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.
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