What the Polls Say About Gaza

In our polarized country, it counts as news whenever members of one political party deeply disagree on an issue. The Israel-Hamas war has become an example for the Democratic Party. Many Democrats — including members of the Biden administration — are divided over Israel’s war strategy.

That divide has rightly received a lot of attention. But the focus on Democratic infighting can obscure other parts of American public opinion about the war. In today’s newsletter, I will walk through four main findings from recent polls.

1. More Americans support Israelis than support Palestinians.

This finding holds across polls. When a Marist poll (conducted for NPR and PBS) asked people which side they sympathized with more, 61 percent chose Israelis and 30 percent chose Palestinians. When YouGov (in a poll for The Economist) asked a similar question with a third option — “about equal” — the results also favored Israelis:

In an NBC poll, Israel’s approval rating — with 47 percent of Americans saying they feel positively toward it, compared with 24 percent who feel negatively — was very similar to Ukraine’s right now. Only 1 percent of Americans feel positively about Hamas, and 81 percent felt negatively.

Similarly, most people blame Hamas for starting the war — that is, they see the Oct. 7 killing and kidnapping of Israelis as the central cause, rather than longer-standing issues like Israel’s blockade of Gaza. In a Quinnipiac poll that asked Americans who was “more responsible for the outbreak of violence,” 69 percent chose Hamas and 15 percent chose Israel.

Most Americans also believe that Israel is an important ally of the U.S. The Quinnipiac poll asked people whether supporting Israel was in the national interest of the United States, and 70 percent said it was.

2. Americans are worried about the civilian toll in Gaza, and support for Israel’s actions has slipped.

Although most respondents in the recent Marist poll said that Israel’s military response has been either appropriate or too restrained, the number who called it too aggressive has risen since last month:

The share of people who said they sympathized more with Palestinians than Israelis has also increased — to 25 percent this month from 15 percent last month, according to the Quinnipiac poll.

A major reason appears to be the civilian death toll in Gaza, which is mostly women and children. More than 80 percent of Americans told Ipsos (in a poll for Reuters conducted a couple weeks ago) that Israel should pause military operations, as it since has, to allow humanitarian aid to reach Gazans.

3. Public opinion isn’t always consistent.

Consider these two facts: One, most Americans say that Israel’s military response has been both reasonable and understandable. In the Ipsos poll, for instance, 76 percent of people agreed that “Israel is doing what any country would do in response to a terror attack and the taking of civilian hostages.”

Two, most Americans say they favor an end to the fighting. They support not only a humanitarian pause but also a full cease-fire. In the YouGov poll, the margin favoring a cease-fire was 65 percent to 16 percent. In the Ipsos poll, 68 percent of people agreed that “Israel should call a cease-fire and try to negotiate.”

This combination of views doesn’t quite mesh. A full cease-fire would amount to a defeat for Israel and a victory for Hamas, with Hamas’s leaders able to claim the Oct. 7 attacks as a major success. Still, you can understand why many Americans would hold this mix of views: They both support Israel’s effort to topple Hamas and do not want Palestinians to keep dying. Poll questions don’t always ask people to make consistent choices.

I encourage readers to avoid the temptation to focus on only one of these two patterns — the support for a cease-fire or for Israel’s military actions — and to ignore the other one. Yes, only one of the two findings is convenient to each side in the debate, but both findings are real.

4. Very liberal Americans view this war differently from most other Americans.

Democrats sometimes like to point out ways in which Republican views depart from majority opinion, and there certainly are such cases. But there are also issues on which Democrats, especially those who identify as very liberal, have views that most Americans do not. This war has become an example.

While most Americans told Marist that Israel’s military response was either “about right” or “too little,” most Democrats — 56 percent — said it was “too much.”

And this breakdown from the YouGov poll is stark:

Self-described “very liberal” Americans express more support for Palestinians than Israelis. No other ideological group does. That helps explain the intensity of the debate on the American left.

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