Gen Z and Palestine
The traits of Gen Z make this cohort uniquely susceptible to the Palestinian cause — and threaten to make Donald Trump president again. This is not our grandparents’ McCarthyist nightmare of communists under the beds. This is a real threat of inadvertent MAGAs living in the basement.
Could the Gaza war defeat Joe Biden?
The conflict between Israel and Hamas is dividing friends, families and political parties worldwide. This is especially notable among Democrats in the United States, with younger, more progressive voters siding with Palestinians and older, more conservative voters empathizing more with Israel. Some younger voters, as well as some Arab-American voters, are actively mobilizing against Biden over what they view as his administration’s pro-Israel positions.
In a presidential election that polls say is basically a tossup, dissatisfaction with the administration’s foreign policy could flip multiple swing states (to say nothing of down-ballot repercussions). While younger voters have poorer turnout numbers than other voters, any loss of enthusiasm for the Biden-Harris option could be determinative.
If the stakes are this high, we are almost required to delve a bit deeper not only into what young Americans think, but why they think that way.
Public opinion polling is an imperfect science, but it is about all we have to go on. We can draw conclusions based on the fact that overall trends among polls indicate broad similarities — and among these indications are that the youngest Americans are significantly out of step with their older siblings, parents and grandparents on the issues of Israel, Palestine and the current war.
While multiple polls point in the same general direction, the reports are confounding nevertheless. Answers from the youngest respondents are often bewildering or entirely contradictory. For example, according to one of the most recent comprehensive surveys on the subject, more than half of young respondents (51%) said Israel should be “ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians,” while even more (58%) contrariwise said Hamas should be removed from running Gaza. In other words, most of the respondents do not have a coherent opinion on the subject — although judging by comments on social media and the ferocity of protestors, they hold these incoherent opinions vehemently.
This particular poll is also challenging because the questions themselves are problematic. Certainly there are those who argue that Israel should cease to exist and an independent Palestine should exist “from river to the sea,” a dangerous chant we have heard routinely in recent months. But even among those extremists, giving Israel “to Hamas” is surely a different proposition than giving Israel to “the Palestinians” and a pollster should have been more specific.
The larger issue is that asking people whether they support Israelis or Palestinians ignores the real binary. We have two options, but they are not represented in most polls. Our genuine choice is to support both Israelis and Palestinians or to support neither. Compromise, coexistence and a negotiated settlement are the only things that will “free Palestine” and any movement that rejects those values will never succeed. One cannot realistically be pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel, nor can we be pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian. We are either “pro” both or “anti” both. Nevertheless, for the purposes of gauging public opinion on a deeply divisive subject, these nuances are inevitably cast aside.
The lack of nuance in the formulation, though, is secondary to the absence of nuance in the responses. The clashing values among young voters represented in survey findings raise very basic questions about what this cohort thinks.
What, for instance, do we make of the fact that 66% of 18–24-year-old Americans polled consider October 7 to represent “genocide” while 60% believe the terror of that day was justified? By these measures, a majority of young American believe genocide is justified. Could this be an accurate representation of young Americans’ opinions?
It may be tempting to conclude that this demographic, when it comes to Israel, Palestine, Hamas and the current conflict have no idea what they are talking about. Perhaps they are perplexed by conflicting information they are receiving.
This explanation seems reasonable. But given the basic humanity and morality (or lack thereof) that some of these responses illuminate, we are obligated to delve deeper. Do young Americans, even while wrapping themselves in the language of human rights and peace really endorse kidnapping, immolation, rape and beheadings as a just way to free Palestine? That is what polls suggest — and surely that deserves a deeper consideration.
*
The 18–24-year-old group does not exist in a vacuum. Their approach to Palestinians and Israelis is on a continuum with other Americans. Put simply: Older = More pro-Israel. Younger = More pro-Palestinian. To graph these opinions, though, would send the y-axis of pro-Palestinian opinion off the chart. The youngest voters reflect the larger trends across age demographics, but magnify them far beyond a consistent trajectory. Why are the opinions of young Americans so out of whack with the rest of the country?
