What A Day - What’s Really Behind America’s Generational Divide Over Israel

Episode Date: May 11, 2024

Why are middle-aged and older Americans persistently pro-Israel? It hasn’t always been the case. This week on How We Got Here, Max and Erin discuss the profound opinion shift among younger Americans, and then take a trip off campus to understand how geopolitics and propaganda in the 21st century have entrenched pro-Israel sentiments in Gen Xers, Boomers and beyond. SOURCES:The U.S. Public’s Pro-Israel History | Pew Research CenterMajority in US Say Israel's Reasons for Fighting Hamas Are Valid | Pew Research CenterDaniel Hopkins and Gall Sigler | On-campus protests reflect stark generational divide on Israel-Palestine | The Daily PennsylvanianAmericans' Reaction to Middle East Situation Similar to PastAmericans' Views of Both Israel, Palestinian Authority DownMajority in U.S. Now Disapprove of Israeli Action in GazaDespite concerns about war, many voters would ban pro-Palestinian campus protestsHalf of US adults say Israel has gone too far in war in Gaza, AP-NORC poll showsAmericans' views divided on US policy toward Israel-Hamas war: POLL - ABC NewsThe history of US support for Israel runs deep, but with a growing chorus of critics - ABC NewsThe generation gap in opinions toward Israel | BrookingsPublic Attitudes toward Israel: A Study of the Attentive and Issue PublicsAmerican Public Opinion Polls: Attitudes Toward Israel Prior to 1967Foreign Policy Interest Groups, Mass Public Opinion and the Arab-Israeli DisputeCBS News poll: Rising numbers of Americans say Biden should encourage Israel to stop Gaza actionsThe American Public and IsraelThe 1987 AIPAC ConferenceTrump’s Hard-Line Israel Position Exports U.S. Culture War Abroad - The New York TimesHow Republicans fell in love with Israel - VoxWhat unites the global protests for Palestinian rights - VoxIsrael vs. the Palestinians: TV Coverage of the Second IntifadaPentagon deleted part of official's apology - Oct. 20, 2003Franklin Graham conducts services at Pentagon - Apr. 18, 2003Religious Beliefs, Elite Polarization, and Public Opinion on Foreign Policy: The Partisan Gap in American Public Opinion Toward Israel | International Journal of Public Opinion Research | Oxford Academic

Erin, I have a poll I want to read you. You sound like the subject line of a Democratic Party fundraiser email. It's on American attitudes toward Israel. And the question is, what should the U.S. do about the conflict? Well, that sounds like a straightforward question with a simple consensus answer. Okay, given that sarcastic prediction, I think you're going to be surprised. Because the most popular answer to this poll by far was that the U.S. should stay out of the situation entirely. 58% said that. Only 13% said the U.S. should

support Israel in any way. Was this poll of my Instagram friends? What? That can't be right. 13%? So those numbers are correct, but well, they are from 1970. Ah, okay. Still, Americans really did say that. It's wild, right? Yeah, it's hard to square that with where we are now. It's so baked into conventional wisdom that Americans have always been fervently pro-Israel. But they haven't, and the story of when and why that changed, I think, tells us a lot about whether American attitudes toward Israel could be changing again. Well, if anybody can help explain a complicated topic without giving me math tears, it's you, Max. Thank you. I'm Max Fisher.

And I'm Erin Ryan. This is How We Got Here, a new series where we explore a big question behind the week's headlines and tell a story that answers that question. Our question this week has to do with the student protest over Israel's war in Gaza. Free Palestine! Free, free, free Palestine! Free, free Palestine! Free, free Palestine! We wanted to do an episode about what has been a profound shift in attitudes toward Israel-Palestine among younger Americans.

But we did not want our question to be, why are young people becoming more opposed to U.S. support for Israel? Right, because the answer is obvious. Israel has killed 35,000 Palestinians since October, mostly civilians. It's displaced hundreds of thousands, leveled cities, all with U.S. weapons and support. So it's not mysterious why people would be opposed to that. Why do you feel so passionately about being here,

even though the police are telling you to leave? Because we know that we're on the right side of this right now. Are you scared? No. I think that the children in Gaza are more scared than I am. That's from a Sky News interview. What's curious about this isn't that young people are getting more critical of Israel. It's that older people aren't, at least not to the same degree. Right. They've moved a little, but there's still a pro-Israel tilt among Americans over 35 and especially over age 50. But there is a big and growing generation gap here.

