The Chicago Council on Global Affairs poll comes as Israel braces for retaliatory attacks from Iran and its allies following an assassination campaign last week.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in a joint press conference with Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in Tel Aviv, March 2023. (Secretary of Defense/Flickr, Alexander Kubitza, CC BY 2.0)
By Edward Carver
Common Dreams
A majority of Americans oppose sending U.S. troops to defend Israel if it’s attacked by a neighboring country, according to a poll released Tuesday.
The Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA) poll found that 55 percent of Americans oppose such military support of Israel while just 41 percent favor it, marking a shift from previous iterations of the poll over the last decade in which support for the U.S. defense of Israel was just above 50 percent.
The poll comes as Israel braces for retaliatory attacks following the assassinations last week of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut.
The U.S. has moved additional forces into the region to support Israel as diplomats try to deescalate tensions and prevent an all-out war in the Middle East. The poll was conducted June 21 to July 1 and doesn’t account for these developments.
The reasons for declining U.S. support for defending Israel aren’t explored in the poll, but CCGA author Dina Smelt suggested that “the unrelenting Israeli attacks against Gaza have likely dampened American willingness to defend Israel,” and critics of Israel’s assault on Gaza drew similar conclusions.
Haniyeh, center, meeting with the Supreme Leader of Iran Ali Khamenei, right, on July 31, hours before his death. (Khamenei.ir, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
“Nothing seems to undermine Americans’ support for Israel more than Israel’s own policies,” Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote on social media in response to the poll.
CCGA’s findings fit with other polling this year that shows decreasing American support for Israel, which has laid siege to the Gaza Strip for the last 10 months, killing nearly 40,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza health ministry, and destroying a large proportion of the enclave’s buildings.
The siege began after Hamas and affiliated militant groups massacred more than 1,100 Israelis on Oct. 7. [The Israeli daily Haaretz has reported that the IDF killed an unknown number of Israelis that day rather than allowing them to become hostages.]
A Gallup poll in March showed that most Americans disapprove of Israel’s military action in Gaza, and another poll that month by the Center for Economic and Policy Research showed that most Americans wanted to stop U.S. weapons shipments to Israel until the country ended its assault on Gaza.
That people in the U.S. — Israel’s strongest diplomatic ally and military backer — have decreased their support for Israel is indicative of a global trend. A poll conducted across 43 countries showed a tremendous dropin support for Israel over the first three months of the war, for which Israel has faced widespread international condemnation.
Both the United Nations General Assembly and U.N. Security Council have adopted resolutions demanding a cease-fire. The International Court of Justice, the U.N.’s top court, has issued a series of rulings against Israel this year and the International Criminal Court has sought arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders.
The international criticism has not deterred Israel from further aggression. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set back cease-fire negotiations with Hamas last week with his military’s assassination campaign, and he now faces the prospect of an all-out war on multiple fronts, with both Hezbollah and Iran vowing to retaliate.
Hezbollah, a militant group and political party in Lebanon, has ties to Iran and is considered to be significantly better-armed than Hamas, raising the possibility of a war of devastating magnitude. Israel and Hezbollah have traded thousands of airstrikes since October, leaving more than 500 dead, mostly on the Lebanese side, but until now have avoided a major escalation.
Western diplomats have even greater fear of a direct war between Israel and Iran. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is leading what The Washington Post called a “diplomatic sprint” around the Middle East to try to indirectly pressure Iran to use restraint in its response to the assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran. The State Department has refused to say that Iran has a right to defend itself.
The U.S. has placed squadron of F-22 jets and naval destroyers near Israel in preparation for an Iranian attack. U.S. and Israeli leaders have long spoken of the two countries’ “ironclad” bond, but no formal military defense treaty exists that requires the U.S. to defend Israel in the event of an attack.
Edward Carver is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
This article is from Common Dreams.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
No one should want to support Shitrael after seeing this.
America is a golden calf and we will suck it dry, chop it up and sell it off, piece by piece, until there is nothing left but the world’s biggest welfare state that we will create and control.
This is what we do to countries that we hate. We destroy them, very slowly and make them suffer for refusing to be our slaves.
Netanyahu recorded at Finks Bar, Jerusalem, 1990
Pay attention to Finks bar and what was said there.
veteranstoday.com/2020/07/22/bibi-trump-assad-saddam-finks-bar/
isn’treal can go it alone. troublemakers need no one else.
Which brings us to the next presidential mock elections. The choice is to vote for Zionist puppet Trump or Zionist puppet Harris/Biden.
What if RFK Jr. who is the only candidate who could change things stopped once and for all to suicide himself by supporting tthe Zionists and the genocidal state of Israel and decided to expose them and take side with the victims as he has done all his life?
What would happen?
He will lose Jewish/Zionist funding
Take the risk of them trying to kill him
BUT
He will win millions of votes from both sides, especially from the youth.
And he could rock the system.
He hasn’t spoken what people want to hear from him yet, why?
Is he afraid of losing his Jewish donors?
Is he a coward?
Is he that naive regarding Israel?
Is he controlled opposition?
Do they have Epstein style file son him?
Why having defended children all his life and then defending now children mass murderers who most likely were part of his father and uncle assassinations?
