How Israel Lost the American Public

by James Rushmore | Oct 22, 2025

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

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 nation’s 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 Israel’s 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 Israel’s reputational collapse are self-evident. For two years, Americans’ 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 media’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as their government’s complicity in Israel’s 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 acts—killing members of a group, causing serious physical or mental harm to its members, deliberately inflicting conditions of life intended to bring about the group’s physical destruction, and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group—which satisfy the criteria for genocide. The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has also described the war as a genocide, accusing Israel of “taking coordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip.”

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, Washington’s 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 Israel’s most strident defenders have blamed Tel Aviv’s 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.