So our question this week, why are middle-aged and older Americans persistently pro-Israel? And the story I want to tell you is about how that came to be in the first place, because it was not always that way. Well, sure. You just read out that poll from 1970 when only 13% of Americans wanted the U.S. to support Israel. So clearly something's changed. And those numbers were pretty typical of the time. In 1975, U.S. support for aiding Israel actually dipped to 5%. Wow. Well, it might be some Vietnam fatigue there. That's true. And the timing of that 1975 poll is telling because just two years earlier,

the U.S. actually had aided Israel in a war it fought with Egypt and Syria. So this wasn't some hypothetical. Washington cared about Israel because it saw it as, you know, a foothold of American influence in the Middle East during the Cold War. But American voters were really not interested. An American president aiding the Israeli military over the wishes of his supporters. Where have I heard that before? One difference is that unlike those Americans today who are critical of Israel over things like its occupation of the Palestinians, Americans back then were more just indifferent.

Is it even really America if people aren't screaming at each other about Israel? You know, I scream, you scream, we all scream about Israel. We do. Okay, well, to give you an example, like one set of surveys in the 50s and 60s, pollsters asked Americans to rate how they felt about Israel on a scale from negative five for most critical to plus five for most critical to plus five for most positive. I feel like today Americans would be all plus fives and minus fives. Right. But back then, almost everyone was between a minus one and a plus two.

So Americans were mostly pretty indifferent. And that's held true really for most of Israel's existence. A poll from 1948, taken just before Israel's founding, found that only 28% of Americans said they sympathized with the Jews in the territory, another 11% with the Arab populations, and 44% said neither. Neither. Wow. Okay. But clearly Americans are not indifferent anymore about Israel or about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No, I think it's fair to say that for most of our lives, it's been one of the most contentious issues in American politics. It is famously the thing you don't bring up at Thanksgiving or parent-teacher conferences for that matter. Wow, that sounds like a hard-learned lesson. When I was getting into journalism, I had it drilled into me. This is the trickiest thing you could write about because it was so complicated and fraught, which in retrospect, I actually don't

think is true, but it's what people said. Like, here's a Daily Show clip from back in 2014 that kind of exemplifies this. Look, obviously, there are many strong opinions on this issue, but just merely mentioning Israel or questioning in any way the effectiveness or humanity of Israel's policies is not the same thing as being pro-Hamas. So you're against murder children? Free Gaza! Free Palestine! Okay, to review, contrary to what you might have been told, Americans have not always cared about Israel. In fact, from the moment of Israel's creation onward, they were mostly indifferent.

Right, yes. But at some point that changed, and Americans became deeply invested in caring about the Israel-Palestine conflict and were mostly pro-Israel. That happened a lot more recently than you might think. One poll in 1990 found that same indifference as back in the 40s, with 70% of Americans saying they didn't sympathize with either side in the conflict over the other. And that didn't really change until the mid to late 90s. You're telling me that Americans polarized over Israel so recently that Frasier existed in the time before it happened. Who has a nice toast?

Niles? Oh, all right. L'chaim. Muzzled off. Next year in Jerusalem. Take it down a notch, Tevye. Wow. So that didn't cause immediate backlash when it aired.

I know. So it really helps to show that up through the 90s, caring or talking about Israel was seen as something that was really mostly just for religiously observant Jews. And evangelical Christians. Yeah. When you were quoting those older polls with 10 or 20 percent American support for Israel, that was presumably mostly American Jews and evangelical Christians. Yeah. And these two groups are important because

they kind of set the norms for how Americans talk and think about being pro-Israel once that position later became mainstream. Right. Most people today who are pro-Israel are neither Jewish nor evangelical. The two biggest predictors today for being pro-Israel are actually being older and being conservative. But the evangelical rationale for Zionism has since become really important for shaping what it means to be pro-Israel in America, because evangelicals drove so much of the political advocacy around Israel back in the 80s and 90s. And the evangelical case for supporting Israel is scarily uncompromising. Yeah, they see it as a matter of religious prophecy that Jews should control the land,

