and 1/53 of the attention per capita. Sacredness explains a floor of interest. It does not explain war-zone tone in peacetime, and the Psalms did not assign Israel more coverage than sub-Saharan Africa.

America's ally. Bronner again: "We, in the media, reflect the interest I don't think we create it" — Congress obsesses, so the press follows. But his colleague Matti Friedman, a former AP correspondent, answered that one for good: "America has 30,000 servicemen in South Korea... and yet if there has been obsessive South Korea coverage, I've missed it." Taiwan, Japan, South Korea — alliance linchpins with world-war stakes — draw 1/10 - 1/30 of Israel's per-capita coverage. And the peer-reviewed finding is stranger still: remove American outlets from the sample, and Israel's salience goes up.

It's easy to cover. Open country, English-speaking, safe hotels, good flights. All true. Here is what that convenience produced, in the words of a man who worked inside it — Matti Friedman, reporter and editor in the AP's Jerusalem bureau:

"When I was a correspondent at the AP, the agency had more than 40 staffers covering Israel and the Palestinian territories. That was significantly more news staff than the AP had in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the 50 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. [...] Before the outbreak of the civil war in Syria, the permanent AP presence in that country consisted of a single regime-approved stringer. The AP's editors believed, that is, that Syria's importance was less than one-40th that of Israel."

Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark and Ireland are just as safe, just as open, just as Anglophone-friendly — and no wire service assigns them with 40 journalists. During the war's first year Israel's press office issued 5,530 press cards; the BBC alone sent 425 people.

There's a war. There is — sometimes. There was no war in 2017, 2018, 2019: first place per capita every year, in the same dark register. Syria, Yemen, Sudan and Ethiopia had wars vastly larger and got 1/100th of the attention. The academic model that includes conflict intensity still finds Israel covered far beyond what its conflicts predict. And every war on Earth decays on camera except this one.

People are just interested. Then the interest should show up where people choose freely what to look at. It doesn't. Wikipedia views of the Israel article per reader sit in the same tier as Ireland, Norway and Denmark in normal years. People do not seek Israel out more than they seek out Norway. They are fed Israel — and fed enough, they crave. Asked how the New York Times covers Israel, its own Jerusalem bureau chief answered: "In a very aggressive way as a mainstay of its daily news diet."

The signature of a target

The investigator's question: is there a documented actor with intent, capability, and a 50-year output aimed at exactly this result — keeping Israel on the world's mind, in the world's dock?

There are several. I have written two full investigations about them, and I will only point here.

The narrative itself was industrial product. The highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to defect from the Soviet bloc, Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, testified to what he had helped run:

"In 1972, the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the U.S. As KGB chairman Yury Andropov told me, a billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on America than could a few millions. We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States. [...] [B]y 1978 the whole Soviet-bloc intelligence community had sent some 4,000 such agents of influence into the Islamic world. [...] We in the Soviet bloc tried to conquer minds, because we knew we could not win any military battles."

Those agents seeded the Middle East with hundreds of thousands of copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Soviet presses printed "hundreds of anti-Zionist and anti-Israel books and thousands of articles... with millions of copies", translated into 16 languages and pumped through front groups into the Western left. Scholars who reconstructed the operation called it "perhaps the greatest triumph of disinformation even to see the light of day". I traced this machine and its heirs in The Invisible Weapon.

The institutions kept it running. The UN General Assembly has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than the rest of the world combined — 173 against Israel versus 80 against all other countries over the last decade; in one November day in 2025 it adopted 6 resolutions on Israel and 0 on Sudan (and the genre has a pedigree: the 1975 "Zionism is racism" resolution was passed with the KGB's New York station working the vote count). The UN Human Rights Council keeps Israel as the only country with its own permanent agenda item — a standing arrangement so naked that Ban Ki-moon himself was "disappointed at the Council's decision to single out only one specific regional item." 9 of the Council's 39 emergency sessions in its entire history have been about Israel. The watchdogs match the pattern: Human Rights Watch's own founder broke with his organization in the New York Times because it "has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region," and a departing senior editor confirmed that the Israel-Palestine chapter "has always been longer than those of rights-abusing goliaths such as Iran and North Korea."

The volume is subsidized. Half of the world's Israel coverage in quiet years comes from the state-dominated media of the Muslim world — and its crown jewel is a broadcaster a hereditary emirate built into one of the largest news networks on Earth, whose American arm the US Justice Department ordered to register as a foreign agent — "controlled and funded by the Government of Qatar." Iran's contribution is not rhetorical: Microsoft's threat-intelligence unit measured that 43% of all Iranian state cyber operations target Israel — "more than the next 14 targeted countries combined" — and that Iranian influence operations jumped from one every other month to 11 in October 2023 alone. In the war's first days, an analysis of the online battlefield found 1 in 4 profiles pushing the anti-Israel surge was fake, reaching half a billion views in 48 hours; X itself ended up actioning over 1 million accounts over the conflict. And the money that irrigates the West's own anti-Israel activism — the NGOs, the campus networks, the protest infrastructure — I followed in Aiding & Abetting.

Advertisers understand something the audience of news never applies to news: repetition is not information, it is influence. Nobody runs the same ad every day for 50 years unless it sells — and nobody pays for that placement without wanting something sold. Now apply the availability heuristic to the question itself: a 50-year campaign; one tiny country, #1 per capita in 9 of the last 10 years, immune to decay, negative past the register of active war criminals, sustained by the documented output of superpower intelligence services, hereditary monarchies, a captured international system, and swarms of fake accounts — landing on a public that could not find Sudan on the map it thinks it's reading. Which is likelier: that 10 million people have organically out-mattered every catastrophe on Earth, in every count anyone has run? Or that the men who said — in writing — that they built a machine to make you watch Israel, and hate it, built exactly the machine whose output you are holding?

The old formula says the press tells you what to think about. For 50 years, someone has been telling the press what to think about.

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Israel has been made the most important story on Earth, by parties with budgets and a strategy. It has worked so well that the world now polices toddlers’ channels, ice-cream flavors, and city councils for insufficient attention to Israel, while an actual genocide runs unwatched elsewhere for want of a camera.

Don’t fall for the narratives: it has nothing to do with justice, human rights, or accountability. The spotlight is a constant stimulus that tells you where to direct your attention and how you can be most useful.