A Majority of U.S. Jews Think Israel Has Committed War Crimes

If you gentiles weren’t aware, us Jews like to argue, so disagreement over existential questions is not exactly seen as some cardinal sin the way it has been portrayed in media as some broad antisemitic assault on Jews by uh, Jews like me? That’s just another Tuesday for most Jews. Debate over what Israel is and should be among Jews is as old as Israel itself. Not this modern imperialistic version designed as a forward operating base for the U.S. and U.K.—the biblical notion that us as a people are the state of Israel too. I’ll admit that I have lost some of my tether to Judaism in the last couple of years as my revulsion to people not learning what “never again” really means mounted, and when I traveled to Ireland this summer and saw flags flying in solidarity with Palestine, I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel more connected to my mom’s Irish Catholic side she converted from than my dad’s Jewish side who fled authoritarianism in Europe. It’s beyond dismaying to see so many of my fellow Jews support authoritarianism when it’s our flag attached to it.

But I was raised Jewish. I just celebrated the High Holy Days. I had a Bar Mitzvah, and to this day I can and do still read Hebrew (but only with the vowels, I am no Torah scholar). Just because I firmly believe that a significant chunk of my people, roughly 29 percent to 51 percent according to this poll, are like modern versions of ancient Israelites, lost and worshipping a false idol in the desert, does not mean they are still not my people. Some of my closest friends and I disagree fundamentally on this issue, but that doesn’t mean I abandon them or write them off. In 2020, a year after he was indicted, just 28 percent of American Jews had a poor rating of Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership of Israel, and now that is up to 48 percent. The digital echo chambers we all sit in all day can make it seem impossible at times, but people prove time and time again they are willing to listen to new information and update their priors. It’s a very small plurality of very noisy people who make everyone think they are far larger than they really are.

And American Jews are watching Israel kidnap Greta Thunberg and others in international waters in the midst of a genocide while they bomb four other countries in their region and realizing that this state may not represent our interests. Any logical conclusion of what Israel is doing now means the world is less safe for Jews. Netanyahu has wrapped his genocide in the Jewish flag while the United States expelled and jailed students for protesting it, all in the name of supposedly combating antisemitism. It’s logical for a lot of people to think allegations of antisemitism are a crock of shit and cover for a genocide, and will now take this very real problem far less seriously. No one has made combatting actual antisemitism around the world more difficult than Benjamin Netanyahu and the dwindling minority of revanchist Jews who support his genocidal regime.

This is a major development for Judaism. Forget politics and the impacts it’s already having like getting a majority of Democrats to cast a symbolic vote against arming Israel, but the idea that Jews must look to Israel for leadership is waning. While this poll reveals that Israel is still intrinsic to a significant majority of American Jews’ identity (76 percent say Israel’s existence is vital for the long-term future of the Jewish people, personally I say New York City is), there are nuances in what Israel means. Most do not share Netanyahu’s genocidal mission to displace Palestinians, as 59 percent of American Jews still believe that Israel and an independent Palestinian state can coexist peacefully with each other. The age, education and religiosity breakdowns among support for Israel follow American partisan political trends where older, less educated and more religious people support Israel. The younger you are, the more likely you are to oppose Israel’s genocide and call it one. This is the end of an era.

Nearly as many Jews believe that Netanyahu deserves “a great deal or a good amount of responsibility for the continuation of the Israel-Gaza war” (86 percent) as Hamas (91 percent). Most Jews still blame Hamas at higher rates because their terrorist attack sparked this and caused a psychic shock among my community, but you can see the internal deliberation among many Jews taking place in these Netanyahu results. Anyone who has actually spoken with a Jew dealing with the inherent conflicts of supporting Israel since October 7th knows how much blame gets offloaded on to Netanyahu. My conservative friends and family don’t necessarily disagree with a lot of my criticism about Israel, they just say Netanyahu needs to go instead of agreeing with my take that the problems are rooted in the structures of the state itself, and Netanyahu is a symptom more than a cause of Israel’s problems.

But he is still a big cause of many of them. He is the planet’s most intransigent leader, and Israel has long been one of its most bellicose states who perpetrated what Ronald Reagan called a “holocaust” in Beirut. In an era where the elites across the entire globe clearly believe they are not subject to rules anymore, Israel is just following power’s larger depraved trend towards autocracy. A lot of American Jews can see this clearly, even if they are not ready to fully admit what many of us Reform Jews have long argued, but they are clearly trending in that direction. Israel’s influence in American politics on the left has clearly peaked for a generation, and this poll proves it will never recover as long as Netanyahu is in power.