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‘Profound generational shift under way’: How US public views Israel
While the US government remains a staunch supporter of Israel, views among the American public – including members of President Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) base – have shifted dramatically amidst Israel’s war on Gaza.
“There is a profound generational shift underway,” said Shibley Telhami, a professor at the University of Maryland and director of the Critical Issues Poll.
“Just as we had the Pearl Harbor generation and the Vietnam generation, now we have the Gaza generation, which sees Israel as a genocidal villain,” Telhami told Al Jazeera.
“That’s a generation of young people who saw these horrors unfold on their screens in real time, and I don’t think Israel gets how deep the shift is,” he said.
“Israelis probably feel that this is just a media problem, especially social media, and that if they can just counter that narrative, people will come back to them. They won’t. This is a profound change, one that will determine US public perceptions for years to come.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met pro-Israel social media influencers at an event in New York on September 28
US group urges Israel arms embargo after report finds hundreds of potential abuses
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is urging the Trump administration to apply the US’s own laws and cut off weapons transfers to Israel over its military assault in Gaza.
CAIR’s call comes a day after The Washington Post reported on a US government watchdog report that found “many hundreds” of possible human rights violations by the Israeli military. The report said it would take years to investigate those potential breaches.
Under what’s known as the Leahy Laws, the US government must cut off assistance to foreign military units that commit gross human rights violations. But Washington has refused to apply the rules to Israel.
“Our nation has been stained by the support of administrations of both major parties for these atrocities and the fact that many of them were carried out with American weapons. This must end,” CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad said in a statement.
“The Leahy Law must be applied to the genocidal Israeli government. No more American weapons should be used to slaughter innocent men, women and children.”
Pro-Palestine UK journalist’s detention sparks US legal battle
Soumaya Hamdi was planning for the family holiday she would soon be taking with her husband when she received a text message that changed everything. “Is it true that Sami is being abducted?” a friend asked.
She had called her husband, British-Tunisian commentator and journalist Sami Hamdi, earlier that day to check in on him, as he travelled around the US on a speaking tour discussing Israel’s war on Gaza.
When he didn’t answer, Soumaya had assumed he was at a speaking engagement. Instead, he had been detained by US immigration authorities, news that came as “a complete shock”, she told Al Jazeera.
Sami had been stopped at San Francisco International Airport. Unbeknown to him, his visa had been revoked by US authorities two days earlier after a pressure campaign by anti-Muslim and pro-Israel social media influencers.
The detention of the 35-year-old critic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza has sparked a legal battle. His case is also the latest in what Muslim advocacy groups describe as a campaign to silence pro-Palestinian voices in the US through immigration enforcement.
