More than half college-age American kids think Israel should be “ended and given to Hamas”? Really?
This is a segment from The “Opinions, Opinions, Opinions!” Edition.
Now it’s time for our first discussion.
So, Allison, American kids say the darndest things to pollsters, those scamps, don’t they?
And those wacky Harvard students.
What are we going to do with them?
Yeah, a much-discussed Harvard-Harris poll made huge headlines, had some people scratching their heads and other people smacking their foreheads with the butts of their hands and doing other various things with their body parts.
The Harvard part of the poll comes from Harvard University’s Center for American Political Studies, or CAPS.
I picture all these people like Noah style wearing caps, like different forms of caps.
I guess you could think that it’s a cap.
I thought all caps, yes.
Yeah, all caps.
The Harris part of the poll comes from the Harris Polling Organization, one of the longest-running opinion surveys now entering its 68th year.
Its slogan is “Hard Data, Human Truths.
” The human truths uncovered in this week’s Omnibus Poll cover a range of topics in American politics, Biden versus Trump, optimism about the economy, immigration, etc.
, and two topics that are of special interest to us, American attitudes towards Jews and American attitudes towards the war in Gaza.
On the first topic, the most spectacular finding was that among American young people age 18 to 24, two-thirds of them answered yes to the question, “Do you think that Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors?
” with only one-third saying that this belief is “a false ideology.
” When all the ages are taken together, three out of four Americans do not share the harsh opinion of this youngest cohort, but over all the groupings, the younger you are, the more likely you are to tell a Harvard Harris poll that Jews are oppressors.
On the second topic, the war in Gaza, the results are weird, self-contradicting and mostly unnerving, especially among the youngsters, 60% of whom say that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, even as 70% say that Israel is trying to avoid civilian casualties.
That makes sense.
58% of them say that “Hamas would like to commit genocide against the Jews in Israel,” while 76% say that “Hamas is an organization that can be negotiated with to create peace.
” 80% of the young people say that “Israel has a right to defend itself against terror attacks by launching airstrikes on targets in heavily populated Palestinian areas,” while 57% say that Israel “should cease all hostilities now.
” And while 54% of this youngest cohort say that Hamas is “primarily responsible for putting civilians in Gaza in harm’s way,” 51% nevertheless say that “Israel should be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians.
” Dawn, let’s start maybe with the second topic, Israel and Gaza, and my question to you is, what the fuck?
After we all try to figure out those results, the next round question about Jews being oppressors is, well, what the fuck?
And then my final question, in conclusion, wrapping it all up, will be the relationship between the first “what the fuck” and the second “what the fuck.
” So, Dawn, what should we make of what young Americans tell pollsters about the Gaza War?
Well, I think what it tells us is that the youngest cohort knows very little about Jews, knows very little about Israel or about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and apparently they’re getting most of their information about Israel’s war with Hamas from TikTok and Instagram over the last two months, where they’re seeing a lot of videos of the destruction of Gaza, and some TikTok videos more recently by freed hostages.
So perhaps, I mean, this is a guess, but they just have very little context.
I mean, as you share the answers, some of which seem blatantly contradictory, it tells us that they answered each question independently without relation to the other questions or without an expectation of consistency, or that their answers would reflect a coherent analysis of their position on the war.
I mean, as you pointed out, can you be trying to avoid civilian casualties and at the same time trying to commit genocide?
Maybe they don’t know what the word “genocide” means, I don’t know, but beyond interpreting it to mean killing a lot of people who belong to the same group.
I mean, to me, the most shocking outcome is the characterization of Jews as a class of oppressors who ought to be treated as such a class, as shocking in the formulation of the question itself and in the answers, but we’ll talk about that in the next round.
Yeah, I think that today, and we set up the show, it’s a little bit gimmicky, but it’s also interesting, all these different polls that we’re going to be talking about over the course of the day and spending several days pouring over all these polls and trying to make sense of them has made it really clear to me that public opinion polls are really problematic.
It’s a very problematic genre.
They’re all filled with nonsense and internal contradictions and it’s really hard to know what they mean.
In this case, though, I think that American young people and others have a bunch of intuitions that they hold strongly, moral intuitions that conflict with one another.
I think that one of the really important ones is that the people who are weaker are the people who are more valorous and deserve your support more.
And so there’s a way in which the idea that so many people say that Israel should be ended, which by the way is a very chilling phrasing that I don’t think that question ever should be asked, but that so many people say Israel should be ended and given over to Hamas and the Palestinians, it goes on.
I think the reason why so many people support that is because they see that there are Palestinians who are being killed and wounded and having their homes destroyed, and it just seems like their most fundamental moral intuition is if you’re a victim like that, then you deserve my support.
Then when asked other questions, other fundamental moral intuitions seem to kick in.
Most of the people seem to be aware of the atrocities that happened on October 7th and they don’t support that either.
And so then when they have that in mind, then they’re more willing to be sympathetic in some ways towards what Israel is doing, or at least to acknowledge that in certain circumstances, if you’re attacked by terrorists, then it is the right thing or at least justified to fight back.
And so I just think that these moral intuitions are not brought together in any way.
And then, so one of the questions that I have for both of you is, does it matter what these people think?
I have this worry, feeling that it does matter.
I think it totally matters, right?
I mean, whatever, cliches, the children are the future.
I think it definitely matters and it’s definitely a cause for concern.
So how do you read the results, Alison, about this Gaza thing?
I mean, I agree with Don mostly that we’re looking at a TikTok and Instagram phenomena where people polarizing polls, interesting that they have sort of the same route that they’re hearing very loud messaging from either side and without any kind of depth of discussion or nuance, you know, they’re hearing slogans shouted at them.
