It’s not TikTok, stupid! It’s the generational change!

The rebelliousness of the younger generations has long been an established standard observation. Another standard rule, unsurprisingly, is for the older folks to treat the youth as deviating from the supposed truth or the so-called normality. Has any generation ever acknowledged that it is them that might have been wrong all along, and that it is their children and grandchildren who might just be the more rational ones? In any case, it is always the incoming generations that would have the final word. The constant and uninterrupted historical social change is and always has been irreversible due to the very natural feature of our existence, namely the generational change. Whether we are talking about the end of human sacrifice, about the abolition of serfdom, about women’s suffrage, or about same-sex marriages, we are not talking about a better idea winning over a worse idea. This has nothing to do with persuading one’s opponent with logical and rational arguments. Historical social progress is not the result of some battles of ideas. Rather, old ideas die out because the generations that would believe in them die out.

This historical law is as valid today as it has been throughout the centuries. And among the contemporary social and political issues that could perfectly illustrate this constant generational divide we find the colonial conflict in Palestine. To demonstrate the dominant pro-Palestinian stance among the members of the generation Z is no longer news. Recently, however, a couple of public figures - as prominent as Hillary Clinton to name at least one - have once again stirred up this issue by blaming TikTok as the cause for the anti-Israel sentiment among the youth. Yet again, alongside all of the previous generations, our contemporary outgoing ones are not capable and not willing to learn from history.

Just as human sacrifice or serfdom, for instance, were bound to become obsolete, so is the case with colonialism and inequality between different nations. Here is the infamous quote by Winston Churchill from the year 1937, supporting Jewish settlements in Palestine:

“I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here. They had not the right, nor had they the power.”

Such words by any statesman are hardly imaginable today. And if anyone dared, however, to maintain such a position publicly, the backlash would be immense. This shows how far our social consciousness has progressed since those days. And while this ideological progress is bound up with the economic progress of human society, the liberal mind tends to search for particular and singular events that would trigger such changes in our social consciousness. Yet, the ever-growing rejection of Israel among the young generations would have arrived even without the most recent genocide of the Palestinian people. Just as the absolutist rule by the French kings would have been overthrown sooner or later even without the economic distress that might have provoked the French Revolution. Such historical moments merely accelerate the tendency towards social change, but do not condition it. This is what the liberal scholars, for instance, more than often get wrong about the historical social progress. And this is also what, incidentally, the Zionists do not grasp about the changing trends in the global support for the Palestinians.

One should also remind Hillary Clinton and her acolytes that TikTok did not exist during the Great French Revolution. Neither did it exist at the time of the abolition of slavery, or during the Reformation of the 16th century. Hence, while our modern communication technology can be a powerful tool, it remains merely a tool. And while political movements are keen to use those tools for their cause, the former do not arise because of the latter. Rather, they arise because what was considered to be normal yesterday is no longer perceived as such today. And after being born, such political movements strive for change by using all the tools at their disposition.

Consequently, it is only natural that pro-Palestinian voices would use TikTok or any other platform to further their cause. At the same time, one must acknowledge that all that horrible genocidal content that we can find out there on TikTok today would not have yielded the same results during the World War I years, for instance. Those generations had quite different social consciousness from us today:

“The notion of civilian POWs may appear jarring and counter-intuitive today at a time when civilians are usually seen as the opposite of combatants, and thus as innocent bystanders who should be shielded from suffering any consequences or adverse treatment as a result of warfare. However, during WWI, civilians who were linked by their nationality to the enemy state were perceived and treated as a threat to the security of the state in the territory in which they were, not least because of the widespread use of mandatory military service and the prevalent notion of ‘total war’.”

