That AIBU thread is mad. I mean, thinking kids study the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for GCSEs means they're well informed(!) 🤦♂️
I don't know a single teen in Northern Ireland who studies that for GCSEs and Scotland doesn't have GCSEs. And I doubt England & Wales even has it at GCSE unless one of you know?
If it starts in the 1940s, then it's skewed and incomplete as WW1 was also critical to understanding how partition came to be. Late 19th Century is also an important part of the story.
Young people see footage online via social media, but they're not experienced enough to detect propaganda from Hamas/Iran much to Khamenai's amusement recently!
They also aren't familiar with International Humanitarian Law.
In short, a lot of people don't really know how to correctly assess the footage they're seeing. They've a lot of gaps in their knowledge which shows when they start trying to create a false equivalence with other conflicts, terrorist groups and so on.
But that's what happens when people lack very important pieces of information. The message the last nearly 10 years telling people that how they feel about something emotionally equates to the truth and that NOBODY has the right to question it has been very damaging.
Absolutely Prime conditions for rogue States such as China, Russia and Iran to exploit the West with. They're pushing at an open door with that kind of thought process.
It doesn't help that the Western powers have been steadily declining for decades now, especially the United States whose floating pier sums up Biden's administration in addition to their chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan we all saw.
That gave Putin absolute confidence to invade Ukraine as he knew NATO wouldn't actually lift a finger. After all, he took Crimea in 2014!
It's important to Israel that the West remains strong, especially militarily.
Most people in the West have not had to live with military confrontations or terrorist attacks on any large scale. I think the West has forgotten how to win a war. We've not won one since 1991 Gulf War in the conventional sense. And terrorist groups have since massively evolved from the 20th Century forms of an insurgency to cell structure and are now much more like a small to medium sized army. Hamas certainly is and, I think, Hezbollah.
That should give you some clues as to why the United States loves to lord it up when it comes to the Belfast Agreement. They've had a LOT of military failures since 1991. But the Troubles was a pretty minor conflict, definitely not a war and PIRA/UVF were never on the scale or capabilities as Hamas and Hezbollah.
Ugh.