December 12, 2023 - 7:15pm
The US remains a global outlier in its popular support for Israel, but pro-Israel sentiments are declining. Americans continue to side more with Israelis than Palestinians, yet recent data shows that net support for Israelis dropped a full 14 percentage points from October to November amid continued fighting in Gaza.
Polling company YouGov has asked US respondents which side they felt more sympathy for in the Israel-Palestine conflict several times over recent years. Net support for Israel, calculated by subtracting the percentage of people who feel more sympathy for Palestine from the percentage who back Israel, has been in the teens to low-20s for years, but spiked to a high of +38% in the days after 7 October. In the weeks since, it has declined to +24%.
If the current opinions of young voters are any indicator of where public opinion is moving, American views on the issue will start to look more like those of the UK, where public support for Israel is much more tepid and has been for decades. British support for Israel over Palestine has been in negative territory for some time — like the US it surged upwards in the days after 7 October, but has been declining since.
As the graph above shows, net sympathy for Israel over Palestine spiked in both the US and the UK after 7 October and has been gradually declining since, but remains higher in both countries than the corresponding figures prior to the attacks. Net support for Israel has been consistently about 30 points higher in the US compared to the UK. Youth opinion has followed a similar pattern in the two countries, with net support lower for young people compared to the general population, spiking after 7 October and then declining. Unlike the general populations, net support for Israel is now lower than it was prior to October among Generation Z and younger millennials in both countries. It is worth noting that less recent data is available for the UK.
Opinions on Israel largely fall along party lines, with Right-leaning voters favouring Israel and Left-leaning voters holding more critical views of the nation and its military activities. Young people’s opposition to Israel is a reflection of the finding that Gen Z Americans lean further Left than previous youth cohorts, and show no signs of moving to the Right with age.
The graph below illustrates that net support for Israel among Americans aged 18-29 peaked at +24% in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s attacks, before declining to a low of -13%. Young people in Britain remained broadly in favour of the Palestinian cause even after 7 October, but net support for Israel has now dropped to a low of -37% among the 18-24 age demographic.
The Democratic Party is generally supportive of Israel, with the exception of some younger and more progressive members of Congress, but its base, which skews young, is much more critical. Attitudes among Democrats and Republicans have fluctuated significantly since 2001 but, overall, support for Israel has risen about 20 points among Republicans and declined by around 45 points among Democrats, according to Gallup.
This may prove to be a problem for the party in the coming decades as the Democratic base becomes increasingly hostile to Israel. Then, the Democrats could be forced to reassess their stance on the issue, or see an erosion of its majority among young voters.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeJust proof positive that people don’t understand what happened or what Israel’s options are. Why are we surprised.
Also, once Israel goes, who do you think will be next?
“White oppressors” and “settler colonialists”. I find it pretty hilarious when people who immigrated to the US call people who were born here “colonialists”.
Do tell. ISIS, which Israel supported in Syria as enthusiastically as Britain and the United States did but with far more practical assistance, is like al-Qaeda in despising Hamas, which fulsomely returns the compliment. Hamas is allied to Iran, it participates in elections, and it has not implemented Sharia in Gaza in anything like a form acceptable to those factions, if at all. There, it has stamped them out without mercy.
To ISIS or al-Qaeda, it is absolutely forbidden to fight alongside Hamas on those grounds, and it would be even if none of them applied, since Hamas, while it vaguely aspires to a global caliphate as in some sense any Sunni Muslim does, is fundamentally and ultimately a nationalist movement, really only actively seeking an Islamic State in Palestine, and then only its own understanding of one, the character of which may already be seen in Gaza. ISIS cannot, however, hold it against Hamas that it has been funded by Israel, although it is now permissible to point out that it has been.
Germany, Russia the US maybe
How many nukes do the Zionists have again ?
you only need one properly functioning one!
Enough
Where is Israel going? They are the ones doing most of the killing, have a formidable army and about 200 nukes. They are under no existential threat from Palestinians and are rather friendly with the countries (ie Saudi Arabia) supplying the Islamists in Syria (as are the US). Those Islamists are a threat to the west. Hamas is not.
As for what happens now, the killings so far although grossly disproportionate are only the beginning. The situation in Gaza looks like it will cause many more deaths from lack of access to housing, water, healthcare, the destruction of the water system and all the rest. This is based on what the UN says. There’s probably no way out of hundreds of people dying and/or emigrating which would be seen as ethnic cleansing.
And Hamas is the helpless victim here? If Israel simply lays down its arms, everyone could live in peace? You’re right about one thing – Israel isn’t going anywhere.
