I think about this a lot re: Israel. I had a conversation once with an Israeli where he was convinced "everyone is racist," but we're all too woke to admit it or something, or have some belief that racism is wrong but work to overcome this inherent thing.
His arguments were all very zero sum, "if we didn't do it to them they'd do it to us," and from conversations with friends I'm thinking that what's happening here is the Israeli media apparatus focuses heavily on creating an "us vs them" mentality for diaspora Jewish people, which has now backfired to create a whole lot of Islamophobic and racist people.
It's interesting because one may think that people with a historical trauma of one of the worst things ever carried out in human history would be the least likely to do something like that and the most likely to see the writing on the wall if something like that was about to happen again, but sadly that was too optimistic: the opposite happened.
People with historical trauma are far more likely to inflict further wrongs than people without historical trauma. This is the case for individual trauma too. It has always been this way.
