Gen Z will know the truth

About a year ago on December 11 2023, The Hill, a US political newspaper and digital news channel, published a report headlined, 'Why is Gen Z so pro-Palestine and anti-Israel?' What was the basis of such claim by this report? It was that there were 31 billion posts on the media app TikTok supporting Palestine (#freeepalestine), whereas there were only 590 million posts in favour of Israel (#standwithisrael). Such overwhelming support for Palestine among the TikTok users (half of whom are below 30) is no doubt shocking for the traditional supporters of Israel both among the Jews and non-Jews in America. And it was slightly over two months after Hamas, the Palestinian political movement of the Gaza strip, launched the attack on Israel killing about 1,200 Israelis and taking more than 250 hostages, that the report appeared.

The incident was still fresh in public memory at that time. But why were then the US youths in their late teens and early twenties not swayed by the mainstream media reports which were awash with empathy for Israel and hatred against Hamas? Clearly, as the author of the article viewed, the US Gen Z was not upset by Hamas's action. And the reason for that, he argued, was largely the impact of the social media apps like TikTok, which, he believed, was 'the media source that most shapes their kids' worldview.' According to the author of the article, the teenagers film bite-sized videos which lack sufficient information about the actual events taking place, say, in the Middle-East, and as a result, they fill the information gap with passion. However, the author of the report did not explain what drove those American TikToker teens to be so passionate about the Palestinians. 

Now we have another report based on an official opinion survey published recently in the Israeli newspaper, The Jerusalem Post, which holds that 42 per cent Jewish teens in the US believe that the occupation army has committed genocide in the Gaza strip. Some 37 per cent of those surveyed, on the other hand, were sympathetic towards Hamas, according to the survey.  But the response of the age group limited to 14 years was indeed striking since 66 per cent of them sympathised with Hamas! However, only seven per cent of the Jewish teens elsewhere in the world are critical of Israel, the survey further informed. Those disparities (in opinion) highlighted a 'worrying divergence' in how American Jewish teens perceived Israel influenced by, what it (the survey) noted, differences in culture, community and education.  The survey was conducted by Israel's Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Anti-Semitism'.

Visibly angered by the survey findings, the Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli, stressed strengthening the bonds between Jewish teens in diaspora and Israel.

But however much the Israeli authorities blame the differences in culture, education, community and bond between the Jewish children in diaspora and those in Israel, they need to accept fact. Children of today, not only in the USA, but everywhere have rejected the corporate media. What is actually happening in Gaza strip or the West Bank they can know from news apps on the social media. Some blame the social media apps for being biased as they are strongly influenced by movements like Black Lives Matter. This motivates many American teens to see the 'Palestine-Israel conflict' through the lens of race relations, they contend. Now problem lies exactly here. What the mainstream media and intellectual discourse portray as 'Palestine-Israel conflict', the younger generation see it, thanks to the social media, as atrocities being committed by Israel against the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The Western mainstream media has long been telling the official version of the truth. But advancements in information technology have now revealed the truth before the young generation. How can the old guard hope to make the Gen Z unlearn the truth that the new media are unveiling before them?

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