PS. Don’t listen to the UN – about anything.
Don’t start none, won’t be none. Hamas started this thing and cares as much for those who put them in charge as they do about the Israelis they raped and tortured to death.
“Disproportionate”? What is grossly disproportionate is the restraint Israel has exercised.
So their opinion must be based on ignorance because it differs from your own? I had the same accusations levelled at me by those on the left after the Brexit vote funnily enough
I get it if someone has a nuanced opinion on Israel. It has done some awful things over the years and still has settlers in the West Bank. I’m not sure that’s the case for most people though. They see Israel as the oppressor of Palestinian people, when in fact it is Hamas that has oppressed its own people.
The graphs do support that many people have a nuanced view. Strong support following the Hamas atrocities followed by a decline due to what they see as Israel’s disproportionate response.
This ‘disproportionate’ thing is a nonsense.
Doesn’t make sense.
You put the force into the field that you need to win. That is all.
Furthermore, 1,400 people murdered. In one day. 250 people kidnapped.
Scale that up to US terms. Imagine a terrorist attack in Carolina or wherever that killed 30,000 people.
How proportionate should the US response be?
Hopefully better than the response to the 11 September attacks which a) failed to win “the war or terrorism” and b) led to the rise of the Taliban, ISIS etc with the ensuing chaos that is still going on.
Even assuming that Israel can defeat Hamas by conventional means, which is a very big if, how many civilian casualties do you think would be proportionate to achieve this? 20,000, 200,000, 2,000,000
Proportions. What proportion of the peaceful inhabitants of the kibbutzim were murdered by Hamas on 7th October? What further proportion of those non-combatants were dragged off into the tunnels as hostages? Total 80%?, 90%? What proportion of Gaza inhabitants have been killed in Israeli strikes? Less than 1%. And of these deaths, counted by Hamas, how many were fighters?
Good point.
Imagine what a “proportionate” response would have been? How about some rape and torture of Gazan women and then uploaded to YouTube. Like for like, eye for an eye.
Hamas is committed to Israel’s destruction and to some extent the killing of Jews (expect maybe those members of anti-Zionist sects) world wide.
We are also learning how to defeat the west. Put your weapons behind your civilians and invite in media cover. Couple that with the US’ DEI ideology where the world is divided into oppressed and oppressor groups and “settler colonialists” are oppressors to be dealt with by any means necessary.
I think it shows that people in the west get bored easily. Same thing is happening with Ukraine, except with accelerated time lines in Israel,
Israel’s response isn’t disproportionate unless it goes further than is required to eradicate Hamas. Since that has not yet happened, Israel’s response is entirely defensible so far.
Could it be that both have a role in bad outcomes for the Palestinian people?
Or maybe Hamas is responsible for the bad outcomes of Palestinian people.
Support for Israel among news consumers in the West will return to equilibrium levels once the fighting has died down, and the news cycle moves on.
Fear of Israel among those who might otherwise choose to attack it will remain long afterwards, and Israel making it damn clear what the costs of a military attack on it are is a benefit which will far outlast the ‘costs’ of temporarily seeing their numbers drop in opinion polls.
People are quick to forget, or too ignorant to know in the first place, what the lessons of history have been for Jews who relied upon others for their security and safety. In short, it works for a while, and then when times get hard, it doesn’t. Israel is nothing if not the fix for that.
The Middle East is a patchwork of dictatorships run by people who get there and stay there by force. Anyone who looks like a soft touch gets replaced by someone who isn’t. The only really democratic country between the Mediterranean and India exists not because public opinion in the West wishes it so, but because they are prepared to defend themselves, gloves off, and the hard men around them know it.
Cynical as this may sound, the fact that the IDF is prepared to keep going even with dead children on TV may actually be the message they need to deliver.
Spot on-Israel will do what it intends to do which is destabilise Hamas to the extent that it can and the withdraw.All the pearl clutching critics will move on and the usual islamo fascist supporters will carry on with their anti semitic shouting.
For Israel its not a debatable issue -its existential .
Israel can only keep bombing civilians because the US gives it the bombs and other weapons to do so. There is rising anger in the US because their tax dollars are paying for mass murder.
Israel is the only true ally the US has in the Middle East. It isn’t going anywhere.
Not only cynical but totally lacking in a straightforward respect for our common humanity.
Yes, let’s extend the hand of humanity to HAMAS.
The use of civilian populations as human shields (never mind the hostage-taking) is part of Hamas’ modus operandi, and the claim being made is that Israel should stop its operations against Hamas in order that those selfsame civilians not be harmed.
Acceding to that claim would legitimize the use of civilian populations as a tactic of war.
