Last Sunday marked World Refugee Day, which annually highlights the plight of the over 30 million people forced to flee their homes due to war, famine, or ethnic strife. This year, the event could not have occurred at a more fitting time. Over the past two weeks, an estimated 400,000 citizens of Kyrgyzstan have fled their homes in the wake of riots between ethnic Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in the country’s south. According to many Uzbeks, Kyrgyz troops burned their passports, effectively preventing them from taking part in a constitutional referendum scheduled for this Sunday. The violence, which has left some 2,000 people dead, is some of the worst to have hit the former Soviet Union since its breakup two decades ago. Indeed, the very fate of Kyrgyzstan’s tenuous provisional government — which assumed nominal control of the country following the violent ouster of President Kurmanbeck Bakiyev in April, the aftermath of which I covered — hangs in the balance.

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But you wouldn’t learn much about the dire situation in Kyrgyzstan by reading the international media, or by perusing the statements of foreign ministries, the agendas of international aid organizations, or the resolutions of the United Nations. Were you to rely on these sources for information, you would think that the greatest calamity to befall the world in recent months was last month’s raid by Israeli commandos of a Gaza-bound vessel in which nine Turkish Islamists were killed.

The details of the incident are disputed by both sides, but it’s clear by now that the “Freedom Flotilla” was not a caravan of peace-loving humanitarians. The Turkish organization that sponsored it is alleged to have ties to al-Qaeda, and passengers on the convoy’s largest boat, the MV Mavi Marmara, came equipped with knives, metal bars, and other physical instruments not usually befitting aid workers. Far from a mission intending to bring food and supplies to the residents of Gaza (each of whom, by the way, receive about a ton of food per year from Israel), the flotilla was a stunt, a staged spectacle intended to provoke the Israeli government into taking defensive action, which it inevitably did.

As always when it comes to Israel, the world was primed to attack. The UN Security Council convened an emergency session in which it “condemned” Israel’s behavior, after which it called for an international investigation of the very behavior it had already judged with the strongest word in its rhetorical arsenal (never does the UN “condemn” the concentration camp that is North Korea, Iran's brutal crackdowns on democracy activists, or China’s gulag system known as the laogai). Turkey’s foreign minister told reporters in Washington that the event was “Turkey’s 9/11.” The incident made front pages around the world for weeks on end, with the headline of Britain’s Daily Mirror leading the pack in sensationalism and distortion: “MASSACRE IN THE MED.”

According to Michael Weiss of the British press watchdog Just Journalism, the British media devotes more attention to Israel than any other foreign country in the world. “The British media’s fixation on Israel trumps all other foreign policy considerations, even Afghanistan, where British soldiers are still fighting and dying,” he says. “A particularly noticeable example was Sri Lanka’s crushing of Tamil separatists at the exact same time Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in response to Hamas rocket fire,” says media expert Tom Gross. “Tens of thousands of Tamil civilians died — 1,000 in a single bombing of a hospital complex alone — compared to perhaps 300 Palestinian civilians. Yet there was virtually no coverage of the Sri Lanka situation.”

Contrast the international outrage over Israel’s entirely legal enforcement of its blockade on the Hamas-ruled territory of Gaza with the massive crisis now facing Kyrgyzstan. Sure, Western governments, led by the United States, have offered a few million dollars in aid. But there have been no emergency Security Council sessions to address the carnage. There have been no attacks on the Kyrgyz government in the international media comparing its alleged, wanton killing of Uzbeks and the burning of their identity documents to the Nazi Holocaust. Nor is much being done to address Kyrgyzstan’s massive refugee problem, at least not on the scale that the international community has devoted to the Palestinian cause. Indeed, the Palestinians are the only people in the world who enjoy the patronage of their own United Nations outfit, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. For over five decades, UNRWA has spent untold billions keeping Palestinians in squalid refugee camps as a means of avoiding their resettlement in neighboring Arab countries.

Why does Israel attract so much attention while Kyrgyzstan is ignored? Kyrgyzstan is, for lack of a better word, hard. Most of the journalists, humanitarians, and foreign ministry officials who perpetually stew over Israel would not be able to locate it (or any of the former Soviet republics of Central Asia) on a map, never mind offer a rudimentary analysis of the country’s problems. Indeed, the entire region is opaque to Western observers, what with its obscure Turkic languages, Eastern traditions, and inhospitable living standards. The endemic corruption and clan-based political system of Kyrgyzstan makes the possibility of there being some form of representative, liberal government — which has never had a better shot than in these past few months — seem hopeless. But the difficulty of alleviating the situation in a place like Kyrgyzstan is all the more reason for people who claim to care about human rights to tackle it.

Moreover, the very things that make Kyrgyzstan difficult for Westerners to understand also apply to the Arab-Israeli conflict. There, colonial powers drew arbitrary borders that created more problems than they solved. There, the people speak different languages. And there, the decades-long dispute between Arabs and Jews over a sliver of land is a complex, wrenching problem that generations of the world’s best diplomats have thus far been unable to solve. Yet most observers in the West have created an easy narrative framing the problem as one between a colonialist, settler state battling a displaced, victimized, helpless people.

Those who focus disproportionately on Israel claim that the attention is justified because the persistence of the Arab-Israeli conflict enrages the Muslim world, thus endangering our relationship with Islamic countries. This has always been a dubious claim. (If Muslims cared so much about the plight of the Palestinians, would they not do more to alleviate their situation? The way Palestinian refugees have been, and continue to be, treated in Arab countries like Jordan, Kuwait, and Lebanon puts the lie to this claim.) But even if we take this charge at face value, there’s no reason to believe that Kyrgyzstan isn’t of any less strategic importance to the West. For one, it hosts the Transit Center at Manas, the main refueling and cargo station for NATO troops and supplies entering and exiting the Afghanistan theater. In addition, Kyrgyzstan is a major route for two deadly things: Islamist fighters and opium. If the rest of the country begins to resemble the lawless south, trafficking in both of these will increase.

But for those who readily attack Israel, the far greater human impact of what’s happening in Kyrgyzstan (or Sudan, or North Korea, or half a dozen other global hot spots) doesn’t matter. They have their own reasons for piling on the Jewish state, whether it’s extreme leftistm, a hatred of capitalism, or plain old anti-Semitism. For Europeans in particular, demonizing Israel and sanctifying the Arabs helps to absolve them of their collective guilt about the Holocaust. That the world obsesses over Israel while ignoring far greater humanitarian crises is a perennial complaint. But it’s one worth registering as Kyrgyzstan teeters on the brink of collapse, and the world barely notices.