A family member texted me recently and asked if I could explain why people would be on the side of the Palestinians. She wrote that one of her co-workers said that he thinks most people their age (Millenials) are on the side of Palestinians and she didn’t know how to respond because she was "a little surprised."
Here’s my response, slightly edited:
There are a number of answers to your question. First, pro-Palestinians are of course either Muslims or non-Muslims. If they're Muslim they've been taught from childhood on up to hate Jews (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Christians).
Many Muslims also believe that Allah wants them to dominate the world, by the sword if necessary, and the existence of a Western, non-Muslim island, no matter how tiny, in the midst of a Muslim sea is intolerable to them. It’s made even more insufferable by the amazing success of the Jewish people and the miserable failures of Muslims living all around them in the Middle East.
Muslims have waged a war of conquest against the non-Muslim world for 1300 yrs. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is just one battle in an unending war to spread Islam across the entire globe.
But if the Gen Z/Millenial pro-Palestinian folks are not Muslims then they often have other reasons for their pro-Palestinian bias.
One is that they don’t know the history of the region. They think that the Jews just took the land away from the Palestinians like Europeans took land away from the Indians in North America. This is not true, of course, but in our postmodern society objective truth doesn’t exist. What’s true for many of your contemporaries is whatever "works" for them, whatever confirms their desires and biases, whatever makes them feel good, or whatever just seems right. Actual historical facts are not really relevant to them. What matters is that they read news reports about suffering Palestinians and they react emotionally against those they think are causing the suffering.
A second related reason is that many just don't know the facts about Oct. 7th or what has happened in the war since. They often believe the propaganda put out by the Palestinian news agency or health ministry which are both controlled by Hamas, the terrorist organization that perpetrated the horrific atrocities on October 7th. They think that the Israelis are indiscriminately killing innocent Palestinians, but that's false. The Israelis have tried harder to limit civilian casualties than any nation in history has done in any previous war. Meanwhile, Hamas uses their own people as human shields and even shoots them in order to prevent them from fleeing combat zones.
A third reason is that your generation has been steeped in Marxist Critical Theory whether most of your generational cohort realize it or not. CT teaches that the world is comprised of oppressors and oppressed. White-skinned people are inherently oppressive and brown-skinned people are invariably their oppressed victims. This paradigm serves as a lens through which many young people view the world, so by definition the Palestinians are the oppressed and the Israelis are the oppressors, regardless of the objective facts, and a desire for justice requires them, they think, to side with the oppressed against the oppressors.
This is why when the Muslim Syrian president slaughters tens of thousands of other Syrian Muslims hardly anyone cares because that’s brown-skinned Muslims killing other brown-skinned Muslims. Or when white-skinned Russians bomb a children’s hospital in Ukraine full of white-skinned children no one on the left says much of anything because that’s just whites killing whites, but if white Jews kill brown Palestinians the world is outraged. We see this same script play out between our own police and criminals. If a black cop shoots an unarmed black man the story dies in a day, but if a white cop kills an unarmed black man we have summer-long riots with dozens dead and billions in property damage.
An interpretive framework like CT is very convenient because it saves people the trouble of doing the hard work of researching the facts. All they need do to see who the good guys and bad guys are is look at their skin color and/or ethnicity. It's like a litmus test.
A fourth reason is anti-semitism, the hatred of Jews because they're Jews. Anti-semitism keeps popping up in our society every other generation or so and the recent demonstrations on our university campuses shows that Gen Z and possibly a lot of Millenials are deeply afflicted with this disease. Anti-semitism is completely irrational, but tragically enough, it's also historically ubiquitous.
There's more that could be said in response to your colleague's remark, but this is probably already more of a reply than what you wanted. If someone tells you that they support the Palestinians in the Gaza war you might ask them their reason and very likely it'll be one of those, or a combination of those, mentioned above.