Discrepancies between older and younger Americans in their opinions toward Israel have sometimes been explained as driven by those who remember the Holocaust — and therefore have a deeper sensitivity to the Jewish condition — and those who do not.
This explanation seems needlessly simplistic. The Holocaust is a factor — a vast one — in any discussion of contemporary issues involving Jews. But can it explain the opinions of seemingly millions of Americans to the Israeli-Palestinian situation? To some extent, perhaps, but it almost certainly cannot come close to a satisfactory overall explanation.
The “Holocaust ignorance” explanation would also contradict an alternative thesis set out by the author Dara Horn, who argues that using the Holocaust as the baseline for concern around anti-Jewish attitudes is to set the bar rather high. An overemphasis on the Holocaust can lead people to look at rising antisemitism in the United States and globally, or even at the unconcealed rhetoric of Palestinian terrorists, and conclude, Well, it’s not the Holocaust.
In this context, put crudely, awareness of the Holocaust might diminish, rather than stimulate, support for endangered Jews. Grandparents of Gen Zers may have been indelibly impacted by the newsreels in the Odeon of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz. But, either whether awareness of Holocaust history to any degree helps or hurts empathy for Israelis, it seems a stretch to believe that this explains such a chasm in current public opinion.
Given that a significant chunk of young (and some other) Americans are not just expressing “pro-Palestinian” opinions but overt support for Hamas and their atrocities, “forgetting the Holocaust” (and presumably paving the way for a repetition) may seem like a handy explanation. The schism between generations is not just over policy but represents a break with basic Western values of humanity. Given that a sizeable chunk — a vast majority — of young Americans self-define as progressive, liberal, democratic socialist and other orientations that ostensibly advance peace and coexistence among peoples, the inconsistency on this issue begs explanation. A majority of open-minded, peace-loving, accepting Gen Zers tell pollsters October 7 was justified. Something beyond ignorance of history needs to explain the endorsement of rape, immolation, kidnapping and mass murder as legitimate political tools.
*
One explanation may be that the ignorance of history is not so much about the Holocaust but about something more recent. For we of a certain age, September 28, 2000 — the day Yasser Arafat and Palestinian terrorists destroyed the Oslo peace process and the launched the Second Intifada — is basically current events. At that decisive moment, Americans 18 to 24 were either submerged in amniotic fluid or yet to be conceived. When they chant “Free Palestine!” they seem unaware that Israel and Palestine were negotiating precisely that outcome when Palestinian leaders chose war and continued statelessness over peace and self-determination. The prevailing narrative is that Palestinian self-determination cannot come through negotiation and therefore “any means necessary,” including the most gruesome violence is justified. This near-certainty betrays an ignorance of recent history that shows a “free Palestine” was never so near as when Palestinians negotiated and never so far away as when they reverted to terror.
Still, young Americans seem willing to justify the most grisly Palestinian violence on the assumption that the Palestinians have no option but violence. Since they may be unaware that Palestinians were offered a “free Palestine” on a silver platter but chose instead to launch the Second Intifada — what part of yes, don’t they understand? — young Americans are not inclined to ask what observers with more experience might: What is it Palestinians really want?
Still, there may be an explanation that fits even better than ignorance, something inherent to this generational demographic.
What appears to be an intellectually disordered response makes more sense if you understand something about both the peculiarities of young Americans and the characteristics of the Palestinian movement.
Reasonable Western observers routinely misjudge the objectives of the Palestinian movement. Too many people assume that the slogan “Free Palestine” means, well, just that. Leaving aside that there is precisely no evidence that an independent Palestinian state would be “free” for anyone — let alone women, LGBTQ+ people, minorities or those with opinions that diverge from the repressive religious, political and social orthodoxies — there seems to be an almost unanimous belief that Palestinianism is a run-of-the-mill nationalist movement seeking self-determination for their people.
