OPINION: Polls show sympathy for Israel… so why do we still feel so isolated?
By Dr Jonathan Boyd, director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) in London
With all the antisemitic incidents, the anti-Israel demonstrations on our streets, and the often-distorted narrative propagated by parts of the media, it feels as if the whole world is against us right now.
It has been the most gruelling period to be a Jew in the UK that I can recall, and it’s difficult not to feel isolated, alienated and anxious about the future.
Just two months after the last major flare-up in Gaza in 2021, JPR research found that 73 percent of British Jews felt as if they were being held responsible by non-Jews for the actions of the Israeli government at that time.
We don’t have equivalent data for our feelings right now, but the proportion is almost certainly even higher.
Yet amidst all the apprehension, it’s important to assess what is happening through an empirical lens as well as an emotional one.
And based on research conducted by YouGov over several years, it is striking to see that levels of British public sympathy for Israel actually doubled in the month immediately following 7 October, while equivalent levels of sympathy for the Palestinians fell to their lowest levels for years.
In the four years before 7 October, about 20-25 percent of people in Britain sympathised with the Palestinians, compared to just 10 percent with the Israelis.
The remainder – about two-thirds of the whole – either felt sympathy with both sides equally or had no opinion.
Sympathy levels over these four years were largely steady; biannual data gathered by YouGov found essentially the same results each time.
But straight after the 7 October attacks, sympathy for Israel jumped from 10 percent to 20 percent, while sympathy for the Palestinians fell from about 25 percent to 15 percent.
In short, for the first time in years, there was a complete realignment in public opinion, with actually more sympathy for Israel than for the Palestinians.
Over the following few weeks, as Gazan casualties and fatalities began to mount, the picture began to change again, although perhaps not quite as one might expect.
While sympathy for the Palestinians gradually climbed, reaching around 20 percent by early November, sympathy for Israel remained fairly steady, staying at more or less the same level.
So whereas before 7 October there were about five Palestinian sympathisers for every two Israeli sympathisers in Britain, a month later, the ratio was about one-to-one.
When I share this information with many British Jews, they are often extremely surprised. It simply doesn’t align with their perception of reality; their feelings of isolation and alienation are such that the empirical reality just doesn’t compute.
But this is reliable data, conducted by a credible research agency. And we are lucky to have it – it gives us critical information, not only about public sentiment during the crisis, but even more importantly, benchmark figures from before the war to contextualise what we’re seeing now.
This is not ‘nice to know’ information; if the Jewish community is to be able to respond intelligently to the threats that exist, it has to collect the right data, on the right issues, in a careful and methodical way, on an ongoing basis.
But we only have this data because YouGov gathers it. Few, if any Jewish community organisations have seen fit to invest seriously in the research work required to understand, even in the simplest terms, what is going on.
And not just on this issue, but on numerous others too – even on the most basic demographic statistics such as Jewish births and deaths and migration.
The 7 October attacks on Israel, and their impact on Jews worldwide, should demonstrate to all of us that Jewish communal life is not a game.
The world has changed and we as a community urgently need to step up our act. Emotions are high and likely will be so for some time. In that context, having cold, hard data and using it to shape communal policy is more critical than ever.
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