The shift was apparent before October 7th. A Gallup poll in March 2023 found that 49% of Democrats sympathized more with Palestinians, while 38% favoured Israelis.That poll too showed the same generational gap.
Lots of bad things were happening in the West Bank and Gaza for two decades - with 2023 being the deadliest year for Palestinians, before Oct. 7th. Settlements exploded as did the settler violence, land confiscations, home demolition too. Gaza was blockaded for 17 years - it was a miserable existence of want, need and pent-up rage. In the West Bank, Palestinians were caged into ever shrinking bantustans (sorry for the apartheid reference), subject to military rule, detentions, night raids and checkpoints. Netanyahu was already talking of annexing the West Bank and Israelis increasingly thought that was not a bad idea. So much violence and injustice. OPPRESSION (you seem not to like that word, sorry). People in the U.S. noticed these things. Israel was losing support, especially among the youth, who had not yet been subjected to decades of Israeli myths and propaganda. They saw clearly which side was behaving badly and were immune to the usual rationalizations.
You speak of racism. There is a lot of that in Israeli society, just ask any Palestinian, even those living in Israel. Even before October 7th a large slice of Israelis wanted even their own "Arab" neighbours gone, out of Israel, though they are citizens of Israel albeit second class, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. There are myriad ways they are treated like inferiors. Why else enact a law that says only Israeli Jews have the right to self-determination in Israel? Seems a bit supremacist to me.
Racism and supremacy go hand in hand. I don't really see the protesters - most of them students or ordinary folk outraged by the slaughter - as supremacist, do you?
Israel not only has the right to exist (let's leave out whether it had the right to exist on top of a native population that had to be driven out in order for it to exist) but it exists already and it's far-fetched and absurd to say it faces an existential threat, as some still claim as justification for this heinous war. So I'm really tired of the old "Israel has the right to exist" argument, especially when it's often used in defense of Israel's barbaric actions going back decades.
But I'm even more tired - aghast, really - of painting opposition to Israel's crimes and ongoing land-theft and expansionism as anti-semitic. I highly doubt those tens of thousands of student protesters or the millions of ordinary protesters around the world are motivated by anti-semitism rather than a desire for justice and an end to the slaughter and starvation.
I agree about Trump. Netanyahu plays him like a drum. I fear for the coming ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, inevitable and foretold since the first 2000 lb bomb dropped on a residential building. Trump is sadistic and stupid enough to let it happen.
= new reply since forum marked as read