Yasser Arafat never hid the fact that his goal was not the creation of an independent Palestine but the elimination of Israel. Immediately after his duplicitous handshake on the White House lawn, when the world decided en masse that the old terrorist had become a peacemaker, he reiterated his “phased strategy,” first expressed two decades earlier and never repudiated, to take any concessions as a springboard to the ultimate goal of destroying Israel.
Lasting peace was never his goal. Every “peace” agreement, every “foothold,” was a step to eradicating Israel. Arafat knew he didn’t even have to couch his words because supporters around the world either chose to hear what they wanted to hear or secretly agreed with his destructive aims. (And Arafat was the “moderate,” the voice the world chose to recognize as the legitimate voice of Palestinian aspirations, the mantle now carried by his successor Mahmoud Abbas, so you can imagine the worldview of “extremists” like Hamas.)
The larger point, and the surest proof of this destructive ideology for those great many who remain doggedly unconvinced, is that neither Arafat nor Abbas ever created the rudiments of a successful state, despite being saturated with billions in international aid. Arafat admitted to his friend Nicolae Ceaușescu, the Romanian dictator, that he was incapable of statecraft and that his people were effectively ungovernable. Palestinians, Arafat told Ceaușescu, lacked the tradition, unity, and discipline to become a functional state, and independence would bring nothing but failure from the first day. For Arafat, for Abbas and for many or most of the Palestinian people, despite the rose-tinted glasses Western activists don when they fête the Palestinian “resistance,” an independent Palestine is not what this is about.
Only susceptible overseas chumps can look at the facts of history and believe state-building is the goal of Palestinianism. Palestinianism was created and is sustained to end Jewish self-determination in the Middle East. To express this is to invite a torrent of outrage and accusations of Zionist shilling. But to deny it is to repudiate every facet of Palestinian history and the explicit words of the Palestinian leaders from Arafat and Abbas, to media commentators, religious figures, academics and effectively every leading voice in Palestinian society. To not see the real objectives of Palestinianism requires a profound willingness to suspend belief.
This is not to say that the Palestinian people deserve what they have gotten. Not at all. It is, though, to say that the chanting millions on the streets of Brooklyn and Berkeley are directing their blame at precisely the wrong perpetrators. And as long as we refuse to recognize the root of the problem, we will never resolve it. The definition of insanity is worth revisiting when millions of activists are doubling down on Israel while ignoring the role Palestinian leaders, terrorists and the vast majority of ordinary Palestinians (according to opinion polls) play in perpetuating Palestinian statelessness.
Although polls say ordinary Palestinians overwhelmingly endorse the barbarity of October 7, we need to remember that they have been subject to four generations of genocidal antisemitic indoctrination. Under the circumstances, it is a bit of a silver lining that a tiny minority intrepidly come to their own conclusions.
Within this dystopic, destructive Palestinian movement are clues to young Americans’ distorted approach to this subject. Unlike other nationalist movements that (whether successful or not) are constructive, forward-looking and aspirational, the Palestinian movement is overwhelmingly destructive, backward-obsessing and nihilistic. Weirdly, in young Americans, this is a nihilistic movement that has met its target market.
*
Note the centrality in Palestinianism of “resistance” — which is by definition oppositional. Obviously, if your movement self-defines (however ahisorically and misguidedly) as anti-colonial or anti-imperialist, this is conflictual and antagonistic to the status quo. But the successful decolonializing and nationalist movements of the past decades have also had at least some component of state-building in their mission. Palestinianism has effectively none. They are not for anything. They only “resist.” Palestinian leaders, commentators, academics and thinkers do not waste their time imagining what an independent Palestine would look like or constructing the foundations of a civil society. Instead, they rage. They wail in furious indignation. They fixate on the (presumably glorious) past instead of a constructive, gratifying future.
Scan the titles in the Palestine section of your library: The Hundred Years War on Palestine; The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine; Palestine Hijacked: How Zionism Forged an Apartheid State from River to Sea; Palestine: History of a Lost Nation; The Making of a Human Bomb: An Ethnography of Palestinian Resistance.