which means they believe Israelis have to be made to prevail over Palestinians no matter what. Here's James Inhofe, who at the time was a Republican senator from Oklahoma, giving a speech to the Senate in 2002. I believe very strongly that we ought to support Israel for its right to the land. And this is the most important reason, because God said so. As I said a minute ago, look it up in the book of Genesis. It's right up there on your desk, Mr. President. This is not a political battle at all. It's a contest over whether or not the word of God is true. And he was replaced in the Senate by a man whose first name is Mark Wayne.

One of our faves. Yeah, one of our faves. The part of this he's not telling you about is that according to evangelical prophecy, Jews need to control Israel so Jesus can come back and take all the Christians away to heaven and leave everybody else to be tortured on earth for seven years. Cool. With most of us eventually succumbing to the Antichrist and being sent to hell. Cool, cool. So as a secular Jew, that would not be my preference?

Yeah, we don't talk about this enough and it's extremely fucked up. Well, anyway, again, all of this is actually pretty recent. Evangelicals getting involved in pro-Israel lobbying or really getting involved in politics generally. Just as an example, in 1976, half of evangelicals voted for Jimmy Carter. Yeah, it was Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson who led the evangelical takeover of the Republican Party in the 80s and 90s, mostly as a reaction against social issues like abortion and LGBTQ rights. One stat I found interesting on this, in 1993, less than 7% of House Republicans personally identified as evangelical. And by 2015, that was up to 36%. So what you're saying is that evangelicals radicalized around Israel over religious prophecy, but at first they didn't act on it politically.

Until starting in the 90s, evangelicals got deeply involved in Republican politics. They were motivated by social issues, but they brought their Israel obsession with them. So that became part of the party line as evangelicals took it over. Right. Here's a video from 2011 recorded by an evangelical pastor named John Hagee. The man, the church, the nation that blesses the state of Israel, the Jewish people will be blessed beyond measure. That's God's promise. There will come a day that it's important for Christians to speak up and stand up in defense of Israel and the Jewish people.

Okay, so this guy is not like a friend to the Jews. I know this guy is a hellfire and brimstone charlatan who is famous for some anti-Semitic viewpoints, like the Holocaust happened because the Jews disobeyed God. Whoa. Yes, he's gotten in trouble for saying that. I can see why. And that the Antichrist will be a, quote, partially Jewish homosexual.

Okay, based. Like Hitler was. He has called Hitler a half-breed. He is not. Not a friend of the Jews. Not good for the Jews. Not invited to the Seder in any way, shape, or form. I am not comfortable with the idea of him watching my plants, much less influencing international

politics. Well, he's important for this story because Hagee founded a Christian Zionist group called Christians United for Israel that became highly influential on the right. Like that was his case to Republicans. And as all of this is happening, there's something forming within Washington that gets informally referred to as the bipartisan consensus. I know it's about Israel, but I hear the 1990s and Washington bipartisan consensus, and it makes me think homophobia and austerity. Basically, both parties agreed that U.S. foreign policy should favor Israel as a fellow democracy and a strategic ally against countries like Iran and Iraq. What could be more American than propping up one problematic ally as a check on other

former problematic allies turned enemies? Yeah, you got it there. The D.C. consensus on Israel does have a big caveat, though, for the Israel-Palestine conflict. Both parties agree that, yes, we should send Israel aid and guarantee its security, but we should also fund and support the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza, and we should pressure both sides to reach a two-state peace agreement. It's hard to give Washington too much credit for this since, you know, it didn't work. And Israel got away with so much intransigence on the peace process for so long. Oh, for sure. My point is just that the politics of Israel and Palestine used to look

very, very different in this country. It was seen as like a wonky foreign policy issue that got a lot of engagement from a couple of interest groups and otherwise wasn't something that people much cared about. So we know when that changed at the end of the 90s, but why did it change then? Well, today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. But they have failed. Our country is strong. A great people has been moved to defend a great nation. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them. Wow. Everything goes back to 9-11, doesn't it?

