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 only 36% saying the same about the Israelis.
My perception going back decades was that Israel was beset on all sides by people who wanted to destroy it, and it was a big shit show, and they did problematic stuff but that’s what they had to do to stay alive because other nations wouldn’t even acknowledge their right to exist.
That is very much not my perception any more. There is no sort of hand waving away their culpability in intentional genocide. They know better than anyone the kind of evil they are inflicting, and they continue to do so.
I don’t in any way condone Hamas or their tactics, but I get it. They were being slow-genocided for decades and they strike back with the very limited means that are available to them. Asymmetrical warfare is fucking ugly. It’s ugly to do, it’s ugly to fight against. But I get they needed to upset the status quo. I think in that they succeeded by showing the world exactly who Israel is. I hope the future is kinder to the Palestinian people than the past has been.
That is my own experience as well. It took a while, but my eyes started to open in similar ways. Thank you for taking the time and putting words to it; you’re braver than I am to do so.
The only thing I would add is that Trump has gone out of his way to inflame differences, like in his first term when he moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem knowing it would reignite what had long been settled by truce: something like 50 people died the day it opened. And that wasn’t the only thing; I’m just going off the top of my head. It’s been thousands of small and large insults, aggressions, injustices directed at the Palestinians all along. And now look at what it’s become. I can’t even begin to imagine the pain of the Palestinian people.
For me anymore, it’s not even just about Israel. It’s about the utter corruption of both Bibi and Trump, and for me personally, a suspicion I can’t kick that they and a few others literally planned this genocide together so as to make a couple miles of highly-desirable waterfront property available for development. Last I heard, even Tony Blair was helping them plan it out.
So it makes sense now, to me anyway, why pro-Palestine protests and protesters have been met with such intense, personal, over-the-top hostility and even legislative action in both the UK and the US: it’s because they were pointing directly at the large scale murder-theft of their people and land openly taking place before all our eyes and interrupting the age-old move along, nothing to see here charade put on by corrupt leaders only playacting at peace.
This basically describes hamas in Gaza now.
There’s a lot of parallels between Israel during the six day war and hamas during Oct 7. Both were surrounded by hostile country/s who would not recognize their right to exist and had an army ready to attack on their borders and were blockading them, though Israel was only being blockaded on one port. Then they launch a surprise attack on their neighbors. The difference is Israel succeeded and Hamas didn’t.
It’s been an imperialist settler colonialist project since day one the religious aspect was just convenient to roll into the racialized supremisist ideology that justifies annexation of land and genocide of the indigenous that drives the imperial colonization machine
No lies detected.
I’m very much in the same boat. Much of the discussion I’ve had on the topic in the past has centered around how they were thrust into a weird and fucked up geopolitical situation as a direct fallout of the Holocaust and one of the final gasps of overt British colonialism… but these days, it’s WAY harder to use those facts as an excuse anymore (as in: the behavior of the Israeli government has gone so far beyond pragmatic defensive measures that could be reasonably appropriate to that context, to the point that it now looks and feels deeply hypocritical with regards to how things started for Israel in the first place).
Israel never had pragmatic defense. It always used the security concern BS to continue settler colonialism
You should read about the zionists leaders and how they always wanted the whole land in long term and Herzl advocating for ethenic cleansing
Great post, speaks for a lot of us.
Add to that that with Syria, the last external threat to Israel is gone. It’s like Israeli politicians and the military still think Israel is the David threatened by a Goliath, when they have become the Goliath and their actions against civilians now look what a superior force does to a helpless victim.
David is an apt comparison actually, celebrated for genociding the Amakelites but made out to be the underdog by history written by the victors.
They were Goliath from day one, notice how they won every single war in short order, none were even close, because they’ve superior technology, the most advanced weaponry in the world, without even paying for most of it.
You say still david, they never were, and only a sheep would have thought so.
That’s why they’re picking fights with Iran. You wouldn’t do that if you were actually scared