It is never, notice, about nation-building, developing civil society or the groundwork of a functional state. It is never hopeful, productive, idealistic. It is always backward-looking, vengeful, grievance-driven and polemical.
There is little to nothing constructive among these mountains of published works. It is almost all hysterical hyperbole with neither fair history nor productive future as guideposts. This is ethnic cleansing! That is apartheid! This is racism! Strangulation! Asphyxiation! Genocide! It is a book-length form of the chanting mob. Not that historians and commentators don’t — or shouldn’t — have political slants, but a review of some of the more scholarly writers on the subject suggests that, when it comes to Palestine, the standards of the academy are more elastic than one expects when opening a volume by a person with “professor” in front of their name.
These volumes, as well as the billions of words spilled online, jabbered in endless symposia and screamed at rallies are entirely absent of constructiveness, hopefulness or any tangible ideas for national self-realization. There is, for all intents, a movement to free Palestine from Israeli occupation, but an absolute void of what should happen the day after.
This compares starkly with the Zionist literature of pre-Israel times. Works like Leon Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation and Theodor Herzl’s Old-New Land and The Jewish State are forward-looking, even utopian, works of inspiration and optimism. (Though they tragically misjudged their neighbors’ openness to peace and coexistence.)
Before the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948 and the instantaneous invasion by all neighboring Arab states, Jews had built the infrastructure of a functioning state — functioning so well, indeed, that it would be one of the greatest examples of postwar decolonialization and statecraft, even if it hadn’t all taken place in the face of unparalleled and incessant external threats and attacks.
On the flip side, possibly more than any other realized or aspirational nationalist movement, the Palestinians have had more time, resources and encouragement to build precisely the rudiments of a state to which nationalist movements aspire — and they have unfalteringly refused to do so.
They have, by some measures, received more humanitarian aid per capita than any people on earth; entire multi-billion-dollar United Nations bureaucracies exist for no purpose but to build up Palestine; a worldwide network of supportive allies, possibly the biggest such movement known to human history, supports their cause. And, still, if Palestine became free tomorrow its people would be worse off than they were yesterday.
The Palestinians and their overseas ostensible allies refuse to acknowledge that it is precisely this obsession with avenging the past that precludes their successful future. Palestinian self-determination will come when Palestinian leaders prepare their people to live in peace and coexistence with their neighbors. That was the one obligation under Oslo (the kids won’t know this) but it was a step too far for Arafat and most of the Palestinian society then or now.
There will be an independent Palestine when Israel’s leaders and people are confident that an independent Palestine will not mean perpetual repetitions of October 7. Until Palestinians give even a hint that they are willing to abandon their genocidal fixation, there will be no resolution to this conflict and no self-determination for the Palestinian people.
It’s pretty simple: No peace? No Palestine!
*
Which brings us back to the opinions of 18-to-24-year-old Americans. The seemingly unintelligible ideology betrayed by their responses to opinion pollsters make more sense in the context of the stark obstructionism of the Palestinian movement.
The privileged, mostly safe, middle class young people who make up the poll respondents and a good swath of the multitudes marching for Palestine carry the peculiar qualities of Generation Z. There are among them a great number of well-informed, morally driven, peace-seeking activists. However, anyone who has engaged an average Gen Z “anti-Zionist activist” in conversation will soon discover ignorance, ideological intransigence and stubborn self-righteous hostility to Jewish self-determination. You are also likely to find close to zero concern for what might happen after Palestine becomes “free,” a stunning nonchalance about what happens the day after we “end the occupation.”
Among the stereotypes associated with this age group are an addiction to screens and social media, which are obviously not places to develop deep or nuanced understandings of any subject. Gen Zers are often said to have short attention spans and seek instant gratification.
