The arrests of rival student protesters following Mike Huckabee’s speech against President Obama’s Palestine policy highlight tensions among Israeli youth.

The FOX News contributor and former presidential candidate spoke in Jerusalem on Monday from a Palestinian neighborhood in support of expanding Israeli settlements, saying there should be no Palestinian state on the West Bank of Jerusalem. The reception was private, but Huckabee later elaborated his opposition to Obama’s policy of a two-state solution and ban on expanding settlements into Palestinian territory.

“It’s inconceivable that we would ever understand how two sovereign governments would control the very same piece of real estate,” Huckabee told TIME magazine. “We don’t know how that would work.”

Keeping with decades-old American policy, Obama has called for a two-state solution. He has also opposed expansion of settlements into Palestinian areas, including those near Hebrew University and the Shepard Hotel site where Huckabee spoke. [Scoop44 reported on how Obama’s efforts to strengthen relations with the Arab world have alienated some Israeli Jews in a previous article.]

Protesting Huckabee’s presence outside the event was Peace Now, an advocacy group that calls for peace without expansion beyond the 1967 borders and works with other groups opposed to development expansion. The pro-settlement protesters in attendance, Im Tirtzu (“If you will it” in Hebrew), denounced Peace Now members as traitors from behind the police border put between the two groups, according to the Jerusalem Post.

The two camps of protesters clashed in a nearby neighborhood after police had left the event with Huckabee. Four were arrested, police told the Jerusalem Post.

A generational shift in Israel and Palestine, according to Reza Aslan, author of No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, is that youth activists are often more motivated by repercussions for Islam or Judaism.

“When it comes to Israel and Palestine, it’s primarily scripturalism and not nationalism as the primary marker of identity for the youth, not like it was for their parents,” Aslan told Scoop44. “Some of the religious movements in Israel, like (among the Orthodox Haredi) don’t accept the authority of the state….In the Arab world, Pan-Arabism was a big part of the 1950s, but those things are gone now.”

Viewing themselves as on-campus Zionist watchdogs, Im Tirtzu claims that 80 percent of Israeli university classes teach “anti-Zionist” and “anti-nationalist thought.” At the University of Haifa in June, Im Tirtzu members clashed with campus security when Arab students arranged a controversial speaker from the Islamic Movement, known for incitement against the Israeli government.

On Americans campuses, students of the Union of Progressive Zionists try to expand education beyond what they see as university bias from the Left, said the group’s Director Tammy Shapiro. This fall, the group will become J Street U, joining forces with pro-Israeli advocacy group J Street, which opposed Huckabee’s speech.

“On American campuses you see the radical left as more organized and loud and professors espouse more Left wing perspectives,” said Shapiro. “For years on campus you’ve heard ‘Israel can do no right’ or ‘Israel can do no wrong,’ but there’s been no middle ground debate. A lot of what we’ve done is bring those voices who are more questioning from Israel and I think that’s been an important thing to create a more nuanced debate that’s not black and white.”

While the debate in Israel has been more nuanced, there is great frustration among both Israeli Arabs and Jews after the fruitless peace efforts by several American presidents, according to Isaac Luria, campaigns director for J Street.

“There is a demographic threat to Israel’s character as a Jewish democracy by how many Palestinian’s live in the West Bank,” said Luria. “The Israeli government should think about the repercussions of how the Palestinian Territories would change the government if they were given a vote, instead of their own state.”

Economic opportunities from peaceful border agreements could improve unemployment in the Palestinian Territories, where only 17 percent of the youth are employed, according to Gallup polling, and 70 percent of the Arab population is under 30 years old.

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