Whither then our common humanity?
Unfortunately, I think they are going to have to release the unfiltered video of the atrocities. The denialism of what really happened on 10/7 is already well advanced.
Won’t make a difference. It’ll just be denounced as a “deepfake” or “fake news” or some other buzzword involving “fake”.
Unfortunately we need to continue despite the lack of public goodwill in the West. It would be more pleasant to be more popular, but when my life is on the line, I am happy that the message is being put over in no uncertain terms. There are consequences to murdering, raping and kidnapping Jews. And if we get more of our kidnapped brothers and sisters back, then that will be even better.
Seeing as you’re a firm believer in might has right, does that mean it would be fair game for the rest of the Middle East to attack Israel if they believe they’re strong enough to defeat it? If one day the yanks lose interest like they do with all their foreign escapades then I’ll wager the Israelis will wish they’d made more friends on the international stage
Despite your eagerness for a second Holocaust, it just isn’t going to happen.
The Shi’ia and Sunni loathe each other – and many nations anyway prefer to keep Israel in place as a lightning rod.
Besides, if Israel fell it would take much of the Middle East with it.
If Israel faces an existential threat from an aggressor, I have zero doubt that nation will be nuked into oblivion.
Didn’t pretty much the main players in the Middle East try that before…….?
Iran and it’s proxies don’t need my opinion on whether or not to slaughter us. They will try as soon as they get a chance. And this is the reason I that they and their proxies need to be taught a lesson. I think that most Israelis would wish that we could turn time back to 6th October and continue with our carefree lives, but now the only option is the decisive defeat of Hamas.
Sorry, when it comes to survival, the Israelis don’t care about your opinion, because “making friends with your neighbors” in their case means giving their enemies the opportunity to kill them now. But look at the streets of your capitals. I’m afraid the mob in these streets will kill you first. Maybe I will have the opportunity to call you and ask, “What does it feel like to have your head chopped with a hoe?”
Israel is only able to “continue” because the US supplies the weapons. As citizens in the west see their tax dollars used to fund mass murder, there is a growing anger and if Israel keeps going as it is that “military aid” will dry up.
US supplies Israel weapons to do its work for it. Like they supply Ukraine and other allies/proxies. When the US fought the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and ISIS directly did you call that mass murder as well? Did you ever check how many innocent people died and how much misery was wreaked in Falluja, Mosul or Raqqa?
We stand with Israel.
Tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of people across Europe and North America stand with Israel.
You are not alone; you will never be alone.
Am Yisrael Chai.
No they don’t. Pro Israeli sentiment is very much in the minority everywhere in the world except America
I have zero sympathy for the Palestinians. I saw the jubilation with which the greeted the barbarian Hamas’ atrocities on October 7th. Damn them all.
Granted, our media is mostly anti-Semitic – but if you think that represents the broad public, think again.
Outside of the Muslim community and far Left radicals there is no real support for the mass-raping, baby-beheading Hamas monkeys.
They killed a baby in an oven. Decapitated about 40 others.
Nobody with even a simple moral compass does *not* support Israel.
If we’ve learned anything over the past 22 years–and I’m not saying we have–it’s that terrorism works.
It worked for the Israeli’s, it allowed their country to come into being after all
That is a new depth of stupid comment, even for you.
So there was no violent campaign by Jewish terrorists against British forces in Mandated Palestine?
These historical references get tiresome. There are 10 mill people living in prosperity in Israel. They aren’t going anywhere.
When you know from all of history and from current events that most of the rest of humanity either wants you wiped out or would be largely indifferent if you were, the dinner table and op-ed opinions of others just don’t matter at all.
Christian support is crucial to Israel, notably in the United States, while sadly European nations have become secular societies now governed by this ideology of multicultural left-liberalism which, though spiritual, is a quasi-religion driven by ressentiment.
“ sadly European nations have become secular societies now governed by this ideology of multicultural left-liberalism”
That multicultural ideology is entirely driven from the US. It’s true that some (but nowhere near most) European countries – mostly the English speaking ones – are subject to it but its origins are clear.
Israel is governed by parties that act on what they regard as their religious obligation to burn down churches. And across Europe, parties have become more pro-Israeli as they have become less Christian.
Herr Goebbels,
Would you care to share with UnHerd readers to what you attribute your ability to reach the ripe old age of 126.
On Israel and Palestine, there are, in drastically reduced order of size from each to the next, four broad schools of thought in Britain: the indifferent, the profoundly ambivalent, the strongly pro-Palestinian, and the fiercely Zionist. Yet almost all politicians, and the entire media, belong to that tiny fourth faction, which barely featured in British public life until there was a Prime Minister whose constituency happened to have a wildly untypical ethnic profile, but which did not become anything like dominant even under her.