It really does. And just a quick note on that, we edited together a few different lines from different points in Bush's speech, just to remind you that America sort of collectively snapped after September 11th. An event that, of course, had nothing to do with the Israel-Palestine conflict. Not directly, no, but almost immediately they became linked in American minds. And a big reason for that was that at that moment, Israelis and Palestinians just happened to be locked in a period of very intense violence called the Second Intifada. Here's a retrospective on that from an Israeli outlet called I-24 News. Suicide bombings, a lynching, targeted killings, and fierce military campaigns.

Horrible memories of the second Intifada, which broke out 20 years ago and brought relations between Israel and the Palestinians to a new low. Just so people know, Intifada is the Arabic word for uprising. Here it refers to two Palestinian uprisings against the Israeli occupation through things like marches, protests, and armed violence. The second of those broke out in 2000. The full story is, of course, complicated. Just know that it was a few years of extremely heavy fighting, including many Israeli military attacks on Palestinian communities and Palestinian groups setting off bombs in Israeli cafes and buses. This has become kind of a famous case study in media bias because coverage tended to privilege Israeli perspectives

and the harms to Israeli civilians over those to Palestinians. So even though three times as many Palestinians died as Israelis, Americans often perceived it as something happening mostly to Israelis. Yeah, and the point is that the story dominated American nightly news for a solid year before September 11th. These images of bombings and civilians being pulled from rubble. So then September 11th happened, and it felt like our experience in Israel's were the same.

Americans had a lot of help in making this connection from one guy in particular. So for these militants, they don't hate America because of Israel. They hate Israel because of America, because they see Israel as an outpost of Western values and the very freedoms and liberalism in the larger sense of societal freedoms that they despise. Because of that, Israel has been fighting at the cutting edge between this terrorist militancy and the West.

It was just a matter of time until Benjamin Netanyahu showed up. He was actually out of office at this point, just a former prime minister and private citizen. But he flew to Washington barely a week after September 11 and gave one interview after another, multiple rounds of congressional testimony with one message. Our fight is your fight. It's the same struggle against the same enemy. So America, you better back Israel categorically, unconditionally against the Palestinians, whatever it takes, no matter how far we have to go. Here's another stop from Netanyahu's September 2001 War on Terror tour of D.C. In the summer, there were summer camps, summer camps for Palestinian

children, kindergarten children, teaching them how to become suicide martyrs. If I can tell you one thing about the terror network, it is this. The success of the terrorists in one place and the terror network breeds, I would say, emboldens terrorists everywhere. As this was happening, the violence of the second intifada was still filling Americans' TV screens every night, alongside the invasion of Afghanistan and Bush's speeches about an axis of evil. Al-Qaeda and the architects of the September 11th attacks did also, for their own reasons, encourage the world to see a link between their attacks and Israel. So it all started to feel linked for Americans, even if it mostly wasn't. This is when American public indifference to the Israel-Palestine conflict ended, 2001 to 2003 or so. A Gallup poll around then found that almost two-thirds of Americans now

considered it a critical issue for the U.S. And just a decade earlier, remember, the overwhelming majority of Americans had said it didn't concern them at all. So this is it, the moment when Americans first came to deeply care about Israel and Palestine. But the way that they cared about it, the way that they talked and thought about it, was shaped by the politics of the moment. I was just old enough to start paying attention around this time, and I can tell you, the politics of the moment were extremely fucked up. Toby Keith was burning up the charts. The band then known as the Dixie Chicks were being blackballed by country radio for mildly criticizing George W. Bush. Americans after September 11th, you just have to say it, we kind of lost our minds.

We were paranoid, angry, nationalistic, xenophobic, and then along comes Netanyahu and Bush and Biden, all telling Americans that they're locked in a grand, epochal struggle for the future of humanity with Israel at the forefront. And this was just as evangelicals were rising within the Republican Party. So they were in a good position to reaffirm Netanyahu's message to Americans. Now with this added topspin that helping Israel fight the Palestinians was their glorious mission as God-fearing Christians. I dug up another set of polls for you, Erin. All right, let's hear it.

