The numbers are staggering: According to an August 2025 Harvard-Harris poll, 60% of Americans aged 18-24 now say they support Hamas over Israel. Not “sympathize with Palestinians.” Not “want peace in the Middle East.” They explicitly support Hamas—a designated terrorist organization that massacred 1,200 people on October 7, 2023, including raping women, beheading babies, and burning families alive.
How did we get here?
The answer isn’t simple, but it’s traceable. In The Enemy Within: How the West Is Destroying Itself, I document the precise mechanisms behind this collapse—from the weaponization of “anti-whiteness” and systemic guilt to the foreign actors who exploited these vulnerabilities. It’s a story of social media manipulation, foreign interference, institutional capture, and a generation desperately searching for a sense of belonging. And if we don’t understand how this happened, we can’t stop it from getting worse.
The Perfect Storm: TikTok, Universities, and the Search for Identity
Social Media: The Soviet Playbook Goes Digital
The Palestinian narrative didn’t conquer Gen Z by accident. It was engineered.
In the 1960s, the Soviet KGB, working with Yasser Arafat, transformed the Palestinian cause from a regional Arab-Israeli conflict into a global anti-colonial struggle. They rebranded Palestinian Arabs as “indigenous victims” and Israelis as “white European colonizers”—a narrative designed to weaponize Western guilt and recruit the global left.
But the Soviets could only dream of what China and other hostile actors achieved with TikTok.
A 2024 study by Northeastern University found that pro-Palestinian posts on TikTok outnumbered pro-Israel posts 20 to 1—with 170,430 pro-Palestinian posts versus just 8,843 pro-Israel posts. The pro-Palestinian content accumulated 236 million views, following an organic “social movement” pattern: growing steadily over time, peaking during key events, then declining symmetrically.
Pro-Israel content, by contrast, spiked briefly after October 7, 2023, then rapidly faded—the typical pattern of a news event, not a movement.
This wasn’t organic. TikTok’s algorithm, controlled by ByteDance in China, determines what Gen Z sees. And what they see is a carefully curated narrative: Israelis as oppressors, Palestinians as victims, resistance as heroic. The app has become the primary news source for young Americans, with 63% of People Also Ask interactions happening on mobile devices.
The infrastructure of manipulation runs deep—from algorithmic amplification to coordinated influence campaigns. As explored in The Enemy Within: How the West Is Destroying Itself, foreign actors have systematically exploited social media platforms to sow division, radicalize Western youth, and turn our own technologies against us. TikTok is just one weapon in a broader arsenal.
Universities: The Qatari Gold Rush
Follow the money.
Between 2001 and 2021, American universities received over $17 billion in undisclosed foreign funding—much of it from Qatar, the country that hosts Hamas’s leadership in luxury Doha hotels.
The pattern is unmistakable: Universities that receive Qatari funding see dramatic spikes in antisemitic incidents.
- Northwestern University received $600 million from Qatar. After October 7, the campus erupted in pro-Hamas protests, with students chanting “Long live the Intifada.”
- Georgetown University received $1.5 billion. Its campus became ground zero for anti-Israel activism.
- Cornell University received $1.8 billion. A student posted online threats to “rape and kill” Jewish women and “shoot up” the kosher dining hall.
This isn’t a coincidence. This is institutional capture.
Qatar doesn’t fund Middle Eastern studies programs out of generosity. They fund them to control the narrative. Professors whose salaries depend on Qatari money teach students that Israel is an “apartheid state,” that Zionism is racism, that “resistance” (read: terrorism) is justified.
And it works. The data is undeniable: the more Qatari money a university receives, the higher the rate of antisemitic incidents on campus. The universities transformed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a complex geopolitical reality into a simple moral binary: oppressor versus oppressed, colonizer versus indigenous, evil versus good.
The construction of the Palestinian narrative—from its Soviet origins through its modern digital incarnation—is meticulously documented in The Palestinian Myth: How the invented Palestine to erase Israel and take over the West. Understanding how this myth was manufactured is the first step in dismantling its hold on young minds.
The Psychology of Belonging: Why Gen Z Is Vulnerable
But foreign money and algorithmic manipulation don’t fully explain why 60% of young Americans now support a terrorist organization. There’s something deeper: Gen Z is desperately searching for community, identity, and purpose.
This generation grew up isolated. They experienced childhood through screens, adolescence through social media, and early adulthood through a pandemic. They’re the loneliest, most anxious, most depressed generation in recorded history. And they’re desperate to belong to something bigger than themselves.
The pro-Palestine movement offers precisely that.
Building Identity Through Activism: The Somerville Model
Walk through Somerville, Massachusetts—a progressive enclave just outside Boston—and you’ll see how the left has mastered community-building through political identity.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) don’t just hold meetings. They’ve created an entire lifestyle:
- Running clubs where members jog together while discussing “decolonization.”
- Cooking collectives that combine meal prep with political education
- Farmers’ marketsare branded as “mutual aid” and “anti-capitalist.”
From – Somervillforpalestine Instagram page
- Book clubs focused on radical texts.
- Social events where the “Free Palestine” yard sign is your ticket to inclusion
This is genius—and it’s working. Young people don’t join the DSA for the political theory. They participate in the running club, stay in the community, and adopt the politics because that’s the price of belonging.
Palestine has become central to this identity. Supporting Palestine isn’t just a political position—it’s a marker of moral righteousness, a signal that you’re one of the “good” people. It’s the new BLM yard sign, the new rainbow flag. It says: “I’m educated, I’m compassionate, I’m on the right side of history.”
