The serious lesson from UCLA's Meltdown Girl

Amid the joking about Meltdown Girl (and here is a well-worn Internet meme used to good comedic effect on the subject), there is something important for supporters of Israel to realize.

As commenter Max writes:

Even though many of us are enjoying this moment of schadenfreude, that video contains some clues about what we're struggling with, especially on college campuses:

1. The girl is having a purely emotional experience. To her, and millions of other impressionable college kids around the world, understanding the Middle East conflict isn't about historical facts, complex political realities, or necessary security measures. It is simply an emotional issue. Pathos-based rhetoric will very often carry the day. Many of these impressionable kids get whipped into a frenzy. Which leads to my next point:

2. To much of the pro-divestment crowd, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been reduced to a cartoon image of sadistic, imperialistic Israelis brutalizing helpless, innocent Palestinians. To them, the conflict boils down to depraved Israelis perpetrating their evil unless "we" can stop them.

This girl is probably not consciously anti-Semitic. But she's definitely been infected by this Israel-as-pure-unmitigated-evil rhetoric that's so reminiscent of some of history's more loathsome, demagogic anti-Jewish propaganda campaigns.

Indeed. The girl is not an idiot. She was valedictorian in her high school class of some 700 students. The only way to understand her severe emotional reaction to a meaningless vote is to understand that she isn't using her brain when thinking about Israel.

For people like her, Israel is not the nation state of the Jewish people. - it is a shorthand meme for evil itself. It is not a place where people are born, live, love and laugh, where people care about each other and even about those who want to destroy them. It is not a place that has given back to the world far more than it takes. It is merely a symbol of racism, oppression and tyranny,  more so than its truly tyrannical neighbors.

How do people like Danielle get infected with such hate? Simple, actually. It is because one side of the Israel/anti-Israel debate deals with facts, and the other side deals with emotions.

And emotions always win.

I spoke about this in my 2010 Hasbara 2.0 lecture, but since no one wants to watch a movie-length lecture, here is a ten minute section on this very theme, along with what Zionists must do to even the playing field.