The Unseen Environment

 The campus protests that have roiled the country for the past week-plus have posed something of a political and electoral mystery: why do young voters—many of whom were scarcely aware of the Israel-Palestine conflict a year ago—suddenly care so much about this issue? And why do they seem to pin the blame entirely on the current Democratic administration, in spite of evidence to the contrary?

Of course, many will retort that this is no mystery at all: the war has been horrific, and it makes sense that people would have a strong emotional reaction to the stories of civilian death and famine coming from Gaza. And I would agree with this, up to a point. But it also has to be said that the war has been horrific on both sides of the conflict, and it's not clear why only one has received the attention of the young. 

After all, it is possible to imagine an alternative timeline in which videos and stories from Hamas's October 7 terrorist attack were replayed endlessly for months, and the result was a lockstep unquestioning support for Israel in whatever retaliation it deemed best. Indeed, this is what I most feared would happen, in the wake of the attacks. I worried there would be a post-9/11-type reaction, in which people ignored human rights violations in the response because they were (rightly) outraged by terrorism. 

Instead, virtually the opposite has been the case. The events of October 7 have all but been forgotten and erased, especially from the notice of the young. Left-wing activists are rightly outraged and horrified by disproportionate and indiscriminate Israeli strikes that have left tens of thousands of Gazan civilians dead—many of them children—and the once-densely populated enclave in rubble. But they have completely forgotten—or never even learned about—the Hamas atrocities that prompted these strikes. 

This is no exaggeration. For many voters, the mass murder and abduction of Israeli civilians on October 7 has barely registered—and if it made any impression on them six months ago, it has long since been eclipsed by the Israeli response. An article yesterday from NBC News illustrates the problem. In a profile of young college-age voters, many of whom have grown disillusioned with the Democratic Party because of the war, the authors report: 

Many students were familiar with videos on social media that they said show Israeli strikes killing and injuring Palestinian civilians, including children, but some were not familiar with the details of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and hostage takings that triggered the current conflict.

The point about "videos on social media" is also key. As the same article also reports, "Almost everyone interviewed said TikTok is where they get most of their news." 

Bingo. Our mystery may be solved. 

It would be hard to ask for a starker illustration of Walter Lippmann's fundamental point, in his classic book Public Opinion. As he argues there, we are wrong to think of "public opinion" as something that emerges naturally and of its own accord from the daily experience of ordinary citizens. After all, the issues with which a complex modern democracy must deal are often international in scope, bringing in far-reaching concerns that will never fall within the ken of any one person, no matter how well informed. 

And so, people's opinions on the pressing issues of the day often cannot be explained by their direct experience. Therefore, someone must be interpreting these events to them—telling them how they ought to feel about what's happening in the great outside world beyond their direct knowledge (which Lippmann evocatively called the "unseen environment"). And since people's time and attention is limited, these explanations often make themselves intelligible by defaulting to "stereotypes." 

Today's young people—just like most of the rest of us, myself included—have limited if any first-hand experience of what is happening in Israel and Gaza. The war in the Middle East belongs, if anything does, to the "unseen environment" beyond our ken. Yet they all seem to have very strong opinions about it—opinions that do not—as I have tried to show above—stem necessarily and directly from the overt "facts" of the situation. (For the "facts" could just as easily have lent themselves to a "pro-Israel" reaction.)

Following Lippmann's line of reasoning, therefore, we should start to look for an interpreter. Who is telling the young people what to think and feel about this? Who is deploying emotionally-potent symbols and "stereotypes" to generate a strong opinion, in the absence of direct experience and first-hand knowledge? Who is deploying the "great feelings and passions of the human family/For base designs," as Edgar Lee Masters wrote (in a poem about sleazy journalism that I cited in my previous post)?

The answer has become clear: it's TikTok. People who have been getting their news from this site over the past six months have heard only a single, extremely one-sided and distorted version of the truth. They have heard that Israel is a "settler-colonial, Zionist, imperialist, apartheid state." They have heard that Israel is killing babies and children, seemingly willfully and without provocation—out of sheer malice, I suppose. They have heard that Joe Biden is a genocidaire bent on massacring Palestinians. 

So they go out and protest. They use chants and slogans that are drawn from the propaganda of jihadist groups. U.S. citizens at some of the country's most fancy, elite, and privileged institutions are roaming through campus shouting "Glory to the Martyrs." I would be interested to know what they think that phrase means. Perhaps, in their minds, they are thinking of the civilians who have died unjustly under IDF fire. But it sounds an awful lot like they are endorsing Hamas's armed attacks on Israeli civilians. 

None of this behavior can possibly be explained by a straightforward analysis of the actual events in the Middle East. Israel is indeed fighting a brutal war; but they are doing it in response to a brutal attack on their own citizens, many of whom—including those now held captive in Hamas's hands—are also U.S. citizens. Instead of marching in the streets to call for the release of their own compatriots held in Hamas captivity, though, U.S. students have been marching under the banner of Hamas slogans. 

I admit that my own perspective on the Israel-Palestine conflict has changed over the course of the most recent violence. But, strangely, it seems to have moved in the opposite direction from everyone else's. 

To be sure, I do not consider myself an apologist for Israel's actions. I oppose the Israeli military's occupation of the West Bank as strongly as I ever did, as well as their seeming indifference to civilian casualties in Gaza. But October 7 also made it impossible for me to ignore Israel's genuine concerns about its survival as a country. The risk seems real to me that Israel's neighbors might try to annihilate it, along with all its people, and that the world would stand pat and do nothing as the country was destroyed. 

I used to be interested in the now-academic debate as to whether an ideal "one-state solution" was incompatible with all currents of Zionism (I thought it wasn't—I argued that partition into two nation-states was not the only necessary conclusion from the original goals of Zionism). I also used to be very offended by people who equated a binational one-state solution with "denying Israel's right to exist"—I argued that it was quite possible to imagine a region-wide Israel that shared power across nationalities. 

But I don't care about this debate anymore. Because it no longer seems to me that there is a sizable group of people fighting for a multinational one-state solution who actually mean it in good faith. Even if it is possible to conceive of a one-state solution that ensured both Jews and Arabs in Israel-Palestine a permanent home and a right to stay, that is not what the campus protestors are agitating for. Instead, their vision of a one-state solution seems to mean the expulsion and mass murder of the Jews. 

Is this an unfair characterization? I don't know how else to interpret "Glory to the Martyrs," unless it means something close to this. Who are the "martyrs"? What "glory"? These can only be references—as they are in Hamas propaganda—to armed fighters who have died in terrorist attacks against Israel. And every major form of armed struggle against Israel to date—from suicide bombings to rocket attacks to Iran's drone strikes to the Hamas shootings—has been aimed directly at Jewish civilians. 

This is not a normal thing for people to celebrate and glorify. This is not a logical good faith deduction from the "facts" about the war in the Middle East. This is an outgrowth of propaganda of a very sinister kind. 

Who is ultimately pushing this propaganda is still somewhat of an open question. Maybe it's Russian bots. Maybe it's the Chinese government that influences much of the content on TikTok. Maybe it's just the algorithmic amplification through the underlying technology that works of its own accord to boost content that is emotionally incendiary and context-free, and which caters to the unexamined biases (including antisemitism) of its audience. 

But the vehicle through which people seem to be mainlining this content is clear: it is a video app that was originally supposed to be about silly dance videos, called TikTok.