That dominance arose in a window of perhaps half a generation, between the retirements of the British Mandate veterans (although a few of those are still alive, such as my late father’s old Army comrade who went on to by my Senior Tutor when I was an undergraduate), and the emergence of the mass anti-war movement in relation to Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq. To this day, Israel is not a British ally. In what specific way is it? It simply is not. Yet we are expected to make Israel’s, often undeniably unpleasant, enemies our own.
Israel armed Argentina during the Falklands War as an act of anti-British revenge on the part of Menachem Begin. Even beyond that, what have the Israelis ever done for us? What would they? Why should they?
Expect to be heavily downvoted by the evangelical boomers on here for not worshipping Israel and subordinating British interests to it.
Yeh. Of course he’s right – the pro Israeli faction is loud but a minority. The pro Palestine faction is a larger minority. Britain has historically not been pro Zionist. British conservatism definitely not.
As his Shadow Foreign Secretary, William Hague described the 2006 bombardment of Lebanon as “disproportionate”. Days into being Prime Minister, and with Hague as Foreign Secretary, he himself called the Gaza flotilla raid “unacceptable”. As Prime Minister in 2010, he called Gaza “a prison camp”; still in office in 2016, he described the West Bank settlements as “illegal”. And now, David Cameron is back.
Cameron has been made Foreign Secretary thanks to Hague, who himself arranged to pass on his own parliamentary seat to Rishi Sunak, and Cameron’s Minister of State, who attends Cabinet with him so as to answer for him in the elected House, is Andrew Mitchell, who has displayed the spirit of his old Department for International Development by endorsing the position of Robert Mardini, the director-general of the International Committee of the Red Cross, against the targeting of Gaza’s hospitals under any circumstances. Sunak’s speech to last month’s Lord Mayor’s Banquet was quite something. Anyone who said anything like that would be expelled from the Labour Party.
This is when we need a button to say I agree/disagree because I agree with some of what you say and then don’t agree with other parts I wont go in to context about it but will not be voting either way but it was an interesting read
Thank you.
True point made,one of those things that we are not really “supposed to say”. Id like to add that,in recent years a lot has been made of that modest man Sir Nicholas Winterton and his heroic effort to save a whole lot of Jewish people on the eve of WW2. It’s very represented (or is this my interpretation)as an example of British fair minded decency and as this one man representing the wish and will of the whole British public. We are told that his silence about his part in this heroic venture for decades was modesty and reticence which is undoubtedly true but there is a question of how it might have affected his post war career,or am I too cynical. Britain is so close to Germany that it could have been physically possible for all the Jewish people to have been evacuated from Germany via Denmark/Jutland area. I believe you can sail across to Ipswich area in a couple of hours in a small boat. But that didn’t happen. Whatever the geographic realities,the political realities were much more complicated. As I was born in the mid 1950s my growing up years were in the 1960s and the picture presented to me by media and at school of our British attitude to Jews and Israel was wholly positive. It was also strongly implied that we entered WW2 in order to rescue the Jews which doesn’t make sense in view of how surprised we were on discovering those death camps. Or we fought for freedom and democracy. That old lie now being flogged again. The unpleasant fact is (I have subsequently learned) that in the 1930s most of the population of Britain was anti-semitic. It was a prevalent attitude in the working class and even more so in the aristo upper class. The people who were sympathetic were the educated middle class and of them,principally the Quakers. Who are nice people. When Mr Winterton organised his rescue,it took ages and some convoluted movements to get anyone in the UK government to sign for it to go ahead. They couldn’t find ANY civil servant willing to approve it,until they at least did. And then they had to agree that only the children could travel to Britain,the Mum’s and Dad’s has to stay behind. So not that humane.
My late Dad’s best friends wife had been one of the Kindertransport children.
I know im being way too unpleasantly cynical but we are taught one version of history which is not how it actually was.
The parallel is not exact but when the United States was attacked by a small group of al Qaeda terrorists the US responded by invading and occupying the country of Afghanistan. The disproportionate response did not work out well.
Now when Israel was attacked by a small group of Hamas terrorists Israel responded by invading and occupying Gaza. The disproportionate response seems unlikely to work out well.
I wish we could have a benevolent dictator. If we are to believe the image presented by the Media, the People are good at protesting, but are not able to reach a rational consensus. I am very much persuaded by Dio Cassius’ observation (arguing for an Emperor rather than a Senate) that “its easier to find one good man, than many”.