Why does Israel-Gaza have so much salience with younger people?

[courts]

why does israel get millions of $$$$$$ from america? Answer lies there. We're directly complicit

people don't like their tax dollars going to ethnic cleansing. who knew

[Kamala's side hoe]

inshallah the superfluous USGD threads get merged

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I'm not complaining. It's good to finally see pushback to our government's idiotic policy of supporting Israel, no questions asked, despite all of the sh!t they've been doing, and getting away with, over the years.

Of course, the assholes who harass and threaten Jews for no reason other than simply being Jewish, can go f**k themselves.

Young people aren't allowed to form opinions, so the opinions that do form if they are contrary to the establishment; climate action is important, access to housing in important, the police need accountability, thousands are being killed in Palestine, trans people don't bother us etc must be nefarious 'foreign plots' or social media indoctrination...according to addled centrists on other social media platforms of course.

Palestine is the new Vietnam for USA in terms of social domestic impact it has with the population, with the differential that is much more of an internationalist solidarity sentiment, as a lot of the Vietnam backlash within the US drove from nationalist anti-war resentment about US troops being sent to die. Something that doesn’t exist in this Palestine context.

This feels hyperbolic. There was significantly bigger youth-driven protest movement in the US that grabbed way more of the country’s attention less than five years ago. Outside of universities, this so far doesn’t feel comparable in impact to that. Unlike with George Floyd and what I imagine the case was with Vietnam, there’s still a very high percentage of the population whose attitude towards The Conflict is “I don’t care and I don’t see why I should”.

If you tell Americans not to care about something, that is the 1 thing they will actually care about.

One can ask why some young people are so obsessed with Palestine. One can also ask why certain members of this forum are so obsessed with young people who care about Palestine, while lustily cheering on the bunch of politicians running our country who just voted for the genocide of Palestinians.

This post from Xahar a few months ago is still true:

A lot of red avatars here feel that their team is entitled to the unconditional support of young people. So, when they see young people angry about something that they see as electorally advantageous, they get very angry, because in their view young people aren't being team players. What is really striking is the lack of intellectual curiosity: you would expect people on a forum about elections to be interested in why people feel a certain way or why that might affect their votes, but I guess if you're sufficiently self-satisfied that doesn't matter anymore. This is how you get posters like BRTD (and not just him) sounding right now the way GeneralMacArthur does all the time.

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Virtue signaling and wanting to identify themselves as an ally and adopt a “progressive” identity. It’s not about human right or even media coverage, or we would’ve seen much greater protests against Bucha than irl. It’s all about self identity.

Of course people like GMac who dismiss all concerns of young voters without even an ounce of sympathy don’t help, but they are doing that for the same reasons ironically (the desire to self identify as a good “moderate”)

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A lot of it might have to do with growing up during American society being at its most Islamophobic and hostile to MENA people.

It is definitely generational though, even between myself and my younger sister, as an example, with only six years separating us.

I think it’s a reaction to 1. The mindless unquestioned support for Israel of the older generation which absent all the propaganda just seems to come out of nowhere and 2.the dehumanizing way the older generation views Muslim people.

I think Netanyahu is a big part of it. If Israel had a reasonable government and didn't regularly attempt to destroy our country by trying to get Republicans elected then they wouldn't get so much hate. A more reasonable government would also have handled this entire conflict better, meaning less interest in protests. Not saying there would be no interest among young people, but I think your average young person would be more sympathetic to Israel. I probably would be.

Don’t confuse activist students at elite colleges with young people more broadly. Israel-Gaza has little political salience with most young people.

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Opposition to unjustified wars has high salience among people. Gaza today is just what Iraq and Vietnam were yesterday

why does israel get millions of $$$$$$ from america? Answer lies there. We're directly complicit

people don't like their tax dollars going to ethnic cleansing. who knew

[Meclazine for Israel]

A Fashion Statement

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C6RZ365oU1H/

[HisGrace]

And a lot of these are students at decent colleges who you'd expect to have a pretty decent understanding of how our system works.

