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How Jewish leaders tried — and failed — to keep a Farrakhan follower off a Florida city council
(JTA) – When Brother John Muhammad emerged this fall as the leading candidate for a vacant city council seat in St. Petersburg, Florida, local Jews were distressed.
Muhammad is well known in the city as the president of a local neighborhood association and as a frequent advocate for minority groups. But Jewish leaders learned that he was also a follower of Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader who has a long history of antisemitism, and that he had made comments dismissing concerns about Farrakhan’s record.
Jewish leaders tried to stave off Muhammad’s appointment, pushing for more extensive vetting of the seven candidates and, in the case of the local Holocaust museum, actively lobbying against him. But the council confirmed him in a 4-3 vote, leaving local Jews frustrated — before they considered ways to make the situation a learning experience for their city.
“When I see a situation like this, it screams ‘opportunity’ to me,” Michael Igel, chair of the Florida Holocaust Museum, located in St. Petersburg, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
The saga playing out in St. Petersburg, Florida’s fifth-largest city, unfolded during the same period that a handful of Black celebrities, including Kanye West and Kyrie Irving, first became enmeshed in controversy over their own antisemitic comments and social media posts. The coincidence meant a dicey environment for broaching a conversation about the antisemitism of the Nation of Islam, whose rhetoric disparaging Jews overlaps with that of Hebrew Israelites, the ideology that Irving promoted by sharing a link to an antisemitic film.
It also turned St. Petersburg into a window for understanding how ties forged between Jewish groups and others can be tested.
Local Jewish leaders initially sought to stop Muhammad from gaining the city council seat, which was vacated after its previous holder resigned following redistricting and accusations she no longer lived in her district. They learned about Muhammad’s city council application only a week before the council’s vote, leaving them with little time to mobilize. The information came from a political rival of Muhammad, former mayoral candidate Vince Nowicki, who shared information about Muhammad’s Nation of Islam affiliation with local Jewish groups.
Nowicki also shared a comment Muhammad had made about Jews in a 2016 video in which Muhammad interviewed local Black LGBTQ activists. In the video titled “A Conversation About Growing Up Black And LGBT,” which JTA viewed, Muhammad said, “Minister Farrakhan got accused of being antisemitic for a long time because he pointed out and made some corrections about the activity of Jews. And anybody who says anything critical of the Jewish community is labeled as being antisemitic. Good, bad, right or wrong, it doesn’t matter what you say. If you criticize them that’s what you are.”
He continued, saying, “And I’m finding that it happens when you are critical of the gay community, when you say anything critical or anything that doesn’t align with that ideology, now all of a sudden you’re homophobic.” Muhammad’s comments about gay people received some light but friendly pushback from his interview guests.
Muhammad did not reply to multiple requests for comment by JTA, including to questions emailed to him at his request. He said during a public meeting ahead of the council vote that he thought scrutiny of him by Jewish groups had been unfair.
To Jewish leaders, the comments in the video coupled with Muhammad’s Nation of Islam affiliation were clear signs that he should not be appointed to the city council.
“I would sure hope that being antisemitic would be a red line, that you could not be a candidate,” said Rabbi Philip Weintraub of Congregation B’nai Israel, a Conservative synagogue in the city.
Jewish leaders began to take action, issuing statements and launching a letter-writing campaign to the council. They felt so much urgency that some even conducted business on Simchat Torah, a Jewish holiday when Jewish organizations typically pause their activities in accordance with Jewish law.
As a nonprofit, the local federation was constrained in how it could weigh in. Since it could not endorse or oppose specific candidates, it instead pushed for every candidate to be “properly vetted” and informed council members about Muhammad’s affiliations and past comments, according to Maxine Kaufman, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Florida’s Gulf Coast. She said the efforts did not have their intended effect.
“I don’t think anybody said, ‘Well, who is this Farrakhan, what does he stand for?’” Kaufman said. “I don’t think enough was done, personally.”
