How Gaza Turned Ordinary Americans Against Israel

Harold Kalmus remembers feeling proud of Israel. Now, the 69-year-old Democrat from Arden, Delaware, who describes himself as Jewish by birth, calls its actions against Palestinians “an unspeakable horror”. In an interview published by the Associated Press this year, he acknowledged the threat from Hamas, then delivered a devastating judgement: “They’re trying to wipe out a civilization as far as I’m concerned.”

There is something in that journey which the language of diplomatic disagreements fails to capture. Pride has become revulsion. A country once associated with survival and refuge has become, for this American, responsible for the destruction of another people’s world.

Kalmus cannot speak for an entire nation. But his disillusionment gives a human voice to a change now visible across American polling: Israel is losing people whose support it could once take for granted.

In a Pew Research Center survey conducted in March 2026, 60 per cent of American adults viewed Israel unfavourably, compared with 53 per cent in 2025 and 42 per cent in 2022. The proportion holding a very unfavourable view had almost tripled since 2022, from 10 to 28 per cent.

The distinction matters. Mild unease leaves room for reassurance. Deep disapproval presents a much harder problem. An audience that has lost faith in a state’s conduct is unlikely to be won back by another polished explanation of the same conduct.

Gallup’s February 2026 findings showed another historic change. Forty-one per cent of Americans sympathised more with Palestinians, against 36 per cent with Israelis. The difference was within the survey’s margin of error; it would be wrong to present it as a decisive Palestinian lead. What had disappeared was Israel’s longstanding advantage in a measure it had led throughout Gallup’s annual tracking from 2001 to 2025. That erosion began before October 2023, but the subsequent years have made its political significance impossible to ignore.

The fury surrounding that shift finds its bluntest expression in the work of husband-and-wife commentators Caitlin Johnstone and Tim Foley. They publish video readings on the YouTube channel @CaitlinJohnstone, with around 47,400 subscribers. Foley narrates their jointly written commentary, including the piece published on 7 October under the deliberately abrasive title “No One Gives A Fuck About October 7”.

Their argument is that Israel has squandered the sympathy it received after the attacks through the cumulative horror of its own actions in Gaza.

“And then, the bombs started dropping,” the commentary declares. “And dropping. And dropping. And dropping. And dropping.”

“And as the bombs dropped, Israel’s approval rating dropped with them.”

That repetition captures the experience of watching a catastrophe continue long after the first expressions of outrage: another bombardment, another explanation, another family destroyed. For the authors, the loss of support follows a collapse in the credibility of the story Israel tells about itself.

“There are only so many children you can see shredded to bits by Israeli military explosives before you start suspecting that there’s something terribly wrong with the Zionist project,” they write.

The passage is deliberately confrontational. It asks how long an audience can be expected to reconcile claims of moral restraint with the suffering unfolding before it. The American polling gives that argument a political context, although it cannot establish what caused each respondent to change their mind.

The commentary describes the moment when Israel’s public messaging ceases to persuade: “And once the Hasbara stops working, it’s just you and the unadorned reality of the situation staring each other right in the eyes.”

Its most personal passage turns from public opinion to the lasting effect of watching Gaza’s destruction.

“Day after day, month after month, year after bloody year staring right down the barrel of that waking nightmare changed me forever,” the essay says. “And there is nothing in me that will ever forget the horrors I witnessed.”

“And the world is full of people who had the exact same experience I had.”

That sense of irreversible disillusionment is central to the piece. An audience that once accepted assurances may begin to hear the same language as an attempt to evade responsibility. Each repetition can deepen the distrust it was meant to overcome.

“Their words are just words now,” the authors write. “They have no power anymore.”

As an absolute claim, that goes beyond what the evidence can show. As an expression of lost trust, it helps explain the anger of people who feel they were asked to suspend their judgement for too long.

Taken literally, the headline claims too much. People still grieve those killed on 7 October. The murder of civilians remains an atrocity. Remembering those victims, however, creates no obligation to excuse the killing of other civilians. The moral force of mourning cannot be converted into an unlimited licence for a government.

That is the central failure of an argument which continually returns to the first day while demanding indulgence for everything that followed. A Palestinian child does not inherit responsibility for Hamas’s crimes. An American does not have to forget Israeli suffering to refuse the destruction of Palestinian life.

Nor does that refusal depend on accepting the claims of a social-media commentator. Amnesty International concluded in December 2024 that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. The Israeli human rights organisations B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel reached that conclusion in July 2025. The UN’s independent commission of inquiry reported a genocide finding in September 2025. These are findings by investigators and rights organisations, rather than a final court judgement; Israel rejects the allegation.

The documented basis for that outrage is extensive. Amnesty’s investigation described civilian killings, the destruction of essential infrastructure, repeated displacement and restrictions on supplies needed for survival. It examined photographs, video, satellite imagery, witness accounts and officials’ statements. The case against Israel’s conduct extends far beyond a handful of distressing clips circulating online.

For an American encountering that evidence, a reasonable question follows: how much destruction must be explained away before the explanation itself becomes impossible to believe?

