OPPOSITION TO SELF-DETERMINATION IS LITERALLY UNAMERICAN:

Summer 2014 marked one of the most deadly episodes of violence in Gaza. In May that year, Israel Defense Forces soldiers killed two Palestinian teenagers. In June, three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped while hitchhiking in the West Bank and ultimately killed, and the IDF launched a full-force defense operation in response. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 73 Israelis were killed -- 67 soldiers and six civilians. Meanwhile, 2,251 Palestinians were killed, 551 of them children. Those casualty numbers affected the way the world saw the conflict, and the narrative of justified self-defense that the IDF presented wasn't universally accepted outside Israel, said Dov Waxman, director of the Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies at UCLA.

"It's really the last decade, during which so many events and shifts and factors have changed thoughts in the public domain," Waxman said." Indeed, myriad dynamics -- for example, how U.S. social-justice movements drew parallels to the escalating violence of the 2010s and how Donald Trump's allied stance toward Israel raised eyebrows during his presidency -- have gradually moved the needle on how the American public views the Palestinians. 

Notably, what happened in 2014 was the first large-scale escalation in the age of widespread social media. In the years since, researchers have pointed to the ways in which social media has reframed how the international community observes war in real time, whether over the past decade with the Palestinians or this year with the Ukrainians. Whereas bumper stickers once spread messages locally, hashtags were now sending information buzzing around the globe. Until then, most wide-scale information, particularly about life in Gaza, came through mainstream media outlets. Now, for the first time, people around the world were exposed and had access to firsthand accounts from Palestinians, many of which challenged (or at least contextualized) the details reported by large outlets. Some posts also singled out headlines and language used by such publications, accusing their framing of the violence as unfairly neglecting the Palestinian struggle.

"That summer, it was just so clear, how disproportionate the violence was," said Ben Daniel. "The Israeli government will often talk about their assaults as 'it's a war,' but it became clear that there was only one side with a military."

Her change in perspective is indicative of how Americans' opinions on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have shifted, too -- with change especially pronounced among younger Americans. According to Pew Research Center data from March, 61 percent of American adults under 30 have a favorable view of the Palestinian people, compared with 56 percent who have a favorable view of the Israeli people. Ben Daniel thinks it's important that these young Americans have also been witnessing growing civil rights movements at home.

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