Of course I wasn't a teenager in the sixties and have to go by what I know from reading and hearing about it, movies, etc. But I think there are some things that repeat themselves, if perhaps not always in exactly the same way, in each new generation of teenagers / young people.

Each time, they rebel against the positions of their parents' generation because they see hypocrisy, adherence to outdated traditions or viewpoints for historical reasons which no longer affect them, cynicism and perhaps most of all a willingness to be selectively blind to outrages when they are perpetrated by 'our side'. Though on the other hand, as you said, teenagers also tend to be even more 'black vs white' in their thinking than older generations, and can be just as blind for the outrages perpetrated by the rebels or underdogs they favour. Whether it's the sixties and seventies with protests against the Vietnam war, or for my generation in 2003 with protests against the Iraq war, or today.

There's an obvious similarity between the sixties' chant of 'hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?' and today's teenagers who just can't understand how many people in older generations just collectively shrug at the thousands of dead children in Gaza in the past month because they figure Hamas asked for it.

But there are certainly also differences - today's world is far more globalized than the one of the sixties, both in terms of having easy and near-instant access to a far wider range of sources and viewpoints, and in terms of greater diversity in the US or Europe. Hence young people can identify more easily with people suffering on the other side of the globe. And I think it's also fair to say that politics and morality have gotten more complicated, at least for most people - back in the Cold War days, there was more of a consensus about the geopolitical situation, even if young generations still rebelled against that consensus.

Another difference more specific to the conflict in question is that today's young generation has grown up in a period further removed from the Holocaust and from the early years of Israel's history, and until the start of this conflict had only ever seen Israel in the role of oppressor - sometimes falling victim to small-scale terrorist attacks, yes, but killing and harming far more Palestinians than the other way around. And of course also in a time when the negative legacies of colonialism and racism are a very big topic - and while Israel obviously isn't a colonial state in the normal sense of the word, there are still a lot of similarities so it's logical enough that people make the association. Even if the history of how it came about is different, the situation prior to this conflict, with the Palestinians locked into Gaza and the increasingly fragmented remains of the West Bank that Israeli settlers haven't stolen yet, looks a LOT like the Bantustans of 1980s apartheid South Africa.

I'm sure you're aware that there are plenty of people on the Israeli side, including ministers in the Netanyahu government, whose ideas are just as extreme in reverse - who want an Israel 'from the river to the sea' (it's even literally in the Likud manifesto, I believe) with all Palestinians gone, unless they accept a status as permanent second class citizens (and even then, only if there aren't too many of those). I think the point of the phrase, used on either side, is not so much that it necessarily advocates genocide or eradication, but rather that it expresses the sentiment of not giving a fuck about what happens to the other nation: they can all die or all emigrate or have their own state for all we care, whatever, just as long as it isn't here.

You may not agree that what Israel is actually doing today is genocide, but there are certainly ministers in its government who openly do advocate for, at a minimum, mass ethnic cleansing by removing all Palestinians from Gaza (which by the definition most experts use is genocide, even if they are expelled rather than killed). And when journalists go interview people in the streets of Jerusalem, it doesn't generally take long until they find someone whose thinking is more along the lines of 'no, but if we expel them, they might try to come back - we should just kill them all'. Yes, it's a minority in Israel who is that extreme, but let's stop this nonsense about how all Israelis only want peace and only the Palestinians have these violent ideas.

Yeah, as discussed at length above, young people do have a tendency to think in rather black and white terms - but that being said, if I look at the rhetoric from a lot of Americans whether in the media or here on the site, I see little if any interest in 'peace and freedom for Palestine', only for Israel, so I'd imagine your American teenagers don't see that either. The Biden government is of course trying to push Israel to reduce the collateral damage, in secret and increasingly also openly, but they see that as too little too late - can you really even call it collateral damage anymore when the large majority of the victims is innocent and when the enemy is a terrorist organization who care more about winning hearts and minds than about their physical territory?

I dare say I was even more windy.