The entrance to the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, Nov. 27, 2016. (Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The Florida Holocaust Museum took another approach, circulating information about Muhammad to the wider community, along with a statement opposing the candidacy of anyone who would support Farrakhan’s antisemitism. Their goal, Igel said, was to educate the community about the severity of these views.
“There’s nothing else to talk about when somebody is supporting Louis Farrakhan,” Igel told JTA. “Particularly when you are seeking a position representative of a city, particularly one like St. Petersburg that is so known for its inclusivity and its openness.”
Igel praised some members of the city council who asked Muhammad pointed questions about his views at the vote, giving him the opportunity to refute Farrakhan’s comments about Jews. One council member who voted against Muhammad, Lisset Hanewicz, said her stepfather is Jewish and read Farrakhan’s past antisemitic statements into the record, saying, “I think people need to understand why a certain part of this community is upset.”
Igel acknowledged that getting involved in a city council appointment was an unusual move for a Holocaust museum. He said museum leaders had held a meeting beforehand to determine how to proceed but made a decision fairly quickly to weigh in.
“In this case, we don’t consider this to be a matter of politics,” Igel said. “This is a matter of morality. And this is what we teach.” If the candidate had been a white supremacist, Igel said, “that person would have been disqualified out of the gate.”
The Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center, two hate watchdogs, define the Nation of Islam as a group that propagates antisemitism and other forms of bigotry, not a religion. Founded in 1930 by Wallace Fard Muhammad, the Black nationalist group is not the same as traditional Islam and is rejected by most Muslim clerics; it entered mainstream prominence in the 1960s after civil rights leader Malcolm X and boxer Muhammad Ali publicly joined the movement. (Both later left the group, with Malcolm X publicly denouncing its leadership; he was assassinated shortly after, and two Nation of Islam members who were wrongfully convicted of his murder recently received a large settlement from New York City.)
The Nation of Islam entered its current era after Farrakhan took over the group in 1977. Now 89, he has used his platform to issue a steady stream of antisemitism, including calling Jews “wicked” and the “synagogue of Satan,” saying they have “wrapped your tentacles around the U.S. government,” and calling Hitler “a very great man.” Only a few years ago, the Women’s March progressive activist collective was nearly derailed over some of its founders’ associations with Farrakhan.
It is rare, but not unheard of, for public officials to have current or former associations with the Nation of Islam. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a practicing Muslim, was dogged by accusations that he had formerly been a member of the group when he first ran for Congress in 2006; he apologized for his past associations with the group. Trayon White, a Washington, D.C. council member and onetime mayoral candidate who has spread antisemitic conspiracy theories, has donated to the group in the past. Former President George W. Bush once praised the group, and a photograph showing Barack Obama in the same room as Farrakhan was fodder for Obama’s critics during his presidential run.
Muhammad, who is referred to on the city council website as John Muhammad and whose legal name is John C. Malone, declined to condemn Farrakhan at the city council meeting.
“I am not willing to denounce the leader of my faith no more than a Catholic would be willing to denounce their pope,” he said.
Muhammad’s reaction to questions about Farrakhan particularly concerned the federation and other local Jewish groups. Kaufman told JTA she didn’t know whether Muhammad himself is antisemitic, but she said his refusal to disavow Farrakhan was alarming.
“I do have issue with his reverence of someone who is blatantly antisemitic, and he won’t disavow him, he won’t reject him,” she said, echoing the the federation’s official statement on the vote.
At the meeting, Muhammad did say that he had reached out to the Florida Holocaust Museum but had not heard back — and that he thought the museum’s criticism of him was unfair.
“What I found when we reached out to have dialogue with the Holocaust Museum director, they did not want to talk to me,” he said. “They wanted to evaluate and disqualify me based on the association that I have as an individual. I don’t think that that’s just.”
