Despite Terror and Hate, Democrats’ and Millennials’ Sympathy for Palestinians Grows
German tourists in the West Bank were attacked merely for having Israeli license plates.
On Saturday two German tourists drove into Nablus, in the northern West Bank, in a rented car with Israeli license plates. They found themselves surrounded by a mob of young Palestinian men and were almost lynched.
One of the tourists, Gerald Hetzel, told two Israeli TV channels about the experience:
I’ve never encountered a situation like this. It was a very very dangerous situation, and we really thought they wanted to kill us….
Young men came from taxis around us…and started to knock on our windows, to scream at us in Arabic…. They were bringing stones and a traffic sign and throwing everything against the car. After one or two minutes they pulled out a knife and stabbed the wheels of the car, and also threatened my friend.
I didn’t understand what they wanted. We tried to tell them in English that we are tourists, and we are not Jewish Israelis, that we are there to visit and see the town, but they seemed to not understand it….
I really felt the hate from their eyes, and from the way they were acting. And they were throwing rocks, maybe double the size of my head.
When Palestinian police officers tried but failed to break up the mob, they instead told the two tourists to flee. Luckily for them, an Israeli Arab signaled to them to follow him and led them out of the city.
Gerald Hetzel went on to tell Israeli TV:
“It doesn’t change my entire view on Israel. I think Israel is a very friendly country…. It definitely changes my view on the Palestinians and the Palestinian Authority areas in Judea and Samaria.”
He said that in an earlier trip to Bethlehem, three 16-year-old Palestinian boys “told me if they meet a Jew on the street, they want to kill him, just like this. And I think it’s a big problem they have so much hate in their education.”
The hate in Palestinian education is indeed a big, thoroughly documented problem (for instance, here, here, or here).
And yet, The Times of Israel reports a new Gallup poll that finds 49% of Democrats in the US sympathizing more with the Palestinians compared to only 38% sympathizing more with the Israelis. It’s hard to say how much of this stems from ignorance and how much from an insistence on favoring the perceived “underdog.”
In contrast, the poll found 78% of Republicans sympathizing more with Israel and only 11% with the Palestinians; among independents, the corresponding figures were 49% and 32%.
The Democrats, for their part, backed the Palestinians over the Israelis for the first time since 2001.
A decade ago, 55% of Democrats sympathized more with Israel, and 19% sympathized more with the Palestinians. Israel’s positive margin in the survey has progressively declined since then.
The trend in recent years, Gallup said…, has been toward increased sympathy toward the Palestinians, but it did not detail what caused the 11% surge in sympathy for the Palestinians among Democrats in the past year.
True, in recent months Israel has not excelled on the public relations front. Statements by a Knesset member and a cabinet minister praising a violent rampage by some Israelis in the West Bank Palestinian town of Huwara, which came on the heels of a terror attack there that killed two brothers, are golden nuggets for Israel’s demonizers.
But the trend found by Gallup appears to go well beyond specific news items—and it looks worrisome, if not ominous: “Gallup also reported that sympathies for Israelis tended to diminish among younger voters. Baby boomers sympathize with Israelis over Palestinians by a margin of 46 points, but Palestinians hold a two-point advantage among millennials”—an especially steep drop from a much older generation to a much younger one.
This year Israel’s 75th Independence Day falls on April 25-26, in just about a month. As always, there’s much achievement to celebrate, and in the newly published World Happiness Index for 2022, Israel ranks no less than fourth in that commodity. But 2023 has been tougher so far, with dark clouds on the horizon: Iran’s progress toward the bomb, intense domestic strife in Israel over the government’s planned judicial overhaul, and—not least, even if talked about less—the possibility of declining US support.
Not many people, of course, will have an eye-opening experience like the two German tourists who blundered into a Palestinian town with Israeli license plates. Instead Israel should be launching a major advocacy campaign stressing its nature as a democracy that does not teach its children hate, in stark contrast to the hate-promoting Palestinian dictatorships in the West Bank and Gaza.
Unfortunately, though, the current governing Israeli coalition with its far-right elements is not well suited to that task, which is one of the reasons I hope it falls sooner rather than later.
From the linked Times of Israel article.
"Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Gallup’s question presents a false dichotomy and that the Democratic Party’s leadership is pro-Israel.
“Democrats – from President Biden on down – strongly support Israel’s safety and security,” she said. “There is no contradiction between being pro-Israel and supporting Palestinian rights, which is why Democrats continue to support a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as security assistance for Israel and humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a zero-sum game, and thus polling that presents it as a binary choice is inherently flawed.”
I think this is true.
With that being said there is this element on the left that equates material advantage with oppression. The logic goes that if Palestinians are worse off materially then they must be oppressed. This comes from Marxist ideology.
Similarly but not identical other people on the left believe that the way to achieve peace and a two state solution is for Palestinians to be empowered economically and that the source of the anger and violence is in the material shortcomings of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
The other fact is that many on the left in the US don't exactly care about the conflict, and they see it through the partisan lens of US politics and it isn't on their mind much. The only thought they may have is that they don't like Netanyahu because he was friendly with Trump and not so friendly with Democratic candidates. The thinking does not go further than that. I would think that if an Israeli leader was friendly towards Democrats and actively against Republicans that would encite some reaction from people more vested in US partisan politics than geopolitics as well.
Overall I think that Gallup poll is something to keep an eye on as an indicator but it's not something that is really definitive due to the quote from the Times of Israel article.
There is anti-Semitism on the left. It's come up in the US a bit, and it actually became somewhat prevalent in the UK when the leftist Jeremy Corbyn became the leader of Labour.
Left-wing anti-semitism exists and is linked explicitly to Israel and that conflict with Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. However I think the vast majority polled by Gallup are just looking at the conflict as a tragedy band their sympathies lie with whomever they feel are suffering the most at any given point, hardly any are actually siding with the underlying ideology of say Hamas.
We do not need to explain ourselves anymore. True, there is a danger of losing the support of the U.S., but we would be amiss if we were not planning on a future wherein the U.S., by choice, no longer plays a leadership role in the world order. We need to concentrate on solidifying our relationship with India, Africa, the Gulf States and Saudia. Unlimited capital, and Jewish and reborn Arab and African genius working together to define a new center of cultural, economic, and spiritual vitality--a renewed Fertile Crescent--that will by sheer force of momentum breathe new life into the failed states of the Middle East, and provide a platform for African friends to reach their full potential.