And if you question it? You’re not just wrong—you’re a Zionist, a colonizer, complicit in genocide. You’re expelled from the community. The social cost is too high, so most young people simply conform.
The Algorithmic Echo Chamber
Once you’re in, the algorithm keeps you there.
Social media doesn’t just reflect your views—it radicalizes them. The platforms are designed to maximize engagement, and nothing drives engagement like moral outrage. So if you watch one video about Gaza, the algorithm feeds you ten more. If you like a post about “Israeli apartheid,” it shows you fifty accounts posting the same message.
Before you know it, your entire feed is pro-Palestine content. Every influencer you follow, every account you see, every comment section you read reinforces the same narrative. You’re not getting news—you’re getting propaganda. And you don’t even know it.
This is how you end up with college students who can’t name the river or the sea in “From the river to the sea,” but chant it anyway. This is how you get protesters demanding a “ceasefire” who can’t explain why Hamas still holds hostages. This is how 60% of young Americans support a terrorist organization—they genuinely don’t know it’s a terrorist organization. They think it’s a “resistance movement.”
The social media manipulation, combined with institutional capture, creates what intelligence agencies call a “total information environment”—a closed loop in which every source reinforces the same narrative. When universities, social media, celebrities, and peer groups all send the same message, critical thinking becomes nearly impossible.
The Numbers Don’t Lie: A Generation Lost
The trajectory is terrifying. Look at how support for Hamas among 18-24 year-olds has evolved:
- October 2023 (immediately after the massacre): 48% Hamas vs. 52% Israel
- March 2025: Still 48% Hamas vs. 52% Israel
- August 2025: 60% Hamas vs. 40% Israel
In less than two years, support for a terrorist organization among young Americans jumped from 48% to 60%. Meanwhile, among Americans 65 and older, support for Israel remains at 92%, with only 8% supporting Hamas.
This isn’t just a generational divide. It’s a generational collapse.
The Consequences: Rising Antisemitism and Moral Collapse
The results of this indoctrination are already catastrophic.
Antisemitic incidents in the United States tripled in 2024, with 1,654 reported cases—the highest number in decades. Jewish students are harassed on campus, Jewish-owned businesses are vandalized, and synagogues require armed security. In Australia, the Bondi Beach massacre on December 14, 2025, killed 16 Jews celebrating Hanukkah—the deadliest terror attack in Australian history.
But the damage goes beyond physical violence. An entire generation has been taught to view the world through a warped moral lens where:
- Terrorism is “resistance.”
- The massacre of civilians is “decolonization.”
- The genocide of Jews is “liberation.”
- Evidence doesn’t matter if the narrative feels right
This isn’t just about Israel. This is about the collapse of critical thinking, the death of nuance, the triumph of ideology over truth.
When 60% of young Americans support Hamas, they’re not making a careful geopolitical calculation. They’re repeating what their algorithm told them, what their professors taught them, what their friends believe. They’ve been manipulated—by hostile foreign actors, by radicalized institutions, by social media platforms designed to exploit their psychology.
And they have no idea.
What Happens Next?
The infrastructure of manipulation is still in place. TikTok is still controlled by China. Qatar is still funding universities. The DSA is still building community through political identity. The algorithm is still radicalizing young people.
And the numbers keep getting worse.
If current trends continue, by 2030, a supermajority of young Americans will actively support groups designated as terrorist organizations by their own government. They’ll vote for politicians who share those views. They’ll enter positions of power in media, academia, government, and corporations. And they’ll bring those beliefs with them.
This isn’t a distant hypothetical. It’s already happening. A generation that supports Hamas today will help other terrorist organizations tomorrow. They’ll apply the same moral framework to other conflicts. They’ll excuse other atrocities. They’ll justify other massacres.
Watch this young American student calmly declare that killing Israelis and Jews is “resistance.” This isn’t his first time—he previously justified the murder of two Jews in Washington.
How is this okay? How does a teenager in America learn to call murder “resistance”? He was taught this by his professors, his social media feed, and his peer group. And where were his parents? Where were his teachers? This is where we have failed as a society.
Unless we stop it.
Fighting Back: What Can Be Done
The solution starts with understanding how we got here—how the Palestinian narrative was constructed, how it spread, and why young people believe it.
We need to:
- Expose foreign funding of universities and demand transparency
- Regulate social media algorithms that radicalize users
- Counter the narrative with historical truth and factual evidence
- Build alternative communities that don’t require ideological conformity
- Teach critical thinking instead of ideological indoctrination
Most importantly, we need to tell the truth about the Palestinian myth—its Soviet origins, its fabricated history, its reliance on social manipulation rather than facts. We need to expose how hostile actors weaponized social media to turn an entire generation against the West, against Israel, and against truth itself.
The battle for Gen Z’s minds is the battle for our civilization’s future. And right now, we’re losing.
But it’s not over yet.
The manipulation of an entire generation didn’t happen by accident—it was engineered through decades of narrative warfare, institutional capture, and social media exploitation. To understand the full scope of how the Palestinian myth was constructed and spread, and how social media amplified a fabricated narrative into mainstream belief, read The Palestinian Myth. To see how foreign actors and domestic radicals are systematically destroying Western civilization from within—from Chinese influence on TikTok to Qatari capture of universities—explore The Enemy Within: How the West Is Destroying Itself.
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