What Would It Have Cost For Israel To Maintain Its Popularity?

By Seth Mandel

Friday, April 10, 2026

 

There isn’t much question that Israel is facing an unusually tough challenge to its image in America. The question, then, is twofold: What should Israel do about it short of committing national suicide? And how much of this was inevitable?

 

These are not easy questions, and they will no doubt be the subject of much debate in the near term. But it’s worth noting how much October 7 complicates the picture.

 

Folks online are pointing to this latest Pew survey as a marker of Israel’s public-relations struggles in the U.S. And they are not wrong that it shows what they say it shows. But I found the dates listed in the survey to be interesting.

 

In 2022, according to Pew, Israel was viewed favorably by 55 percent of the country and unfavorably by 42 percent. Four years later, those numbers are 37 percent and 60 percent respectively. Israel is underwater. In 2025, the numbers were in the middle: 45 percent and 53 percent. The trend was clear.

 

Curious as to where 2023 sat in all this, however, I looked at Gallup’s running survey which included that year rather than jumping from 2022 to 2025.

 

Gallup polls a different question, asking respondents whether their sympathies lie with Israel or the Palestinians. Still, with that in mind, Gallup shows a similar trend—but widening the lens, we see Israel’s last peak at 60 percent in 2020, six years ago and three years before October 7.

 

The trend is downhill from there. In 2023, it was 54 percent, just slightly lower than it was in 2022. In 2024, it dropped three points to 51. If the surveys are taken the same time each year, then it was still early in 2024 and just months after October 7. Where was the so-called sympathy boost for Israel? The Palestinians carried out the most deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, using methods no less barbarous than the Nazis themselves on a wide scale, and took over 200 hostages—including a baby whom Hamas would kill with their bare hands and then mutilate the corpse.

 

So: What could Israel have done at this moment to prevent its continuing fall in U.S. public opinion? We have our answer: not hit back.

 

Well, sure, some people say, Israel could have carried out airstrikes without a ground invasion. But first of all, that wouldn’t have worked either, since the accusations of “genocide” began while Israel was still trying to capture or expel the remnants of the invading Palestinian forces. Israel carries out airstrikes in Lebanon and gets accused of genocide there, too. The accusation is held at the ready and fired at Israel the second it does something in response.

 

Second, the idea that Israel shouldn’t go in after the hostages is genuinely insane, not to mention the fact that Israel absolutely had to strike back hard and that Western leaders agreed from the outset that taking out Hamas was a legitimate goal.

 

But let’s go back to the hostages. Americans were among those taken by Hamas, and the American public was punishing Israel for going in to find them?

 

Now, it’s true that along the way, various media figures falsely reported claims of a famine in Gaza, of intentional starvation, of genocide, and whatever else they could think of. There’s no question this hurt Israel’s standing, but since Israel didn’t do those things, it is necessarily limited in what it could have done to prevent people lying about it.

 

Either way, the underlying point seems to be clear here: Israel could have stopped or slowed its popularity slide in the U.S. had it been willing to let Iran and its proxies get away with Nazi levels of violence against Jews.

 

Are there things Israel can do at the margins to improve its public image? Absolutely, and those will be enumerated and debated as this discussion continues. But I can’t shake the feeling that marginal effects have been the only ones on the table outside of Israel doing something suicidal.