Digital Library
Majority in U.S. Say Israel Has Valid Reasons for Fighting; Fewer Say the Same About Hamas
Topic:
Israel & Regional Politics
Principal Investigators:
Laura Silver, Becka A. Alper, Scott Keeter, Jordan Lippert and Besheer Mohamed
Study Date:
2024
Source:
Pew Research Center
Key Findings:
-Israel enjoys more American support than Hamas, but its military actions receive mixed reactions.
-Jewish Americans strongly back Israel, while Muslim Americans are much more critical.
-Younger Americans are less supportive of Israel and more sympathetic to Palestinians than older generations.
-Democrats and Republicans hold sharply different views, with Democrats more supportive of humanitarian aid and Republicans more in favor of military aid to Israel.
-Few Americans believe lasting peace is likely, though support for a two-state solution is growing, especially among Democrats.
-Public opinion on Biden’s handling of the war is divided and uncertain, with younger Americans becoming increasingly critical.
Methodology:
Pew Research Center conducted a survey to explore views about the Israel-Hamas war. Pew surveyed a total of 12,693 U.S. adults from Feb. 13 to 25, 2024. Most of the respondents (10,642) are members of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel, an online survey panel recruited through national random sampling of residential addresses, which gives nearly all U.S. adults a chance of selection. The remaining 2,051 respondents are members of three other survey panels – Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel, SSRS’s Opinion Panel, and NORC at the University of Chicago’s AmeriSpeak Panel – who were interviewed because they identify as Jewish or Muslim.
Pew “oversampled” (i.e., interviewed a disproportionately large number of) Jews and Muslims to provide more reliable estimates of their views on the topics covered in this survey. But these groups are not overrepresented in the national estimates reported here, because Pew adjusted for the oversampling in the weighting of the data. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education, religious affiliation and other categories. In total, 1,941 Jewish and 414 Muslim respondents participated in this survey.
While the sample design was identical for Jews and Muslims, the resulting sample sizes are different. There are two main reasons for this. The Jewish population in the United States is roughly double the size of the Muslim population. Consequently, national survey panels have roughly twice as many or more Jewish panelists as Muslim ones. In addition, decades of research on survey nonresponse has shown that some groups in the U.S. are more likely to participate in surveys than others. Generally speaking, Jewish adults are more likely to participate in surveys than Muslim adults.
The survey also included questions about where people were born and whether people identify as Arab or of Arab origin. Because of insufficient sample size, Pew is unable to analyze Arab Americans or Americans of Israeli or Palestinian descent separately.
In this survey, Jews and Muslims are defined as U.S. adults who answer a question about their current religion by saying they are Jewish or Muslim, respectively. Unlike Pew’s 2020 report on Jews in America, this report does not separately analyze the views of “Jews of no religion” (i.e., people who identify as Jewish culturally, ethnically or by family background but not by religion).