Most Americans Afraid to Publicly State Position about Israeli Conflict (Opinion)
While there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who have no issue with taking a side in the Israeli war in Gaza by demonstrating and posting online under their own name, most Americans are keeping their views to themselves. But why? There has been a call by some very wealthy, influential Americans that corporations and universities need to state a position so people can see whose side they are on. The American government and a tremendous amount of business leaders have a pro-Israel position. However, many Americans and others around the world are confronted with a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and feel that innocent people are stuck in the middle of the conflict and are dying because of the conflict. No one questions that Israel was attacked and that thousands of Israeli’s died as a result. The issue now is Israel’s pursuit of Hamas who are entrenched among Palestinians who are just everyday citizens and have nothing to do with Hamas or the attack. It cannot be denied that Israel was caught completely off guard and had scaled down monitoring of Hamas on the Gaza strip. That being said, this is an attack that should have been a lot less severe. One cannot help but wonder that if the attack had been less severe would Israel’s response also have been less severe.
America has been drawn into two wars over the past two years: Ukraine and now Israel. It’s easy to step outside this picture and view America as a sort of watchdog, a keeper of the international gate. This is disturbing to some Americans because of our own internal problems, in particular the inability to finalize a federal budget needed to pay not only for other countries wars, but our own needs such as Social Security, military, government operations. Why are we always the go-to?
As of today it appears there will be an immense loss of life in Gaza, and that many of those lives belonged to children, woman, Palestinians who lived in the enclave and had no terrorist connections. This seems unfair to many Americans, but the overall, primary position of the United States is an unquestionable support of Israel, and those who are not on that page are considered pro-Hamas, support terrorists, etc. This is why many Americans will not publicly state their position unless it is pro-Israel. To state otherwise gets one accused of being anti-Semitic, or worse.
Even when this conflict settles down – it will never be over – it almost seems like Hamas won. They entrenched themselves among the citizens who are killed because Israel knows that cannot pick and chose who to shoot or bomb. The Hamas appear not to care that innocent citizens are killed – at the hands of Israel. If Hamas are willing to sacrifice everything for what they are seeking – a homeland for Palestinians – and they do sacrifice everything, including tens of thousands of lives, then it can be seen how they think they won. There will be no homeland but there also will be no people left to need a homeland.
The fact is though no one won. And the war will continue for months, probably longer. Meanwhile, the new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is proposing a 14.5 billion dollar unattached aid package to Israel to help them with their efforts. As the most politically divided country on Earth, at least half of Americans support this move. The other half want the fighting to cease and for citizens in Gaza to be extracted from the conflict.
Regardless of your political position in this matter, everyone should be able to agree, there are not 2 million terrorists living on the Gaza Strip. It’s preposterous to state otherwise.