November 20, 2023
The Gaza Ministry of Health announced
Sunday that on the previous day at least 80 people were killed by the Israeli
bombardment of the Palestinians, with 32 of them being from one extended
family, according to Al-Arabiya. The deaths occurred because of two distinct
Israeli airstrikes on the Jabaliya refugee camp targeting schools.
One strike hit the Al-Fakhura school.
which is run by the United Nations. Al-Jazeera reports, “Dead bodies [are]
scattered … pieces of flesh”, an unnamed witness told Al Jazeera. “No one can
recognise their sons. Our life is hell.”
Thousands of internally displaced
people (IDPs) had taken refuge in the Fakhoura school.
Another Israeli bombing raid targeted
a private home, killing 32 persons, including 19 children.
Marwan Bishara, a senior analyst at
Al-Jazeera, said, “There is nothing discriminate about the fact that a school
that shelters thousands of people has been bombed from the air; that is meant
to create damage, human loss, suffering and death.”
On Monday morning it was reported that
al-Shifa hospital was evacuated during the humanitarian pause implemented by
the Israeli armed forces. It had housed some 7,000 internally displaced people.
Israel attacked the hospital repeatedly, claiming that it was serving as a
headquarters for Hamas, but no evidence was ever presented for the truth of
these allegations.
More than 12,000 Palestinians have
been killed by the Israelis since the horrific Hamas attacks af October 7, in a
“revenge” genocide. Some 5,000 of them were minors and children.
Israel’s
Problem Is Not TikTok
Israel’s problem is not that people
are being propagandized into hating it, it’s that enough people are not being
successfully propagandized into supporting it.
Nobody starts out as the sort of
person who would support a genocidal bombing campaign that murders children by
the thousands. It’s something you come into gradually over the years, one moral
compromise at a time.
Again and again over the course of
their lifetime, a supporter of Israel is given the choice to either kill off a
piece of their conscience or abandon their support for Israel.
They are presented with this choice
any time they see Palestinians being treated in a way they’d never want
themselves or their loved ones to be treated — whether it’s bombs, protesters
shot by snipers, people being driven out of their homes, human rights
organizations ruling one after the other that Israel is an apartheid state,
tales of the racism and abuse suffered by Palestinians in the West Bank, or
testimony about how horrific life in Gaza had been made for the people who live
there, long before this latest round of killing began.
This information is unavoidable in
modern times. You can avert your gaze, you can try to insulate yourself from it
in an ideological echo chamber, but it will inevitably find its way into your
field of perception once in a while.
And every time you are confronted with
it, you have to make a choice whether to compromise your personal sense of
morality a bit further than it was already compromised, or abandon your support
for Israel.
You carve off pieces of your own
morality one at a time, mostly in order to avoid the psychological discomfort
known as cognitive dissonance which necessarily goes along with any drastic
change in worldview. Then before you know it, you find yourself opposing a
ceasefire to a murderous onslaught that has killed thousands of children.
Deep down you know you’re on the wrong
path. You know this isn’t how you started out, isn’t how you’re meant to be
living your life. But you drown out that small voice inside with the much
louder voices of life in a modern industrialized society, many of whom are paid
millions of dollars a year to tell you your worldview is the correct one.
This is why there’s such a massive
generation gap on the Israel-Palestine issue; young people haven’t spent a long
time gradually eroding their moral compass into a worthless trinket, and they
don’t consume enough mass media to have been convinced that doing so would be
worthwhile.
They have not been sufficiently
indoctrinated into depraved indifference toward the suffering of others.
In a recent statement rejecting right
wing claims that its algorithms are stacked to favor Palestine and promote
anti-Israel sentiment, TikTok says the real reason pro-Palestine sentiments are
so popular on the platform is because young people just statistically oppose
Israel a lot more than older generations.
TikTok writes the following:
“Support for Israel (as compared to sympathy for Palestine) has been
lower among younger Americans for some time. This is evidenced by looking at
Gallup polling data of millennials dating as far back as 2010, long before
TikTok even existed. A March 2023 Gallup poll, before the war, shows young
adults have rapidly shifting attitudes towards the Israeli/Palestinian
conflict.”
In a leaked audio clip obtained by
Tehran Times, Anti-Defamation League director Jonathan Greenblatt is heard
bemoaning the loss of Gen-Z to pro-Palestinian sentiment.
“But I also wanna point out that we
have a major, major, major generational problem,” Greenblatt complains to his
cohorts. “All the polling that I’ve seen — ADL’s polling, ICC’s polling,
independent polling — suggests this is not a left or right gap, folks. The
issue in the United States’ support for Israel is not left and right, it is
young and old.”
“We really have a Tik-Tok problem, a
Gen-Z problem,” Greenblatt adds.
In reality, what Greenblatt and his
associates have is a morality problem. They have a large group of people who
have not been indoctrinated into accepting madness and amputating parts of
their own conscience over the years, and so are able to look at the mass murder
of civilians in Gaza with clear eyes.
And really that’s all you need to see
the ongoing Gaza massacre for what it is: a look with clear eyes. Just one
swift glance, unmolested by propaganda distortion or cognitive biases. That’s
all it takes.
Israel’s problem is not that people
are being propagandized into hating it, it’s that people are not being
successfully propagandized into supporting it. Their problem is not malign
influence but a lack thereof.
Because the fact of the matter is
there’s only so many ways you can spin the murder of thousands of children, and
now all the media obfuscation in the world is not enough to pull the wool over
fresh eyes that are ready to see.
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