The Gaza genocide permanently diminished the power of pro-Israel propaganda

For nearly 40 years, Gallup has been asking Americans a series of questions about the Middle East and U.S. policy in the region.

One of those frequent questions is, “In the Middle East situation, are your sympathies more with the Israelis or more with the Palestinians?“

In 2003, just 16% of Democrats said that they sympathized more with Palestinians than Israelis. When the annual survey was carried out this past February, that number had ballooned to 65%.

There are many reasons for this dramatic shift.

2003 was the year that the United States launched its war on Iraq, spurred by government lies and a post-9/11 bloodlust that permeated a sizable chunk of U.S. society. 2026 also saw the United States launch a war in the Middle East, but this one is broadly unpopular with the population, which has naturally grown skeptical of foreign conflict after 20-plus years of disastrous Forever Wars.

The tireless work of Palestine activists has also increased support for the cause, as Americans have developed a deeper understanding of Israeli apartheid and occupation. These efforts found particular resonance during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, as many activists stressed the connections between liberation at home and abroad.

However, the biggest reason for the jump is obviously the Gaza genocide and U.S. support for it. Since Israel’s war on Gaza began three years ago, conservative estimates say 74,000 Palestinians have been killed, and more than 175,000 have been injured. More than 1,400 have been killed and nearly 5,000 injured since the Trump administration declared a “ceasefire” on October 10, 2025.

Those Gallup results are just a small part of a vast trove of polling showing that Americans have completely flipped on the issue, and although Democratic voters have soured on Israel at a higher rate, the shift is certainly not limited to one political party.

Here’s some more:

• A Pew report from this past spring found that 60% of U.S. adults have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 53% in 2025. The country is viewed unfavorably by 41% of Republicans, but that number is 57% among Republicans aged 18-49.
• In addition to Democrats, the aforementioned Gallup poll shows that Independents sympathize with Palestinians more than Israelis, 41% to 30%, for the first time since the analytics company began conducting the surveys.
• A recent Marquette Law School poll found that favorability toward Israel has been steadily declining for the last 20 months.

In a recent interview about AIPAC, investigative reporter Eli Clifton told Mondoweiss that, because of the country’s actions in the region, the propaganda of pro-Israel lobbying organizations just isn’t hitting like it used to.

“I think some of this is out of their control. Images of dead children and civilians continue to flow out of Gaza. The mainstream media hasn’t been the best at covering it, but with social media now, it’s very hard to suppress the scale of what is going on in Gaza, or the settler violence in the West Bank, or the violence against various communities, including Christians in Lebanon,” said Clifton.

“This stuff horrifies people, and it’s significantly responsible for shifting public opinion. People get facts on the ground in a manner that they had previously been denied and I think as long as the facts continue to be this way where Israel is occupying lands, people don’t have equal rights in Israel, they continue to engage in these wars on multiple fronts, they continue to engage in genocide in Gaza, there’s a limited amount that AIPAC can do.”

“They are deeply, deeply unpopular with Democrats and increasingly unpopular with Republicans and even with Christian evangelicals,” he added. “That poses a nearly insurmountable challenge for them.”

Similar sentiments have openly been expressed by Israeli leaders.

“What concerns me—and I believe it should concern every American leader—is a troubling trend in public opinion, particularly among younger Americans,” wrote former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in a July Time op-ed. “Surveys show growing skepticism about Israel among the next generation of U.S. citizens. I do not believe this reflects their true values. American young people are, overwhelmingly, decent and justice-seeking. This is not merely Israel’s problem. It is America’s problem, too. In my opinion, the same forces working to delegitimize Israel are working to undermine the Western alliance, democratic institutions, and American leadership itself. Countering this shift is a shared responsibility—and an urgent one.”

Will Israel’s PR crisis actually result in a rethinking of U.S. foreign policy? There certainly doesn’t seem to be any big changes on the horizon, as Israel has continued to receive an effective blank check regardless of which party occupies the White House. In this sense, Israel has simply become yet another issue, like health care and the environment, where U.S. lawmakers are completely out of step with their constituents.

However, the ultimate fate of the “special relationship” remains unwritten, as the domestic struggle continues. Since the genocide, we have seen the issue permeate our political discourse and even watched some successful candidates highlight the issue on the campaign trail. Congress has even begun to slowly move. When Senator Bernie Sanders introduced an amendment aimed at blocking arms sales to Israel in November 2024, just 18 senators backed him. In April of this year, 40 of the 47 Democrats voted to block a sale of bulldozers to the country.

This is obviously wildly insufficient, but it’s clear that this is no longer a third-rail issue in Washington and, barring an absolute miracle, it seems unlikely that it will ever emerge as one again.