Some excerpts from article; “That might have been why, when President Biden and Israeli officials said that Oct. 7 was Israel’s Sept. 11, intending the comparison as a rallying cry for self-defense, their words seemed to many instead a cruel provocation of trauma. Were they kidding? The response to Sept. 11 was catastrophic for the Arab and Muslim world and, eventually, terrible for the United States. A similar response to Oct. 7 would be terrible for the Israeli people, and a total reinvention of hell for the Palestinians. We know this because we are Americans. In the Israelis, we saw our own leaders: shocked victims for a day, destroyers of worlds every day thereafter.
But by then, the bombing of Gaza had already begun.
This year, the United States found itself engaged in two major global conflicts, in Ukraine and Israel. Both Mr. Biden and the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, have linked the two wars together in an effort to shore up a common foreign policy against those who seek to “annihilate a neighboring democracy.” Americans’ attitudes toward both conflicts vary, however, particularly among a youth population that is furious about Gaza and ambivalent about Ukraine. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll found that a stunning 72 percent of voters ages 18 to 29 disapprove of Mr. Biden’s handling of the Gaza crisis.
The young always rebel against the old. But this generation might be unique for one reason. Their whole experience of American foreign policy — as well as American values, reflexes and rhetoric — has been defined by one overarching foreign policy era: the war on terror.
In the 20th century, the Cold War era inculcated a Cold War worldview. Many Americans came to see foreign conflicts through the prism of good and evil. They viewed their country’s foreign affairs “mistakes” as a divergence from, as the British writer Anatol Lieven called it, a “state of noble innocence.” The older generation spent most of their lives awash in such myths. Those of us in the middle absorbed them for half of our lives, until Sept. 11, 2001, ushered us into a whole new state of being.”
“After the withdrawal from Afghanistan, it felt as if Americans might reconsider their country’s role in foreign affairs. But six months later, Russia invaded Ukraine. “Pressure is growing again, especially given the failures in Afghanistan,” as the legal scholar Aziz Rana had written just a few months earlier, “to find new ways to display American power, to prove that, as Biden has said, ‘America is back.’” Ukraine was a different enough war to resist comparisons to the war on terror. It was a clean break: a war that once again pitted democrats against authoritarians and restored Americans to the side of the good against evil.”
“But young people, according to polls, felt uncertain about American involvement in Ukraine. The binary of democracy versus authoritarianism didn’t ring true for a generation that had begun questioning the meaning of democracy at home and abroad. They lived with a sense of doom around climate change and many had embraced Black Lives Matter protests, both of which taught them about American hypocrisy and the preciousness of human life. “We have trouble with the idea that our nation has a right to lecture any other,” the young editors of the magazine The Drift wrote in June 2022. (I have taught international affairs to 20-year-olds for the last three years, so I have had exposure to these sentiments.) Many Americans had been left with a void in their emotional landscape, an unanswered question about the American project: If the war on terror was something imagined by a democracy, then what was a democracy? What is a democracy that kills so many people?
As of this writing, the Israeli military has killed around 20,000 Palestinians and wounded 52,000, according to Gazan health authorities. That death toll includes an estimated 7,000 children. It has killed more than 60 journalists, over 130 U.N. aid workers, poets and cooks and teachers and I.T. specialists and mothers. The bombing is worse — faster, heavier, more indiscriminate — than what the Americans did in Iraq, Syria or Afghanistan. But it is also reminiscent of all the wars there.”
“In October, the Americans and Israelis said that Oct. 7 was Israel’s Sept. 11. Americans know that on Sept. 11, Al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people, and in the 20 years that followed, the U.S. war on terror killed almost one million. Many Americans, marooned in the condition of future thinking, fear what could come next in the Middle East. They fear that one day Israel, aided by the United States, will destroy Gaza entirely. They fear that the devastation will set off another horrifying cascade of crises, an unfathomable loss of life. And they know that someday Americans will question what madness overcame them in 2023, why they once again allowed the killing of so many people, and what happened to them long ago that made them this way.”
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FS | NY
We expected every American President to support Israel but they always also gave voice to Palestinian rights. The most disturbing aspect of Gaza war was that we impulsively jumped into this war as our war and President Biden’s Administration made clear they have no red line for Israel (John Kirby) and this is no time for being neutral (Lloyd Austin). President Biden himself furiously advocated on behalf of Israel, including some fabrications. This further inflamed the situation rather than calm it and now we have over 20,000 innocent Gazan dead with our supplied “Dumb Bombs” and Hamas still not much degraded.
We should be proud of our younger generation who can see this injustice and plight of violently oppressed Palestinians and is raising their voices against injustice. That is what we taught and expected from them to speak up if you see any injustice.”
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