Can we get back the Gen Z and Millennials who seem to be drifting away into hate?
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There’s a scene in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies that applies, and doesn’t, to the madness that now grips the civilized world.
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In Golding’s famous book, a plane full of boys crashes on a deserted island during a nuclear war. The pilot dies, the boys survive. The boys soon realize that they need to fend for themselves — no one has come for them.
One of the boys addresses the others. Says he: “This is our island. It’s a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us, we’ll have fun.”
“We’ll have fun.” Therein lies the contradiction. The boys want adults to rescue them. But they also don’t. So they start to form their own society, one that is replete with extreme violence and factionalism.
It’s just a book, yes, one that Golding later said readers can take from it what they will. But, observing the epidemic of anti-Semitism and anger that is now seemingly everywhere, things look quite a bit like Golding’s book. That is, young people are off on an island on their own, these days, and they are descending rapidly into violence and hatred.
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But here’s the key difference: They don’t want to be rescued.
The statistics — in Canada, the United States and Europe — all show the same depressing thing: Vast swaths of younger generations hate the Jewish state, and they increasingly hate anyone who does not feel as they do. Poll after poll show the same thing: Shockingly-large segments of Generation Z and younger Millennials have moved to their own island, one where Jew hatred and hatred of the trappings of modern society are the rule.
Some of the polling, from across the West:
— A Harvard poll, conducted right after the carnage of Oct. 7, found that more than half of American Gen Z support Hamas. That Hamas was “justified.” A fifth of them regard the Holocaust as “a myth.”
— A March Leger poll found that 22% of Canadian Gen Z have “a positive view of Hamas,” and they are eight times more likely to doubt or deny the Holocaust than older Canadians.
— A fall Ekos poll found that half of Gen Z regard Israel as an apartheid state. Angus Reid found that three times as many young women in Canada side with the Palestinian/Hamas side over Israel’s.
— A December Harvard/Harris poll found that more than half of American Gen Z say “Israel should be ended and given to Hamas.”
That is not all. Other polling, unpublished to date, shows nearly 40% of Canadian Gen Z “support the destruction of Israel.” More than 40% of them say the “extreme violence” of Hamas on Oct. 7 was “justified.”
You don’t need to be a pollster to know these things. Turn on on your TV, or glance at your computer screen, and you will see it: The protests and rallies — some violent, many anti-Semitic — are filled with young people. White young people, mostly.
But why?
All of us were as young once. When you are young, it is normal to be oppositional — to oppose your parents, your teachers, your governments. Opposing war is something every generation does — from Vietnam onwards. And, now, it’s the Israel-Hamas war — but with a difference.
RMG Research in the U.S. has attempted to answer the “why” question. Young people, the pollster found, regard Israelis and Jews as wealthy and powerful, and that is why their war on Hamas is unjust — they are the oppressors, the powerful, wreaking vengeance on the weak. Their hatred for Israel and Jews dovetails with the hatred we now see them expressing about Western society, says one of the poll’s sponsors: “Gen Z is so embarrassed about being American that a large swath of them have become terrorist sympathizers.”
It is not an exaggeration.
The anti-Semitic trope that Jews are wealthy and all-powerful is part of it. But so too is the racial dimension. Even though more than 60% of Israel’s population are non-white, many North American and European Gen Z and Millennials falsely depict it as a racist state (in fact, Israeli Apartheid Week got its start on Canadian campuses). So, a recent investigation by PBS saw youthful anti-Israel protesters repeatedly citing race as a motivator, too. Previously, they participated in Black Lives Matter and Native American protests. Now they are protesting for Gaza and against the Jewish state: It’s all connected, to them.
Can it all be fixed? Can we get back the Gen Z and Millennials who seem to be drifting away into hate?
Perhaps. Maybe. But, for now, they are on their own little island, “having fun.”
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