Moreover, they have been raised with the knowledge that the environment is on a collision course with disaster. Additionally, conflicts almost anywhere one cares to look on the planet seem to preclude a harmonious future, which makes it understandable that Gen Zers are said to embody a degree of hopelessness that makes them view the future as not really worth investing in.
Together, these and other trends among young Americans dovetail nicely with the approaches of Palestinianism. More than any other conflict on the planet, this one has been reduced to good-and-evil. Many activists, if you scratch the intellectual surface, know about the conflict little more than they learned from the slogans chanted at anti-Israel rallies or memes shared on Instagram. They have been told by activists that, ignorance notwithstanding, silence is complicity. A know-nothing attitude is no barrier to engagement; it is celebrated. Reasoned pro-Israel defences are met with rejoinders that begin “Nothing can justify …” Never mind the deets, “Free Palestine!” Don’t worry about creating an environment where the occupation can end peacefully, “End the occupation now!” Peace process? Process is for suckers!
Most notably, young people today were not immersed, as some of us were, in the tetchy debates around cultural appropriation, White Savior Complex and disempowering narratives of Developing World peoples. It should be jarring to their older siblings, parents and grandparents who unlearned these approaches, to see today’s activists donning Palestinian scarves like blackface, appropriating terms like “apartheid” as well as the right to speak on Palestinians’ behalf, and infantalizing Palestinians as if they were some sort of single-cell organisms, entities absolutely devoid of agency, capable only of reacting to external stimuli.
These approaches to Palestine and Israel no doubt stand on the shoulders of young Americans’ larger problematic experiences. The incessant barrage of negativity, of literally world-ending environmental prophesies, instill perhaps more nihilism than idealism in their worldview. They seem less concerned with replacing what is with something better than tearing it all down and hoping that, by some fluke, something better emerges from the ashes. TikTok does not engender long-range thinking. Issues like the environment, for which we have scientifically available solutions, are not getting better, so maybe reason and evidence-based explanations aren’t what the big thinkers make them out to be. By definition, a problem like Palestine that has been raging since the day they were born might seem impervious to constructive approaches. It is no surprise that the slogan “Burn it all down” is a common response to current challenges.
If any of this is remotely accurate, it may explain the incoherent opinions Gen Z has toward Israel and Palestine better than ideas of historical ignorance or any well-considered ideology.
Palestinianism thrives in environments where historical facts and contemporary nuance are weakest. Barked slogans like “End the occupation now!” — a demand that precludes the creation of an environment of peace where the occupation can end — and “free Palestine” — an assumption about the inevitability of “freedom” in an independent Palestine that defies all evidence — sound reasonable mostly in a vacuum of knowledge.
For 75 years, the Palestinian movement has brayed for “resistance” while resisting any efforts toward state-building. It demands instant gratification without laying the foundations for success. It is perpetually oppositional, with effectively no constructive program. It demands that the cart of independence be put before the horse of peace and coexistence.
It is, at root, the perfect cause for disenchanted Gen Zers: No plan. Nothing constructive. Just burn it all down.
*
Parents and older sibs might reassure ourselves that, at least, the young’uns are taking an interest in the world around them. (More than their me-generation parents might have!) Or, we might reassure ourselves, we were outlandish radicals at that age, too. Crazy kids.
But did we celebrate beheadings? Did we revel in mass rape as a tool of “resistance”? Did we fete the spirit of those who learned to fly hang-gliders in order to descend on an outdoor rave and murder 360 people, almost all of them the age cohort of American Gen Zers? This is not the political activism of marginally over-zealous kids. These are young people whose basic sense of humanness, whose most fundamental sense of right and wrong, have gone massively off the rails.
Oh well, we might soothe ourselves. They’ll grow up and get some common sense whacked into them.
Will they? And will it happen by Nov. 5? Because, if not, disgruntled, “pro-Palestinian” Gen Zers are set to inaugurate President Donald Trump.
This should genuinely set off alarm bells. This is not our grandparents’ false anxieties about communists under the beds. This is a real threat of inadvertent MAGAs living in your basement.