And so they, you know, it’s entering their minds and their consciousness and they’re seeing the images and these are very strong images they’re seeing.
I mean, I hate to say there’s no solution other than to change the entire culture, but it’s very difficult.
I mean, I try to give space to the fact that we all see foreign conflicts, very black and white, you know, good and bad, white hats and black hats.
We pick a team and we decide who is a good guys and who are the bad guys and who are going to root for and who are not going to root for.
And this is a generation that is very sympathetic to the Palestinians because of the era that they’ve grown up in, you know, justice for the Palestinians, the oppression of the occupation.
And it’s very hard when it’s a foreign conflict to make this mental distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian cause and people who have sunk their identity and their beliefs into the Palestinian cause have trouble saying like, okay, you know, this is right.
But yet, you know, what the Hamas did on October 7th is horrible and wrong and atrocities.
Again, from far away, it’s very hard to make those kinds of distinctions.
And Israel, if Israel is a bad guy in their mind, Israel is going to continue to be the bad guy, continue, you know, and these images that are coming out of Gaza confirm it for them.
So I mean, to connect with what both of you are saying, yeah, I think, you know, if you go back during the Netanyahu era, the messaging has been very consistent about Israel operating the occupation and being oppressive and Netanyahu being best pals with Trump.
All of those things hurt Israel’s standing and image among this population.
And at the same time, as you said, it’s triggering their very visceral identification with victims, with people who seem helpless.
What they’re seeing is that they are being bombed from the air, unarmed civilians dying in massive numbers, thousands and thousands of children being killed.
And, you know, we could say, well, that’s a good thing that that should strike their conscience because it’s, we are having so much trouble with our own sense of empathy.
It’s good someone else is still feeling that.
On the other hand, it’s also clear that there’s no context, no political context, no historical context, no background.
I mean, the answer about Jews being an oppressive class, I’ve never heard Jews called a class before, but that Jews are an oppressive class.
So many young people saying yes to that answer is really shocking.
And that suggests to me that, you know, maybe the Jewish story when we were growing up and maybe one generation after we were growing up was very prominent in American public discourse and in American pop culture.
Lots of movies, lots of books, lots of stories about Jews and what they went through, incredible sympathy for victims of the Holocaust.
But maybe this generation, 18 to 24, isn’t getting any of that.
They’re not reading those books.
Those movies are too old.
They don’t know about this anymore.
And that story is not being told today.
And so maybe we need to go back and do some of the groundwork and say, hey, wait a second.
This is who Jews are.
This is our story.
You guys, you guys need to pay attention to us and understand the context of some of these things.
And then you can decide if you like the Netanyahu government or not, but not just say, yeah, let’s just destroy their country and give it to terrorists who just committed the greatest atrocity in your lifetime.
About that particular question, Jews as a class are oppressors and that they should be treated as oppressors.
I went into the poll and just read all of the questions as they were asked.
And to me, the poll itself seemed egregious on this point and that this like very upsetting data point seems to me to be an artifact of the poll, because the question that is asked directly before that question is something to the effect of there is an ideology that is precisely how it begins.
There is an ideology that says that white people are responsible historically for the oppression of people of color and that as a result, people of color should benefit from affirmative action to redress the historical wrongs.
Do you agree with that?
Now, by the way, and 79% of the people agree with that.
And I would agree with that.
Pollster asked me that.
I’d say, sure, no question about it.
The next question is, is do you think that Jews as a class are oppressors?
And if you think that Jews are white and you’ve just told the pollster, I think that white people did this, then what do you say?
You say no?
No, no, that makes a lot more sense.
And the irony is that Israeli Jews are not white.
I mean, majority of Israeli Jews are people of color or they would be called people of color anywhere else in the world.
Right.
But for most Americans who are getting asked this, then Jews seem white.
And so then the fact that there’s a drop off, it’s 6%, between the people who say that whites as a class are responsible and the people that say that Jews as a class are responsible, there’s a drop off of 6%.
That actually suggests that these young people who were asked were a little bit reticent to blame Jews, the class Jews as just normal whites.
And that makes it far less of an upsetting statistic.
Or some of them are Jews, so they didn’t answer that question that way.
I was going to say, this is all about American identity politics and class and racial politics.
And it’s something that Jews have been yelling about now for the past however many years.
Are Jews white?
Should we consider ourselves white?
What box should we check?
And so that’s a very, you know, oppressors, you know, basically asking are Jews oppressors?
And if you, exactly what you said, Noah, if the previous question said, are white people oppressors?
The next question can be implied, are Jews white?
And, you know, most of them said yes.
And that’s very debatable.
I just have to put in the data point that there has been, you know, a concerted effort, a concerted, very clever strategic effort on the part of the Palestinian advocates in the United States to put a racial cast on the conflict in Israel as white European Jews versus brown Asian African Palestinians.
And we know that that’s factually not correct, but the facts don’t seem to matter in this case.
And it has been painted very much as a mirror reflection of white oppressor colonialists versus brown natives.
And colonialists versus indigenous people.
Right, exactly.
Right.
And two quick points.
So one is Israel’s messaging, the Jewish community’s messaging has been very ineffective countering these messages and reframing the issues.
And if you look on page 131 of Adam Unrehearsed, you will see Adam, a 12-year-old boy, explaining to his friend, Suvan, who is for Indian Heritage via London, why Jews do not consider themselves white.
Of course.
Back then in the 70s.
Yes.
That’s excellent.
What a relevant novel.
Who wrote that again?
I’ll look it up.
And I think that just reinforces your point from before that more people should be reading books like that in this day and age.
It’s like, okay, if 40 years, if your parents read Philip Roth, then you should be reading Adam Unrehearsed.
I read Philip Roth.
Me too.
