I continue to think about the fault lines exposed by what has happened in Gaza, including the generational division on support for Israel.
Political splits between old and young aren’t new. May 1968 in France was a split between college students and their elders and it was fierce and culture-changing. When I was in college, Vietnam split America between the rising young and the generation that fought World War II.
Splits aren’t new, but the one happening now is troubling in unique ways. For one, the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian university students this time are reflecting a generation of indoctrination in higher ed: They’ve been taught to hold progressive views and do, taught to approach history as a matter of oppressor/oppressed, with the West the oppressor, and do.
American students in the 1970s hadn’t been instructed all their lives in the proper view on Vietnam. For all the intellectual fads and fashions that swept through their era, their commitments rose up pretty much from the students themselves: The anticommunist obsession of the U.S. government was wrong-headed, the domino theory mindless, the bombing of innocent agrarian villagers wicked. Young men didn’t want to be drafted, so they took to the streets.
If you’re in your 20s now, you’ve been taught throughout high school and college to view the world within a certain framework: white privilege, Western imperialism, the whole woke agenda. Every time you try to describe that regime you feel like you’re reciting clichés, which is part of its brilliance as an ideology: It makes you feel as if you’re chasing ghosts when you know you’re not.
While students were being indoctrinated, they weren’t being educated. Critical thinking can only get you in trouble, so stick with the narrative, don’t read too deep. A professor at an esteemed college mentioned this week that when he likened the airport mob in Dagestan to a “pogrom,” not one of his students knew what the word meant.
But what’s newest in these protests is the bloody-mindedness. The letters produced by students and the prevaricating responses of university leaders came immediately following 10/7, when it was already clear that unarmed Israeli civilians had been targeted, children and old people executed or taken hostage in the kibbutzim. One might call them innocent agrarian villagers. The college groups were aligning themselves with the strategically deliberate use of violence on civilians. And the final shock—that “We support the Palestinian people” devolved so quickly into hatred for Jews. This anti-Semitism was new. That’s not America, that’s not how we roll. It is beyond disquieting and feels like an active threat to the American future.
What are the universities going to do about this? It is good that alumni and donors are pushing back, good that some professors are speaking out. But I must say the general mood of many people my age is an astounded sense that we began in our youth, in the 1960s and ’70s, saying “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” And now, as we survey the wreckage the woke regime has done to the academy, the arts, the corporate office, we are thinking something that had never crossed our minds. “Don’t trust anyone under 30.”
We continue to think in this space that the invasion and bombardment of Gaza was a mistake, and not only because of the intractable question of who will govern it when the Israelis are done.
After the morning of 10/7 Israel was a wounded and grieving nation. It had endured a profound and gruesome shock; everyone in the country knew someone among the dead or abducted. In the world, those with a fully developed moral interior suddenly saw Israel differently. In their shock, opponents felt an easing of their coldness, supporters a quickening of their warmth.
In our view what was needed for Israel was an absorbing, a regirding. Sometimes you must wait, build up your strength, broaden your resources, reach out to friends, let opportunities present themselves—everything shifts in life; some shifts are promising. But don’t get sucked into Gaza and spend months providing the world with painful and horrifying pictures of innocent Palestinian babies being carried from the rubble. (“We told them to leave,” isn’t enough. Some people can’t leave, they’re not capable, they’re old people in an apartment somewhere.)
A few weeks of that and the world goes back to its corners.
Every day as things turn more kinetic, more fiery, with more casualties, there is the increased possibility it all spills over into the region, and new fronts are opened, and, as Israel goes deeper, the hostages are killed.
All this is a gift to cable news. Here is a truth: Anything good for cable news is bad for humanity.
Our final point. If the Gaza operation continues, it is even more important for Israel to face the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu is the wrong leader for this crucial moment. His own country doesn’t trust his leadership. He sapped the Israeli people’s strength over the past year by forcing on them a deeply damaging dispute over his judicial power grab, sundering what unity they had. His actions smeared Israel in the eyes of the world as increasingly undemocratic. He has been aggressively deaf on the rights of the Palestinian people.
Whatever war decisions he makes will be interpreted as not moving out of protectiveness and high strategy but from a desire to salvage his own reputation. He has allowed the messianic settlers of the West Bank to expand and dominate, and they may deliver to Israel a new war front. From the Financial Times on Thursday: “Armed settlers have stepped up their assaults on Palestinians, especially those in remote villages.” The European Union this week called it “settler terrorism” and asked Israel to stop it. Some think only Mr. Netanyahu has the clout to make them stop. But they haven’t stopped. Maybe they too see his weakened position.
The corruption charges that have dogged him leave him, always, with a reputation for untrustworthiness. As for his judgment, after Oct. 7 he essentially hid out from his own people and, having decided to come out and speak more, he decided to send out a Trumpesque tweet accusing Israeli’s security and military institutions, not him, of being responsible for Oct. 7. In the outcry that followed he did something uncharacteristic, which is admit the mistake and delete the tweet. You have to wonder what those he insulted have on him.
Sometimes a leader has too much history.
Everything is being remade now; all the pieces are moving on the board. Israel’s meaning must be made new, as if the young are looking at it and trying to understand it for the first time. It would be good for them to have a new person the world could look at, freshly weigh his or her words, sift them. Even if this person isn’t “much better,” an unknown variable might shake this up in a way that benefits civilization.
The U.S. in its support of Israel is tied to this discredited man in a way that doesn’t help.
It is a mistake for Israel, for its Knesset, to allow him to continue.