Muhammad also defended his record with Jews by claiming that they were among the “diversity of those who support me.” He added, “And if you look at those who oppose me, they’re coming from one particular group.”
Since the vote, a local Black newspaper condemned the scrutiny on Muhammad, calling it a “perusal into his faith practice.”
Igel said the museum had no record that Muhammad had reached out but encouraged him to come and learn more about the Holocaust and the nature of antisemitism. Stuart Berger, head of the local Jewish Community Relations Council, acknowledged at the city council meeting that Muhammad “has made himself available to us” at the federation, but that none of the federation staff “had been in direct contact with him.”
The federation’s involvement in Muhammad’s case became its own issue at the council vote, when the candidate referenced an email Berger had written to the county commissioner. In the email, Berger wrote that Muhammad’s vetting process had been “good enough for me!”
While Muhammad took the email as proof that the federation believed him to be fit for office, Berger and Kaufman maintain that it meant nothing of the sort. Berger had not been speaking on behalf of the federation, they say, and had not intended for his email to be shared publicly.
Now that Muhammad is on the council, attention has turned to building relationships with him. Kaufman has been meeting with individual city council members, and hopes to eventually meet with Muhammad himself. She also aims to have the federation make a presentation to the council about the dangers of antisemitism and push them to make a statement about it.
She doesn’t think it’s complicated. “I think hate’s hate,” she said. “Many different colors.”
Weintraub’s congregation is celebrating its 100th anniversary in March, and one of its congregants, Eric Lynn, is also involved in politics: he was the Democratic nominee for Florida’s 13th Congressional district in the midterms but lost his race to Republican Anna Paulina Luna, who said she was raised as a Messianic Jew and campaigned with far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Weintraub himself is a member of an interfaith ministerial dialogue group with Black churches and says he’s “a professional optimist” when it comes to managing conflict between different communities. He sent JTA an episode of the public radio podcast “Hidden Brain” about how to keep conflict from spiraling, saying it “describes what I’ve tried to do.”
Since Muhammad was appointed, Weintraub has met with him; the pair had what Weintraub described as “a pleasant conversation.” The two talked about parenting and “shared traumas,” he said. They did not discuss Muhammad’s comments supporting Farrakhan, but the rabbi couldn’t help but think about him.
“I thought I was a termite, according to Farrakhan,” Weintraub said. In contrast, Muhammad “said I was a person, so that was nice.”
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Europe’s smallest Jewish community gets a home of its own — complete with geothermal mikvah
(JTA) — REYKJAVIK, Iceland — Until recently, this city located near the Arctic Circle was one of the few places in Europe where organized Jewish life did not exist — no synagogue, no ritual bath, no communal building. That changed this week, as the Jewish community in Iceland opened the Beit Shvidler Jewish Center of Iceland, the country’s first-ever Jewish center.
The center is housed in a renovated, roughly 9,000-square-foot building in downtown Reykjavik that once operated as a bar and, before that, as the headquarters of a political party. It sits just minutes from where the husband-and-wife team of Rabbi Avraham and Mushky Feldman have lived and worked since arriving on the island in 2018. The project has been funded largely through community donations.
The center includes a synagogue, a seminar room seating nearly 80 people, a kosher shop, a community kitchen, a youth center, a library lounge and a security center, amenities the community has never had access to in one place.
There is also a mikvah, or ritual bath, that is heated geothermally, using the abundant underground volcanic heat that provides much of the country’s power.
“Jews here were yearning for a synagogue, for a rabbi, for some sort of a community,” Avraham Feldman said of the years before the couple’s arrival, “and it has been amazing to fill that need.”
Community members agree.
“Iceland has a highly diverse, dispersed and diffused Jewish community; given that we’re an isolated island, we all kind of washed up here,” said Michael Klein, an American Jew living in Iceland since 2020.
“The Feldmans managed to pull together the resources, the building and the work to turn a disused political party headquarters and restaurant into a Jewish center that can serve not only our small community but the far larger group of visitors from all over the Jewish world who come for our natural beauty and peaceful isolation,” added Klein.