LOL

[DaleCooper]

And a lot of these are students at decent colleges who you'd expect to have a pretty decent understanding of how our system works.

LOL

People that go to college for the "experience", whether that's dorm life or activism, never have a decent understanding of anything.

[HisGrace]

The young people also have no direct connection with growing up in a world where every single media source they had access to told them that the government of Israel were the good guys

Someone needs to ban the use of the phrase "the good guys" when talking about a real life war, this isn't an action movie.

Opposition to unjustified wars has high salience among people. Gaza today is just what Iraq and Vietnam were yesterday

Iraq and Vietnam didn't attack the US like Hamas did Israel.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

They think Palestine is being opposed but wasnt there when a Palestinian killed RFK Sirhan and the Iranian Revolution in 1979 has Russia, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine included as allies

I am allied with Israel, we should not be partnership with Palestine with Iran

[SnowLabrador]

Simply put, Ukraine's no longer in the news. Notice that if you want to find out about the latest developments in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you have to actively look for them, which wasn't the case two years ago. People forget quickly and move onto the next war.

[wbrocks67]

Young people are guided mostly by peer pressure and will hop on whatever the latest trend is.

Of the 80% of young people who disapprove of Biden's handling of the Israel-Gaza conflict, I bet only 30% of those could point to Gaza on a map.  In fact I bet most of them couldn't even tell you the difference between "Palestine" and "Gaza".

This, essentially. It's exactly why phrases like Genocide Joe and all that spread. They're not rooted in any fact, they're just talking points passed along. The same reason why most of these young people had no idea about this conflict at all before October 2023.

I'm sorry, but anyone trying to say this has anything to do with Israel propaganda or pro-Israel news sources or boomers or Gen Xers getting different reads of Israel... it's not that deep. This is simply about a lot of young people wanting to fit in, how it's "cool" to be in these protests, and how it's "cool" to dislike Biden, etc. It's also about getting total misinformation from TikTok and other platforms.

[HisGrace]

They think Palestine is being opposed but wasnt there when a Palestinian killed RFK Sirhan and the Iranian Revolution in 1979 has Russia, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine included as allies

I am allied with Israel, we should not be partnership with Palestine with Iran

Unironic OC rec from me. If even the biggest supporter of marginalized people groups olawakandi can look past that and see the truth here not sure what these other people's problem is.

[wbrocks67]

why does israel get millions of $$$$$$ from america? Answer lies there. We're directly complicit

people don't like their tax dollars going to ethnic cleansing. who knew

People's tax dollars are not going to ethnic cleansing. This is just a factually incorrect statement and a reason why it's hard to take some of these protests seriously

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The most direct parallel that I can think of in recent years is almost certainly the Saudi intervention in Yemen: geostrategic interest for the US, but also an extreme-right regime that was doing mostly a combination of bombing and terror famine because it couldn't be bothered to expose its own troops. You even had the Houthis involved in both, although within Yemen there was a compelling argument to be made that they were genuinely the less-bad side, whereas with Gaza they're just quasi-nihilistic gadflies. And there was quite a lot of opposition to and protest against the American support for the Saudis there, even though, crucially, it did not rise to the level of constant sturm und drang and campus-culture-driven escalation domestically. That should probably be our null hypothesis here.

[dead0man]

to answer the OP:
it keeps their simple minds off of the fact the party they voted for screwed up FAFSA so thoroughly

[T'Chenka]

People's tax dollars are not going to ethnic cleansing. This is just a factually incorrect statement and a reason why it's hard to take some of these protests seriously

Israel's military budget looks totally different than it would look if the USA was not funding Iron Dome. America is giving them the financial flexibility to be able to afford to bomb civilians.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Important to note that US defense contractors get a really sweet deal re: Israel specifically.