New poll shows how Americans' sympathies have shifted in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Feb 28, 2026

WASHINGTON — American sympathies in the Middle East have shifted dramatically toward the Palestinians, according to new Gallup polling, after decades of overwhelming support for the Israelis.

That shift accelerated during the war in Gaza. Three years ago, 54% of Americans sympathized more with the Israelis, compared to 31% for the Palestinians.

Now, their support is about evenly balanced, with 41% saying their sympathies lie more with the Palestinians, and 36% saying the same about the Israelis.

The numbers reflect how support for Israel has become deeply contentious in the U.S., with profound implications for American politics and foreign policy. The changing sentiment has been largely driven by Democrats, who are now much more likely to sympathize with Palestinians. U.S. assistance to Israel has been a major dividing line in the party's primaries this year.

Gallup's data indicates the shift was already happening before Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, then increased during Israel's subsequent military operations in Gaza. The polling has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points, meaning sentiment toward Israelis and Palestinians are roughly even.
Democrats and independents

About two-thirds of Democrats now say their concerns lie more with the Palestinians, while only about 2 in 10 sympathize more with the Israelis. As recently as 2016, the picture looked very different: About half of Democrats sympathized more with the Israelis and only about one-quarter sympathized with the Palestinians.

Palestinian militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in the initial attack and took another 251 hostage, but the Israeli response has been widely seen as disproportionate, with Gaza health officials reporting more than 72,000 Palestinians killed, nearly half of them women and children.

Democrats have expressed greater sympathy for the Palestinians than the Israelis since 2023, but Gallup's recent surveys show their support in the conflict has been tilting toward the Palestinians and away from the Israelis since around 2017.

Some of that early decline in sympathy appeared to be tied to disapproval of the right-leaning Israeli leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose favorability in the U.S. fell nearly 15 percentage points between 2017 and 2024, according to separate Gallup polling.

Netanyahu clashed with former President Barack Obama in the last year of his administration, then forged a warmer relationship with President Donald Trump, who delivered several victories to Netanyahu in his first term, including recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

The conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians was a point of tension for Democrats during President Joe Biden's administration, as well as during the 2024 presidential election.

Democrats' sympathy for the Palestinians intensified as the war progressed, Gallup's polling shows, and independents' views also shifted. This year, independents expressed more sympathy for the Palestinians than the Israelis for the first time in Gallup's trend. About 4 in 10 independents are more sympathetic toward the Palestinians. That's compared to about 3 in 10 for the Israelis, a new low.

Most Republicans, about 7 in 10, continue to side with Israel, but that is a slight downtick from about 8 in 10 before the start of the war.

Generational gaps

Younger adults — those 18 to 34 in this poll — are also increasingly sympathetic toward the Palestinians, according to the Gallup survey.

Younger Americans' sympathies have been shifting toward the Palestinians since around 2020, and reached a new high this year. About half of 18- to 34-year-olds say they have more sympathy for the Palestinians, compared to about a quarter who say that about the Israelis.

The new poll also found for the first time that middle-aged Americans, those 35 to 54, expressed more sympathy for the Palestinians than the Israelis — a reversal from last year. And while Americans over 55 are more sympathetic toward Israel, that gap is narrowing, too.

Palestinian state

About 6 in 10 U.S. adults, 57%, favor the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, according to the new polling.

In the last few years, there's been an uptick among Democrats and independents in support for the two-state solution. Now, about three-quarters of Democrats and roughly 6 in 10 independents say they support an independent Palestinian state. Only about one-third of Republicans say the same.

The opinions of the people who would be directly affected by a two-state solution are quite different. Only about 3 in 10 Israelis living in Israel and Palestinians living in the West Bank and east Jerusalem said they supported a solution in which an independent Palestinian state existed alongside Israel, according to the 2025 Gallup World Poll.

"On the ground, in the region, far fewer Israelis and Palestinians tell us that they are in favor of the two-state solution than Americans when asked a very similar question," said Benedict Vigers, a senior global news writer at Gallup. "There is that interesting sort of disconnect between the region itself and Americans' views toward it."

The Gallup poll was conducted Feb. 2-16 among 1,001 U.S. adults, aged 18 and older, using a sample drawn from Gallup's probability-based panel.

How Israel Lost Americans
Michelle Goldberg
Feb. 27, 2026

It’s been obvious for some time that Americans are souring on Israel, but a Gallup poll that came out on Friday marks a turning point. For the first time in the poll’s 25-year history, it found, more Americans sympathize with the Palestinians than with the Israelis. The shift wasn’t just among Democrats, whose opinion of Israel has been in free fall in recent years. According to Gallup, only 30 percent of independents now sympathize with Israel; 41 percent sympathize with the Palestinians. Among adults under 35, support for Israel has fallen to a record low of 23 percent. With numbers like this, bipartisan backing for Israel, long a constant in American politics, will in time become unsustainable.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel famously prides himself on his ability to shape American policy. As he said in a secretly recorded 2001 conversation, “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.” Yet he has presided over an ongoing collapse in American Zionism and could eventually go down in history as the prime minister who lost Israel’s most important ally.

