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By Ali Abunimah for Electronicintifada
As the US and Israel launched an all-out war on Iran, they did so amid shrinking American public support.
As recently as last week, a YouGov poll found that just a quarter of Americans wanted a war against Iran.
On Friday, a Gallup survey showed American sentiment shifting decisively towards the Palestinian people and away from Israel.
Forty-one percent of Americans now sympathize more with the Palestinians, while 36 percent sympathize more with the Israelis, according to a new Gallup survey.
The poll reverses the firm’s findings from a year ago and confirms long-term trends.
Last year, a Pew survey indicated that more than half of people in the United States held a negative view of Israel – an 11-point surge since 2022, according to that organization.
Loss of support across the board
Gallup notes that over the last 25 years, “Israelis consistently held double-digit leads in Americans’ Middle East sympathies, with the gap averaging 43 points between 2001 and 2018.”
But that lead began to erode from around 2019, and Israel’s dramatic loss of support has only accelerated during Israel’s US-backed genocide in Gaza.
Fifty-seven percent of Americans favor an independent Palestinian state, according to Gallup, close to the highest level of support ever recorded by the firm.
There remains a clear partisan gap: a whopping 65 percent of Democrats sympathize more with Palestinians, while just 17 percent favor the Israelis.
Support for Israel among Republicans remains strong: Those sympathizing more with Israelis peaked at 87 percent in 2018, but that number now stands at 70 percent – the lowest level since 2004.
The greatest shift has been among so-called independents, according to Gallup: “By 41 percent to 30 percent, independents say they sympathize more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, whereas in all prior years, they were more sympathetic toward the Israelis, including by 42 percent to 34 percent last year.”
In recent years, a clear generational shift has emerged, with younger Americans tending to support Palestinians. But as Gallup notes in its new survey, “Americans of all age groups have grown more sympathetic to the Palestinians in recent years.”
Yet younger Americans remain the strongest reservoir of support for Palestine. “Among those aged 18 to 34, 53 percent say they sympathize more with the Palestinians, marking the first time a majority of this age group has expressed this view,” according to Gallup.
Meanwhile, a record low of 23 percent of young adults now sympathize more with the Israelis.
Democrats chose genocide over White House
Eroding support for Israel should shape policy – if democracy works as taught in civics class.
But the Democratic Party under President Joe Biden preferred to sacrifice its chances of re-election in 2024 to maintain its support for Israel’s genocide despite an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters favoring an arms embargo.
An internal “autopsy” of the 2024 Democratic campaign has reportedly concluded that the party’s support for the Gaza genocide played a major role in its candidate Kamala Harris losing the election.
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee is demanding that the party release the report, noting that the advocacy group had “repeatedly warned that a political reckoning would be inevitable if the US did not end its financial, military and diplomatic backing of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza.”
Still, the most senior elected Democrat, New York Senator Chuck Schumer, recently made clear that his priority remains ensuring that American money and weapons keep flowing to the genocidal regime in Tel Aviv.
The Trump administration’s escalating support for Israel’s most extreme positions – including Ambassador Mike Huckabee’s endorsement of Israeli territorial expansion as far as Baghdad and Cairo, and American recognition of Israeli colonies in the occupied West Bank – is arguably more democratic: at least it is in tune with a majority of Republicans, if not with most Americans.
But even on the right, there have been unprecedented ruptures, with many commentators, most notably Tucker Carlson, expressing not just open hostility to Israel but tentatively embracing Palestinians.
The “Epstein regime” does what it wants
Eroding support for Israel may eventually affect policy, but public opposition has not restrained President Donald Trump from launching another American war.
Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute argued that Israel’s dwindling support pushed Washington and Tel Aviv to speed up their attack.
“It is difficult to overstate the significance of this,” Parsi commented regarding the Gallup poll the day before the American-Israeli joint assault. “This is a key reason why Israel – and its supporters in the US – have a sense of desperate urgency when it comes to war with Iran and annexation of Palestine.”
“The window for these aggressions with US support is closing,” Parsi added.
Tehran University professor Mohammad Marandi – speaking from the Iranian capital under attack – called the unaccountable elite responsible for this war the “Epstein regime.”
Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine, now out from Haymarket Books.
Also wrote One Country: A Bold-Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.
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