Jewish life in Iceland has always been sparse and intermittent. Jewish traders are known to have passed through as early as the 1600s. Still, the organized Jewish presence dates to the late 1800s, and the first practicing Jew believed to have settled permanently was Fritz Natan, a businessman who, in 1917, built Iceland’s first five-story building.
For decades afterward, Jewish life in Iceland survived on the efforts of a handful of dedicated volunteers who coordinated informal gatherings, often meeting in rented spaces or in the basement of Hallgrímskirkja, the country’s most recognizable church. The U.S. Navy base in the town of Keflavík, near the international airport, occasionally provided Jewish chaplains until it closed in 2006. But there was still no permanent institution, no resident rabbi, and no dedicated building, a gap that led some to call Reykjavik the only European capital without a synagogue.
That began to change in 2018, when the Feldmans relocated from the United States to Reykjavik to establish a Chabad-Lubavitch presence, becoming Iceland’s first permanently stationed rabbi and his wife in the country’s documented history of a thousand years. The couple started small, hosting Shabbat dinners and holiday services out of their living room. Estimates of the community’s size hover around 300 self-identified Jews, out of Iceland’s total population of about 400,000.
Momentum built quickly. In 2020, the Jewish community celebrated its first native Torah scroll, commissioned by a donor in Switzerland and completed with the help of the Icelandic congregation. A year later, the Icelandic government formally recognized Judaism as an official religion, opening the door to officially recognized Jewish weddings and allowing residents to direct part of their religious tax to the community. How many have done so is not public information.
By 2024, the community had outgrown its rented rooms and church basements and purchased the building that became the new Jewish center, roughly tying one in Fairbanks, Alaska, as the northernmost Chabad houses in the world. The building sits in Reykjavik’s compact downtown, just blocks from the iconic Rainbow Street and Harpa Opera House that make the city one of the most Instagram-friendly sites in the world.
In a city that caters to tourists, and for a community built largely from immigrants, longtime Icelandic Jewish families, and people who married into Icelandic life, the new center represents something rare: a shared physical home.
“It’s been clear for a long time that we need a home for our community,” said one Jewish resident in Iceland, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because not all of his colleagues know he is Jewish. (Iceland’s relatively small number of Jews means that there is little record of antisemitism; anti-Israel sentiment is strong, with the country one of five to boycott the Eurovision song contest this year over Israel’s participation.)
“It’s not like we’ve been hiding or aren’t a strong community; we celebrate holidays together, and there are Shabbat dinners,” he continued. “But I think it’s important that we have this center. Seeing it opened is very moving and important.”
Like many Jewish institutions in Europe, the center will ensure security by being open only to members of the community or visitors who reach out in advance.
Avraham Feldman said the space will hold a display case with three small prayer books donated by early Jewish residents, the only known surviving physical remnants of Jewish life in Iceland before his arrival, a reminder of how recent, and how hard-won, this permanence has been.
“The result of this center is a combination of home, family, and permanence that was unimaginable when I started visiting 14 years ago and was only a mere dream when I moved here in 2020,” Klein said.
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Armenia’s Jews hope Israeli recognition of 1915 Ottoman genocide will jumpstart bilateral ties
(JTA) — YEREVAN, Armenia — Last Friday night, 13 mostly Russian-speaking Jews and three Arab Muslims gathered under a cherry tree next to the popular Common Grounds coffee shop in Yerevan — capital of the world’s oldest Christian country — to welcome Shabbat.
Samson Karapetyan — the son of an Armenian Christian father and a Jewish mother from Azerbaijan — recited the Hebrew blessing for wine over a glass of Georgian Palavani kosher merlot. Karapetyan, 29, stood at the head of a table piled high with hummus, falafel, pita, stuffed grape leaves, babaganoush and other Middle Eastern delicacies supplied by a local Lebanese caterer.
