In the past month, an increasing number of Americans are registering their horror at the genocide of the Palestinian people despite the insistent framing by many mainstream news outlets deflecting from Benjamin Netanyahu’s destruction of Gaza.
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As we approach the two-year anniversary of October 7th — the beginning of the Gaza War, when Hamas launched armed attacks on Israel in response to the Israeli occupation, killing 1,200 people and taking over 250 hostages and Israel’s subsequent and unending retaliation — American opinions on the brutal war have undergone a dramatic shift.
In December of 2023, a survey by the Pew Research Center reported that 65 percent of Americans believed Hamas bore a lot more of the responsibility for the violence in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s murder of 1,200 people and the kidnapping of more than 250 more, than the Israeli government (35 percent).
Gallup polling around the same time showed that half of Americans approved of Israel’s large-scale assault on Gaza in response. Only 45 percent disapproved. A majority of Americans also approved of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then widely seen as a respected world leader responding appropriately to an attack on his country.
A year and a half later, the majority of Gaza has been bombed to rubble, and images of widespread famine — children withered to skin and bones, babies starved to death — lead television broadcasts around the world. Israeli soldiers, who initially claimed Hamas stole aid, recently admitted they had no evidence they did so — and in fact, copped to blocking food and medical supplies from entering Gaza for nearly three months.
When they did allow aid into Gaza, IDF soldiers routinely shot into the crowds of Palestinian families who gathered to try to get food and water. United States subcontractors who set up the aid stations in coordination with the Israeli military put them in dangerous places and used armed guards as crowd control, according to witness reports given to Human Rights Watch.
As of last month, according to Gallup, 60 percent of Americans now disapprove of the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza. A majority of Americans, 52 percent, disapprove of Netanyahu. And while more Republicans than Democrats side with the current Israeli government, younger Republicans are just as likely as older ones to view Israel unfavorably.
Notably, this shift has occurred despite the American news media’s coverage. By and large the American corporate press and its political pundit corps has treated the conflict as an excuse to attack free speech, denigrate leftists, and cheer the authoritarian crackdown on dissent in the United States.
The humanity of Palestinian children under fire while seeking food, the humanity of Israeli hostages stolen from their families for months, all took a backseat while pundits debated what to call the unfolding nightmare, who it might be good for politically, and how it might affect U.S. elections. Atrocities flourished in the shadows while American audiences were told to pay attention to college students disrupting the quiet space of a library to protest.
Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, news media platformed Trump’s outlandish claim to to be working on a deal to end the war, reported on Trump’s idea to turn Gaza into some kind of branded resort when the war is over, and speculated about the impactt opposing Israel will have on the 2028 presidential race. As CNN reports:
Fearing Zionism could die among Democrats, many party leaders are explicitly breaking with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to try to stop anti-Israel attitudes from becoming a litmus test for next year’s midterms and the 2028 presidential primaries.
The article goes on to talk about “images of starvation” as a major concern, as though the children in those images aren’t real, or couldn’t possibly be of as much concern as the topline political maneuvering and presidential horse race.
America’s top opinion journalists aren’t doing much better. They have spent a lot of their time arguing about what to call what was happening, focusing on the word “genocide.” The designation of Israel’s actions as a genocide would trigger certain legal obligations by the international community to intervene and stop ongoing atrocities, but columnists treat it as if it were a matter of semantics.
From opinion columnist Bret Stephens at the New York Times, just last month: “No, Israel Is Not Committing a Genocide in Gaza”:
If genocide — a word that was coined only in the 1940s — is to retain its status as a uniquely horrific crime, then the term can’t be promiscuously applied to any military situation we don’t like. Wars are awful enough. But the abuse of the term “genocide” runs the risk of ultimately blinding us to real ones when they unfold.
Stephens went on to say calling Israel’s actions genocidal was meant as an antisemitic slur, a “license to incite a new wave of Jew hatred,” despite the fact that many American Jews have been on the frontlines of protests against the war in Gaza.
A week later in the Times, Israeli human rights groups accused Netanyahu’s goverment of genocide. In his follow-up column, Stephens didn’t reckon with that disagreement nor any of the other arguments against what he wrote but instead simply urged Israel to mind its public relations game:
Few things hurt Israel more than the global perception, however tendentious, that it’s deliberately starving kids. Nothing helps Hamas more, either.
The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed claiming the photos of those “starving kids” were being manipulated by Hamas, and the Guardian “clarified” that one of the children of many in horrifying images had a genetic condition, as though that somehow erased his suffering from malnutrition.
Journalism from, and on, Gaza, is hampered by the extreme violence of the conflict zone. Israeli forces killed a group of five journalists last weekend, the entirety of Al Jazeera’s staff in Gaza. In fact, more than 200 journalists have been killed since the war began, the majority of them Palestinian reporters killed by Israeli forces. Those who remain, even those employed by U.S. news organizations, are at risk of the same violence as civilians in Gaza.
Their words and pictures, provided under terrible circumstances, are driving the shift in public opinion despite the hedging of columnists and politicians. A survey by the Economist/YouGov published by the Brookings Institution just last week showed that 84 percent of the American electorate wants an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
If our media figures want to retain the trust of their audiences, they should listen to those people warning them of the turn against Netanyahu and his supporters. Too often the opinion pages chase after change instead of driving it, offering a skewed picture of what Americans really support, and whose interests they have in mind.
The pages of our newspapers of record, the opinions and analysis expressed on news programs and online, should be taking note: Americans are not waiting for the opinion columns to tell them what to think about what’s happening in Gaza. They’re believing the evidence of their own eyes and ears, and making up their own minds.