Those members of Gen Z who are marching for Hamas or telling pollsters they oppose Israel are driven by a variety of motives. For many, old-fashioned ignorance or personal factors such as a desire to join a popular cause may determine whether they march against Israel, as their predecessors marched for isolationism in the 1930s.
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| Pat Cross |
. . ."Does that mean all Gen Zers were pro-Israel when the left-of-center Yair Lapid was prime minister fourteen months ago? Hardly. The real reason for hostility toward Israel among that age bracket is their ignorance of the history and facts of the Arab-Israeli conflict, not the specific policies of a particular prime minister. Israel is not to blame if many young people choose to base their views on misleading Instagram photos, biased college professors, and radical ideologies that falsely paint Israel as a “white supremacist” state.
"Nor is ignorance about foreign affairs among the younger generation a new problem in America. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was bothered by it, too.
"In the 1930s, polls found that 63% of college students favored unilateral American disarmament, and many thousands of them signed a public pledge declaring, “We will not support the U.S. government in any war it may conduct.”
"They couldn’t be bothered to read up on what was happening in Nazi Germany and the threat Hitler posed to world peace. They were worried about being drafted. They preferred sweet fantasies of peace to the reality of a world headed for war. And some just wanted to mimic “what the cool kids were doing”—they saw that many British university students were signing the Oxford Pledge, vowing that “under no circumstances” would they “fight for [their] king and country.”
"In 1934, 25,000 American college students took part in a one-hour walkout from classes to demonstrate their opposition to U.S. involvement in any war. The strike mushroomed to 175,000 participants in 1935, then 500,000 in 1936— nearly half the national college student population.
"The student antiwar movement began to crack when communist-aligned students changed their position—again and again—not as a result of studying the facts but out of obedience to their party. For them, ignorance was indeed bliss.
"In the early 1930s, the Soviet Union preferred that America keep out of European affairs, so their followers on U.S. college campuses promoted the antiwar strike. But when the Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936, and the Kremlin-backed Spain’s leftwing government, its campus sympathizers suddenly dropped their calls for American isolationism. Then when the Soviets signed their nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany three years later, their followers all went back to urging America to stay out of Europe’s conflicts." . . .
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