Palestine: The Wall is Breached. Young Americans are pro-Palestinian

Young Americans are more pro-Palestinian. Why? Because, unlike their Zionist-misinformation captive elders, the Internet has liberated the truth and opened their eyes to the historical facts.

For the past several months of war between Israel and Hamas, US public opinion on the conflict appears to have shifted, except for one constant: a divide between the views of older and younger Americans has creeped up both during the war and in the years leading up to it.

A late October YouGov poll found that more people ages 18-29 sympathized with Palestinians than with Israelis in the current conflict — the only age bracket with that view (28 percent expressed more sympathy with Palestinians vs. 20 percent for Israelis — though even more sympathized with both peoples equally, 31 percent). Older groups were more likely to sympathize with Israelis than Palestinians or both groups equally, particularly those 65 and older. Only 14% of 18- to 29-year-olds thought it was “very important” for the United States to protect Israel, in contrast to two-thirds of those 65 or older. It appears that the unrelenting Israeli savagery against innocent civilians in Gaza has breached the wall of Israeli supremacy in the generally ignorant and biased American understanding of the conflict.

Two generations, two narratives

One expert says that each age group has a different “generational memory” of Israel. Older generations have been impregnated by Zionist propaganda that has over-exploited the Holocaust to view Israel as a refuge for the Jews, exclusively seen as permanent victims.  Palestinians, on the other hand, who are the real victims of the creation of Israel, have been globally, though wrongfully, associated with third-worldism, terrorism and Islamism.

Germans and other Europeans committed the Holocaust, not the Palestinians. Instead of directing their anger and hatred at the innocent Palestinians whom they expelled into refugee camps and whose country they invaded and destroyed, Israelis should direct their anger and hatred at those Germans and other Fascist Europeanswho perpetrated the Holocaust.

The paradigm myth which Zionist propaganda has literally drilled (movies, newspapers, books, documentaries, and endless tales of Germany's barbarity against its own Jewish citizens) into the older generation of Americans as one of a people returning to their homeland after living for 2,000 years as a scattered diaspora facing persistent persecution, has finally failed the test of reality in the minds of the younger generation. Persistent calls by Palestinian intellectuals to try and present the conflict in a more balanced and less biased way, combined with Israel's growing militarism, ultra-religiosity, expansionism, racism, and denial of a Palestinian identity searching for its own return to its ancestral homeland, have borne their fruit. Archival records, together with archaeological and genetic data, debunked the made-up and bible-garbage-founded links between the ancient Hebrews of Bronze Age Palestine and modern-day, newly converted, European Jews.

Israel's military victories against its Arab state neighbors (Syria, Egypt and Jordan), in 1948, 1967 and 1973, could no longer camouflage the horror of foreign colonial settlers from Europe displacing with untold violence the native indigenous Palestinian population. During the months before and after the 1948 war that created Israel, an estimated 700,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes by threats, massacres, rapes and looting, and about 600 Palestinian villages were literally erased from the maps of Palestine to either completely disappear or be replaced by Zionist "settlements". The language used does not need further explanation: Palestinian places are known as "villages", while Zionist places are known as "settlements"; this alone should tell you who is the real historical owner of the land and who is the savage colonial intruder.

But by the time millennials began forming their understanding of global events, the violence of the second Intifada had concluded in the mid-2000s with separation walls and barriers constructed between Israel and the West Bank, and then Gaza. Illegal in the eyes of the whole world, including by Israel's closest and only blind ally, the expansion of land theft, dehumanization and humiliation of the Palestinians, led the younger American and western generation to form a different idea of Israel than the one their elders had: The myth of the white European pioneer - a builder of Soviet-style Socialist collective settlements known as Kibbutzim who was "greening" the desert - slowly mutated into one of a repressive militaristic Israel that cultivated a racist attitude toward the lowlier "brown" Palestinians, that denied everything to the Palestinians, not just access to water and to their own lands, but also its freedom of movement, its life and livelihood, and its dignity trashed by unlawful imprisonment and unfair trials, under the military control of what had become a wealthy rich, nuclear-armed and malevolent power.

A racial justice lens

Joey Ayoub, a Palestinian-Lebanese writer, podcaster and academic, says young Americans are more likely to conceptualize the Palestinian cause as a sister issue to U.S. efforts for racial justice. There is a “visual parallel,” he said: of an armed white soldier or police officer dominating a space inhabited by a darker-skinned populace with limited power, whether in a town in the occupied West Bank or a majority-Black neighborhood in the United States.

“It’s a natural ally to the Palestinian struggle, because it’s very similar if you think of it in terms of the bullet points being demanded — the right to dignity, the right to life and so on,” he said.

He sees 2014 as a pivotal year in a new generation’s understanding of the conflict: A war in Gaza killed about 2,250 Palestinians and 73 Israelis at roughly the same time as protests erupted in Ferguson, Mo., over the police shooting of an unarmed Black man.