Then everyone, including the three invited Arabs, joined in a spirited rendition of “Lecha Dodi” — with printed transliterations in English for those not familiar with the traditional Jewish melody.
“I’m so glad we have a community here,” said Ekaterina Goldschmidt, 32, a tattooed landscape architect who showed up to the Shabbat dinner with Teya, her little black Kokoni dog.
The dinner was organized by Yerevan Jewish Home, a social network formed by Russian-born journalist and blogger Nathaniel Trubkin in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. That ongoing war spurred a large exodus from both countries and brought as many as 2,000 Jews to Armenia — boosting the ex-Soviet republic’s tiny Jewish population tenfold and injecting new blood into what had been a stagnant, dwindling community of mostly pensioners.
The explosion of Jewish life came against the backdrop of frosty ties between Armenia and Israel, the country that absorbed the most Ukrainian and Russian Jewish emigres since the war’s start. The chill has been a consequence of Armenia’s close relations with neighboring Iran as well as Israel’s unwillingness to offend Turkey by naming as a genocide the Ottoman massacre of 1.5 million Armenians during World War I.
Another key obstacle has been resentment over Israel’s extensive weapons sales to neighboring Azerbaijan, with which Armenia has fought several border wars in the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Those obstacles may be falling away. Last year in Washington, predominantly Muslim Azerbaijan and mostly Christian Armenia signed a peace treaty at the urging of U.S. President Donald Trump — garnering praise from Jewish leaders in both countries.
And on June 29, Israel’s Cabinet unanimously passed a resolution recognizing the 1915 genocide. That declaration now goes to the full Knesset where, despite intense lobbying from both Turkey and Azerbaijan, it will likely be ratified — making Israel the 36th country to take that step.
“The Jewish community here is happy that Israel has finally recognized this genocide,” Trubkin told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Every self-respecting Jew knows what happened to the Armenians, though of course many Armenians are asking, ‘Why only now?’ It’s all about politics.”
Added Karapetyan: “Everyone understands that our two nations have a similar heritage, with a similar destiny. It is impossible, when you speak about the Shoah, to not also speak about the Armenian genocide. If we study one of them, we need to study the other.”
Both Turkey and its ally, Azerbaijan, immediately condemned the Cabinet vote; the chief rabbi of Azerbaijan’s Ashkenazi congregation in Baku, Shneur Segal, has already urged Israel to reverse it immediately.
The reaction from Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan was cold. Suggesting that Israel is motivated purely by geopolitics, he told reporters the day the change was announced: “We believe that not entering into the issue of the weaponization of the Armenian genocide is in the interests of the Republic of Armenia. Therefore, we do not see any need for a response.”
Other external factors appear to be drawing Yerevan and Jerusalem closer together.
Late last month, some 350 women representing the Israeli labor federation Histadrut gathered at Yerevan’s Megerian Carpet Restaurant to mark International Day of Women in Diplomacy. The event featured popular songs in Hebrew by prominent Georgian vocalist Kristi Japaridze as well as a performance of traditional Armenian music and dance.
The Histadrut visit — the largest such Israeli delegation to tour Armenia in years — was organized with help from Israeli House, an NGO based in Jerusalem. Founded in 2012 by former Jewish Agency official Itsik Moshe, the network promotes Israeli culture and business, and now operates in 30 countries including both Azerbaijan and Turkey.
Moshe, who is also president of the Israel-Georgia Chamber of Business, said Israeli House will open its next outpost in Armenia sometime in August or September.
Assisting Moshe is Andranik Arakelyan, an educational consultant at Yerevan’s National Polytechnic University, though a specific location has yet to be decided. In its final form, he suggested, Israeli House could include a business center to showcase Israeli tourism as well as innovations in agriculture and medicine.
“I consider Israeli House as a cultural first step for strengthening ties between our two nations. The rest is up to politicians and diplomats,” said Arakelyan, 36, a Christian who spent four years in Glendale, California, a predominantly Armenian suburb of Los Angeles.