Israel’s imploding reputation is largely a consequence of its oppression of the Palestinians, in particular the mass killings in Gaza, which millions of Americans watched up close on social media. At the same time, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank — which is increasingly turning into outright annexation — is making Zionism and liberalism seem incompatible. Today, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, about 7.2 million Jews preside over a slightly larger number of Arabs, if you combine Israel’s Palestinian citizenry with the populations of Gaza and the West Bank. The majority of those Palestinians are stateless and have almost no guaranteed rights, as we see in the growing number of settler pogroms in the West Bank and the systematic ethnic cleansing of villages.

As long as the possibility of a Palestinian state remained alive, liberals who feel warmly toward Israel could tell themselves that this system of de facto apartheid was only temporary. But Netanyahu’s government has done everything in its power to make a two-state solution impossible, including, before the attacks of Oct. 7, propping up Hamas. In theory, a state that’s both Jewish and democratic may be possible. Today, on the ground, it looks like a pipe dream.

But it’s not just Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians that have eroded Americans’ good will toward Israel. Perhaps as important has been Israel’s role in American politics.

For decades, pro-Israel organizations in the United States have struggled mightily to control the parameters of acceptable debate about the Jewish state. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has spent countless millions intervening in primary elections, including against Jewish critics of Israel like the former Michigan congressman Andy Levin, a self-described Zionist who infuriated AIPAC by fighting for a Palestinian state. Israel’s allies have pushed speech codes defining anti-Zionism as antisemitism. They’ve passed anti-boycott laws used to punish American enterprises that refuse to do business not just with Israel proper but also with Israelis in the occupied territories.

Efforts to make harsh criticism of Israel verboten redoubled after Oct. 7, as many of Israel’s backers watched in horror as campuses exploded with pro-Palestinian demonstrations, some of which shaded into genuine antisemitism. Major pro-Israel groups like the Anti-Defamation League cheered on Donald Trump as he cracked down on universities in the name of fighting anti-Jewish discrimination, which the administration treated as synonymous with hatred of Israel. The right-wing pro-Israel group Betar U.S. gave the American government lists of pro-Palestinian immigrant students to target for deportation, including Columbia’s Mahmoud Khalil, who was arrested by ICE last March.

By aligning Zionism with American authoritarianism, Israel’s champions earned the country the enmity of many Democratic partisans. The influential resistance podcaster Jennifer Welch is indicative. A wealthy interior designer from Oklahoma, she was once a Hillary Clinton-supporting Democrat who backed Israel without thinking much about it. But more recently, she told Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan, she’s come to link the pro-Israel lobby with the forces destroying American democracy. “My husband always said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on in Israel and Palestine, but I just know every politician I hate supports Israel,” she said, using an obscenity. The more she read about the conflict, the more she saw Israel as a genocidal state.

Republicans remain broadly pro-Israel; according to the Gallup poll, 69 percent of them view the country favorably. Still, some of the conservatives who’ve spent the past decade denouncing wokeness have been infuriated by restrictions on anti-Israel speech. They see — with good reason — the government attempting to silence political arguments in the name of safety and sensitivity. “You can say whatever you want about America, whatever you want, and people do, and I’m glad you can,” Tucker Carlson said in a conversation with Cenk Uygur, a host of “The Young Turks,” an enormously popular left-wing streaming show. “But the second you’re critical of Benjamin Netanyahu, you get punished by the U.S. government?”

Netanyahu and his government deserve this growing bipartisan opprobrium. Unfortunately, ordinary Jews are experiencing it as well. I’ve long argued that anti-Zionism and antisemitism aren’t the same thing. Yet as antisemitism rises in the United States, contempt for Israel sometimes gives way to anti-Jewish paranoia and hostility. Carlson doesn’t just disparage Israel; he also hosts white nationalists and Holocaust deniers. And just this week, Uygur’s “Young Turks" colleague Ana Kasparian indulged in an antisemitic outburst on X, writing, “The goyim are waking up. Deal with it.” (She used an obscenity I’m not allowed to repeat here.) Kasparian refused to apologize, insisting that she was merely deploring Israel, even though “goyim” is a Yiddish word for non-Jews, not non-Zionists.

No one is to blame for Kasparian’s bigotry but herself. But Israel, by behaving appallingly and then trying to silence any condemnation of its appalling behavior as antisemitic, gives ammunition to Jew haters. As Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder and president of the liberal Zionist group J Street, told me, “When you end up using antisemitism as a pretext for kicking kids out of universities and out of the country, and you use it as a pretext for ending cancer research and use it as a pretext for undercutting the First Amendment, you’re going to get some blowback against the people doing that.”

The blowback will almost certainly get much worse now that Trump, working in concert with Israel, has bombed Iran, just as Netanyahu long hoped. Americans don’t want a war, and Trump hasn’t bothered to explain why he might wage one. In this murk, conspiracy theories about Israel manipulating America into another Middle Eastern conflict are bound to flourish, especially because there will be a grain of truth to them. Friday’s Gallup poll marks a low point in American sentiments toward Israel, but they could still have much further to fall.

Israel may have lost the Americans. But they have got
an American lapdog in the oval office which more than
made up their loss.