Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Poll Shows Dip in American Voters’ Supporting Israel

American voters’ support for Israel has dropped 20 percent in the past nine months, a new survey found.

Some 49 percent of American voters call themselves supporters of Israel, down from 69 percent last September, according to the poll conducted for The Israel Project.

The number of voters who called themselves undecided rose during that same period, and the number of Palestinian supporters remained steady at 7 percent. The number of Israel supporters hit a low of 38 percent immediately following the 2005 disengagement from Gaza, with an equal rise in undecided voters.

The poll was conducted among 800 registered voters on June 2 and 3 by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. It has not been officially released by The Israel Project, but was leaked to the media by someone who received the numbers the day after the poll was completed on Thursday.

According to the poll, some 44 percent of voters believe the United States should support Israel, down from 69 percent a year ago. Some 5 percent of voters believe the United States should support the Palestinians, with 32 percent undecided.

Some 23 percent of voters believed that Israel should return all lands captured in 1967, with 57 percent saying some should be retained for security.

Some 66 percent of those polled do not believe that Israeli support of a two-state solution – including establishing an independent Palestinian state and stopping the expansion of settlements – will bring lasting peace to the region, with 22 percent saying it will. In addition, 48 percent believe the Israeli support would not end Palestinian terrorism; 39 percent said it would.

Some 85 percent of respondents believe that Iran is a serious threat to Israel, with only 7 percent saying it is not – figures that have remained virtually unchanged over the past year.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.