“This is the best time for our countries to get closer,” Arakelyan said, while acknowledging that “a small minority” of Armenians hold antisemitic views. “Many parties here question the timing of this [genocide] recognition, calling it a political maneuver. But when the draft becomes resolution in the Knesset, Armenians will see that it wasn’t fake.”
Marina Kozliner, a community activist who has long campaigned for this recognition, said reaction among the 10,000 or so Armenian Jews and Christian living in Israel has been mixed.
“On one hand, there is real happiness. Our community has waited for this for decades,” said Kozliner, the daughter of a Jewish father and an Armenian atheist mother who is based in Bat Yam, just south of Tel Aviv. “On the other, many people feel it came at the wrong political moment. Because of that, something that should have been a moral decision has become a political tool, and that has taken away part of the joy.”
She added: “Still, I prefer to look ahead. Armenia is making real efforts to move toward peace and to normalize relations with its neighbors, including Azerbaijan. That gives many of us hope for a more stable future in the region.”
In fact, the same day Trubkin and his friends were celebrating their Shabbat dinner in Yerevan, Narek Mkrtchyan, Armenia’s ambassador to the United States, received prominent pro-Israel philanthropist and Trump supporter Miriam Adelson in Washington, D.C.
“We had an interesting and substantive conversation regarding the Armenia-U.S. agenda, investment opportunities in Armenia, and the country’s rich historical and cultural heritage,” Mkrtchyan posted on Facebook, adding, “Mrs. Adelson expressed great interest in considering a visit to Armenia.”
Eric Hacopian, a political analyst who made his career advising Democratic candidates in southern California, suggested that such a meeting “could not have happened a few months ago.”
But when it comes to Armenian-Israeli relations, he said, it’s important to take a long-term view of the genocide declaration from Jerusalem..
“I think something like this five to 10 years ago would have meant a lot more. It means a lot less now,” he said. “One reason is that [Prime Minister Pashinyan] is particularly anti-nationalist and more focused on normalization of ties with Turkey and Azerbaijan, so they won’t engage directly with Israel.”
He predicted a long-term shift. “I’m very confident that over the next 10 or 15 years, we’re going to see a switcheroo, in which Israel will have much better relations with Armenia, and more problematic relations with Azerbaijan,” Hacopian said. “I see relations improving, mostly because Turkish-Israeli relations are going downhill, and Israel’s relations with Azerbaijan are entirely transactional — oil for weapons and access to Iran.”
And if and when the Islamist regime in Iran collapses, Azerbaijan’s strategic importance to Israel declines as well, and Armenia’s increases. For one thing, Hacopian noted, Armenia’s economy is booming. In 2018, per-capita GDP was around $4,500; this year, it’ll likely surpass $10,000 — helped along by the presence of information technology giants including AMD, Synopsis and Invidia.
“The one ‘X factor’ no one notices is that the IT business is booming. Israeli IT firms are already here, and data centers are being built,” he said. “You cannot be in the IT business in this region if you don’t have relations with Israel.”
Meanwhile, Jewish life is taking root in Armenia, thanks largely to the efforts of Trubkin and his friends in the Yerevan Jewish Home network.
Goldschmidt, the tattooed landscape artist with the dog, was born and raised in Saratov — a major city southeast of Moscow. She left Russia in 2023, about a year after it attacked Ukraine.
“When everything started, I shared my opinions and told everyone what I thought. Eventually, I had to leave; otherwise I’d have ended up in jail,” said the young woman, who moved to Berlin and then spent four years in Limassol and Nicosia with her Cypriot ex-boyfriend. She’s now been in Armenia for the past six months — where she proudly wears a Star of David necklace — and wants to open an art gallery here.
Karapetyan, who recently spent a semester at the European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden, sees a future for liberal Judaism among the newcomers to Armenia.
