For the first time, a Gallup survey found more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis in the long-running Middle East conflict, a watershed moment in relations between the US and one of its closest — but most controversial — allies.
New polling data from Gallup found that 41 percent of Americans say their sympathies are more with the Palestinians versus 36 percent for the Israelis. While that’s still within the margin of error, it’s a major change from last year, when the numbers were 46-33 in Israel’s favor.
Since Gallup started tracking this question in 2001, Israel typically held a double-digit lead, with the numbers shifting dramatically only in recent years, accelerating with the war in Gaza under then-President Joe Biden and the Trump administration’s embrace of some of Israel’s most controversial policies.
The shift over the past year is not, primarily, another example of the oft-told story of Israel losing American Democrats. Democratic sympathy had already collapsed between 2023 and 2025 and didn’t change much over the past year.
The big shift has been among independents, who flipped from 42-34 percent in Israelis’ favor in 2025 to 41-30 percent in Palestinians’ favor now. Republican support for Israel is still strong but has also been dropping, with a 10 point decline since 2024.
The shift is evident across all age groups, but the drop in support has been most pronounced among young and middle-aged Americans, whose sympathies in the conflict have nearly flipped over the last two years.
Comparing cross-tabs of age and party ID reveals some even more striking developments. (These are broken into three-year buckets to get a more robust sample size.) From 2024–2026, only 52 percent of young Republican and Republican-leaning voters sympathized more with the Israelis, down from 69 percent in the 2018–2020 period before the Gaza War, a finding that dovetails with other recent surveys showing a drop in support for US aid to Israel among young Republicans. Among young Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters, it’s only 11 percent.
A sea change in US-Israel politics
Over the past two decades, a long bipartisan consensus on the Middle East conflict has more or less broken down, as the government of Israel, led for most of that time by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has become ever more closely linked to the Republican Party.
This is an era that included Netanyahu’s public feuding with the Obama administration over the Iran nuclear deal; controversial moves by the Trump administration to move the US embassy to Jerusalem and endorse Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights; and then widespread US backlash, predominantly on the left, to US military support for Israel during the recent war in Gaza.
Opposition to arms sales to Israel was once a fringe position for Democratic US lawmakers but is now increasingly mainstream. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful lobbying group that for decades worked to maintain a bipartisan consensus on Israel, is becoming increasingly toxic for Democrats.
Israel grew closer to the Republican Party throughout the 2000s and 2010s, when it was seen as a valuable ally in the post-9/11 war on terror and a religiously and culturally friendly bulwark against Islamic radicalism among conservative evangelicals.
More recently, however, there are signs that Netanyahu’s bet on the Republican Party in the Trump era may be backfiring, as “America First” elements of the MAGA movement are becoming increasingly vocal in their opposition to US support for Israel, led by figures like pundit Tucker Carlson and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The party’s divide was on full display in a recent contentious interview between Carlson and US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee (arguably the country’s most prominent Christian Zionist), which made waves throughout the Middle East due to Huckabee’s suggestion that Israel would be entitled to control of much of the region on biblical grounds, though he added they had no such ambitions.
This trend is clearly not all about geopolitics or sympathy for the Palestinians. Carlson hosted the antisemitic, white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes on his show. And Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback, running on an anti-Israel platform, has used antisemitic talking points in his campaign.
President Donald Trump seems to have a sense that the issue is not the political winner it once was for his base, reportedly warning a Jewish campaign donor last year that “my people are starting to hate Israel.”
Nonetheless, his administration continues to back some of Israel’s most controversial policies.
Just weeks after Israel’s security cabinet announced new land ownership policies for the West Bank, described by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich as part of an effort to “continue to kill the idea of a Palestinian state,” the US announced that it would provide embassy services to US citizens living in West Bank settlements for the first time, a move seen by critics as an indirect endorsement of a settlement project considered illegal by most of the world.
As the US military builds toward a potential new war with Iran, Politico reported this week that White House officials prefer a scenario in which Israel begins the military campaign because “the politics are a lot better if the Israelis go first.” But the latest polling suggests that the politics around America’s longtime ally in the Middle East are not what they used to be.
