WASHINGTON (Middle East Eye) – Democrats in the U.S. are more likely to sympathies with Palestinians than with Zionists for the first time since 2001, a new poll has found.
For the poll released by Gallup, Democrat voters were asked: “In the Middle East situation, are your sympathies more with the Israelis or more with the Palestinians?”
In response, 49 percent said that they sympathized more with the Palestinians and 38 percent sympathized more with the Zionists.
There has been an eleven-point increase over the past year in sympathy toward Palestinians from those who voted Democrat.
Meanwhile, the same voters’ sympathy for Zionists has been on the decline for more than a decade, since a high point in 2014 when 58 percent sympathized with Zionists and only 23 percent with Palestinians.
The shift is the first since the poll started 22 years ago.
The violence against Palestinians has been on the rise since the beginning of 2023, with at least 85 people killed, including 16 children, by Zionist troops and settlers, making it the bloodiest start to a year since 2000, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
Meanwhile, the regime’s right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has seemingly burned bridges with many Democrats in the U.S. by openly aligning with the Republican Party in general and former president Donald Trump in particular.
The occupying regime is currently experiencing a political crisis that has pitted Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet against the regime’s civil society, academic, and business elite, as well as former ministers and military figures.
The prime minister is also spearheading a controversial plan to overhaul the regime’s judiciary, a move that has seen weeks of mass protests across the occupied territories.
Sympathy toward the Palestinians also hit a new high among political independents, with 32 percent sympathizing with Palestinians, according to the poll.
Gallup’s new poll finds that, overall, “sympathy toward the Palestinians among U.S. adults is at a new high of 31%”.
For decades support for the Zionist regime was a largely bipartisan affair in Washington. But the polarization of American and Zionist politics has resulted in sharper dividing lines emerging over the Zionist-Palestinian conflict.