A friend I’ll call the Dependable Contrarian was giving his kids a hard time about this Sunday’s Save Darfur: Rally to Stop Genocide in Washington. It’s not that he’s soft on genocide. It’s just that he is not sure that organizers have made a compelling case for gathering tens of thousands of people to protest the Sudanese government’s reign of terror in its rural south.

“What’s the point of burning gasoline to travel to Washington,” he asks, “to urge an inherently nonresponsive government to do something, when anything that could be done would require either the diplomatic support of China — which wants the Sudanese oil reserves — or the unilateral use of American troops, which are already overstretched on behalf of Iraqi oil reserves?”

My friend’s blunt, even cynical, view of the political reality surrounding Darfur brought to the surface something that has been bothering me for weeks. I’m not talking here about the Jewish imperative that demands we do something in the face of genocide. That has been well articulated by those organizing and supporting the rally. The Jewish groups in the lead of the Save Darfur Coalition have carefully and admirably noted the rally’s proximity to this week’s commemoration of Yom Hashoa. Why go? “Because our humanity is at stake,” declares Elie Wiesel in a message for the American Jewish World Service. “As 21st-century Jews, as citizens of a world made smaller by globalization, we do not have the luxury to look the other way,” writes Steve Gutow, executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.

Such appeals are strong on conscience but vague on policy. In an essay for the Washington Jewish Week, Gutow does not mention a single concrete action that rally-goers might demand of the White House or the world. Instead, he writes that the rally’s intention is to “focus attention on Darfur” and “to question the actions of those in power, and, when necessary, to draw public attention to their failings.” He does not, however, specify what those actions or failings might be.

Exhortations from other Jewish leaders have been only slightly more specific. Jewish organizations have been urging supporters to sign a Save Darfur Coalition postcard asking President Bush to use “the power of your office to support a stronger multinational force to protect the civilians of Darfur.” Ruth Messinger, who, as head of the AJWS, has taken a lead in the Jewish community’s response to Darfur, has spoken of increasing allocations to an African Union peace-keeping force, establishing a no-fly zone, and enlisting more help from NATO countries. But consciousness-raising — not policy — remains at the forefront of the organizing efforts for Sunday’s rally.

This strikes me as both nostalgic and naive. Nostalgic, that is, for the days of the Soviet Jewry movement, when the enemy was a Soviet government that became increasingly sensitive to outside pressure on human rights, and when official Washington had achieved a bipartisan consensus on its bottom line for confronting the Soviets.

The campaign will also appear naive if its leaders do not appear willing or able to confront the real hurdles — political and logistical — standing between the West and a humanitarian response in Darfur. Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, outlined the obstacles in The New Yorker two years ago: an overstretched U.S. military, an international community put off by the Bush administration’s unilateralism, America’s own distrust of the United Nations, and this country’s “contempt” for the International Criminal Court. Not to mention the political unpopularity of sending American kids to die in yet another desert.

The campaign to save Darfur cannot succeed without the willingness of its leaders to address this realpolitik — or to confront the Bush administration politically if it appears to be dropping the ball on Darfur. Individual Jewish organizations are often willing to challenge an administration on domestic policy. But when it comes to foreign policy, Jewish organizations seek and usually achieve communal consensus and bipartisan support. At a time when Hamas and Iran have appeared as double-barreled threats to Israel, it’s doubtful that the Jewish foreign-policy establishment would be willing to risk its standing in the White House on behalf of the Darfurians.

Calls to conscience and cries of “never again” are meaningless unless attached to concrete actions. And it is not as if there is a dearth of such actions to be taken. In that regard, the Save Darfur campaign needs a little less Elie Wiesel and a little more Nicholas Kristof. The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winner this week outlined the “specific actions the U.S. should take.” They include:

• “a robust U.N. peacekeeping force of at least 20,000 well-equipped and mobile troops,” which, to preclude a Muslim backlash, should not include U.S. ground troops;
  
  
• a no-fly zone enforced by the United States and France;
  
  
• a public diplomacy campaign that includes a spotlight on the fact that “nearly all of the victims of the genocide are Muslim,” a White House photo-op with Arabic-speaking survivors, and the release of atrocity photos; and
  
  
• a summit meeting on Darfur in Europe or the Arab world.

I’ve been to the Web sites of the AJWS, JCPA, and the Save Darfur Coalition. If they contained as explicit a list of possible actions, I couldn’t find it. It needs to be front and center.

My friend is not proud of the fact that he disillusioned his kids about the rally and brought his 14-year-old daughter to tears. But he is unapologetic. “Feeling good about doing something,” he writes, “if that something is ineffectual, may be worse than doing nothing honestly.”

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