Why does Palestine bring out such strong feelings?

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I really don’t want this to become about individuals’ feelings about the conflict. There are plenty of threads for that.

I am interested in why Palestine provokes such a strong feelings about civilian in Britain. We didn’t see weekly marches and such intense, passionate feelings regarding any other conflicts over in, say, the past ten years (Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, Congo, Somalia, and, of course, Ukraine). These all involve thousands of civilian casualties caused by conflict.

What is it about Palestine in particular that causes British people to feel so passionately about it?

Someone said to me today that, for them, it was the most pressing political issue. They have never even mentioned any of the other conflicts above. It got me thinking about it. If you care greatly about what happens in Palestine, why Palestine and not the other conflicts?

Please don’t come on and say you care about them all. It might be true but there is no doubt that the reaction to what’s happening in Palestine in Britain is much greater than the rest, which barely cause a murmur.

It's not uniquely young. There are a fair few countries where the average age is 15 or less - Mali, Chad, Uganda, Niger. More where half the population is under 18 - Nigeria, mentioned earlier in connection with atrocities happening there, is one of those.

there was already a pro Palestinian movement that mobilised easily. But the attention on this war has been greater than that; First, It’s a given than conflict between two states always get the most media attention. Then there is the traditional western support of Israel which makes people feel more responsible for what is happening. Then there is the controversy and the timing. With the rise of division between left and right and separately Jewish people feeling personally attacked which again causes more controversy. The extent of the involvement of the US.

for the media to stay interested there needs to be new dramatic moments for them to report on and we have had this in abundance. The horror of the Hamas massacre, the immediate genocidal talk from Israel, the hostage releases, the macabre return of the Bibas family, the Trump Gaza video, dead children, starving children, mutilated children, Netanyahu speaking to a rather empty UN, the slow turnaround of western governments from firm support of Israel to condemnation (but with little action), the extraordinary images of destruction.

There is also plenty of social media content coming from both sides. More controversy.

It’s not one simple reason, there are many factors.

It's unique among the category of "genocides being filmed and put on tiktok". People react more strongly to videos by children than by adults. Which is why the feeling is stronger Vs Ukraine for example.

Antisemitism. @ACynicalDad, are you aware that Jews are only 2% of the population of the US? There continue to be less than 16M on the entire planet--the same number as in 1938. I wonder what happened.

Are you seriously asking why does ethnic cleaning, genocide and famine bring out strong feelings in people?

I’m asking why it does so in Palestine but not in other places of conflict.

We just care more when it's children and no other genocide has had such a young population.

1.5 million Jewish children and tens of thousands of Roma children were murdered in the Holocaust.

300,000 children were murdered in the Rwandan genocide.

Nearly 11,000 women and girls were trafficked in a campaign of rape and forced conversion, thousands of boys remain unaccounted for in the Yazidi genocide.

The Uyghurs were subjected to a programme of forced sterilisation and "re-education" that halved their birth rate in less than a year.

300,000 were killed in the Darfur genocide, the majority civilian men, women and children. As of April 2025, the UN reports that children in Darfur are being killed and maimed "at an unprecedented rate" and women and girls are being raped, gang-raped and abducted for sex on a large scale.

This.

Feelings were pretty strong about Ukraine too. Lots of talk about heroic zelensky and mad, bad Putin. In that case the political focus was understandable because the UK had a genuinely meaningful position there, as a European state that is also an ally of the superpower enemy of the aggressor.

As for toktok, I do think it's depressing and maybe alarming that political interest is determined by Chinese built algorithms. But, that's 2025 for you.

No Jews, no news.

If people want to lie to themselves about the ugly underlying reason they're obsessed with this conflict like no other, go right ahead but don't diminish and ignore the tremendous scale of suffering in other countries to do it.

Your next door neighbours in Ireland have a different view mostly to most of ye. Most likely because of how we were treated by ye in the past. The day after Oct 7th I said to my mother it's going to be a blood bath now in Palestine and sadly I was correct. Thousands and thousands of children and babies being murdered is appalling however you look at it. Apartheid is wrong. Denying people food, water, medicine is wrong. Levelling whole cities is wrong. In fact we can't understand how the descendants of people who lived through the holocaust are literally inflicting the same on another country.

