NEW YORK CITY: The views of Americans on Israel have fallen close to their lowest levels on record, while support for the creation of an independent Palestinian state has risen to one of its highest levels in more than two decades, according to the latest research from Gallup.
The company’s annual update on US attitudes toward the Middle East reveals a significant shift in public opinion over the past year. For the past 25 years, Israel has held large, double-digit leads in terms of US sympathy, but this year more Americans said they sympathized with the Palestinians.
In the Gallup poll of 1,001 adults, carried out by ReconMR between Feb. 2 and 16, 41 percent said they sympathized more with the Palestinians, compared with 36 percent who sympathized more with the Israelis.
Though the five-percentage-point difference is not statistically significant, it contrasts sharply with the results of a Gallup poll a year ago, in which more people (46 percent) were sympathetic to the Israelis than the Palestinians (33 percent).
In fact, for more than two decades Israelis have garnered much greater sympathy than Palestinians; for most of the time between 2001 and 2025, the difference was in the large double digits.