By 2003, 44% of Americans said they believed God had given the land that makes up Israel to the Jewish people. Nearly as many, 36%, said Israel's creation was a step toward the second coming of Christ. Oh, gosh. 36% said Israel's creation was a step toward the second coming of Christ. Oh, gosh. We talk a lot about the puritanical, socially conservative 90s, but it truly does not hold a candle to the frothing lunacy of the 2000s. It's going to be quite a reckoning when we get to it. And this all started to get expressed in a phrase that was absolutely everywhere in 2000s America. That's hot.

Thankfully, no. Paris Hilton wisely stayed out of this one. No, the phrase is Judeo-Christian. You're giving me trauma flashbacks to 2002, Max. You could not turn on a cable news panel in the early 2000s or listen to a politician give a speech without hearing about Judeo-Christian values, Judeo-Christian traditions.

And this was a time of rampant Islamophobia in America, animated by Bush's war on terror, which shaped people's perceptions of the Israel-Palestine conflict too. This wave of xenophobia, just for people who maybe were too young, was extra stupid. Extra stupid. Even as far as xenophobic waves go, people who weren't even Muslim but simply looked brown or other, like Sikhs, for example, were being targeted by hate crimes. All of which becomes yet another big cultural current, pulling Americans toward identifying with Israelis and toward seeing the Palestinians as their enemy. Which is, of course, ridiculous. Palestinian groups were fighting the Israeli occupation that had been suffocating their communities for decades. There's no reason that

should feel threatening to Americans. Something else happened after that. For the rest of the 2000s, pretty much any time there was a big debate over something related to the war on terror, conservatives would invoke Israel. I remember this. When Bush got caught doing torture, the justification was, well, Israel did it too, and we have to be tough like the Israelis. Same with phone tapping, targeted killings abroad, even security screenings at the airport. Israel did it, so we have to do it. This may have done a lot to create the dynamics that still exist in American attitudes toward Israel. Research by an Israeli political scientist named Amnon Kavari felt that basically these 2000-era political fights within the U.S.

over things like torture or inclusion led a lot of Americans to associate supporting Israel with being a conservative. Oh, so if Israel is the ultimate embodiment of conservative values because it's unapologetically tough on terror and proudly Judeo-Christian and all that, then saying you support Israel becomes a way to signal that you're a true conservative. Like everything else in American life, it's all polarization and political identity. Though we should say a lot of Democrats still supported Israel for years after this. All that post-September 11 messaging about Israel as America's ideological forward operating base and the Israel-Palestine conflict as America's war on terror in miniature was really sticky with Americans who lived through it. And it still is. It's why Homeland

worked as an adaptation to American television. Yes. So being pro-Israel became weirdly both a partisan right-wing position and also a matter of widespread bipartisan consensus. For a while anyway. But then Barack Obama became president promising to mend ties with Muslim Americans and with Muslim populations abroad. And was widely accused on the right of himself being a secret Muslim. So Republicans saw an opening to attack him as hostile to Israel. Here's Mitt Romney debating Obama as part of the 2012 presidential race. The reason I call it an apology tour is because you went to the Middle East

and you flew to Egypt and to Saudi Arabia and to Turkey and Iraq. And by the way, you skipped Israel, our closest friend in the region. But you went to the other nations. And by the way, they noticed that you skipped Israel. It's easy to forget now, but back in 2012, when the global war on terror stuff was still fresh, accusing the politician of being too friendly to Muslim countries was read as basically calling them a high-ranking member of the al-Qaeda organization. Which again, was also all treated as synonymous with being insufficiently pro-Israel.

But support for Israel was never going to last for long, as long as it was both a bipartisan issue and also a deeply partisan right-wing issue. That contradiction was just not going to hold. Benjamin Netanyahu helped see to that when, in 2015, he decided to make himself an overt partisan actor by flying to Washington and telling Congress to kill Obama's nuclear agreement with Iran. I can only urge the leaders of the world not to repeat the mistakes of the past, not to sacrifice the future for the present, not to ignore aggression in the hopes of gaining

an illusory peace. Forcing half of Americans to choose between their president and a foreign country was maybe a little short-sighted by Netanyahu in retrospect. And this wasn't purely about partisan polarization either. Some of it was driven by certain voting blocs re-evaluating how they felt about Israel on the merits. Jews, especially younger and college-educated Jews, started expressing not exactly outrage at Israel's occupation of the Palestinians, but a lot more skepticism. Well, Netanyahu had been ramping up the conflict.

