Born after the Holocaust, the Six Days War, the Yom Kippur War, the Munich Olympic Massacre, and too young to remember Iran’s threat to “wipe Israel off the map,” young Americans are the only age demographic to find Israel’s current actions in the conflict with Hamas unjustified.

Niall Stanage has the story:

Are millennials turning away from Israel?

Young Americans are showing far less fervent support for Israel than older generations, but almost no-one can agree on why the change is happening, how permanent it is likely to be, or what it all means.

Observers offer a laundry list of possibilities.

They say millennials are more likely than their elders to be liberal and Israel’s actions — particularly in the current offensive in Gaza — increasingly meet with vigorous criticism in left-of-center circles.

Millennials are also much more avid consumers of social media, on which different narratives explaining the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians are more readily available — as are especially gruesome images of the human toll extracted by Israeli missile strikes.

These young people also don’t have the same memories as their parents.

Many older Americans can still recall the Six-Day War in 1967 or the Yom Kippur War in 1973, during which Israel’s very existence seemed to be threatened by its Arab neighbors.

By contrast, “young Americans have grown up with Israel as an incredible superpower in the region, and with occupation and intifada,” said Ira Stup of J Street, the liberal-leaning pro-Israel lobby group. “Young Americans often have a vision of Israel vis-a-vis Palestine that is more in line with what is going on now.”


 
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