Palestinian rights groups in US fight to protect gains as public opinion shifts toward Israel
Public opinion polls surveying Americans’ views on the Israel-Hamas conflict suggest support for the Palestinian cause has taken a hit as a result of the carnage unfolding in the Middle East.
The recent wave of violence followed a period of significant improvement in US public opinion toward Palestinians, with Gallup polling earlier this year showing for the first time that Democrats expressed more sympathy for the Palestinians (49%) than the Israelis (38%).
Advocates for Palestinian rights say any regression is probably short-lived. “By the time this is over, we’ll be right back where we started and maybe even then some. Israel is committing horrific crimes. Media will catch up. The administration will catch up,” said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute.
In conversations with the Guardian, advocates described difficulty harnessing public sympathy for the Palestinians while the political establishment and media ecosystem, they say, reflexively amplify Israeli perspectives and suppress Palestinian voices. But they also believe that the tone emanating from Washington DC is likely to evolve as the conflict persists, especially with an Israeli ground invasion into the Gaza Strip appearing increasingly imminent.
Israel has killed nearly 4,000 Palestinians in its bombing campaign of the Gaza Strip following Hamas’s killing of more than 1,400 Israelis and the abduction of hundreds of hostages on 7 October. In both cases, the majority of casualties have been civilians.
Many point to an earlier war on Gaza, in 2014, as an inflection point for US public opinion, with the shift toward greater sympathy for Palestinians aided by Israel’s rightward march under multiple Netanyahu governments and a succession of other bloody military campaigns in the Palestinian territories that have made the conflict’s asymmetry plain.
Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute, believes that the strident support for Israel’s current war being sounded in the halls of power is at least in part a backlash to those gains.
“The desire to label efforts to advocate for Palestinian liberation and Palestinian human rights as outside the pale of what is acceptable discourse is happening now because Americans increasingly have learned there is a flawed US approach to the PalestinianIsraeli conflict, and that people cannot be expected to live under occupation as long as they have,” said Berry.
But polling conducted since Hamas’s attack has shown that Americans are largely supportive of Israel’s actions, with 70% saying, according to a recent CNN poll, that its military response was fully or partially justified. That number dropped steadily with age: while 81% of those 65 years and older saw the response as fully justified, only 27% of 18- to 34-year-olds said the same.
An Economist/YouGov poll taken earlier this week found 48% of people said their sympathies lay more with the Israelis: 62% of people over 65 and 35% of people aged 18-29.
The same poll shows American sympathies have shifted significantly toward Israel since its last major conflagration with Hamas in 2021. The biggest swing is among Democrats, whose sympathy with Israel over the Palestinians increased by 18 points, versus Republicans, whose sympathy increased by 12 points.
Huwaida Arraf, a lawyer and longtime Palestinian rights advocate who previously ran for the Democratic nomination to represent Michigan in Congress, says she is particularly disappointed by the public positions taken by the party, and has heard from many fellow Arab Americans that they won’t be voting for it again.
“This party is showing us that there’s no room for us in everything they talk about – human rights, equality, standing up for each other, the dignity of the other. It’s all rhetoric,” Arraf said.
Berry said her organization was fighting on an overwhelming number of fronts against Israel’s war. Those fights include supporting congressional efforts for a ceasefire, lobbying the Department of Education to protect the free speech rights of university students and pushing back against flawed media coverage. The magazine Jewish Currents reported this week that major networks have canceled scheduled appearances by Palestinian figures or suppressed segments after they were recorded.
Berry’s is an uphill battle at a time when the political establishment is in lockstep behind Israel and taking active steps to tamp down dissent, or even talk of restraint, within its own ranks.
Last week, a state department memo first reported by the Huffington Post cautioned staff against using the terms “de-escalation/ceasefire”, “end to violence/bloodshed” and “restoring calm”. A tweet by the secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, promoting a ceasefire was later deleted.
On Wednesday, a state department official resigned over what he said was the Biden administration’s “intellectual bankruptcy” when it comes to the US’s military support for Israel.
Statements responding to the Hamas attacks made by members of the “squad” of progressive House representatives – which mourned the Israeli victims but referenced the occupation, concern for Gazans and opposition to US military aid to Israel – were condemned by Democratic colleagues and the White House as “repugnant”.
“There’s very little right now happening on the Hill that relates to any intellectually honest or constructive discourse,” said Berry.
Despite the emergent consensus stigmatizing calls for de-escalation, a group of 13 progressive members of the House of Representatives introduced a ceasefire resolution earlier this week.
Lara Friedman, the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, isn’t so sure this picture amounts to a backsliding in support for the Palestinian cause.
“In the heat of this crisis, where the dominant media narrative is deeply empathetic to and largely reflective of Israeli grief and anger,” she said, “the fact that you still have a large percentage of American voters, Democrats and Republicans, that are showing they believe we need to be sympathetic to Palestinians is actually pretty extraordinary.”
But Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine-Israel program at the Arab Center Washington DC, is no longer sure public opinion makes much of a difference.
“There’s a huge gap between public opinion and actual power and the structural realities on the ground,” Munayyer said. “There was a degree of naivety in thinking that one of those things really could impact the other in a way that was as urgent and necessary as the situation on the ground called for.”