The unadulterated hatred on display at pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas rallies worldwide, from Sydney to Warsaw and London to New York, has Jews around the world furious, frightened, and frustrated.
It makes the blood boil to watch a Cornell University professor say he was “exhilarated and energized” by the October 7 massacre, to see signs reading “keep the world clean” with a picture of a Star of David on a garbage can at a Warsaw protest, and to hear people chant “gas the Jews” outside Sydney’s iconic opera house, that symbol of culture and civilization.
But as awful as those images are, as unsettling as is the hatred on display, there is a silver lining: Reasonable people are seeing this Jew-hatred as well, and some are undoubtedly drawing conclusions.
The battle for public opinion is difficult, and those involved in it know that the target is not the true believers on any side of an argument – they will support their cause regardless of the facts. The battle is for the vast majority in the middle who have not yet made up their minds.
If these protests, including a major anti-Israel rally in Brooklyn and London Saturday night, are meant to win adherents to their cause, chanting antisemitic slogans is unlikely to do the trick.
As painful as these demonstrations are to watch, and as much as they surely frighten Jews in the communities where they are taking place, in the long run, they may help convince the reasonable people in the middle of who and what Israel is up against.
While large, noisy protests in cities around the world may make it seem that the world is against Israel, poll after poll taken in the US shows that – at least there – this is not the case.
Israel winning in the court of public opinion
“Israel is clearly winning in the court of public opinion,” Lee M. Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, said in a statement on October 13 as his organization released a poll together with NPR/PBS NewsHour.
According to this poll, taken on October 11 among 1,313 respondents, 65% of the public said the US should publicly support Israel, while only 8% said it should publicly criticize the Jewish state.
In a Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll on October 20, 84% of the 2,116 registered voters said they sided with Israel, while only 16% said they sided with Hamas.
The same trend was evident in a Quinnipiac University poll taken October 12-16, in which 61% of those surveyed said their sympathies lie more with Israel than with the Palestinians, and only 13% said their sympathies were more with the Palestinians. That is almost a five-to-one margin of support for Israel.
This was Israel’s highest level of support for Israel since Quinnipiac started asking that question in December 2001.
A Yahoo News/YouGov poll also showed a dramatic shift in sympathies toward Israel, with 43% of 1,675 US adults surveyed October 12-16, just before the explosion at the hospital in Gaza City, saying their sympathies lie more with Israel than the Palestinians, and only 9% favoring the Palestinians.
This organization last asked this question during Operation Guardian of the Walls in 2021, when 30% said they sympathized more with Israel, and 15% said the Palestinians. This means that support today for Israel is running at a ratio of nearly 5:1, whereas during the last fighting in Gaza in 2021, that support was only 2:1.
Most significantly, the most pronounced shift comes among Democrats, with support for Israel up 22% now as opposed to 2021. Nevertheless, all the polls show that the demographic least supportive of Israel are Democrats aged 18-24.
An earlier Fox News poll taken October 7-9 among 716 registered voters soon after the Simchat Torah massacre shows a similar trend, with 68% of US voters siding with Israel in the conflict and only 18% with the Palestinians.
This 50-point gap was significantly larger than the 35% gap the last time Fox asked the question during the fighting in 2021. Then, support for Israel over the Palestinians was 59% to 24%.
“The main reason for the overall increase in support for Israel is Democrats have dramatically changed their position,” one of the Fox News pollsters, Daron Shaw, was quoted as saying. “They’ve moved from +7 Israel to +34, which undoubtedly reflects revulsion over the nature of the attacks.”
These numbers are even more striking considering that in the February annual Gallup World Affairs poll, for the first time ever, support for the Palestinians was 11% higher among Democrats than support for Israel.
One observer quipped that these numbers give new meaning to the title of Dara Horn’s 2021 book of essays "People Love Dead Jews."
As the war continues, these numbers will surely decline as casualties mount in the Gaza Strip.
Yet the more hatred spewed at pro-Palestinian rallies, the more the American public sees the true colors of those backing Hamas, and the more they hear of college students and their professors standing squarely with murderers and rapists, the support might not fall as precipitously as it might have otherwise.
These protests are disturbing, and some of the words spoken there and slogans chanted are frightening and chilling. Yet, ironically, these protests are not the worst thing in the world when it comes to drumming up public support for Israel among the reasonable center, many of whom will be repulsed by this outpouring of hatred.
At least for now.