‘Take your gap year in the West Bank’: reality challenge for young folk saying free Palestine

This hatred dressed up as self-righteousness comes from a generation ignorant of history.

Bob Vylan during the controversial Glastonbury performance in Britain last weekend.

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In 1985, the world was in the grip of the Cold War. The threat of mutually assured destruction via a nuclear war felt very real, even for a primary school kid living in the suburbs of Perth. The US v Russia, the freedom of Western democracy v the tyranny of communism, was being played out in real life and across pop culture. It was in our news bulletins and in our cinemas.

Possibly the best example of this was Rocky IV, a cinematic gem in which Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa travels to the Soviet Union to teach Dolph Lundgren’s evil Russian Ivan Drago a lesson. At the end, after knocking Drago out cold, Rocky tells the crowd who had come to watch that war is bad, man, and then wishes his son back in the US-of-A merry Christmas.

It also was on our radio waves. Pop musician Sting released the hit song Russians, lamenting: “What might save us, me and you, is if the Russians love their children too.”

The Berlin Wall was still standing then. East Germans were being held under the heavy chains of communism while those of us in free Western democracies lived our best lives in hedonistic 1980s indulgence.

Not long ago, a friend of mine told a story about how a daytrip into East Germany in the late 80s (strict 24-hour visas were granted to select passport holders) permanently turned her political leanings from left to right in a single day. Reality has a tendency to do that.

Reality; history; truths that once shaped and formed us into people of substance. Unimpeachable facts that could not be denied but now are forgotten or subject to vile revisionism. Exhibit A: Did the Holocaust really happen?

This brings me to the here and now. A season in which facts, truth and lessons of history can be discarded like sour milk. Where, last weekend, in a stomach-turning example of what I’m talking about, some B-grade wannabe rap duo led a death chant against the Israeli Defence Forces before an enthusiastic crowd at the Glastonbury music festival. The whole horrific event was live-streamed on the BBC without interruption before an audience of millions. And there were plenty who defended it.

An astute person on social media asked: Are we watching a slow, terrifying march of a generation into fascist tendencies under the banner of social justice? Falling into the embrace of politics that have brought persecution, death and deprivation to millions upon millions? It sounds like a big question when you read it like that but is it that far-fetched?

All of the obvious things have been said about Glastonbury, but I want to place it in the context of the post-October 7 environment. One in which to be Israeli and to be Jewish have somehow become a crime of sorts.

A couple of months ago, on a normal Saturday morning, I was in a bustling shop on Sydney’s lower north shore. For boring reasons, I had to leave my name with the woman serving.

A reader of this paper, she recognised it and said she enjoyed my columns. Very kind, I said, thanking her. Then she leaned forward across the counter: I’m Jewish.

Members of the Jewish community at a rally this year protesting the string of anti-Semitic attacks in Sydney. Picture: Thomas Lisson

Her words came in a whisper and initially I couldn’t hear her. What? I said, straining. I thought, why is this woman whispering, what’s wrong with her? I’m Jewish, she said again, loud enough for me to hear that time.

I remember initially thinking, so? So what if you’re Jewish, why whisper?

But nobody is scrawling Gas the Christians across Sydney. Nobody is torching cars in Christian neighbourhoods to strike fear into the heart of the Sunday people – yet.

Never have I felt the need to hide who I am or apologise for who I am. Not once in my life. That moment affected me deeply.

Back to the bigger picture and how, objectively, the lion’s share of this hatred dressed up as self-righteousness is coming from a generation without context. One without a knowledge of history but whose members pride themselves on being defenders of justice. It is a generation pitiful in its superficiality. It is a blindness that feels sometimes incurable.

One could argue it’s a generation without any sense of identity. I found myself thinking, how can members of this generation be on the right side of history when they have never been taught it?

The recent Israeli-led action against Iran, backed by the US, dealt with a nuclear threat that even the hopeless UN said was imminent and true. As the German Chancellor said at the time, Israel is doing the world’s dirty work, ridding the region of a nuclear threat. But of course, Israel was all of a sudden the aggressor. Talk about flipping the victim-abuser paradigm. First Hamas, now the Iranian regime.

There is a generation that knows nothing but comfort, privilege and safety, and as a result forms its response to Iran’s nuclear proliferation without sober-minded assessment.

Israel is seen only as an aggressor. Members of this generation have no idea, for example, that days after the UN declared the state of Israel in 1948 the nation was attacked, unprovoked, by five surrounding Arab states. Greater context: a people who had just (barely) survived the Holocaust was again attacked for being Jews and for having a home in their ancestral lands. And before you cry “fake news”, archaeology has confirmed repeatedly the presence of Jews in Israel dating back thousands and thousands of years. The Tel Dan Stele sends its regards. Don’t get mad at me, take it up with carbon dating.

Israel was abandoned after October 7. It was left to fight alone. It was left to defend itself in a way no other nation would be abandoned and we have seen the most appalling blood libel gleefully thrown about and shared by the social media generation without so much of a question – is this true? Without knowledge of or curiosity about history.

When I think about the probable solutions they are few and far between, but a great place to start, a simple and obvious place, is this. Swap places. To the young folk saying free Palestine, put your money where your overly confident mouths are.

Trade places with a woman living under sharia law. Trade places with a disenfranchised young man denied a future. Trade places with a woman your age in Iran. You’d have the IDF on speed dial within a hot minute.

Better still, take your gap year in the West Bank. Go on, live your truth! No Tel Aviv summers for you; straight to Khan Younis and Ramallah. You want to free Palestine, go on then. I’m being trite but not really. Nothing like getting mugged by reality to cure a person of rank stupidity.

As for the moron rap act at Glastonbury, its agent has dumped it, the US revoked its visa and its American tour is off, and it has been dumped from playing festivals in Britain and France.

Perhaps the world is waking up. Freedom of speech is cool, I’m for it. Freedom from consequences? That’s the dream of the perennially immature.

As I’ve mulled this generational conundrum this week, I can’t help but think the enemy of this generation needs to be unmasked. Is it indifference? Is it ignorance or lack of empathy? Is it all of these things or more? I honestly don’t know but I do know one thing: reality eventually bites and, when it does, a generation finally will be forced to wake up. I’d like a front-row seat when it does.