From Newsgroup: nz.politics

A new poll published by Quinnipiac University finds that only 21% of
Americans hold a positive opinion of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu. Meanwhile, 49% hold a negative view of the Likud leader.
And while 47% of respondents believe that U.S. support for Israel is
in the national interest, 41% disagree. This represents a marked shift
in public opinion. A Quinnipiac poll conducted in December 2023 found
that 69% of Americans believed their nationAs support for Israel was
in the national interest.

Of course, the Quinnipiac poll is no outlier. In July, a Gallup poll
found that 29% of voters, including 9% of Democrats and 19% of
independents, held a favorable view of Netanyahu, while 52% viewed him unfavorably. Gallup also found that only 32% of Americans supported
IsraelAs military actions in the Gaza Strip, down from 42% in
September 2024. This tracks with the results of an August Quinnipiac
poll, which found that 32% of Americans supported the provision of
additional military aid to Israel. Meanwhile, 60% of voters, including
75% of Democrats and 66% of independents, opposed sending more aid.
50% of respondents, including a majority of independents, also
indicated their belief that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.
Just last week, a poll conducted by The New York Times and Siena found
that 40% of voters, including 66% of those between the ages of 18 and
29, believe that Israel is deliberately killing Palestinian civilians.

The reasons behind IsraelAs reputational collapse are self-evident.
For two years, AmericansA social media feeds have been flooded with
photos and videos of Palestinian civilians, many of them children,
being killed or maimed by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). Social
media has also made the destruction of the Gaza Strip a palpable
reality for Americans living 5,000 miles away. According to the
Israeli online marketing platform Humanz, 109.6 billion posts bearing pro-Palestinian hashtags were posted to Instagram and TikTok in
October 2023. Palestinian journalists and content creators like Motaz
Azaiza, Bisan Owda, and Hind Khoudary have gained millions of
Instagram followers since Israel began bombing Gaza. As of September
2025, 5.6 million videos bearing the hashtag #Palestine have been
posted to TikTok, racking up 59.5 billion views. The more Americans
see of the war, the more they grow disillusioned with the mainstream
mediaAs coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as their governmentAs complicity in IsraelAs atrocities.

According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, over 67,000 people have been
killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, while over 169,000 have been
wounded. In terms of both the ratio of combatants to noncombatants
killed and the rate of death relative to population, the Gaza War
ranks as the deadliest armed conflict of the century. On September 16,
a United Nations commission of inquiry published a report concluding
that Israel is guilty of committing genocide. The commission found
that Israel was guilty of four actsukilling members of a group,
causing serious physical or mental harm to its members, deliberately
inflicting conditions of life intended to bring about the groupAs
physical destruction, and imposing measures intended to prevent births
within the groupuwhich satisfy the criteria for genocide. The Israeli
human rights organization BATselem has also described the war as a
genocide, accusing Israel of otaking coordinated, deliberate action to
destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip.o

Last October, Harvard economist Linda J. Bilmes and policy analysts
Stephen Semler and William D. Hartung calculated that the U.S.
government had spent at least $22.76 billion on military operations in
the region since October 7. Under President Donald Trump, WashingtonAs
spending has exploded even further. In February, the Trump
administration approved an $8.4 billion arms sale to Israel, the
largest since 2015. The following month, Secretary of State Marco
Rubio signed a declaration that would expedite the transfer of an
additional $4 billion in military assistance. By March 1, only a
little more than a month since returning to the White House, Trump had
already signed off on $12 billion in weapons sales to Israel. And just
last month, his administration proposed the sale of another $6.4
billion in attack helicopters, troop carriers, and other equipment.

Many of IsraelAs most strident defenders have blamed Tel AvivAs public relations struggles on Qatari and Iranian disinformation campaigns.
This faulty analysis ignores what should be obvious. For millions of
Americans, bearing witness to the atrocities of the war in real time
has reified what was previously intangible, and the scale of the
Palestinian death toll has proven unshakable. The knowledge that
taxpayer money is being used to cause and prolong such suffering only
adds insult to injury. It should come as no surprise that the American
public is no longer as uniformly pro-Israel as it was prior to October
2023. What remains mystifying is why Washington remains so intent on
ignoring this unmistakable shift.


https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/how-israel-lost-the-american-public/


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