According to a recent Gallup poll, “Forty-one percent of Americans now say they sympathize more with the Palestinians in the Middle East situation, while 36% sympathize more with the Israelis.” Sea changes in American public opinion need not be spurred on by toxic propaganda campaigns energized by American colleges and universities. But this sea change is.
For almost 40 years, Gallup has asked Americans whether they sympathize more with Israelis or Palestinians. Until recently, sympathy for Israelis consistently exceeded sympathy for the Palestinians by 30% or more. In 2018, 64% of respondents expressed more sympathy for Israelis and 19% more for Palestinians. The wide margin began narrowing in 2019. Following Iran-backed Hamas’ savage assault on mostly Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023 – jihadists killed around 1,200 and took 251 hostages – sympathy for Israel plunged. Now, Americans polled by Gallup favor Palestinians by 5 percentage points. Although falling within the poll’s margin of error, these results reveal a precipitous decline in support for Israel.
What accounts for the pronounced shift?
The common explanation is that the physical destructiveness and extensive lethality of Israel’s successful two-year military campaign against Hamas – captured in heart-wrenching photos and videos highlighting and sometimes inventing Palestinian suffering – soured the American public on the Jewish state. In fighting the jihadists, the IDF killed, according to its estimates, 17,000 to 18,000 enemy combatants. IDF operations in pursuit of terrorists who hid and maneuvered amid and under Gaza’s civilian population also tragically resulted in the unintended – at least by Israel – deaths of tens of thousands of noncombatant Palestinians and reduced a sizeable portion of Gaza to rubble.
Taking the common explanation at face value, however, overlooks that most Americans’ perceptions of the war are filtered through media accounts. Media accounts often rely on academic opinion about the Middle East. And academic opinion frequently promotes a viciously distorted picture of Israel while amplifying Hamas propaganda.
Academic opinion about the Middle East tends to blame the conflict between Israel and Hamas on the Jewish state and treats the conflict in isolation. But Hamas’ 1988 founding covenant proclaims a war of annihilation against Israel. In the early 1990s, Iran began financing and training Hamas as part of Tehran’s now-decades-long multifront war against the Jewish state.
Academic opinion tends to overlook Hamas’ ghastly violations of the laws of war. Contrary to basic laws-of-war tenets, Hamas not only slaughtered and kidnapped Israeli civilians, but also attacked the IDF from within Gaza’s civilian areas, using noncombatant Palestinians as human shields while counting on – shrewdly, it turned out – gullible Westerners to blame the war’s carnage on Israel.
Academic opinion tends to promulgate the settler-colonialist canard, which demands that Israel justify its right to exist. Israel, though, is the only United Nations member nation-state routinely subject to that noxious indignity.
Academic opinion tends to advance the scurrilous charge that Israel is an apartheid state. But all Israeli citizens, including Arabs (about 21% of the population), enjoy equal civil and political rights.
And academic opinion tends to affirm or leave unchallenged the odious accusation that Israel’s military campaign against Hamas furthers the Jewish state’s genocide against the Palestinian people. Yet since the defensive war of 1967 in which Israel seized the West Bank from Jordan and Gaza from Egypt, the Palestinian population of those territories has increased dramatically. Over the last 59 years, the West Bank Palestinian population grew more than fourfold, from about 730,000 to around 3.4 million. Gaza’s Palestinian population grew more than fivefold, from about 400,000 to around 2.2 million prior to October 2023; and now, even after the death and departures from Gaza since Hamas’ October 2023 surprise assault on Israel, Gaza’s population remains around 2.13 million. By comparison, between 1967 and the 2026, the U.S population doubled.
The skew of academic opinion against the Jewish state raises worries about seepage of professors’ prejudices against Israel into campus culture and crystallization of educational environments hostile to Jews. The recently released majority-staff report of the House Committee on Education and the Work Force justifies such worries.
“How Campuses Became Hotbeds: The Rise of Radical Antisemitism on Campus” involved investigations of a variety of colleges and universities across the country. These included Barnard College, Bowdoin College, California Polytechnic State University, City University of New York, Columbia University, Depaul University, Georgetown University, Harvard University, Haverford College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, Pomona College, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of California, Berkeley. The report found that many institutions of higher education receiving federal funds violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by turning a blind eye to or stirring up antisemitism.
