This would all be comical if there wasn't something profoundly callous about her little "hostage" video while actual hostages languish, or her pretending to be handcuffed at the airport as soon as she came within sight of the cameras, or all the other gimmicks trotted out for this petty charade. A generation of young Westerners, adrift in their dissolving societies and deconstructed cultures, are grasping for narratives and moral meaning. And when they think they've found it, as in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they cling to it as to a life raft. As though they've stumbled upon the only source of spiritual sustenance available to them - because in the spiritual and emotional wasteland that is the modern Western social-media childhood, it very well might be. Israelis and Palestinians are real people standing knee-deep in a long and complex history. Both tell pollsters in huge numbers that they're convinced the other side seeks their eradication, a belief that drives their decisions. And into this real and horrible conflict come prancing these Western stuntpeople, these young activists who live their entire social lives in an online information landscape almost entirely consumed by moral signaling. They have nothing serious to say about any of it, nothing beyond a simpleton's moral preening. Because it isn't really about any of us real and complex human beings, it's about the moral meaning lacking in their own lives. Or in other words, it's about her, it was always about her. And in that, she represents an entire sad generation.
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