The year before his speech to Congress, he launched a month-long assault on Gaza that killed over 2,000 people. I covered this at the time, and it felt like it had a real effect on American attitudes. TV crews were able to get into Gaza to document the destruction. I think it was the first time a lot of Americans saw what the conflict had become, and they were shocked by it. You mean because of how severe the destruction was? Well, this looked very different from the images of the second intifada a decade earlier. There weren't clashes between Israelis and Palestinians with suffering on both sides. It was Palestinian families huddled in their homes day after day waiting to see whether Israel would drop a bomb on their apartment block. Meanwhile, for most

Israelis, the conflict was totally out of sight, hermetically sealed behind these giant walls Israel had built around Gaza. Like, this was not the image people had in their heads. You do see some tremors in the polls around then, little dips in overall support for Israel. But it looks like what happened was that Democratic support started declining and Republican support started rising, neither by huge amounts. Little changes. Little changes, but a hint, a suggestion that American support for Israel can move in response to big dramatic moments like this one. All of which sets the stage for Trump.

Trump, who came in and immediately abandoned any pretense of wanting to be an impartial mediator between Israelis and Palestinians. Something that even George W. Bush, for all his faults, had at least tried in his way to do. Right. That old D.C. bipartisan consensus, support Israel but pressure it to peace. That's over. After more than two decades of waivers, we are no closer to a lasting peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. It would be folly to assume that repeating the exact same formula would now produce a different or better result. Therefore, I have determined that it is time to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Trump went all in on Israel as basically a culture war issue.

Recklessly escalating one of the world's most entrenched conflicts to own the libs. Trump in the process was kind of redefining what it meant to be pro-Israel in America. Previously, pro-Israel political leaders in the U.S. had tried to portray Israel as a bastion of freedom and democracy and had either downplayed the occupation or presented it as a necessary evil. Now, Trump was presenting Israel's occupation of the Palestinians as something that Israel and America should be proud of. He was holding up Israel as a symbol, not so much of democracy, but this kind of ethno-nationalist brute force domination. In fairness, Netanyahu has also been increasingly presenting Israel as a symbol of ethno-nationalist brute force domination. Israeli lawmakers have passed a law declaring the country the, quote, nation state of the Jewish people. The law says only Jews hold the right to exercise national self-determination in Israel. And critics say it's a betrayal to the country's Declaration of Independence,

which ensured equal rights to all of the country's residents. That was a CBS News clip from 2018 on one of what's been a series of steps from Netanyahu's government eroding things like legal rights for minorities and the country's Supreme Court. Yeah, pulling Israel toward the kind of quasi-authoritarianism that you see in places like Turkey or Hungary. And that Trump and his supporters would really like to see happen in America. For a while, millions of Israelis were regularly protesting Netanyahu, demanding he step down. So again, just like back in 2001 and 2002, Israel was showing up in lots of nightly American news broadcasts. And also like in 2001, what was

happening in Israel felt to a lot of Americans like it was connected to what was happening domestically here in the U.S. Here was Israel having its own like slow motion January 6th driven by Trump's close ally and like-minded wannabe authoritarian Benjamin Netanyahu. Only this time, unlike in 2001, a lot of Americans see Israel as embodying the worst of America. It's an example to fear, not one to follow. This is when you first start to see a change in American attitudes towards Israel, but really just among Americans under age about 40 or so. So Gen X and baby boomers, unmoved by all this, still support Israel. Right. The dividing line seems to be people who were old enough to be paying close attention to politics during the early 2000s.

