The results of a recent Harvard CAPS/Harris poll in the wake of the terrorist attacks on Israel are an ominous marker in changing generational understandings of not just politics and ethics but the value of human life itself.
In response to the question “Do you think the Hamas killing of 1,200 Israeli civilians… can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians?” 51 per cent of participants in the 18-24 age group said yes.
The next age cohort, 25-34 year-olds, were almost equally convinced in the same manner, with 48 per cent saying yes. After that, the numbers change for each older age group, with only a small minority of those over 45 years of age still saying, yes.
To summarise: About half of American adults under the age of 35 believe, at the moment, that the “grievances of Palestinians” justify the killing of 1,200 Israeli civilians.
This sobering statistic is also borne out by reports of the reaction on Western university campuses to the massacre. Hundreds of students have been marching with “Free Palestine” slogans, recalling the energy and fervour of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Some protests and actions have been more directly directed at Jews. A Stanford instructor singled out and criticised Jewish students in his class as “colonisers”. A Cornell professor boasted about feeling “exhilarated” by the massacre of Israelis. Students have torn down posters of missing Israelis. Jewish students have reported feeling unsafe and abandoned by administrators who have largely taken a neutral position (@JewishonCampus_ lists more examples). In Harvard, several student groups signed a letter blaming Israel, but then partly withdrew after their names were exposed and job offers rescinded.
For college students like the Harvard protestors and their fellow travellers who make up the 51 per cent represented by this survey, the world perhaps seems dark and confusing, with having to choose between their ideals of peace and social justice on the one hand and rewarding jobs and careers on the other.
As a teacher, I sympathise with their uncertainties. But at the same time, I have to caution them, fellow teachers, and university leaders about the incredibly dangerous situation college students and recent graduates might be in today.
If thousands of college-educated youth today have failed to understand an act of cruel, spectacular, mass violence that grotesquely violated thousands of lives within the normal frame of human revulsion, but have instead diluted that event in their minds within their own imagined counter-frames of some vastly greater suffering that the perpetrators have allegedly suffered because of Israel, then truly there has been a catastrophic collapse over the last few decades in higher education, and perhaps even school education, before that.
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Generational experience
We have to ask where that counter-frame has come from.
In the months and years after 9/11, students were afraid, as anyone would be after a devastating act of terrorism. That fear was of course cynically stoked and exploited by the political and business elite. But universities were at the forefront of questioning the Iraq war. Students learned about history and geopolitics and the idea of “blowback”. They grew up witnessing scandals about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and Guantanamo, and the outcry about Islamophobia.
They questioned their government, but they did not question the immorality of the killing of thousands on the morning of 9/11, as far as I know.
But twenty years later, an act of mass terrorism in a setting that any college student could identify with—a music event—has failed to ring any alarm bells . This is not a natural reaction, in my view, but an induced one.
What are the events, factors, and forces leading up to this?
The generational experience of American society in the last two decades, and particularly during one’s college years, are relevant factors. The youngest cohort in this sample (age 18) is probably starting college in 2023. The oldest cohort in this sample (age 34), most likely started college just after George Bush’s re-election in 2004. They went through college and their twenties witnessing the backlash against the WMD lies, the cost of the Iraq war, the growing perception of Islamophobia as a major concern, the election of Barack Obama, the financial collapse, and the rise of ‘Make America Great Again’ and Donald Trump.
By the time this generation completed college, even if Fox News and their parents were still talking about Al Qaeda and ISIS, they understood that Islamophobia and the American empire, and of course, Zionism, were all part of the same oppressive system.
The next generational cluster, which has started college in the last few years, has gone through its formative school years witnessing an even more intense churn in America. It had no experience of a terrorist attack from outside like 9/11 (though American media made quite an effort at persuasion since 2016 with its allegations that Putin had fixed their elections).
But it felt besieged by a sense of an attack from the past, a particularly frightful notion when slavery, patriarchy, religion, and white supremacy, all ruled the roost.
The present wave of protests for Palestine was, in a way, anticipated even before BLM in 2020, and as early as 2016.
