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Across more than two months of war between Israel and Hamas, public opinion on the conflict has continuously shifted. But there has been a constant: a divide between the views of older and younger Americans that has shown up both during the war and in the years leading up to it.
A late October YouGov poll is illustrative. It found that more people ages 18-29 sympathized with Palestinians than with Israelis in the current conflict — the only age bracket with that view (28 percent expressed more sympathy with Palestinians vs. 20 percent for Israelis — though even more sympathized with both peoples equally, 31 percent). Older groups were more likely to sympathize with Israelis than Palestinians or both groups equally, particularly those 65 and older. Fourteen percent of 18- to 29-year-olds thought it was “very important” for the United States to protect Israel compared with two-thirds of those 65 or older.
Experts say there are multiple explanations behind why age could be a factor in Americans’ opinions on Israel and its relationship with Palestinians.
Two generations, two narratives
Each age group has a different “generational memory” of Israel, Dov Waxman, director of the UCLA Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, said. Beliefs about the world tend to form in our late teens and early 20s and often don’t change, he said.
Older generations, with a more visceral sense of the Holocaust, tend to see Israel as a vital refuge for the Jews, he said, and see its story as one of a people returning to safety in their homeland after living for 2,000 years as a scattered diaspora facing persistent persecution.
In the decades after its founding, Israel was a relatively lower-income and vulnerable country. Its military victories against its neighbors, in 1948, 1967 and 1973, were generally admired in the West. (An estimated 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes during the months before and after the 1948 war that created Israel.)
But by the time millennials began forming their understanding of global events, the violence of the second Intifada had concluded in the mid-2000s with enhanced walls and barriers constructed between Israel and the West Bank, and then Gaza. This generation formed its idea of Israel from reports of Palestinians denied access to water, freedom of movement and fair trials, under the military control of what was by then a relatively rich, nuclear-armed power.
“When I was in college it was the Oslo peace process, and I still remember that Israel — pursuing peace with the Palestinians and the hopes that came along with that,” Waxman said, of the ’90s. “Younger Americans have no memory of that.”
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict: A chronology
Joey Ayoub, a Palestinian-Lebanese writer, podcaster and academic, says young Americans are more likely to conceptualize the Palestinian cause as a sister issue to U.S. efforts for racial justice. There is a “visual parallel,” he said: of an armed soldier or police officer dominating a space inhabited by a populace with limited power, whether in a town in the occupied West Bank or a majority-Black neighborhood in the United States.
“It’s a natural ally to the Palestinian struggle, because it’s very similar if you think of it in terms of the bullet points being demanded — the right to dignity, the right to life and so on,” he said.
He sees 2014 as a pivotal year in a new generation’s understanding of the conflict. A war in Gaza killed about 2,250 Palestinians and 73 Israelis at roughly the same time as protests erupted in Ferguson, Mo., over the police shooting of an unarmed Black man.
“Palestinian Americans were tweeting advice towards African Americans about how to deal with tear gas, for example,” he said. “That was something very symbolically powerful.”
Eitan Hersh, a political science professor at Tufts University, said conflict between Israel and Palestinians seems to be seen by the young left, especially on college campuses, as “a people of color — that is, the Palestinians — rising up against a White oppressor,” though a significant portion of Israel’s Jewish population is of a non-European background. (Some are the descendants of about 850,000 Jews who were expelled from Arab countries and Iran after Israel was founded.)
“It’s a bit of a curiosity,” he said. “One could tell an oppressor-oppressed story where the Jews, and Israel, is a story of the oppressed: kicked out of all these countries, going back to their homeland, surrounded by a broad set of dominant countries in the region that wants to destroy it.”
One explanation for the generational divide, experts said, was that fewer Gen Zers and millennials identify as conservative or Christian — demographics more likely to sympathize with Israel — than older groups.
“Young adults in America on the left think of Israel in the same way that they might think about Iran, or China or Russia,” said Hersh, referring to a 2021 study of young Americans’ views on Israel compared with other nations. It found more than half of moderate and conservative Americans ages 18-30 held a positive view of Israel.
Thirty years ago, support for Israel was associated more with Democrats than Republicans, Waxman said. This began to change during the George W. Bush presidency, after 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when a perception on the American right developed “that Israel is the front line in this clash of civilizations — between a Judeo-Christian civilization and militant Islam,” Waxman said.
Donald Trump’s support of Israel, including moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to the more contested city of Jerusalem, furthered the trend, said Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat professor for peace and development at the University of Maryland.
“The fascinating thing there is that attitudes toward Islam and Muslims actually improved in America with the rise of Trump,” Telhami said. “People said, ‘We hate Trump, Trump hates Muslims, therefore, we like Muslims,’ ” he said of progressives.
Another “major factor” in older generations’ feelings toward Israel is their greater religiosity, according to Waxman. More than three-quarters of Americans 60-64 are Christian — with increasingly higher numbers for older brackets — compared with about half of adults under 30.
“It’s, I think, for many religious Christians, somehow a kind of atonement in supporting Israel and Zionism,” Waxman added. “Genuinely, a feeling of Israel as a consequence of this long history of Jewish persecution” by Christians.
Some Christians, particularly among evangelicals who are especially likely to sympathize with Israel, believe that Israel was promised to the Jews by God, and that the return of the Jews to Israel fulfills a biblical prophecy of the events that will precede the second coming of Jesus Christ.
Evangelical Christians mobilize to assist Israelis touched by war
But even outside of this belief, the idea of Israel as a sacred land for Judeo-Christians has an emotional resonance that is simply not present for the increasing number of secular young Americans.
“There’s a connection between Israel as they see it in the Bible and Israel that exists politically today,” Telhami said of some Christians. There is an association between place names like “Hebron,” “Jerusalem” and “the Galilee” with Bible stories as much as with 21st-century geopolitics, and a long history of hearing this geography referred to as the home of the Israelites, particularly through the Old Testament.
Social vs traditional media
Dana El Kurd, a nonresident fellow at the Middle East Institute, said different types of media consumption have probably played a role in how people have formed their views on the Middle East.
Americans 45 and older are most likely to get their news from TV networks and their websites, and Americans younger than 45 are most likely to get their news through social media, according to 2022 YouGov polling.
The regular use of TikTok in particular is correlated with criticism of Israel, a New York Times/Siena poll found this week.
Ayoub, whose interview podcast “The Fire These Times” with Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian, Jewish, and Armenian perspectives has mostly Gen Z and millennial listeners, said that new forms of media facilitated access between content creators and consumers without “having a gatekeeper.” This has downsides, including “a huge uptick in misinformation” online, he said, but also positives, including allowing traditionally underrepresented groups to reach an audience.
Israel-Gaza war sparks debate over TikTok’s role in setting public opinion
On social media, Palestinians in Gaza such as filmmaker Bisan Owda and photographer Motaz Azaiza have accrued millions of followers sharing content directly from the war zone.
TikTok has been criticized, especially by Republicans, because pro-Palestinian hashtags appear to be more popular than pro-Israel hashtags on the app. But the company says that phenomenon occurred organically, not because the company was intentionally manipulating its algorithm.
“I’ll give an anecdote,” El Kurd said. “My students, when the war broke out, said that they had gone onto TikTok and toggled between the different locations,” to see what kind of videos were popular in Israel compared with Gaza, the West Bank and other places. “It had never occurred to me before to do that.”
Emily Guskin contributed to this report.