“Jews here cannot relate to the Orthodox way of life. They like their freedom, and they’re not used to having separate seating for men and women,” he said. Karapetyan said that he has discussed joint projects with Rabbi Gershon Burshteyn, who has led Yerevan’s only synagogue — the Mordechay Navi Jewish Religious Center of Armenia — since 1996.
Trubkin says his Telegram chat has around 600 people.
“Every week, I meet several new people asking about Jewish life in Armenia — people from Russia, from Israel, from Moldova. For some of them, it’s their second round of emigration,” he said, adding that he’s looking to establish a physical presence for Yerevan Jewish Home. “And we’re also establishing a new Armenian-Israeli organization for business and culture.”
The sense of optimism is palpable, even with an undercurrent of concern about the influence that Turkey plays in the region. But if Israel fails — for whatever reason — to formally recognize the Armenian genocide after raising expectations, all bets are off.
“I sincerely hope that the Israeli government will complete this process and that the Knesset will adopt an official resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide,” said former Knesset member Alexander Tsinker, co-chair of the Armenia-Israel Public Forum. “Otherwise, it would be, to put it mildly, unacceptable.”
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Americans’ views of Israelis have grown more negative, survey finds
(JTA) — While Americans view Israelis far more favorably than the Israeli government, their opinion of the Jewish state’s residents has continued to decline, according to a survey released Thursday by the Pew Research Center.
The survey, which surveyed 12,574 U.S. adults from May 4 to May 17, 2026, found that 52% have a favorable opinion of the Israeli people, compared with 42% who held an unfavorable opinion.
A similar share held a favorable view of Palestinians, with 50% saying they held a favorable opinion while 44% had unfavorable views. The margin of error for the full sample was plus or minus 1.3 percentage points.
The survey found that Americans’ views of Israelis have grown increasingly negative in recent years, while views toward Palestinians have remained steady. In 2022, 67% of U.S. adults held a favorable view of Israelis, dropping to 52% this year, while views of Palestinians have dropped from 53% to 50%.
Unfavorable views of Israelis rose from 25% in 2022 to 42% this year, while unfavorable views of Palestinians rose from 39% in 2022 to 44% this year.
In contrast, the majority of Americans, 62%, held unfavorable views of the Israeli government, while 69% said they held an unfavorable opinion of the Palestinian Authority, which governs in the West Bank, and 84% said they had an unfavorable view of Hamas.
The Pew survey was conducted prior to Hamas’ announcement Monday that it will dissolve its government in Gaza ahead of its transfer to the Palestinian technocratic committee that was established by President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace.
The survey comes as a number of recent polls show, for the first time, Americans sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis.
Opinions of Israeli and Palestinian people were split among Republicans and Democrats, with 65% of Republicans holding a favorable view of Israelis compared to 43% of Democrats. Roughly two-thirds of Democrats held a favorable view of Palestinians, compared to one-third of Republicans.
Just over half of Democrats now hold an unfavorable view of Israelis, up from 31% in 2022. Among Republicans, the share that held a negative view towards Israelis also rose from 17% in 2022 to 31% in 2026.
U.S. adults under 30-years-old were also more likely to hold a favorable view of Palestinians, at 58%, than Israelis, at 32%. According to pollsters, the attitude was largely driven by young Democrats, of which 72% held a positive view toward Palestinians and just 26% held a positive view of Israelis.
Among Jewish respondents, the poll found that attitudes toward the Israeli people and government had declined in recent years. Since 2024, their favorable views of the Israeli people had fallen from 89% to 83%, and favorable opinions toward the Israeli government had fallen from 54% to 47%.
It also found that 40% of Jewish adults in the U.S. view the Palestinian people favorably, compared to 58% who said they viewed Palestinians unfavorably. Just 10% of Jewish adults said they held a favorable view toward the Palestinian Authority, and 2% said they held a favorable view of Hamas.
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