The generational divide suggests that this question will trouble Israel’s supporters for years. In the March Pew survey, 57 per cent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents aged 18 to 49 held an unfavourable view of Israel. Republicans overall remained more favourable than unfavourable, but younger people within that political camp were already on the other side of the argument.

This makes it increasingly difficult to dismiss the change as the work of a small progressive fringe. Gallup also found that political independents, previously more sympathetic to Israelis, now favoured Palestinians by 41 to 30 per cent. The centre of American opinion is moving too.

The shift takes different forms. In AP interviews published in September 2025, Larry Kapenstein, a 71-year-old Democrat from Middletown, Pennsylvania, still identified with Israel but believed Benjamin Netanyahu had gone too far. Miguel Martinez, a 55-year-old Republican from Miami, supported the aim of defeating Hamas while insisting that civilians needed humanitarian help.

“Not everyone there is the enemy,” Martinez said. “Those people need help.”

Neither man should be presented as having abandoned Israel altogether. Their reservations show how support can become conditional before it disappears. People who accept a military objective can still reject the suffering inflicted in its pursuit. A government which treats every objection as betrayal risks driving even these supporters away.

For Americans, the question also reaches into their own democracy. Their government’s role makes Gaza more than a distant tragedy over which they have no influence. They can demand answers about military assistance, diplomatic protection and the choices made in their name.

An August 2025 Quinnipiac poll found that 60 per cent of registered voters opposed sending Israel more military aid for its war with Hamas; 32 per cent supported it. Opposition included three-quarters of Democrats and two-thirds of independents, although a majority of Republicans still favoured further aid.

Those figures concern a concrete policy choice. They suggest that disapproval has moved beyond reputational damage into resistance to continuing American support. The challenge for Washington is what happens when an established foreign-policy commitment loses the consent of much of the public expected to sustain it.

Another Johnstone commentary, published on 1 October, examines the more intimate consequences of taking a position. Palestine, she argues, has become a test of values which can expose irreconcilable differences between friends and acquaintances.

“Supporting Palestine doesn’t automatically make you a good person,” she writes. “Opposing genocide and apartheid is just a basic bare minimum position we’re all morally obligated to take.”

Her wider claim that everyone supporting Israel is automatically a bad person is too sweeping to account for the people still questioning inherited beliefs, including those interviewed by AP. Yet the argument contains a recognisable moral challenge. When a conversation concerns the destruction of homes, the deaths of children and the means of keeping a population alive, treating it as an amusing exercise in opposing viewpoints can become an evasion.

The public argument is ultimately about whose suffering counts, and what follows once it is acknowledged. Sympathy which never places any limit on the actions of the stronger party offers little protection to those experiencing its force.

Accusations of antisemitism cannot settle that argument. Antisemitism is real, and hostility towards Jews must be confronted. So must attempts to hold Jewish Americans responsible for the Israeli government. But criticism of a state’s military campaign, or refusal to finance it, cannot reasonably be treated as proof of hatred towards a people.

American opinion also retains distinctions that sweeping rhetoric obscures. Pew’s survey conducted in May 2026 found that 52 per cent viewed Israeli people favourably, while only 32 per cent viewed the Israeli government favourably. Palestinians were viewed favourably by 50 per cent. These results leave considerable room for solidarity with civilians alongside rejection of the leaders and policies endangering them.

Johnstone predicts that support for Israel will never return. No opinion poll can establish that. Public attitudes can change again, and disillusionment alone does not guarantee a change in American policy. The purpose of documenting this moment is to understand the breach, rather than declare the future settled.

For those who have changed their minds, however, restoring trust would require far more than persuading them to look away. It would require accountability, an end to the abuses that destroyed their confidence, and recognition that Palestinian freedom and safety carry the same moral weight as anyone else’s.

Israel’s defenders may prefer to debate the tone of its critics. The Americans whose trust has been lost present a more difficult question. What, exactly, were they supposed to do with what they saw?

They were asked to keep believing. Increasing numbers have concluded that they cannot.

Sources and attribution

This opinion feature draws on the two supplied commentaries by Caitlin Johnstone and Tim Foley, alongside independently checked polling, published interviews and investigation findings. The interviews were conducted by the Associated Press, not for this article. Polls measure different questions and populations; their percentages are not interchangeable.

• Associated Press: interview with Harold Kalmus and AP–NORC polling, 2026
• Pew Research Center: views of Israel and Netanyahu, 7 April 2026 (fieldwork 23–29 March)
• Gallup: Americans’ sympathies, 27 February 2026
• Associated Press: interviews with Larry Kapenstein and Miguel Martinez, September 2025
• Quinnipiac University: military-aid polling, 27 August 2025
• Pew Research Center: views of peoples and governments, 9 July 2026 (fieldwork 4–17 May)
• Amnesty International: Gaza investigation, 5 December 2024
• B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel: genocide findings, 28 July 2025
• UN independent commission of inquiry: genocide finding, 16 September 2025
• Caitlin Johnstone and Tim Foley: No One Gives A Fuck About October 7, 7 October 2026
• Caitlin Johnstone and Tim Foley: Being Forcefully Pro-Palestine Weeds The Terrible People Out Of Your Life, 1 October 2026