Examining the abuse of taxpayer dollars is a major congressional responsibility. The Constitution does not explicitly grant Congress the power of oversight or investigation. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed its holding in McGrain v. Daugherty (1927) that “the power of inquiry – with process to enforce it – is an essential and appropriate auxiliary to the legislative function.” Calling to account colleges and universities that flout Title VI obligations to prevent antisemitism on campus and formulating measures to encourage compliance advance the vital legislative purpose of protecting civil rights.
The 2026 report extends the committee’s work in the previous Congress. In 2024 in “Antisemitism on College Campuses Exposed,” the majority staff scrutinized colleges’ and universities’ failures to hold accountable those who, following Hamas’ October 2023 massacre, unlawfully harassed and intimated Jews on campus and illegally erected encampments. The just-published report focuses on “the institutional, ideological, and financial forces fueling” the failure to end campus antisemitism.
First, leadership has failed. “Decisive, strong leadership by university presidents is critical for preventing and correcting a hostile antisemitic environment on campus, as is apparent from every case study in this report,” writes the majority staff. Yet the report finds that top administrators are often derelict in their duty to “consistently enforce policies that protect Jewish students”; “publicly condemn antisemitism fomented by students, faculty, or staff”; “investigate and punish antisemitic harassment and violence”; respond conscientiously “to stakeholders such as boards of trustees and alumni”; “cultivate a campus culture opposed to employing and admitting faculty, administrators, and students who discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, or shared ancestry”; “hire faculty who are committed to scholarship rather than activism”; adopt “policies before incidents occur”; and “foster civil discourse among students and faculty.”
Second, professors have failed. “Faculty members have played a significant role in legitimizing and amplifying antisemitism on college campuses,” states the report. Professors have shown a propensity to whitewash Hamas and vilify Israel rather than examine the conflict dispassionately. Meanwhile, Middle East Studies centers “have become beachheads for activist faculty who foment antisemitism,” and the Middle East Studies Association “effectively functions as an anti-Israel advocacy group.”
Third, students have failed. “Student groups, most prominently Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), have consistently acted as ringleaders for the antisemitic harassment faced by Jewish students on campus,” maintains the report. “Colleges and universities across the country have failed to meaningfully discipline students for this violence and even acceded to their antisemitic demands, thereby incentivizing further misconduct.”
Fourth, university collaboration with Qatar has failed. Satellite campuses in Qatar run by Northwestern and Georgetown “are failing in critical ways to fulfill their stated goal of promoting Western values and liberal education abroad, including with respect to their commitment to Title VI principles,” asserts the report. “These campuses host faculty, students, and programming that perpetuate antisemitism without apparent consequence, in addition to struggling to uphold free speech principles.”
The majority-staff report proposes several sensible reforms for colleges and universities. These include vetting job candidates’ online record for antisemitism; admitting students who are willing and able to explore dissenting opinions and engage in civil discourse; adopting clear time, place, and manner rules governing legitimate protest on campus and enforcing them consistently; and assembling engaged and intellectually diverse boards of trustees to hold administrators accountable.
In addition, the report advises the federal government to impose stricter transparency demands on colleges and universities to promote more effective compliance with Title VI. Enhanced transparency would also reduce the temptation at American colleges and universities to compromise educational principles and violate legal obligations in exchange for substantial gifts from foreign sources and favorable contracts with foreign governments for satellite campuses.
Welcome as such reforms would be, they will not undo anytime soon the damage done by the steady promulgation on campuses over many years of anti-Israel vitriol masquerading as scholarship and teaching. Many professors who preach falsehoods and hate are tenured and their influence will not easily be contained. They control the processes whereby the next generation of scholars is trained, hired, promoted, and tenured.
The transformation of many American campuses into havens for antisemitism has been a long-term undertaking. Reversing course at our colleges and universities by restoring toleration and civility, which depends on building communities devoted to disciplined inquiry and rigorous learning rather than indoctrination into the party line, will require nothing less.
