Even when I was on campus a decade ago, I don't remember pro-Palestine stuff being everywhere. But it seems like among the under-25 crowd, being pro-Palestine and anti-Israel is the dogma. I would imagine if you surveyed kids under 25 it would be like 75% favor Palestine vs. 25% favor Israel (I'm sure these surveys exist) and the split by left/right would be like 90% of the left is pro-Palestine.
I've said many times before that in my opinion, the main thing driving this is that kids today just don't remember what Palestinian violence used to be like in the 90s and 2000s, when Palestinians were bombing school buses, shooting up schools, launching rockets at buildings on a daily basis, kidnapping, torturing, beheading Israeli civilians on a daily basis. It would be on the news. Four more Jews in Israel were killed by Palestinian fighters tonight. Two of them were children. The woman was gang-raped first. Palestine filmed it on video and sent it to us. We're not showing you the video.
And things were worse in the 70s and 80s. Palestinians were hijacking and blowing up planes. They kidnapped, tortured and murdered Israeli athletes at the Munich olympics. They committed acts of terrorism around Europe and in the United States. If you go back on YouTube and watch the news reports of 9/11, there was speculation on every channel that Palestine was behind the attacks. Because that was a real possibility that we were used to after decades of multinational Palestinian terrorism.
But now? Israel crushed Palestine after the intafada. Their security and intelligence services have dominated Palestine for two decades. Since deploying the Iron Dome a decade ago, Palestinian rockets have been totally ineffective. Palestine hasn't been able to blow up a school bus in decades. They haven't been able to kidnap and slaughter a family in decades. They certainly haven't been able to project power internationally by hijacking airplanes or shooting up European hotels or anything like that.
So we have an entire generation that's grown up with no memory of Palestinian violence. No memory of Palestinian terror attacks. No memory of dead Jews on the news. They have no context for any of this. They have no understanding of why things are the way they are. All they see is Israel doing what it has to do to suppress the violence. Israel stops and searches Palestinian children -- looks bad out of context! Of course, Israel does this because Palestine has an extensive history of
using children as suicide bombers. Those of us who are a little older remember this. But younger generations have no memory of it. They've never seen a child suicide bomber before. What they have seen are plenty of images of IDF soldiers pushing children to the ground and searching them for bombs.
I'd like to think that these attacks will be a turning point. Now you see what Palestine is capable of. Now you see what Israel is up against. Now you see why things are the way they are. But I doubt it. For some reason an awful lot of money has been invested in the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States. There's an enormous amount of very sleek and professional propaganda and well-honed talking points that have been deployed across college campuses and left-wing spaces online and in real life. I don't know where this is all coming from, or who's behind it. I wish someone would take the initiative to follow the money. What I do know is that we're going to see a tremendous, very strong effort to keep young people in line and explain away these attacks. We are already seeing it with the deluge of talking points being unleashed in recent days. It's only going to get worse. People are going to dig in. Especially young people who've made activism their identity, for whom pro-Palestinian agitation is a dogma and the only available option.
