The state of Israel currently controls an area of land comprising four distinct regions: the 1948 green line territory (what could be considered “Israel proper”), the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights.
In total, about 14.8 million people live in this combined area, with a plurality (but NOT a majority) of them - 7.2 million - being Israeli Jews. That means that the rest, the majority, are non-Jewish - they include Gazans, West Bank inhabitants, and non-Jewish Israeli citizens (aka ‘48 Arabs).
Are Americans aware of this? It doesn’t get brought up very much, but to me this seems like a pretty significant fact. We’re sending billions of dollars a year to Israel so that a minority of the people who live there can have a special set of rights over the majority.
I did not know this prior to October 7th. I was pro-Palestinian prior to that anyway, but I mistakenly thought that Israel was, at least, oppressing a numerical minority rather than a majority.
Do Americans realize-
no
I don’t usually bother upvoting posts much but this cracked me up
95% of Americans have no idea what you’re talking about. They mostly believe in some vague notion that there are Jewish people there and Muslim people there and they’ve been fighting for thousands of years and this is just an extension of that.
But the upside of such breathtaking ignorance is that, so long as I’m not dealing with a racist or some evangelical over 65, I’ve found it’s actually pretty easy to bring people over to a nominally pro-Palestine position. I simply frame it as “the UN created two countries in 1948. Eventually, Israel attacked Palestine and occupied it. And now for decades the Palestinians have no real rights or freedoms and Israel is slowly trying to take all their land. The Israelis refuse to let them have their own land but also refuse to let them be citizens in Israel”. That angle works surprisingly well on Americans.
Zionists saying pro-Palestinians need to learn history will never not be funny because even learning a broad strokes version of events will lead most people to sympathize with Palestine.
Right! When I talk to people I have to leave out so much (pretty much everything before 1948) because when you talk to an American about history you only have a couple minutes at best before you completely lose their attention. But none of that makes Israel look any better.
They mostly believe in some vague notion that there are Jewish people there and Muslim people there and they’ve been fighting for thousands of years and this is just an extension of that.
100%. I just heard people saying “we shouldn’t talk about the current situation it’s too controversial.”
The “land without a people” myth really did a number on the western imagination
i bet most are simply not paying attention. america is a distraction + trauma factory. they are thinking about their boss, their friends, their kids, their living situation. their awareness of american empire and its rogue client state is probably some vague notion of a religious conflict in the middle east / “holy land” where there are good guys and bad guys, and for the culturally christian informed by the casual glimpse of a headline, the good guys are israel, because jews/jesus.
to that end, the protests are existentially threatening to the imperial relationship, because the minute a reasonable (i.e., not racist, not in a death cult) person asks, “what is all this about?” and gets exposed a non-hasbara narrative, it looks like something bad that should not be supported. not saying that everyone who asks gets the real story, but it creates the opportunity for them to get something closer than the casual media consumption narrative. this is also why uncontrolled but popular media platforms are a threat (like tiktok). the simple facts / context of this conflict are damning to israel as a settler colonial ethnostate and the US as its patron. not to mention, the capital formations that have bet long on israeli theft and were assured by their government allies that it was rigged to fall in their favor.
it surprised me over these months to see the speed and commitment of the entire system to rally around the rogue client state, watching the heavy handed response to peaceful protests, and the moves to frame anti-genocide speech and aid for families to be regarded as support of terrorism. it’s organized and calculating, but it also comes across as panic button. real power doesn’t panic.
i am left wondering if this conflict is the tentpole around which the contradictions of the US will ultimately unravel.
Even Israelis being Jewish is of little consequence; European Israelis are apparently heavily racist to Arab Israelis (even Jewish Arab Israelis) and black Israelis (they were sterilizing Black Jews for so long that apparently the last Jewish black person they sterilized was in 2013). Arab Jews, while they were indeed expelled from several Arab countries, were also attacked by Mossad in others (under the guise of Arabs) to drive them into Israel, where they were then placed in territories bordering Arab nations in case of an invasion so as to be cannon fodder/buffer to slow Arab invaders/freedom fighters. There’s even places where Arab Jews aren’t even allowed to live and mix with European (Ashkenazi?) Jews.
They’re not really one unified nation, it’s a bunch of European colonizers and their mistreated second class citizens living in a glorified military base. Calling Israel a country feels like a joke; how many of their population moved there in this generation, their parents’ generation, or their grandparents’ generation? These same people (except for most Arab Jews I would imagine) have a dual citizenship and can leave at any time they wish and be citizens in a Western country, unlike Palestinians who have no home outside Palestine.
I recall a video I saw of newly arrived Israeli colonizers crying because they just found out that the local court had decided to rule in favor of the Palestinian family who were supposed to be evicted so they could live where the Palestinian family was living; utterly disgusting; Crying? Really? Because a family wasn’t evicted and turned into refugees?
Israel is a settler colonial occupation, it’s not a country.
I don’t think pro-Israel Americans know this and I also don’t think pro-Israel Americans would really care all that much/believe you if you told them.