2016 as narcissistic injury
On the morning of the 2016 US Presidential election, everyone I knew seemed ecstatic in anticipation of Hillary Clinton’s impending historic election as America’s first female President. When that did not happen, sorrow, fear, and rage ripped through young America (at least in some parts).
The day after the election, I recall a wave of noise coming down a street in Berkeley at lunchtime—the schools had let the students out to march in protest. And by January 2021, the idea of being let down had reached a peak. When Trump supporters entered the US Capitol, his opponents declared it an “insurrection” and erased him from TV and Twitter.
It was all ugly, yes. But then, some social media influencers were declaring that 6 January was actually worse than 9/11. I think that was the moment lives stopped mattering to many young Americans. A life could matter only if it had the right label before it.
Right labels matter
Those have been some of the cultural signals and behavioural moments in the life journey of those in college now.
The question now is whether colleges have given their students, especially in the humanities and social sciences, the resources and freedom to explore alternative points of view. Or whether their college years have become more of the same belief they witnessed in their school years—that tens of millions of fellow Americans who voted differently were beyond the pale of civilisation; that they were Nazis, evil, deserving to have freedoms stripped and sent to re-programming camps. I acknowledge that this is a simplification, having taught successive cohorts during these difficult years during and after the pandemic who were more sensitive, human and intelligent than generational labels can depict.
But the feeling of being pressured to think and act in a certain way is even more prevalent among students perhaps than faculty. There is an expectation of conformity and compliance, everywhere. Compliance rewards you with a feeling of moral righteousness. Defiance gets you labelled and stigmatised. And what you comply with is not something generated from reality, evidence, or reasoning, but simply a doctrine whose holy script is identity.
Zionist. Savarna. Hindutva. Cis. Het. All the rest.
On social media, people laughed. Polls showed only academia said stuff like “LatinX” and “South Asian”, while people just preferred “Hispanic” or “Indian.” But on campuses, and in workplaces, taking labels seriously became the most important thing one had to do. After all, George Floyd died because of sinful apathy like this.
Also Read: Indian academia called me ‘Israeli mouthpiece’. Forcing me to pick a side misses the point
1,200 Israelis are not half a George Floyd
Even if 1,200 Israelis including infants died in one day, somehow it did not add up to half a George Floyd.
Strangely enough, the Harvard poll tells us that the majority of 18-24-year-olds who thought that the Palestinian grievances justified the terrorist attacks are also aware of the details of that attack. They know, and believe, that babies were murdered, and rapes were committed. They agree with the word “genocidal” to describe that attack. Yet, they believe it was justified.
This is the bottom line: We have a majority college-age cohort today who believe, essentially, that genocide is justified when it is done by a group deemed to have been oppressed.
When I started college in the 1990s, the oppressed group that American campuses cheered for, with marches and rallies, was Tibetans.
Today, no one speaks about Tibet in American colleges. No one speaks about China, in relation to Tibet at least.
They march for Palestine, after mass murder in its name.
Also Read: Yes, Israel has wronged Palestinians. But that’s not the immediate issue, terrorism is
Propaganda and the Future
We have just caught a whiff of the first smoke from the fires lit by one of the most efficient campaigns of propaganda, dehumanisation, and manipulation in human history. Like cattle mesmerised by animal husbandry techniques to stay calm on their march into the abattoir, children belonging to groups designated by ivory tower fantasists as innately, irredeemably, “oppressive” or even merely “privileged,” have been conditioned to accept the violation of their lives, dignity, and those of their own families and friends as desirable.
In video after video of campus confrontations, we find that the defenders of the Hamas attacks sometimes include young women and men who defend their actions (such as tearing down posters of missing Israeli citizens) by saying they are actually Jewish too. In their eyes, you see fear. You see emptiness. You see a breakdown of memory, of both pain and hope, as it has passed down over generations. You see a world ripped from the past, stranded in a propagandised vision of the present, uncertain of the future.
A whole generation, at least half of it, has been convinced a genocide is correct if it’s just politically correct according to university-approved identities.
What is next in America’s universities? Can they be saved? Can the children of the world who come here thinking they are just getting an education and careers be protected from the looming disaster?
Vamsee Juluri @vamseejuluri is Professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)