Recent Polling Data Suggest That U.S. Support for Israel Remains Strong

Examining a poll of Americans’ attitudes regarding the Israel-Palestinian conflict taken near the end of last month, and comparing it to the results of other similar surveys, Victoria Coates concludes that reports of diminishing support for the Jewish state are highly exaggerated:

The [survey’s first] question was on general support for the U.S.-Israel relationship, and the results indicate that there is robust, bipartisan support for Israel in the survey sample. Forty percent of respondents are following the issue closely enough to have a strong opinion, which is highly unusual in international issues. Within this group, . . . 6.9 percent strongly oppose [the alliance] and 33.7 percent strongly support [it]. Republican support is predictably the strongest, with 70 percent of [Republican] respondents supporting the alliance either strongly or somewhat, with the majority of that group in the “strong” category. But even within the self-identifying liberal demographic, strong support for Israel does not dip below 24 percent.

Among Democrats more broadly, 65 percent support the relationship with Israel either strongly or somewhat. These are solid numbers for a country frequently portrayed in the U.S. media as polarizing, and suggest that what opposition to the relationship there is among the American people is localized to specific congressional districts, and [that such opposition] would not be a successful platform for a state- or nationwide election.

Coates also cautions against overinterpreting any particular set of data, noting that the past 70 years “have seen wide swings in American attitudes towards the Jewish state,” even as pro-Israel sentiment has proved durable in the long run. Rushing to the conclusion that “the relationship is doomed” based on short-term shifts in public opinion would be, in her evaluation, foolish.

Read more at Center for Security Policy

More about: U.S. Politics, US-Israel relations

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF