PUSH POLLING FOR PALESTINE
GLOBAL ATTITUDES HAVE BEEN SEEDED WITH LIES. THAT MAKES GAUGING OPINIONS A CHALLENGE.
For the first time ever, a poll says Americans (albeit just barely) sympathize with Palestinians more than they sympathize with Israelis. The New York Times / Siena University poll last month said 35% align more with Palestinians and 34% more with Israelis. Immediately after the 10/7 terror attacks, 47% of Americans sided more with Israel.
A similar Pew survey unsurprisingly found the chasm greatest among younger Americans and Democratic party voters.
Pew has found that among U.S. adults, negative views [of Israel] have gone from 42% to 53%. Among Republicans, they have risen from 27% to 37%; among Democrats, from 53% to 69%. Looked at by age, young Republicans aged 18–49 have shifted from 35% having an unfavorable view of Israel to 50% unfavorable, while such views among Republicans aged 50+ have gone up only marginally from 19% to 23%. Among Democrats, there has been an increase of 62% to 71% in the 18 to 49-year-old demographic, and an even larger increase from 43% to 66% among 50+ year-olds.
Ugh.
I wrote recently about part of the reason for the stark difference in numbers (TLDR; young and stupid). A lot of the difference is due to where people get their information. Older people tend to get their news from legitimate, mainstream media sources. Younger people tend to get their information from fellow basement-dwelling morons who have created seven-second reels of tragedy porn deracinated from historical or moral context. (I summarize.)
The NYT / Siena poll also found that 40% of Americans believed Israel was “deliberately” killing Palestinian civilians. Let’s focus on that for a sec.
Picture it. 1945. A poll shows 40% of the population of some privileged, peace-enjoying, uninvolved country declares that the Allies are “deliberately” killing German civilians.
Well, we were dropping bombs on Dresden and tons of other places, so, yeah. We were killing German civilians. That is a horrible, tragic, catastrophic consequence of war. It may be worth reminding everyone that Germany lost 5.3 million military personnel during the Second World War, and somewhere between 1.6 and 2.5 million civilians (through bombing, expulsions, famine and disease), for total losses of between 6.9 and 7.8 million souls. The British lost about 384,000 military and about 67,000 civilians for a total of about 451,000.
Does this mean the Germans were moral and right and the British and the Allies were immoral for “deliberately” killing German civilians? Well, the nutters who tear down statues of Churchill probably think so, but these days you can find people who are willing to attest to belief in absolutely anything in order to prove some sort of perverted ideological purity or to shock the grandparents or whatever.
And that is kind of my larger point.
People today are willing to believe pretty much anything, partly because, thanks to the internet, they can find “proof” for just about any nutso kookoo premise or assertion.
The bigger problem, maybe, is that some of that proof is based on a grain of truth.
For example, more than 70% of respondents in the Pew poll believed there was a hunger crisis in Gaza — which there was, because Hamas was stealing food aid to feed its terrorist war machine, a niggling detail the poll respondents either don’t know or don’t care about.
In a way, these polls are irrelevant, because what they are measuring is based on false premises. They are akin to “push polls.”
A “push poll” is a political manipulation tactic disguised as a survey. It pretends to be a poll gathering opinions, but its real goal is to “push” voters toward a particular belief or attitude — usually by planting false, leading or emotionally charged information.
It’s not a real poll (no data is collected or analyzed) — it’s propaganda disguised as research.
A campaign or some devious third-party calls voters and says something like “Knowing that Candidate Y drowns kittens for fun, does this information make you more likely or less likely to vote for them?”
Classic examples of push polling were used against US Senator John McCain during the 2000 South Carolina Republican primary, when voters received calls asking: “Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate Black child?”
McCain’s support collapsed and George W. Bush became the nominee and the president.
A decade later, when the Affordable Care Act was before Congress, conservative groups conducted “surveys” asking: “Do you agree that the new health care law will allow government bureaucrats to decide who lives and who dies?”
Golly, the government wants to kill people? We’re not for that!
What we are seeing in polls about American attitudes toward Israelis and Palestinians right now are sort of like push polls.
I’m not saying the polling companies are actually engaging in push polling. I’m arguing that something more insidious and widespread is taking place. The polling companies are going into a field pre-sown with misinformation and disinformation. This is obviously a far scarier proposition.
For two years, Americans (and everyone else) have been inundated with allegations that Israel is perpetrating “genocide,” is “starving” Palestinians, is “deliberately” killing people in Gaza.
Then, one night around dinnertime, the phone rings and someone asks them whether they are more sympathetic to Israelis or Palestinians and, taking a second from mixing the ground beef into the Hamburger Helper, the answer seems pretty obvious.
The polls, in other words, do not reflect reality. They reflect the screwed-up, skewed, distorted narrative Americans (and the rest of the world) have been fed about this war since October 8, 2023. So, in one sense, maybe we shouldn’t worry too much about them.
But, of course, perception is reality. It doesn’t matter, to a large extent, whether what Americans believe is true or not. They are making decisions based on the information they think is true. Even though it ranges from a pack of lies to decontextualized snippets and airy-fairy ideas about why we can’t all just live in peace and if the Jews would just stop defending themselves this whole thing could finally be over. (Again, I summarize.)
I’m of several minds here. On the one hand, I believe Israel has to do what it needs to do to protect its citizens from genocidal terrorists, and that is going to piss off a lot of armchair generals around the world.
On the other hand, if Americans (and voters in other countries, but especially Americans) stop supporting Israel, the further isolation of that country on the international stage could be disastrous. So my initial instinct — I don’t care what you think, you antisemitic idiot — is not really constructive.
I have written that the real lesson of the Gaza war in terms of the overseas reactions it has spawned is that we desperately need to teach young people (and older people) basic media literacy and critical thinking skills.
Until that shining moment arrives, we need to continue hammering home both the facts and the context of what happened during the war that is now over (for now) and in the longer conflict.
Now that the fog of war is somewhat dissipating, we are seeing a bit of a reset in the discourse. Legitimate voices are revisiting the main canards of the hate-Israel movement (“genocide,” “starvation,” “dropping fire-breathing dragons on unsuspecting civilians”) and setting the record straight and debunking the worst lies. (Quick explainer here.)
But none of this debunking matters if people won’t listen to the truth. In my next post, I’ll explore part of why they won’t.
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Many pro-Pals bring up HInd Rajab to justify their demand that Israel be destroyed and all the Jews driven out or killed. My understanding of this tragic story is that the little girl was in a car of adult combatants who were shot by IDF soldiers who then shot her, too, although she was a child calling for help. I find this very sad. But I have worked with veterans for my whole college teaching career and I know how confusing and scary combat is, especially when facing an enemy who uses child soldiers who have been taught that being a martyr while trying to kill the enemy is the highest goal one can have in life. I doubt this shooting was done in a spirit of sadistic cruelty. But even if it was, how can it possibly be compared to the horrendous torture murders of the clearly defenseless children of noncombatant Israelis far from combat zones? You are so right that the outrage against Israel is manufactured by media.
“Younger people tend to get their information from fellow basement-dwelling morons who have created seven-second reels of tragedy porn deracinated from historical or moral context.”
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