There is an irony in the current conflict on college campuses. The irony is that people think that being pro-Israel means pro war, when in reality polls show that Jews and Israelis support a two state solution and end to war which requires an end to Hamas. At the same time people think that being pro-Palestine means being pro peace when Palestinians have never even proposed a two state solution, by and large support Hamas whose goal is destruction of the Jewish state and all Jews who live in Israel.
The Dunning-Kruger ignorance of all these people who suddenly became experts on the conflict and feel free to tell me what it means to be Jewish or Zionist is amazing. It reminds me of all those people who started to attack Ukraine when Russia invaded. This bizarre demand that the one who is attacked stop responding to the attack for the sake of “peace”. Whether it is a pope or random Facebook person, it is sad to see this inability to see a wider picture. But I don’t blame them. I blame my generation.
My generation is a generation of slackers. We studied not to learn but to pass the class, to get into college, to get a “good job”. We were very good at learning just enough to answer the questions that teachers wanted in such a way as to make them happy. We prioritized “extra-curriculars” over learning because that’s what the colleges wanted. We learned how to pass the standardized tests, because that’s what the colleges wanted. Then when we went to college, we avoided the classes that made us well rounded because that’s not what jobs wanted and if we took them we did our best not to read the books and pass the tests and papers with the minimum amount of learning. We skipped classes in order to go out and get the “college experience”. We then entered the work force with the same bare-minimum mentality. Party at night and on the weekend and give the boss hours, not the product.
This is what created the ignorant generation, and this is what describes journalists of our generation. I have met a lot of journalists when working on my startup. They are generally smart but they are not brilliant people. They are not highly educated or specialized people and they are not the most curious people. What they are is people with large egos, big opinions and like many people in professions with low pay and high college debt: big chips on their shoulders.
I say this knowing that some of them will be offended and I may lose some friends, but we have to be honest about it. While there are exceptions, the vast majority specialize in one thing: writing snappy articles that catch attention, incite emotion and give people what they want: a feeling of being smart and right. To do that, they have to write at 8th grade level and information that comes across as simple to understand and grasp. They have to avoid nuance and deep thought. This includes the “best of the best”, the NPRs, New York Times, Washington Post etc etc. The journalists at smaller publications are usually worse.
The problem with what our generation creates is not that they give us what we want to hear. No, that’s not bias, that’s propaganda. Bias is worse. Bias is choosing to not give the full information. It is the willful refusal to study the background, to understand context and then to take any information that doesn’t fit a narrative and refuse to include it. This creates a simple world where full information is missing and that is dangerous. It makes people have the wrong conclussions, but as long as the conclusions match that which people want to think, it works. Social network algorithms of course help to amplify this problem, lack of diverse news outputs and a societal distaste for reading and being well informed seals the ignorance.
This is what I see in every publication about Israel. When anti-Israel protesters break into the pro-Israel rally at UCLA, they claim there was a skirmish, they don’t mention the assault the concussions, the tear gas and mace used on the pro-Israel supporters, in direct violation of their right to assemble and speak. When Hamas claims to find a grave, they don’t mention that this is a grave created by Hamas a few months earlier. When Hamas shoots a rocket at a Hospital and blames Israel, the news organizations refuse to ask if their claim is true.
So is it a wonder that most people think there is a genocide? Is it surprising that most people think Hamas is fighting for freedom? No. When news routinely ignores the fact that Hamas uses terror, their own people as human shields, child soldiers, kills Palestinians who oppose their views, or glosses over these crimes as if doing so to help free Palestine justifies those acts. When news ignores to speak of the lengths that Israel goes to to safeguard civilian lives, it is not surprising that hate ignites and spreads.
This is the reality we get when students who don’t care to know the truth but to get the “passing grade” become adults; we get the product that lacks truth and we pay for it not just with a war in Middle East, but our own democracy as well.
