Gallup Tolls Another Bell for Israel

and a mother's prediction is vindicated

BONG!

A new Gallup Poll shows that less than half of Americans are sympathetic to Israel, with respect to the Israel/Palestine nightmare, for the first time since they started taking the poll in 2001.

Consistently in the 60s until Obama’s last years in office, support for Israel started steadily declining in 2020 and plummeted last year to its current number of 46%.

Sympathy for the Palestinians, OTOH, ascended from its record low of 12% in 2013 to a peak of 31% in 2023, then dropped to 27% last year amidst the wave of Israeli propaganda that saturated this country, then turned around and shot up to 33% by the time the poll was taken in early February.

A sea change in American public opinion is happening, and it cannot be reversed. Like all sea changes, this one has historical roots, which I think I can best describe through the eyes of a child.

The child was myself. I was a weird kid who liked to watch the news, probably because my dad always had it on and I wanted his approval. It didn’t hurt that both my parents encouraged this behavior.

In 1967, when the Israelis attacked Syria, Jordan, and Egypt and sank the USS Liberty during the Six Day War, 9 year old me asked my mom why we supported Israel instead of the Arabs.

She sighed, and said “Because we felt sorry for them,” them obviously meaning the Jews even to 9 year old me. Of course I asked why, but all she would say is that the Germans did horrible things to them during the war, and “everybody” felt they deserved their own country because of it.

That is the foundation of American support for the State of Israel right there—pity. Pity for the poor Jews who didn’t deserve what happened to them, and a resolve that it should never again happen to them, and by implication anyone else, because if that resolve didn’t include everyone it was meaningless.

Just six years later, during the October War, my 15 year old self, who had by now seen the images of both the Holocaust and of the horrors the Japanese had inflicted on both Allied prisoners of war and the Chinese population in general, asked his mom if she still felt the same way.

My mom, a generally staid farmgirl who hated the farm, from settler Scots-Irish stock, was silent for more than a full minute. Then she said, “No, I can’t honestly say that I do. We all felt they needed our help getting on their feet after the war, but I’d say they’ve been standing up on their own two for quite awhile now. And I don’t think we should be spending our money on them. I wish we’d just stay out of it.”

I asked her if she thought that American support for Israel would ever end. She said no, not in her lifetime anyway, because there were too many Jews in too many positions of power and, not so much because they controlled everything—she never believed they did—but because it just wouldn’t be worth the trouble for the “movers and shakers” to take them on.

Then she gave her own warning to Israel, one she never would have said in public at the time—

Unless the Israelis start treating the Arabs like the Germans treated them. If they ever do that, well, it’s over for them, that’s all there is to it.

Yeah. For the first time, most Americans are aware that the Israelis are doing exactly unto the Palestinians as the Nazis did unto them—starving them, killing helpless women and children, harvesting their body parts and removing gold fillings from their teeth—all the while proclaiming that their victims aren’t fully human so it’s not like they’re committing a genocide or anything.

The pity the majority of the Americans felt for the Jewish settlers in Palestine after World War II has vanished like a mist in the sunrise. The foundation on which American support for Israel has always been based is crumbling faster than a Cleveland street after six weeks of freeze-and-thaw. The pity is gone.

The Zionists will try to actively suppress the growing opposition, but that stubborn old First Amendment insisted upon by most Continental Army veterans, who still had their guns at the time and one of whom was my direct ancestor, is still around and just as stubborn and ornery as ever. They will fail.

They tried to convince Americans that what Hamas did on October 7 justified everything they could ever do themselves, and have already lost the argument.

They are trying now to say that they should be allowed their own settler-colonial ethnic cleansing campaign because it’s their turn or because Americans did that to the First Nations, but that argument is shot down by the same phrase used to justify Israel’s existence in the first place—Never again.

Yes, my settler ancestors got away with it. The Europeans in general got away with it right up through the end of World War II. The lesson of the Holocaust, as taught by real live Holocaust survivors with names like Finkelstein, is that such evils should never be allowed to happen again to anyone precisely because what happened to the Jews was so horrible!

Israel, you are getting your turn at ethnic cleansing right fucking now. You will never get another one, but the longer you act like the Nazis you rightly taught us to despise, the worse it will be for you when we finally get around to judging you like we once judged them.

It’s totally unfair, but people like Americans and Russians and Chinese will sit in judgment over you, not because we have superior DNA, but because we have the power and the rest of the world will insist that we wield it.

Once again, Israel,

It is your destiny. Believe me, Israelis, the sooner you start repenting the better off you will be. Many American Jews have already saved themselves from the whirlwind that’s coming by protesting against you!

Follow their example and find mercy. Ignore it at your peril.

For my Palestinian friends, the dawn is coming. Inshallah or Christ have mercy, whichever is more appropriate.

Thank you for reading, good day or night, and good luck.

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