Why American Millennials Are Unsympathetic Toward Israel

[hedgehog]

33. I was going to post on this very subject myself -

I was discussing Israel last night with my millennial daughter and realized for the first time that she had a very different view of things.

For my generation, you should toss in the Diary of Ann Frank and Exodus as well. It was in our generation also, that many of the details of the Holocaust came to light in an organized narrative.

My parents grew up during WWII and did not view the Holocaust as a significantly different event from other horrific crimes. I think they were putting it into the context of the Bataan Death March, the Japanese POW camps, Hiroshima, Dresden, the Blitz, etc.

My mother also compared it to the Great Hunger. There is serious debate today whether that event constituted a genocide or not. Certainly, the Irish would not have starved if the English officials had viewed them as fully human as themselves. (I would disagree with her on one point; I think Oliver Cromwell's Clearance of Ireland takes the prize for the first modern example of deliberate ethnic cleansing/genocide.) The point being, for her, the Holocast was not an exceptional event.

During the Millennials' lifetime, it has become common knowledge that Gypsies, Gays, Communists and Slavs also ended up in the death camp. The Millennials also grew up in the shadow of Cambodia, the recent Balkan War and Rwanda. Unfortunately, for them, genocide is not very exceptional.