New York Times columnist Ezra Klein says young Americans are rebelling against Israel, and it’s Israel’s fault. Is he right?
In a lead editorial on January 27, Klein wrote that recent polls show that 18- to 29-year-old Americans, known as “Gen Z,” are more sympathetic to Israel than to Palestinian Arabs. 63% of Palestinian Arabs compared to only 27% of Palestinian Arabs. Americans 65 and older. According to Klein, that’s because of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies, because young Americans “only know Netanyahu’s Israel.”
Does that mean all Gen Zers were pro-Israel when center-left Yair Lapid was prime minister 14 months ago? Not likely. The real reason for this age group’s hostility toward Israel lies not in the specific policies of any particular prime minister, but in their ignorance of the history and facts of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
American youth disproportionately support Palestine over Israel
Israel is not to blame when many young people choose their opinions based on misleading Instagram photos, biased college professors, and extremist ideologies that falsely depict Israel as a “white supremacist” nation. .
Ignorance of the younger generation regarding foreign affairs is not a new problem in the United States. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was also troubled by this. In the 1930s, polls showed that 63% of college students supported unilateral U.S. disarmament, and thousands of them signed a pledge declaring they would “not support any war waged by the United States government.”
They couldn’t be bothered to read about what was happening in Nazi Germany and the threat Hitler posed to world peace. They were worried about being drafted. They preferred the sweet fantasy of peace to the reality of a world heading toward war.
Some just wanted to copy what “the cool kids were doing.” They saw many British university students sign the Oxford Pledge, vowing that they would “not fight for” “under any circumstances”. [their] Both the king and the country. ”
In 1934, 25,000 American college students took an hour-long walkout from class to express their opposition to American involvement in any war. Strike participants rose from 175,000 in 1935 to 500,000 in 1936, almost half of the nation’s college student population.
The student anti-war movement began to crack when students who supported communism repeatedly changed their positions out of obedience to the party rather than as a result of studying the facts. For them, ignorance was bliss.
In the early 1930s, Soviet supporters on American college campuses promoted anti-war strikes because the Soviet Union wanted the United States to stay out of European affairs. But when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936 and the Kremlin supported Spain’s left-wing government, campus supporters suddenly dialed back their calls for American isolationism. Three years later, when the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, its followers began en masse once again to urge the United States to stay out of the European conflict.
When the Soviet Union invaded Finland in November 1939, communist American college students defended the attack and criticized President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s offer of modest financial aid to the Finns.
American students have a history of being on the wrong side.
Shortly thereafter, FDR gave a pre-scheduled address to thousands of activists from the Youth Congress of America, including many of his critics of communism. He decided to give them a piece of his heart.
The president said the students’ claim that aid to Finland would “force America into an imperialist war” was “an innocent hoax.” He repeated the slap for emphasis. President Roosevelt called their position “about the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard in my 58 years of life.”
Note the contrast between President Roosevelt’s response to young critics and President Joe Biden’s recent response to pro-Hamas protesters. When Biden was twice heckled over Gaza, he responded that he was pressuring Israel to slow down on Hamas and withdraw from Gaza. He treated the demonstrators’ cries as a rational and persuasive argument, trying to convince them that he was already doing his best to realize their demands.
Not Roosevelt. He considered pro-Soviet student critics ignorant and told them so. Despite audible boos from the crowd, he advised the students that their position was “probably based on sincerity, but at the same time based on 90% ignorance about the subject.”
“There is room for improvement in common sense thinking, and there is clearly room for improvement in the art of not passing resolutions about things you know nothing about,” the president said. He characterized the student critics as “young people.” [who] You hear a little about the topic from two or three speakers, but they themselves know little about the topic. ”
motive doesn’t matter
Has the political climate on American campuses changed much since then? Campus political activity is now driven by a small number of ideologically driven extremists, whether they were communists back then or haters of Israel today. many.
Certain social, economic, and political circumstances create opportunities to attract sympathetic students. Not because many students are deeply familiar with the relevant history, but precisely because they are not. Probably few American college students in the 1930s read Mein Kampf. Probably few people today know that a copy of Mein Kampf written in Arabic was discovered in Gaza.
Gen Zers who march for Hamas or tell pollsters they oppose Israel are driven by a variety of motivations. For many, outdated ignorance or personal factors such as a desire to join a mass movement may decide whether to march against Israel, just as their predecessors marched for isolationism in the 1930s. unknown.
But whatever their motivations, they need to consider the real-world impact of their activities. Their actions at the time contributed to America’s aloofness in the face of Hitler’s outrages against the Jews and fascist invasions in Spain, Ethiopia, and China. Their actions today undermine America’s support for allies fighting for survival.
The author is the founding director of the David S. Wyman Holocaust Research Institute and the author of more than 20 books on Jewish history and the Holocaust. His latest work, in collaboration with artist Dean Motter, is a nonfiction graphic novel called Whistleblowers: The Four Who Fought to Expose America to the Holocaust, which will be published by Dark Horse next month. .