When it comes to Palestine, the kids aren’t all right

Does anyone remember ‘Free Tibet’? Way back when, in the olden days of about the 1990s, if you knew nothing much about the world or politics but wanted to show you generally had the right outlook on things it was normal that you might have a sticker or a poster, or even go on a protest saying ‘Free Tibet’.

It didn’t do any good, of course. Tibet remains doggedly unfree. For it turns out that the Chinese Communist party is not especially interested in the opinions of a few Devon-based sandal-wearers. The CCP occupies Tibet still, and continues to torture, repress and kill anyone there who stands against its brutal occupation.

It seems to me that at least a part of that river of energy has in recent years been directed in a different direction. Specifically into the now even more commonly heard slogan ‘Free Palestine’. Unlike Tibet, the question of what ‘Palestine’ might actually be is an unclear one. Does it mean the West Bank and Gaza? Does it mean just the West Bank? Or does it mean these areas plus all of Israel? On this question there is a happy lack of clarity, which allows the well-meaning heirs of the ‘Free Tibet’ crowd to swim in the same pools as the most rabid anti-Semites and would-be genocidists. And of course the government of Israel – unlike China – is vulnerable to international opinion.

The fact that ‘Free Palestine’ might actually have become the campaign of otherwise uninterested people can be seen from some recent polling in the US and UK.

A poll carried out last month by Ipsos Mori found that among 18 to 34-year-olds in the UK 23 per cent want Britain to support the Palestinians and just 7 per cent us to support the Israelis.