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The strategy to destroy Israel has two parts. You can think of them as a pincer. The first is to crush Western sympathy for the Israelis and then to so stigmatise Israel that American public opinion causes Congress to cut off military aid. The second part is to so distress young Jews that they come to doubt the sense of serving in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and settle instead for the idea of a future in the broader Jewish diaspora. Cut off from external aid and without a deep internal commitment to fight for Israel’s survival, the country will eventually be overrun and cease to exist. That endpoint is coming closer.

Part one of the pincer has reached a critical milestone this year, with Gallup polls finding that the share of Americans sympathising with Palestinians exceeded those sympathising with Israelis. Looking ahead, an age breakdown of that number shows that future support will likely largely collapse.

American public opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has undergone a historic shift. For most of the past four decades, Americans consistently expressed greater sympathy for Israelis than Palestinians.

In 1991, for example, 64% of Americans said their sympathies were more with Israelis, compared with 7% who sympathised more with Palestinians. This gap remained large for decades, with Israelis leading by 46 percentage points in 2011 (63% compared with 17%).

However, the gap began narrowing after the mid-2010s and accelerated after 2023.

In that year, Israeli sympathy had fallen to 54%, while Palestinian sympathy had risen to 31%.

This year, the positions have reversed, with 36% of Americans sympathising more with Israelis and 41% sympathising more with Palestinians. Over the period from 1991 to 2026, sympathy for Israel declined by 28 percentage points, while sympathy for Palestinians increased by 34 percentage points.

The chart below shows how the positions of Americans overall have inverted since 1991:

The biggest political shift has occurred among Democrats and Independents, while Republicans have remained strongly supportive of Israel.

Among Democrats, the change has been dramatic. Democrats were historically more sympathetic toward Israel, but that position has now reversed (in 2025).

Data from this year found that only 17% of Democrats said they sympathised more with Israelis, while 65% sympathised more with Palestinians. Independents have also moved significantly. For decades, Independents generally leaned toward Israelis, but by 2026 they had shifted toward Palestinians, becoming one of the main drivers of the national change.

Republicans remain the strongest supporters of Israel, with around 70% continuing to sympathise more with Israelis and only around 13% favouring Palestinians.

The result is that the issue has moved from a broadly bipartisan consensus around Israel into a deeply partisan divide, with Republicans maintaining strong support for Israel while Democrats and many Independents have moved toward the Palestinian side.

The change in American opinion has also been strongly generational. Younger Americans have moved substantially away from the traditional pro-Israel position, while older Americans remain more sympathetic toward Israel.

Among Americans aged 18 to 34, some 53% now say they sympathise more with Palestinians, compared with only 23% who sympathise more with Israelis.

Among middle-aged Americans aged 35 to 54, opinion has also shifted, with 46% sympathising more with Palestinians compared with 28% for Israelis.

In contrast, Americans aged 55 and older remain more supportive of Israel, with 49% sympathising more with Israelis, compared with 31% with Palestinians. However, even among older Americans, Israel’s advantage has narrowed significantly, with the current 18 percentage point lead being the smallest Gallup has recorded for this age group since 2001.

Views in Europe are the most negative ever recorded, with every European country polled by the Pew Research Center showing negative majorities.

The strongest negative views were recorded in Southern and Western Europe. In Spain, 78% of respondents had an unfavourable view of Israel, compared with 17% who had a favourable view. In Sweden, 78% viewed Israel negatively and 19% positively. In the Netherlands, 76% were unfavourable, compared with 20% favourable, while in Italy 75% were unfavourable, compared with 21% favourable.

Germany and the United Kingdom (UK) have also shifted significantly. In Germany, 73% of respondents expressed an unfavourable view of Israel, while only 23% held a favourable view. In the UK, 69% viewed Israel negatively, compared with 25% positively. Poland, traditionally one of Europe’s more sympathetic countries toward Israel, also recorded negative sentiment, with 70% unfavourable views and 15% favourable views.

The change has accelerated recently. Between 2025 and 2026, several European countries recorded significant increases in unfavourable views of Israel. Germany saw unfavourable views rise from 64% to 73%, an increase of nine percentage points. Italy increased from 66% to 75%, while the UK increased from 61% to 69%.

The chart below shows favourable vs unfavourable views of Israel for several European countries:

The divide is particularly strong among younger Europeans and those on the political left. Pew found that in several European countries younger people are more likely than older people to hold negative views of Israel. In Hungary, for example, 72% of adults aged 18 to 34 viewed Israel unfavourably, compared with 45% of those aged 50 and older. Ideology also plays a major role. In Spain, 96% of people on the left expressed unfavourable views of Israel, compared with 66% on the right. In France, the gap was 86% on the left, compared with 60% on the right. In Germany, 85% of the left held negative views, compared with 63% of the right.

Therefore, outside of older conservative groups, Israel has no Western allies left.

Globally, across the 36 countries polled, Pew found a median of 67% of respondents had an unfavourable view of Israel, compared with 25% who viewed Israel favourably.

Within Israel, too, there are cracks about service in the IDF, especially around fairness, given the question of exemptions for the ultra-Orthodox. Calculations done by The Common Sense, based on data sourced from the Institute for National Security Studies, a think tank based in Tel Aviv, found that 36% of Israeli parents would either discourage service or combat service in the IDF in the face of a law exempting the ultra-Orthodox from service. The importance of those data has nothing to do with ultra-Orthodox service. The importance is instead to show that circumstances can be contrived where not serving may win the support of a significant chunk of internal Israeli opinion. And that will provide endless encouragement to Israel’s enemies that the second arm of the pincer might also be completed.

If both arms are completed, it remains difficult to see how Israel might survive the consequences at all for much more than a generation. It will not have especially the smart weapons to defend itself, meaning that its defensive actions will necessarily trigger even more death and destruction that will further toxify opinion towards it. That will stigmatise Israel even further and the pressure will fall very much on younger Israelis. Match that with internal conflict over conscription and national service, and Israel looks unsustainable as a project, or at the very least less sustainable than at any point in its history.

The lesson the Israelis might learn from this is that the war against them is an information and ideas war to a greater extent than one executed with missiles and bombs. It can win the former, and its confidence in that may have seen it grow complacent on the ideas front. That is always where militarily powerful actors lose wars – with the famous American lament about losing Vietnam “not in the jungles of south-east Asia … but on the streets of Washington and the living rooms of America” being the most apt.

Iron Dome, for example, might stop missiles raining down on Israel’s cities, but it is powerless to stop the flow of media and information. And that media and information drew its strength from something much deeper than a propaganda or public relations exercise conducted against Israel, but rather from defining modern Western societies into categories of victims and perpetrators, where virtue attached to allying with the former against the latter in order to turn the tables. This is itself an inversion of the basis of Western societies, which had been built on the idea of the sovereign worth of the individual.

Match that redefining with the idea of Israel as the apartheid state and its successor idea of the genocidal state, and the information war against Israel is well on its way to its final destination, which is to have the concept of Israel itself declared a crime against humanity – at which point, given what is already seen in the opinion data, it seems optimistic that the state could survive.