American sympathies in the Middle East have shifted dramatically toward the Palestinians, according to new Gallup polling, after decades of overwhelming support for the Israelis.
That shift accelerated during the war in Gaza. Three years ago, 54% of Americans sympathized more with the Israelis, compared to 31% for the Palestinians.
Now, their support is about evenly balanced, with 41% saying their sympathies lie more with the Palestinians, and only 36% saying the same about the Israelis.
My perception going back decades was that Israel was beset on all sides by people who wanted to destroy it, and it was a big shit show, and they did problematic stuff but that’s what they had to do to stay alive because other nations wouldn’t even acknowledge their right to exist.
That is very much not my perception any more. There is no sort of hand waving away their culpability in intentional genocide. They know better than anyone the kind of evil they are inflicting, and they continue to do so.
I don’t in any way condone Hamas or their tactics, but I get it. They were being slow-genocided for decades and they strike back with the very limited means that are available to them. Asymmetrical warfare is fucking ugly. It’s ugly to do, it’s ugly to fight against. But I get they needed to upset the status quo. I think in that they succeeded by showing the world exactly who Israel is. I hope the future is kinder to the Palestinian people than the past has been.
That is my own experience as well. It took a while, but my eyes started to open in similar ways. Thank you for taking the time and putting words to it; you’re braver than I am to do so.
The only thing I would add is that Trump has gone out of his way to inflame differences, like in his first term when he moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem knowing it would reignite what had long been settled by truce: something like 50 people died the day it opened. And that wasn’t the only thing; I’m just going off the top of my head. It’s been thousands of small and large insults, aggressions, injustices directed at the Palestinians all along. And now look at what it’s become. I can’t even begin to imagine the pain of the Palestinian people.
For me anymore, it’s not even just about Israel. It’s about the utter corruption of both Bibi and Trump, and for me personally, a suspicion I can’t kick that they and a few others literally planned this genocide together so as to make a couple miles of highly-desirable waterfront property available for development. Last I heard, even Tony Blair was helping them plan it out.
So it makes sense now, to me anyway, why pro-Palestine protests and protesters have been met with such intense, personal, over-the-top hostility and even legislative action in both the UK and the US: it’s because they were pointing directly at the large scale murder-theft of their people and land openly taking place before all our eyes and interrupting the age-old move along, nothing to see here charade put on by corrupt leaders only playacting at peace.
I’m very much in the same boat. Much of the discussion I’ve had on the topic in the past has centered around how they were thrust into a weird and fucked up geopolitical situation as a direct fallout of the Holocaust and one of the final gasps of overt British colonialism… but these days, it’s WAY harder to use those facts as an excuse anymore (as in: the behavior of the Israeli government has gone so far beyond pragmatic defensive measures that could be reasonably appropriate to that context, to the point that it now looks and feels deeply hypocritical with regards to how things started for Israel in the first place).
Israel never had pragmatic defense. It always used the security concern BS to continue settler colonialism
Yes, growing up the narrative was very much Israel is a heroic underdog valiantly fighting to exist while everyone else in the Middle East tries to destroy them with everything they have. And the US has to help them b/c Holocaust, Christianity, strategic military value, hand wave reasons.
Great post, speaks for a lot of us.
Israel was beset on all sides by people who wanted to destroy it, and it was a big shit show, and they did problematic stuff but that’s what they had to do to stay alive because other nations wouldn’t even acknowledge their right to exist.
This basically describes hamas in Gaza now.
There’s a lot of parallels between Israel during the six day war and hamas during Oct 7. Both were surrounded by hostile country/s who would not recognize their right to exist and had an army ready to attack on their borders and were blockading them, though Israel was only being blockaded on one port. Then they launch a surprise attack on their neighbors. The difference is Israel succeeded and Hamas didn’t.
It’s been an imperialist settler colonialist project since day one the religious aspect was just convenient to roll into the racialized supremisist ideology that justifies annexation of land and genocide of the indigenous that drives the imperial colonization machine
No lies detected.
You should read about the zionists leaders and how they always wanted the whole land in long term and Herzl advocating for ethenic cleansing
Add to that that with Syria, the last external threat to Israel is gone. It’s like Israeli politicians and the military still think Israel is the David threatened by a Goliath, when they have become the Goliath and their actions against civilians now look what a superior force does to a helpless victim.
They were Goliath from day one, notice how they won every single war in short order, none were even close, because they’ve superior technology, the most advanced weaponry in the world, without even paying for most of it.
You say still david, they never were, and only a sheep would have thought so.
That’s why they’re picking fights with Iran. You wouldn’t do that if you were actually scared
David is an apt comparison actually, celebrated for genociding the Amakelites but made out to be the underdog by history written by the victors.
Do you condemn the IDF for carrying out the Hannibal Directive and killing all those Israelis on October 7th?
I think they effectively already answered this. What point are you trying to make?
They said the opposite. They said they understood why the German Nazis exterminated Jews for burning the Reichstag building.
I have never in my life uttered a single positive or empathetic word about Nazis. If you’re trying to put words in my mouth through some twisted false-equivalence, miss me with that shit.
Any goodwill or empathy I feel toward my fellow humans, Nazis are always the exception. It’s a free world, do what you want — unless you’re a fucking Nazi then you should die mad, and preferably screaming. Violence is never the solution — unless the problem is Nazis.
If this is a case of mistaken identity, fair enough shit happens. If not, then in all sincerity, fuck yourself with glass until you bleed out.
I probably should’ve included the word “basically” in my comment, though I do stand by what I said. You understand what Hamas is said to do on Oct 7th, and I compared it to the Holocaust because the Jews burned down their Reichstag building. Jews didn’t burn down the Reichstag building, the same way that Hamas didn’t kill all those Israelis on Oct 7th. The IDF carried out the Hannibal Directive, and killed their own people using Apache helicopters and tanks, and used that as reasoning the comitt a genocide against a semite population, much the same way the Germans did to the Jews during the Holocaust.
Well then, I stand by option B above.
That’s fine. I don’t expect to convince genocide apologists.
What the fuck is wrong with 36% of people?
Those without empathy and their abused victims.
That’s the 36% that still support Trump. I don’t know if they’re actually able to wake up. I kinda doubt it
36% is too high after a goddamn genocide. Zero sympathy to israelis till occupation end
Isrealis got a little bit with the initial attack but it did not take long to be like wow. this is worse than us. that being said what I want is to have nothing to do with the region and that includes the saudis.
Honestly I’d like to back a country and people a bit further north. That being the Armenia and the Kurds, upside is we can also piss off the Turks while being in the moral right.
I mean I don’t like the whole world police thing because we know what happens with police. I do get post ww2 it was kinda inevitable but I wish we had stuck to a two degrees of seperatation. We border canada, mexico, atalantic, pacific, and artic ocean. We should have limited to places boarding those oceans and of course the respect the un special status of the antartic but stayed out of anything that does not touch the atalantic or the pacific. I wish we had not been involved in viet nam but im kinda mixed because you look at how neat south korea is and how crappy north korea is.
Because people who are not happy with the slaughtering of arabs/muslims (even those racists who hate arabs) are the same who have empathy and logic that human suffering is bad and those who inflict it are evil, no matter the race or religion.
Ghislaine Maxwell is effective Queen of Israel and by extension the US and UK. That should shift opinions.
No more zios no more liberals.