It's like those people, just by soaking up all the war on terror stuff, became pro-Israel in a way that has been very stubborn. But anyone our age or younger who's too young to have drunk the war on terror Kool-Aid from about 2019 or 2020 onward, their view of Israel starts turning negative. As of early last year, so just before the war broke out, Americans born after 1980 reported on average sympathizing with Palestinians over Israelis in the conflict. Which had never happened before. And for Democrats, it's the same thing. As of early last year, Democrats became, for the first time, on average, more sympathetic to Palestinians than Israelis in the conflict. So by the time October 7th happened and then Israel's war on Gaza, American attitudes toward Israel were already shifting. By quite a bit, yeah. But polarized by age and by party affiliation. Yes. but when you dig into the poll numbers from the months since the war started,

you find something interesting. It's probably not the remains of Jimmy Hoffa. Unfortunately, it's not. So we all know that support for Israel among younger Americans has dropped substantially since October. Right, and support for Palestinians has gone up. But support for Israel has actually dropped among older Americans too, and even among Republicans.

So in other words, everyone has gotten less supportive of Israel since October. You get the sense from coverage of the campus protests that Americans are dividing further and further over Israel. But I think that's actually not quite right. I mean, it is true that there is still an age gap and a partisan gap. But what this misses is that Americans as a whole have collectively shifted pretty far. Rather than people pulling toward opposing extremes, they're all pulling in the same direction just by different amounts and from different start points. And this all adds up. A CBS poll found that between October and April, the proportion of Americans who said they sympathized a lot with Israelis over Palestinians dropped from 51 to 38 percent. Wow. And the shares that the U.S. should send arms to

Israel dropped from 48 to 40 percent. So as much as the protests get portrayed as a matter of woke youngs versus stodgy olds, it turns out that most Americans actually agree with some of the basic protest demands. Older Americans do seem in polls to be turned off by the protests, but that might be less to do with the substance and more just a matter of old people being, you know, kind of grumps who find the college kids annoying. In a morning consult poll, 47% of Americans said campuses should ban pro-Israel protests, but almost the same amount, 41%, said the campuses should also ban pro-Israel protests. Okay, so an 80% get off my lawn quote. That's right. So, okay, taking a step back here,

Max, I keep thinking about the polls you read out at the top of the show. Oh, the ones from the 70s with only 5 or 10% saying we should arm Israel and everyone else saying stay out of it. What's most surprising to me is how much that lines up with the views of people in my peer group today. And I had the same reaction to some of the more recent polls. It always felt to me like we were kind of in a bubble on this, surrounded by Americans who were immovably pro-Israel. You know, an in and out in a sea of waffle houses, if you will. So it's surprising and a little encouraging to learn that our little cohorts actually used to be the norm in U.S. attitudes on Israel and that the rest of the country is maybe finally moving in our direction. Yeah, I think my takeaway from all this is that, you know, this idea that Americans are innately or categorically pro-Israel and they've always been pro-Israel is really just not true. We're really mostly just talking about two or so generations of Americans

who lived through a very particular and very intense moment in the early 2000s and who, as a result, got these pro-Israel attitudes burned into them that are real but are maybe not so permanent. And understanding that matters because so much of our political system and so much media coverage takes for granted that Americans are always and forever going to side with Israelis against Palestinians. But it's just not so. And the proof is not so much in the protests themselves as the fact that these protests are part of a much wider, albeit quieter, shift in American attitude. Well, whatever Americans think about Israel, it will still feel terrifying to talk about. And on that note, let's go out withble about defense budgets in the United Nations and then you pass out. So to be clear, I sometimes reference the geopolitical complexities

of the topic, which is not the same as going to an antisemitic place. I have no stake in this. I don't either. I'm just saying, if anything, the drunk version of me is probably so supportive of Israel, he wants what's best for it and- Hey man, I'm not touching this.

You do you. How We Got Here is written and hosted by me, Max Fisher, and by Erin Ryan. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Evan Sutton mixes and edits the show. Jordan Cantor sound engineers the show. Audio support from Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vasilis Fotopoulos. Production support from Adrian Hill, Leo Duran, Erica Morrison, Raven Yamamoto, and Natalie Bettendorf. And a special

thank you to What A Day's talented hosts, Travelle Anderson, Priyanka Arabindi, Josie Duffy Rice, and Juanita Tolliver for welcoming us to the family. សូវាប់ពីបានប់ពីបានប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពី Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова