Israel Needs a New Leader
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.
Read more on livemint.com