Should he make the right move, it could change everything and America’s history too.
At 70, isn’t that a risk worth to take?
I was ready to vote for him until I found out that he is a staunch supporter of Israel. Even though Jill Stein can’t win, I’m voting for her. I disagree with her on many other issues, but I believe Zionism is the most critical issue.
Due to the horrific censoring, and outright lying in the mainstream media, it seems like many Americans are under the impression that supporting Israel’s current actions is keeping Jews safe, and protecting their ability to believe as they choose. They don’t realize that Jews, and anyone else, are safest where human rights are a reality for everyone. Hint, hint, that is NOT Israel. Trusting polls goes about as far as trusting mainstream media. We should ALL be tired of having people tell us what we think and what to think.
“Just” forty-one percent are for sending troops? That’s an awfully high number, but it doesn’t surprise me. That number will come down once the soldiers themselves get a look at the racist lunatics who comprise the IOF.
What Big Money wants, Big Money gets.
They want me to fight and die to defend Israel, an aparthied state? Hell no, I won’t go.
Americans Massively Opposed Sending US Troops To Destroy The Sovereign Country Of Iraq In 2003 And Kill Its One-Time Ally In The Process, Despite On-Site UN Weapons Inspectors, Led By Scott Ritter Not Having Proved The Much Proclaimed Notion By The US Of Iraq Being In Possession Of ‘Weapons Of Mass Destruction.
Israel is in possession of the ultimate weapon of mass human destruction, yet this same US refuses to call upon Israel to immediately cease it’s ongoing genocide of non-Jewish Palestinian.
Once again, the American populace’s voice for resolution of conflict through peaceful negotiation is not to be heard nor heeded.
When it comes to Corporate Capitalism’s Imperialist ideology, American duplicity knows no bounds!
So, what’s the latest news? Not much different from that of 15 years ago, except that today the situation is explosively worse with the world on the cusp of WWIII.
Scott Ritter, UN weapons inspector in Iraq, 15 years ago,, alongside of Ray McGovern, former C.I.A. intelligence officer, spoke to the Real News network about Sen. John McCain’s role in Iraq war.
It is a reflection on the sorry state of American journalism.
www(dot)youtube(dot)com/watch?v=GyzqPgaJdUs
“The siege began after Hamas and affiliated militant groups massacred more than 1,100 Israelis on Oct. 7. ”
Irresponsible journalism. The current aggression by the Zionists began after Hamas broke out of Gaza and took captives for a prospective prisoner swap. Those 1100 Zionists were massacred by their own military, under what they call the Hannibal Directive, where the military is instructed to “prevent the capture of civilians at all costs”, which includes murdering them.
I abandoned both Common Dreams and DemocracyNow, after I realized that they both were echoing US empire war-propaganda against Russia. Both of those media organizations avoided retaliation from Paypal, while Consortium News suffered.
It is not known how many Israelis were killed by the IDF that day, but certainly not all 1100.
And I would point out that under international law occupied peoples have a right to defend themselves and occupiers have NO RIGHT to murder occupied peoples.
Me too, I have followed these outlets for many years, and they follow a very familiar pattern: in non “election” time they do a fairly good job of casting light on the crimes/misdeeds of both factions of the Bipartisan Consensus. Then, in the months leading up to the elections, the coverage the message subtly (sometimes quite obviously) shifts to the “lesser evil” routine. The topics begin to shift away from US support for Ukraine war, Israeli Genocide of Palestine, siege warfare against Venezuela
Recently, Hypocrisy Now! interviewed a man who has taken money from the US, and supported Juan Guaido in past efforts to meddle in Venezuelan affairs and he is almost certainly a US intelligence asset. No mention of the Bank of England seizure of Venezuela’s gold reserves, and the US siege warfare was glossed over as no big deal. 100s of thousands of people have been forced to flee, or have died as a direct result of the siege warfare, but very few will mention this.
And of course, they repeat the usual war propaganda regarding Russia, China and very rarely point out glaring facts about the criminal Ukraine govt etc.
Now CD and DsNow! will be in overdrive messaging with urgency: This is (yet another) “historic” election, we must “vote” to “Save US democracy” and “stop Trump”. You MUST vote Genocide, in order to save democracy.
Israel is the aggressor; the US just needs to stop sending weapons to them.
The poll shows the shifting mood of the country, but for most Americans, events in the Middle East are of middling importance. Moreover, the public has long since come to view U.S. military involvement all over the world as a normal state of being, just as long as large numbers of body bags filled with human remains aren’t seen arriving back home. And above all else, the political elite don’t give a damn what the American people want.
Not to mention that the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, associated with the late Lester Crown and his insidious oligarchic dynasty (Whitney Webb, “Crowning the King of Wall Street,” Unlimited Hangout, Apr. 27, 2023), conducted two polls around three years ago that purportedly indicated majority segments of the US public were willing to commit US forces to a war with Russia over Ukraine (Fosca Majnoni D’Intignano and Craig Kafura, “Half of Americans Support Use of US Troops in Defense of Ukraine,” The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Sep. 14, 2021) and a war with China over Taiwan (Dina Smeltz and Craig Kafura, “For First Time, Half of Americans Favor Defending Taiwan If China Invades,” The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Aug. 26, 2021).