Chicago – April 20, 2024
Despite widespread media biasagainst Palestine in the West, nearly half of young Americans say that Israel’s months-long assault of Gaza amounts to genocide, new polling reveals ahead of the International Court of Justice’s initial ruling on South Africa’s case charging Israel with genocide expected Friday.
According to polling conducted this week by The Economist, 49 percent of people aged 18 to 29 say that they think Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians, with 24 percent saying they disagree and 27 percent saying they’re not sure.
This is similar to the proportion of people who identify as Democrats who said that Israel’s assault is genocide, at 49 percent, while only 21 percent disagreed. The group with the highest proportion of people affirming the genocide was people identifying as liberal, with 60 percent in agreement.
The poll findings are powerful considering that major U.S. media outlets maintain an overwhelming bias for Israel and its current massacre, as advocates for Palestinian rights have long pointed out.
Major Western outlets nearly uniformly avoid the word “genocide” in their news coverage on Gaza, despite multiple foreign policy experts saying that Israel’s brutal invasion is a “textbook” case of genocide. And, data has shown that major outlets are reserving nearly all of their most sympathetic language for Israeli deaths rather than those of Palestinians, even as the Palestinian death toll has grown orders of magnitude higher.
The youth of this age is more informed than ever before. This is the reason that they are not afraid to raise their voices for Palestine and the genocide being committed by Israel. Several students of Columbia university have been suspended and arrested for their three day protest in support of Gaza. But, the arrests had an opposite effect on the students as more of them are now coming out in their support.
The focus is seemingly going back to Israel’s assaults on Gaza. That has been in the headlines primarily on Friday.
The Israeli army and Netanyahu have been saying repeatedly that until they go into Rafah on the ground, they cannot achieve an absolute victory, and that’s something that is critical for them in this war.
In fact, it is one of the main goals they set out to achieve back on October 7. However, the Israelis have still not presented the Americans with exactly what kind of plan they are looking to do when it comes to evacuating more than a million and a half people who are seeking refuge in Rafah.
Netanyahu is under immense pressure not just internationally, from his biggest ally, the Americans, but domestically from the families of Israeli captives, from the Bring Them Back movement, who say that Netanyahu has failed them.
Every week, there are protests, with thousands of Israelis taking to the streets and calling not only for Netanyahu to resign but for him to be ousted and removed from office so that there can be governance put into place to secure a deal to bring back the captives.