The average American who supports Palestine is relatively well read on the issue, or at least knows that fundamentally what Israel is doing to the Palestinian people is wrong. They are smaller in number than the Pro-Israel crowd but have way more passion for the issue.
Whereas
The average American who supports Israel does so because that’s what the default opinion is supposed to be. They know little to nothing about the situation on the ground. The most the average Pro-Israel American can tell you is: ”Israel is our closest ally in the Middle East.” and ”Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.” and they don’t particularly care about these issues all that much. Generally, they aren’t vocal about the issue at all unless some outside force intentionally riles them up, but the support does quickly as interest wanes.
That’s why I think this moment for Palestine is huge, but even bigger than most people realize as it pertains to the future of young people in America. The media and government both tried very hard to get American conservatives and liberals aligned and galvanized on the issue by stoking the coals that burn under each side and generally grab their respective interests.
The media/government tried to galvanize liberals through the traditional method of pinkwashing, espousing Israel’s so-called liberal social beliefs, and advocating for a two state solution so that Israel can appear to no longer be oppressing Palestinians.
The media/government tried to galvanize conservatives via Islamophobia, “invasion” rhetoric, freedom and democracy rhetoric, badass military rhetoric, etc.
Historically this has worked well enough, even with younger demographics, but this time it fell flat on its face because the United States and Israel are incapable of adapting this strategy in a way that effectively utilizes the historic method of suppressing information about what exactly Israel is doing. The average nominally pro-Israel American just stopped caring and the issue lost their attention at the same speed it always has. This differs immensely from the pro-Palestine side, which not only sees the ongoing issue with Israel’s actions, but also the issue of the combined effort the media and government are utilizing to suppress the issue/obscure the truth as much as possible.
I may be jumping to conclusions when I say that Tiktok has been an enormous catalyst in regards to galvanizing young people to be pro-Palestine, but at the very least it has been an incredible tool to study this conflict as a social trend amongst its primary user base. Pro-Palestinian content on Tiktok occurs at a rate 2000% higher than pro-Israeli content. A recent study, conducted by computer scientists at Northeastern University who specialize in mass online sociological patterns, determines that “The pattern of pro-Palestinian posts is consistent with a prolonged social movement… while the pattern of pro-Israeli posts is typical of what follows a major news event.” and we can see that demonstrated in the way support for Palestine has remained steadfast no matter what major news event the combined propaganda departments of the United States and Israel try to throw at it.
This is an absolutely unprecedented shift. In my opinion, when accounting for the dual issue of the Israel-Palestine conflict and subsequent obvious bias/obfuscation regarding the conflict, this is potentially the largest mass deprogramming/radicalization event for young Americans I can think of in any stretch of American history. I do not see any major event that touches the speed and depth of which young people have turned against a combination of domestic, international, and media dealings AND narratives. I do not believe that even the events surrounding the George Floyd Uprising (and potentially even the Vietnam war) will have such lasting impacts as the shift in young peoples’ opinion on the issue of Israeli settler-colonialism and apartheid; in each of those corresponding issues, never was the entire government, its international allies, and private media propaganda so completely aligned while being so thoroughly rebuked.
GOOD post.
This is, of course, exactly why the United States is trying to ban TikTok.
What happens is the israelis play a shell game where whenever something good happens in the occupied territories it’s because of how benevolently they’re treating the Palestinians, but whenever something bad happens Palestine morphs into a sovereign nation that is failing to provide for its people and israel has no control over them.
Don’t forget the millions of Palestinian refugees that deserve to be counted and the right to return to the land they were forcibly removed from.
do americans realize
Death to America
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Israel’s not an ethnostate therefore it has a right to exist.
Seriously, that’s what I’m taking from this post. Did you know you can’t criticize payday loans because they are lifeline for many PoC? Your privilege is showing!
That’s not what I was getting at. I was assuming that people who come across this post would already know that Israel oppresses non-Jews. My point is that it gets even worse than that: the non-Jews are the numerical majority, so the whole thing is more egregious than many Americans might be aware.
I guess I do think a numerical majority being subjugated is more noteworthy in some ways than a numerical minority.
I assume it’s meant to push back on “being against Israel means you’re anti-Semitic” but it’s not very clear or effective.
I don’t really think it matters? Why is the specific demographic make up of a genocidal state, or any state, that important?
I agree it’s not a huge deal, but I do think it further adds credence against the tired arguments of “Anti-Israel = Anti-jewish”
No reasonable person makes that argument. Those specific arguments are made in bad-faith by Zionists, same with the constant sleight of hand where Israel doesn’t represents all of Judaism, but also if you criticize the actions of the Israeli state, you are an anti-semite. It’s not an argument you should entertain because it’s designed to waste time and distract both online and at press-conferences or statements.
It’s so that congress people like those in the “squad” have to constantly defend themselves against antisemitism instead of pointing out that the Secular Government of Israel is committing genocide.
I brought it up because it kind of disproves the idea that “Jews have a special relationship with that region and/or are uniquely entitled to it.” They’re not even the majority there currently! And they weren’t in 1948 either.
