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Polls suggest the Middle East is not top on the minds of a large number of young Americans.

The Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School, which has been surveying young voters for more than two decades, found in a poll this year that among 16 topics of importance to voters under 30, the Israel-Gaza war was in next-to-last place…

Israeli governments over the years have invested much effort in what they call their hasbara, or global PR — pushing the Israeli narrative worldwide.

And it was largely successful. This may be the first episode in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict where the Palestinian cause has driven U.S. discourse.

There are many reasons. The sheer scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza, with massive destruction that wiped out entire families, went beyond previous Israeli offensives and quickly overshadowed the Oct. 7 attacks. It is difficult to put positive spin on tens of thousands of dead.

The evolution of social media into an omnipresent visual force has shown the suffering of Gazans to the world relentlessly.

A new generation of Palestinian activists appears far better organized than their predecessors. The Palestinian PR machine was relatively ineffective in the past.

Today Palestinian activists operate busy WhatsApp chats and can flood the zone on par with Israeli hasbara.

“Social media allows people to see lots and lots of material that affirms what they believe,” Porter said. “The accumulative effect is powerful over time.”

It is frighteningly clear – and not only with respect to Palestine – that liberal democracies have failed to produce governments that represent either the views or the interests of the general population. They give control to people who are generally from a small elite, and who – even if this was not their initial impulse – are driven by a lust for power. It is over 100 years since Mark Twain wrote “We have the best government that money can buy”, but it is still true that those with money have a grossly disproportionate influence on who gets elected and on what they focus on afterwards. This is especially true in America, where presidential candidates can spend over $100 million on their campaign, but it also applies in other liberal democracies. Meanwhile, most people are persuaded that their democratic role is limited to ticking a box every four or five years in order to put into power what is often seen as the least bad option.

As has been repeatedly demonstrated, significant reforms have only happened when elected politicians have come under major pressure from below. The anti-war movement that we have seen growing on American campuses could prove to be the beginning of such pressure, in a repeat of the movement that helped end the war in Vietnam. That historical precedent is no doubt in the minds of both the government and the protestors.