I know why Gen Z doesn't much care for Israel at all, no sir

But i hid the explanation under a paywall at the bottom of this post.

I was listening to Ezra Klein’s podcast today, and the new episode is about Israel and Gaza. The guest is the Israeli journalist Avi Shavit. Ezra is someone who I have been reading since he was a college student 20 years ago. I have always been a big fan because we share broad outlooks on the world, but he is much smarter than I am and has a completely different personality than I do. I don’t agree with him about lots of stuff, but I know he is coming from a place I relate to.

If you’ve read my other posts on this subject, I think you’ll know what I mean when I say he and Shavit have generally the same first-position opinions that I have: intensely defensive of Israel’s existence, hurt and estranged by the Left’s reaction to 10/7, contemptuous of the totalizing anticolonialism framework, but also profoundly resentful and angry towards the Israeli right.

Hamas Is Bad. People Shouldn't Defend Hamas.

From there, they go in lots of directions that I think are interesting and worth listening to. In terms of the protests, Ezra is the more sympathetic of the two, and he is not very sympathetic. (His argument is similar to the one I made a few days ago: most of the protesters probably don’t subscribe to the extremist anti-zionism of the organizing groups but just want an end to the war.)

The other thing I like about Ezra is that I have never thought he was lying to me or manipulating me for some activist reason. You can disagree with many of his points or even all of them, but he’s a straight shooter. He genuinely believes the things he says.

One of the things I have found so infuriating about the Discourse over the last few years is how many people I simply think (and, in some cases, know) are liars. Not necessarily actively lying, but lying via selective outrage or focusing on one sort of a story instead of another type because one is something you think would harm a political movement you’re sympathetic to.