Antisemitism is wrong. Holocaust inversion is antisemitism.

Why does the holocaust cause such strong feelings but not the holomodor, Armenian genocide, Indonesian genocide?

It's not a competition.

I wonder why didn’t you offer this reply to the op? It’s the same question.

Shutting down criticism of the actions of the Israeli government by calling anything other than 100% support antisemitism is also wrong.

Don’t forget that millions of people protested in London against the Iraq war, millions more in cities around Europe, the biggest peace protests in recent history - you might think that people care more about this war than others, but frankly it’s bollocks.

?

It appears that Palestinian children matter more then Yemeni, Uyghur, Congolese or Sudanese children.

There is no way there would be UK marches on the streets for any of the others.

I wonder why that is.

People were protesting about our involvement in the Iraq war. It’s quite different.

I see it as two things. Islamist propaganda. Plus the availability of a broadly western style and powerful democracy that can be the baddie. The other conflicts only have Africans killing Africans and Islamists killing Islamists and Russia and China behaving despotically and it’s what we expect from them and all hopeless.
If it was the Israelis being killed by Islamists (as of course they would be if they didn’t centre their defence and overreact when threatened) then people would just shrug and ignore.
People don’t care about South Africa now the apartheid baddies are gone. Even though the people are worse off than ever.

The tribalism certainly brings out strong feelings, which fuels the conversation on social media.

It doesn't help that anyone who expresses any form of support or sympathy for Palestine is instantly labeled an Anti-Semite - a ludicrous point of view and one that only serves to reinforce the 'pick a side' mentality.

But even if you take Israel and Palestine out of it, watching a military superpower (that we support) decimate and commit flagrant war crimes against a largely helpless neighbor with impunity...its not hard to see where the wave of support comes from.

Hatred of Israel is an all-consuming ugly hobby for many on the British left and generally in certain countries. This latest spasm of anti-Israel marching and shouting is just another step in decades of abuse against the sole Jewish state.

All university campuses and left-wing gatherings have been obsessed with attacking Israel since the ‘60s. The BDS movement, the sanctification of anti-Israeli terrorists, the demonisation of Israelis, the wish to see Israel de-recognised and its founding reversed, the minimising of the Holocaust. And of course the cosplaying with Palestinian scarves. It’s very long-running. You have to look at it in the round, not just the most recent campaign of vilification of Israel.

The reason is antisemitism. That’s the long and short of it.

I’ve wondered the same thing OP. I’m not a marcher, but if I was marching against anything it would be the industrial level of rape being used as a weapon in some of the wars mentioned above, and the horrific abduction of young boys to use as child solider a.

is it because the ‘bad guys’ in this conflict are white? If you take the Jewishness out of it, Israel is a powerful, wealthy, white (?) nation who is violently oppressing it’s poor, brown neighbour. They look like colonial oppressors, they fit that role. And they are behaving so, so badly. And we see it - no ones paying much attention to the politics in Nigeria or Chad or Sudan - but stories about Netanyahus political survival, about Ben Givr and Smotrichs poisonous racism, about illegal settlers invading and stealing Palestinian land - they are all over the news and politics podcasts that I listen to.

The cynic in me says they have a better propaganda machine. Also a bit of anti semitism. I’m not denying the people of Gaza hsve suffered. Just that other peoples are suffering too. On the other side of Egypt the Sudanese have double the rate of malnutrition and no one cares.

This is probably the first serious conflict where social media has been able to capture the sheer brutality of war & deliver it to the public on such a visceral scale. And given half the population of Gaza is under 18 makes its even worse particularly the regularity of the graphic carnage of children.

It's also a conflict where our Governments are directly contributing to the indiscriminate murder of thousands of civilians at an alarming pace via their support of Israel. Given the public are ultimately responsible for the Governments they elect they have a responsibility to pressure them to cease supporting a genocide otherwise the blood is also on their hands.