Eitan Hersh, a political science professor at Tufts University, said conflict between Israel and Palestinians seems to be seen by the young, especially on college campuses, as “a people of color — that is, the Palestinians — rising up against a white oppressor,” though a small portion of Israel’s Jewish population is of a non-European background. Some Israelis are the descendants of about 500,000 Arab and Iranian Jews who left for Israel between the 1950s and 1970s, not because they were persecuted as the filthy Zionists claim, but under intense pressure and with more than generous bribes by the arms of the Zionist movement, like the Jewish Agency, that wanted to increase the Jewish headcount at the expense of the native indigenous Palestinian headcount. I know this fact from personal experiences: In our neighborhood in Beirut, we lived side by side with Jewish families of pharmacists, photographers, teachers, bankers... During the 1960s, they would come to us one by one and tell us that "they have to leave for Israel because of pressure, scare tactics, and unimaginable sums of money". The Jewish community in Lebanon was a thriving one with schools, newspapers (The Alliance Israelite), summer resorts, and even a representative in the nascent Lebanese parliament. There were no pogroms, no mass expulsions... these were all lies spewed by Zionists to try and equalize their own pogroms against Palestinians.

Shifting Demographics and the Retreat of Religion

One explanation for the generational divide, experts said, was that fewer young Americans identify as conservative or Christian — demographics more likely to sympathize with Israel. The biblical mythology and its garbage supremacism and exclusivity from the Bronze Age, no longer speaks to younger generations. The advent of the Internet and the dissemination of archives and historical records, which younger Americans are more likely to consult than their ignorant parents (who to date cannot locate Israel on a map), revealed facts about the creation of Israel that were largely hidden or altered by Zionist propaganda. The Zionist made-up myths and lies were slowly debunked: the “biblical return”, the “land without people for a people without land”, the Palestinians’ “voluntary” abandonment of their villages and towns to become refugees, confounding a legitimate national resistance with terrorism and Islamist ideologies etc. The younger American generation awakened to the reality of Israel as one of many colonial enterprises (Algeria, Vietnam, South Africa, India etc.) that always sought to portray their colonized indigenous victims as uncouth savages and barbarians that the colonizer had to civilize under the "white man's civilizational mission".

Moreover, the tenacity of a downtrodden unsophisticated Palestinian resistance in the face of the overwhelming support to the Zionists by the West forced a deeper reflection by the younger generation over the root causes of the conflict, and the realization that long before the Zionists invented the myth of Israel-as-refuge for Holocaust survivors, Israel was conceived in the late 19^th century as a Jewish me-too colonial exploitation and a western outpost in the heart of the nascent oil fields in the Middle East.

“Young adults in America think of Israel in the same way that they might think of Iran, or China or Russia,” Professor Hersh said, referring to a 2021 study of young Americans’ views on Israel compared with other nations.

Thirty years ago, support for Israel was associated more with Democrats than Republicans. This began to change during the George W. Bush presidency, after 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when a perception on the American right developed “that Israel is the front line in this clash of civilizations — between a Judeo-Christian civilization and militant Islam,” the expert said.

Donald Trump’s support of Israel, including moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to the more contested city of Jerusalem, furthered the trend, said Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat professor for peace and development at the University of Maryland.

“The fascinating thing there is that attitudes toward Islam and Muslims actually improved in America with the rise of Trump,” Telhami said. “People said, ‘We hate Trump, Trump hates Muslims, therefore, we like Muslims,' ” he said of progressives.

Another major factor in older generations’ feelings toward Israel is their greater religiosity. More than three-quarters of Americans 60-64 are Christian — with increasingly higher numbers for older brackets — compared with about half of adults under 30.

“It’s, I think, for many religious Christians, somehow a kind of atonement in supporting Israel and Zionism,” Waxman added. “Genuinely, a feeling of Israel as a consequence of this long history of Jewish persecution” by Christians. Some Christians, particularly among primitive ultra-religious evangelicals who believe that Israel was promised to the Jews by God, and that the return of the Jews to Israel fulfills a biblical prophecy of the events that will precede the second coming of Jesus Christ.

But even outside of this belief, the idea of Israel as a sacred land for Judeo-Christians has an emotional resonance that echoes back to the Christian Crusades – essentially an earlier Christian version of Jewish Zionism – in that both movements (1,000 years apart) tried to retrieve the Holy Land from the Muslims. This is simply not acceptable for the increasing number of secular young Americans.

“There’s a connection between Israel as they see it in the Bible and Israel that exists politically today,” Telhami said of some Christians. There is an association between place names like “Hebron,” “Jerusalem” and “the Galilee” with fictional Bible stories as much as with 21st-century geopolitics, and a long history of hearing this geography referred to as the home of the Israelites, particularly through the Old Testament.

Social vs traditional media

Dana El Kurd, a nonresident fellow at the Middle East Institute, said different types of media consumption have probably played a role in how people have formed their views on the Middle East.

Americans 45 and older are most likely to get their news from TV networks and their websites, which almost exclusively endorse and propagate the Zionist narrative, while Americans younger than 45 are most likely to get their news through social media and the wider Internet that opened access to vast but heretofore unreported archives that balance out the traditionally pro-Israeli bias.

