From Yahoo News”
“Social media highlights
shifting perceptions of Israeli-Palestinian conflict among young Americans”
“Understand: the U.S. is
complicit,” reads an Instagram post. “The United States provides $3.8 billion
in military aid to Israel every year.” Created by “So You Want to Talk About,”
an Instagram account promoting progressive politics with 2.7 million followers,
the post urges people to “take action” for Palestinians through petitions and
donations.
It’s part of the dramatic rise in
a wave of social media activism that has gravitated toward informing and
organizing young people around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As the deadly
violence continues to escalate in the Middle East, social media in real time
has illustrated the shifting perceptions of young people. Historically, the
U.S. has provided billions of dollars in aid to Israel, mostly in the form of
military assistance, defending such support as critical for an underdog facing
powerful enemies. Now, young left-leaning Americans are increasingly using
social media to urge more support and aid for Palestinians, framing it as a
human rights issue that echoes the antiracism movement from this past year. “I
think it’s going to be very clear soon that being progressive means you’re on
the side of Palestinian freedom,” said Maya Edery, a 28-year-old New Yorker who
works for the pro-Palestinian organization Jewish Voice for Peace.
As violence escalates — deadly
clashes have killed at least 213 Palestinians, including 61 children, and 12
people in Israel — social media posts about the conflict have become
increasingly popular. “This violence against Palestinian protesters is literal
ethnic cleansing,” said Zahra Hashimee, known as @muslimthicc, to her 3 million
TikTok followers. “And this ethnic cleansing is being funded by your U.S. tax
dollars.” She then urged her followers to support H.R. 2590, a bill that would
prevent Israel from using U.S. funding to detain or abuse Palestinian children
or violate international humanitarian laws. With last summer’s antiracism
protests came a surge in online activism that’s extended to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Last year, Instagram users flooded the site with
black squares in support of Black lives, and it became common to share
infographics on Instagram Stories or post TikTok videos of a protest. Now,
#freepalestine has over 2 billion views on TikTok, while #standwithisrael has
28.9 million. “Once social media came around, the whole game changed,” said
Mitchell Plitnik, president of ReThinking Foreign Policy, a nonprofit.
In addition to organizing, social
media allows Americans to witness firsthand what’s happening on the ground
through the eyes of Palestinians and Israelis, Plitnik said. Graphic footage —
such as a TikTok video showing two Palestinians slapping two Orthodox Jewish
teens on a train — can quickly go viral. But that sort of online activism has
its drawbacks. Misinformation is rampant — there are “rabbit holes of
falsehoods,” said Plitnik. Plus, complex issues like the decades-long history
of Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be oversimplified into memes. One viral
video investigated by the New York Times was shared by Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman, who claimed it showed Palestinians firing
rockets at Israeli civilians. In reality, it was a 2018 video of an attack in
Syria or Libya. Some Palestinian activists allege that social media companies
censor or remove their posts or accounts about the conflict, though Instagram
and Twitter have blamed technical glitches.
Young people are also susceptible
to peer pressure to post online about issues to prove that they are engaged.
“I’ve heard from folks in their teens and 20s that your friends will basically
come after you and accuse you of being callous, uninterested,” said Kat
Rosenfield, a contributor to the current-affairs website the Spectator. “Most
people sharing these things could not point to Israel on a map.” “We’re
creating our own meme-ified version of fake news,” said Rosenfield. On social
media, nuanced topics like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are reduced to
“shallow, facile” content rather than seriously explaining the issues, she
said. However, she acknowledged that the posts can be an entry point for people
who are driven to more deeply research an issue. But for some, the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that clear-cut. “When we’re talking about
Israeli violence against Palestinians, it’s not complex at all,” said Omar
Zahzah, a pro-Palestinian organizer from California. “Ultimately it’s a cause
about total freedom, justice and equality for all people."
The progressive perspectives of
young Americans on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict also illustrate the
generational split among Americans on the issue. “Democrats’ views on Israel
have changed remarkably in the last 10 to 20 years,” said Rashid Khalidi, a
Columbia University professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African
studies. He said he’s “struck by how much change there’s been among younger
people” on the issue in the past couple of decades. “More and more younger
Americans ... have grown up with a very different view of what they’re seeing
of Israel-Palestine,” Plitnik said. “They’ve grown up with social media, and
even before that, views of Israel as a strong, powerful state [and of]
Palestinians as powerless people.” While some of that change may relate to
social media’s role in showing Americans what’s happening on the ground,
younger generations also don’t necessarily view Israel as an endangered state.
Nor is the trauma of the Holocaust as close to young people as it has been to
previous generations. For instance, Edery, who is Jewish and frequently
traveled to Israel when she was younger, said that while her views evolved in
college, some members of her family are still “very Zionist.”
According to a Pew Research
survey conducted in 2020, young American Jews are less emotionally attached to
Israel than older generations. Half of Jewish adults under the age of 30
described themselves as very or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel, while
two-thirds of Jews 65 and older consider themselves very or somewhat
emotionally attached to Israel. According
to Plitnik, a significant political sea change was the 2020 defeat of Eliot
Engel, an influential pro-Israel congressman from New York, at the hands of
Rep. Jamaal Bowman. Bowman’s position on Palestinian issues was measured to
avoid alienating Jewish voters, but Plitnik believes that as more young
Americans vote, it’s likely that the idea that supporting Israel is a “safe”
political position will change. Khalidi believes that, in the future,
conditional aid will be a litmus test for where Americans fall on
Israeli-Palestinian issues. That includes Democratic Minnesota Rep. Betty
McCollum’s H.R. 2590, the bill supported by Hashimee, the activist popular on
TikTok. Currently, it has 20 co-sponsors. But that’s still a far cry from the
three-fourths of Congress members who signed a letter in April calling for U.S.
aid to Israel to be funded without conditions. “Reducing funding or adding
conditions on security assistance would be detrimental to Israel’s ability to
defend itself against all threats,” the letter reads.
Americans haven’t historically
made voting decisions solely based on candidates’ stances on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but Plitnik said he’ll be watching the progress
of McCollum’s bill as well as whether the issue arises at all in the 2022
midterm elections. For young Americans, the conversation has evolved to a
straightforward human rights issue, according to Plitnik. “It’s a great shift,”
he said, “a very important one.”
^ Sadly, many people - young and
old - do not know or understand what Hamas is doing in Gaza and so people see
and hear things and immediately feel sorry for the Terrorists - Hamas - (the
ones who started firing missiles at Israel.)
Israel didn't start attacking
Gaza until Gaza first attacked them and in the past 10 days Gaza and Hamas have
fired 3,500 missiles into Israel.
You also have to remember these
are the same young people who cry for "safe spaces" everywhere (if
they have to take a test, if they have to get a job, if they have to act like
an adult, etc.)
Israelis have safe-spaces too
only they have seconds to run to them after hearing air raid sirens announcing
more missiles are about to land and kill their loved ones and themselves.
If these young people (or anyone
else) want to support Hamas then please go to Gaza. The women will be beaten if
they speak their mind, made to wear a hijab and be banned from most things
while the men will be made to fire missiles or make bombs to go on drones that
will kill innocent men, women and children.
Hamas in Gaza also do not debate
about: Binary or Non-Binary; Homosexual or Heterosexual, what pronouns to use
for a person, etc. If you are not Heterosexual and conform to their strict
Islamist Laws they will simply kill you in public and punish your family. ^
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