Congress Examines Forces Fueling Campus Antisemitism |
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According to a recent Gallup poll, “Forty-one percent of Americans now say they sympathize more with the Palestinians in the Middle East situation, while 36% sympathize more with the Israelis.” Sea changes in American public opinion need not be spurred on by toxic propaganda campaigns energized by American colleges and universities. But this sea change is.
For almost 40 years, Gallup has asked Americans whether they sympathize more with Israelis or Palestinians. Until recently, sympathy for Israelis consistently exceeded sympathy for the Palestinians by 30% or more. In 2018, 64% of respondents expressed more sympathy for Israelis and 19% more for Palestinians. The wide margin began narrowing in 2019. Following Iran-backed Hamas’ savage assault on mostly Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023 – jihadists killed around 1,200 and took 251 hostages – sympathy for Israel plunged. Now, Americans polled by Gallup favor Palestinians by 5 percentage points. Although falling within the poll’s margin of error, these results reveal a precipitous decline in support for Israel.
What accounts for the pronounced shift?
The common explanation is that the physical destructiveness and extensive lethality of Israel’s successful two-year military campaign against Hamas – captured in heart-wrenching photos and videos highlighting and sometimes inventing Palestinian suffering – soured the American public on the Jewish state. In fighting the jihadists, the IDF killed, according to its estimates, 17,000 to 18,000 enemy combatants. IDF operations in pursuit of terrorists who hid and maneuvered amid and under Gaza’s civilian population also tragically resulted in the unintended – at least by Israel – deaths of tens of thousands of noncombatant Palestinians and reduced a sizeable portion of Gaza to rubble.
Taking the common explanation at face value, however, overlooks that most Americans’ perceptions of the war are filtered through media accounts. Media accounts often rely on academic opinion about the Middle East. And academic opinion frequently promotes a viciously distorted picture of Israel while amplifying Hamas propaganda.
Academic opinion about the Middle East tends to blame the conflict between Israel and Hamas on the Jewish state and treats the conflict in isolation. But Hamas’ 1988 founding covenant proclaims a war of annihilation against Israel. In the early 1990s, Iran began financing and training Hamas as part of Tehran’s now-decades-long multifront war against the Jewish state.
Academic opinion tends to overlook Hamas’ ghastly violations of the laws of war. Contrary to basic laws-of-war tenets, Hamas not only slaughtered and kidnapped Israeli civilians, but also attacked the IDF........