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Why is this war "different?" Is the Israel-Hamas conflict is the first time that many young progressives have been on the opposite side from "public" opinion? How will that loss of popular support impact culture wars forward, or will it all?
I remember the mantra of "silence is violence" during the BLM protests. "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor." But there has been a lot of silence- probably because speaking up has led to job offers being revoked, although some of those who lost their offers are not backing down:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/nyu-student-criticized-lost-job-offer-israel-hamas/story?id=104235399
Reddit removed this post for violating community guidelines, but it was a plea to Black women to stay silent about the conflict and not get involved (the comments are still up for some context of reactions): https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackWomenDivest/s/8IU6rXCvle
Why was there so much pressure for everyone to rise up and speak out during other injustices (Ukraine, Uyghurs, BLM, etc) but for this one, the advice is to shut up, sit down, stay out of it? Why did the rhetoric around social justice and activism drastically change overnight? BLM (the organization, not the movement) has gotten in trouble for antisemitism and/or support for Palestine in the past - why is it suddenly going quiet now? Is this the first real consequence to some of the progressive left's views, the first line in the sand?
The Israel/Hamas conflict is really interesting because it is tearing the progressive coalition apart.
In every other major news event recently (BLM riots / Covid lockdowns / Ukraine war) there has been an unambiguous correct orthodoxy that is strictly enforced on all members of the coalition. Even slightly wavering from the party line is sufficient for cancellation.
Early on in the war, it seemed like we almost go to a similar point. There were strong efforts to make support for Israel the official party line. A few people even got canceled for expressing support for Palestine. But the inconvenient truth is that a majority of the progressive rank and file supports Palestine over Israel.
It will be interesting to see where this goes. Neither party feels like a natural home for Jewish people right now. Will Jewish people start to lean towards the Republicans? Will the Democrats abandon their progressive wing? I guess we'll see. The conflict has been a real mask-off moment for who the real anti-Semites are in America.
To use the UK as a parallel example, provided this source is correct (the link to the paper it cites is broken) Jews here voted 31% for Labour and 30% for Conservatives. Remove don't knows and it's 36% to 35%. The actual election result was 29% to 36%, so they were somewhat more likely to vote Labour than the general population.
Then Corbyn became the leader of Labour after their 2015 election loss and, to massively simplify, falls firmly on the pro-Hamas wing of progressivism, and arguably doesn't even care about domestic progressive policymaking at all because he's a foreign policy wonk. So at the next election, Jews voted 63% for Conservative to 26% for Labour, the latter likely holding up somewhat only because the third party left-wing option had collapsed. The actual election results were 42% and 40% respectively.
Note, Jews supporting the Conservatives was used by some as a deflection for Corbyn's antisemitism on the basis that they'd be politically motivated to smear opposition candidates, but prior to him showing up, Jews did not align with the Conservatives, or any other party, in any particular way.
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