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Because my nitpick topic is the intersection between politics and gender/sex, in the last months since 7 October I began a very unscientific analysis of the social media content, especially on Instagram, of my friends, acquaintances and other people I follow. (Context as always, European middle-upper class, intra-national environment, very EU-based)
I cannot emphatise enough how much the driven behind pro-Palestinian content is driven exclusively by women. Between the thousands of people I follow, there is a core of around 50 people, all women apart one anarchist guy, who are hard Palestinian-posters (And remember, there is a lot of interests in politics in my environment, it is normal to see all these people interested in stuff like this). And I am not talking about random posting, I am talking of months and months of posting, all inserted in a moral framework of "do not touch the children" or "Israelis are racists". Having followed the process since the beginning, it was fun to see how it took at least one month until the start of the pro-Palestinian posting, as if they were checking where it was the consensus in their group before beginning to post.
The question I ask the community here, why a topic that is so far from our location and interests (again, we are no Columbia University or Middle East, we are far away both ideologically and physically) is so interesting for women, that makes them post about id dozens of times every week, for months straight? And I am talking about a very intense interest, is not rare to see online meltdown of suffering, death menaces or simply histrionics directed towards obscure metaphysical forces.
Again, my observation are reinforced from what I saw in the US and Europe about the universities and campus protests; the protestors are overwhelmingly women, and the most desperate are women.
For me the question rotates around two different forces;
Thinking about the past, it makes me smile how much it was common to hear, until twenty years ago, that women are very uninterested in politics, unlike men. For my generation, this idea looks absurd. Men do not care about politics at all.
Men and women are both interested in politics if you ask about the actual issues in my opinion. But I’d concede that women are much more susceptible to “it’s called being a GOOD PERSON, GET IT?” reasoning. Women don’t want to be left out of the tribe, women are more willing to show fealty to high status ideas (a man will become a sycophant, will bow to his betters, but internally he is more likely to chafe at this; he won’t do it unless he is certain it’s absolutely necessary).
That’s not surprising since it tracks with extensive research about men much more frequently engaging in almost all riskier behavior. Heterodox politics are part of that.
This is one of the more important points that indicates to me that the causality identified above re redirected maternal instincts is slightly inaccurate. Save for muslims, the vocal women (invariably childless and usually 'queer' feminist allies) who advocate loudly and repeatedly for Palestine are also virulent progressives who support LGBT+ and anti-men behaviors. These women are always progressive in outlook, and the progressive orthodoxy is oppositional to extant western (white male) power dynamics. Support for Palestine maps cleanly into opposition against western govts/institutions that clearly do not support the palestinian cause, mainly because the Palestinians themselves keep saying they want Hamas. Not that this point ever registers for western progressive women: ask them what the Palestinians want and its always some basic 'they just want peace' with insipid talking points interspersed. At no point will they ever listen to what the Palestinians themselves say they want, and they will engage in DAVRO to spin it around to the fault of the jews. Justification of Arab violence, if it is even acknowledged to occur, is always rationalized by reversing the causality: the cause must be made even more pure hearted to justify all resistance against those that deny it. All of this of course stands in full denial of the well documented atrocities that Palestinians proudly published themselves and the ownself stated desires of the Palestinians. I showed footage of Palestinians spitting on Shani Louks body to progressive female friends and they immediately said it was fake because Palestinians would never do something that bad, and they keep saying that Israel lied about 40 beheaded babies so clearly Palestinians have never committed any crimes.
I am generally agree with the many posters above (below?) that misplaced maternal instinct is the reason for most of the extant female support for Palestine, but specific to the nutters blasting off on social media the support is 'enemy of my enemy' rather than 'kindred spirit'.
I think the coverage of the war by the liberal media/NGO complex plays at least as much of a role as maternal extinct. If the NYT, CNN etc started actually showing clips of Hamas stealing aid and shooting at their own emaciated civilians you'd probably see fewer women attributing the images of starving Gazan children to supposed Israeli malevolence.
The media is itself the culprit in this case. Barely a frame of the videos uploaded by Hamas themselves where they executed teenage girls and slaughtered children and whole families in between whoops of joy, but unlimited rehashes of crowded hospitals filmed by Hamas themselves. I still find it disgusting that the media does not give any coverage to the Darfur massacres, Perhaps it is because Hamas is a 'legitimate authority' so attribution can be satisfied, even though Hamas lies more than North Korea does.
Arabs and blacks seem to occupy equal positions on the progressive stack, so most journalists aren't particularly animated by the former massacring the latter.
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