The regular use of TikTok in particular is correlated with criticism of Israel, a New York Times/Siena poll found this week.

Ayoub, whose interview podcast “The Fire These Times” with Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian, Jewish, and Armenian perspectives has mostly Gen Z and millennial listeners, said that new forms of media facilitated access between content creators and consumers without “having a gatekeeper,” the latter being the biased TV networks and newspapers. Opening the floodgates of uncensored information began eating away at the Zionist narrative and allowed traditionally underrepresented groups to reach an audience, though it also had downsides, including “a huge uptick in misinformation” online.

TikTok has been criticized, especially by Republicans, because pro-Palestinian hashtags appear to be more popular than pro-Israel hashtags on the app. But the company says that phenomenon occurred organically, not because the company was intentionally manipulating its algorithm.

Overall public opinion in the United States traditionally supported Israel. But as recent demonstrations on college campuses around the country indicate, there is a fast growing generational divide. Even before the Hamas invasion of October 2023, there were distinct generational differences in Americans’ attitudes towards Israel. These differences are mirrored by divergences between older and younger Jewish Americans. There are signs that these gaps have widened since the current conflict began.

As the following polling from 2022 shows, older Americans have more favorable attitudes towards Israel than younger ones. A 2022 Pew survey found that 55% of Americans had a favorable view of Israel, while 41% had an unfavorable view. But a breakdown of these results reveals key generational and partisan differences. For example, only 41% of those aged 18-29 had a favorable view of Israel, compared to 69% of those aged 65 or older. Among those aged 30-49, 49% held a favorable view of Israel, and among 50–64-year old’s, 60% held a favorable view. Moreover, 71% of Republicans hold a favorable view of Israel, compared to only 44% of Democrats.

In March of 2023, Gallup found that Democratic sympathies in the Middle East now lie more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, 49% versus 38%, even among Jewish Americans who have come to increasingly distance themselves from the growing right-wing Zionist Fascism of recent Israeli governments. In many conversations I've had with Jewish students on US campuses, they could not understand or accept Israel's evolution from a shelter nation to an aggressive expansionist hypermilitarized regime that claimed it did not need friends in its own neighborhood. Not a good recipe for survival on the long term.

A survey commissioned by the Jewish Electorate Institute, a group led by prominent Jewish Democrats, found that 34% of Jewish respondents agreed that “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the United States,” 25% agreed that “Israel is an apartheid state,” and 22% agreed that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians.” When broken down by age, 43% under 40 agreed that “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the United States,” among 40-to-64-year old’s 32% agreed with the statement, and among those over 64, 27% agreed. When prompted with the statement “Israel is an apartheid state,” 38% under 40 agreed, compared to 23% of those 40-64, and 13% of those over 64. Finally, the statement “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians” resulted in 33% of those under 40 agreeing, in contrast to 18% of those aged 40-64, and 15% of those over 64.

Additionally, the poll found that 9% of Jewish voters agreed with the statement, “Israel doesn’t have a right to exist.” Among voters under 40, that proportion was higher with 20% agreeing.

Interestingly, 62% of Jewish voters support the U.S. sending aid to the Palestinian people while only 28% oppose it, apparently demonstrating widespread acknowledgement of the plight of many Palestinian civilians.

An Economist/YouGov poll conducted between Oct. 21 and 24 demonstrates this. Somewhat more people in the youngest group, aged 18-29 sympathize with the Palestinians (28%) than with the Israelis (20%), far different than among those 65 and over who support the Israelis by a margin of 65% to 6%, respectively.

These generational and partisan differences influence views about public policy. In a recent poll, Quinnipiac University found while Americans 65 and older support sending more military aid to Israel by a margin of 46 points (69 to 23%), younger Americans are almost as strongly opposed, with only 29% in favor and 65% opposed. Similarly, Republicans support aid by a margin of 35 points (65 to 30%) while Democrats do so by only 6 points (49 to 43%).

There is a concern that unites Americans across generational and partisan lines. When a close ally of the United States is at war, many people wonder if we will soon be at war too. The Quinnipiac poll found that 84% of the public — from young to old and from Democrats to Independents and Republicans — fears that the United States will be drawn by Israel into a war in the Middle East. It remains to be seen how this concern will find political expression if the conflict continues for more than a few more months or years.

While some younger Americans are increasingly aware of the hardships that many Palestinians have had to endure, others are echoing long-standing anti-colonial narratives calling, as does Hamas, for the outright destruction of Israel. At the same time, some young Jewish Americans feel distant from the story of Israel’s founding and the Jewish struggle to gain the recognition of a homeland. For many younger Americans, the current bloodshed is their first experience with a conflict that has been going on for more than 75 years. The coming months are likely to have a profound impact on the attitudes they will carry with them through their lives.

In short, the walls of the untouchable and forbidden Zionist city have been breached. Never in the 75 years of Israel's history have Americans so clearly distanced themsleves from Israel. The organic connection betwen the US and Israel, woven by decades of propaganda and brainwashing of a generally inward-looking and ignorant American population, is unraveling. The truth is out. The lies are exposed for all to see. Justice can perhaps finally prevail.