Moreover, while the Gaza Strip has been widely decried as a modern-day concentration camp, during the Great War concentration camps were “used worldwide - for foreign civilians deemed by the belligerents to pose a threat on their home territory and for occupied civilians”. It was then perceived as a normal procedure and nothing scandalous. As today we deplore the fate of the Palestinian (or any other, for that matter) civilians, “no clear, generally agreed understanding of civilians existed at the time. Unlike today, when everyone who is not a combatant is considered a civilian and presumed to be ‘innocent’ and in need of protection, the notion of ‘civilians’ as war victims had only started to emerge during WWI.” Here is some more context in relation to the social understanding of warfare during the pre-World War I years:

“The 1907 Hague Conventions do not make use of the term ‘civilian’ or refer to civilian immunity in any defined manner. There is no explicit prohibition on the deliberate or intentional attack of civilians, or the use of indiscriminate attacks. Instead, the notion of ‘soldier’s honor’ was to guide the terms of the appropriate social dynamics of conflict, that is, of the types and form of conduct and interactions of combatants with civilians. However, Article 22 does underscore that the ‘right of belligerents to adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited’. Article 23 prohibits the killing or wounding treacherously individuals belonging to the hostile nation, while Article 25 prohibits the ‘attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended’. While lacking any explicit mention of civilian protections, these stipulations begin to shift the terms of the protection of persons away from an exclusive focus on the soldier to persons not directly participating in the conduct of war.”

In fact, in the years leading to that horrendous military conflict, “certain large military powers argued that such civilians should be treated as francs-tireurs (guerrilla fighters) and would therefore be liable to execution, while most smaller states contended that they should be treated as lawful combatants.” In our days even such a genocidal state as Israel is forced to pretend, in front of the world, that the civilians they are killing are supposedly militants. And while some observers even today may still overwhelmingly focus upon women and children - as if the male non-combatant Palestinians are lesser civilians - the International Committee of the Red Cross during the interwar years would continue to “show a greater concern for women and children than the civilian population generally. The connotations which are today commonly associated with the concept of civilians, namely harmlessness, innocence, non-participation and vulnerability, were not yet necessarily attached to everyone who was not a combatant during the inter-war period.” And this despite the great horrors directed against the civilian populations during the Great War. Their social consciousness had not developed to our contemporary standards yet, and even Tiktok would not have made any difference. As we see, historical social change is a slow and gradual process.

Finally, our contemporary supporters of Israel seem to be oblivious to the circumstance that the world has also moved on from the days when collective punishment and reprisals were acceptable. Our contemporary standard is to judge particular individuals over their actions. As a result, the following would be unfathomable from our contemporary point of view:

“Thus, a dignitary from the Hirson region in France was arrested in February 1915 and found himself, before being deported to Germany, with other hostages, such as the mayor of Noyon, Mr. Noël, and the prefect of Nord Département, Mr. Trépont. All three were arrested on the same date for the same reason: ‘You are suspected of having committed acts akin to those for which German citizens have, in defiance of the law, been executed in Morocco’. Indeed, after the Ottoman Empire had entered the war on the side of Germany, Sultan Mehmed V had proclaimed a holy war ( jihad) and called on Muslims to rise up against the European Powers. Germany, the Ottoman Empire’s ally, promoted strong pan-Islamic propaganda, sending agents to militate against French and British interests. In response to their activities in Morocco, the French arrested 300 members of the German colony there and sent them to an internment camp – known then as a concentration camp – in Algeria. Some were civilians. Others, convicted of spying and arms smuggling against France, were shot. The German reprisals against the hostages from France’s Nord Département testify yet again to the globalization of the war, in this case through the prism of occupation.”

Judging from our social consciousness of today, we can be grateful that - at least on paper - the laws of warfare have progressed to such an extent when compared to the World Wars of the last century. The historical social progress since then has been beneficial to the civilians. But not so much for Israel’s status within the global community. No amount of paid propaganda could make the developed world once again believe in the divine mandate of the kings. Likewise, no amount of censorship of social platforms could reverse the time and force the contemporary world to accept colonialism on Israel’s behalf.

Sources:
https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/race-racism/
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/legal-studies/article/interwar-interactions-in-the-development-of-the-protection-of-civilians-a-historical-perspective/5F0E3C46ACD8250A21555D1F28076CDD
https://lawexplores.com/laws-of-protection-the-historical-emergence-of-the-concept-of-the-civilian/
https://international-review.icrc.org/sites/default/files/irrc-885-becker.pdf

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