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He researches antisemitism for a living. Why does the State Department want to kick him out of the country?
(JTA) — For years, Imran Ahmed has presented his research on how tech platforms enable the spread of antisemitism to receptive audiences across the ideological spectrum.
He’s worked with the Anti-Defamation League and Jewish Federations of North America; the latter credits Ahmed with the backbone of much of its own policy proposals. He’s appeared at a conference organized by the first Trump administration, with Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also in attendance.
He’s joined Republicans in advocating for an end to Section 230, a law granting special protections to social media platforms. During the first Trump administration, on the strength of his research, the British-born Ahmed received a priority visa as an “alien of extraordinary ability” — the so-called “Einstein visa,” after the German-born Jewish physicist.
All of that only added to Ahmed’s befuddlement when, just before Christmas, the current Trump State Department announced it would be revoking his visa because of what Secretary of State Marco Rubio tweeted were “egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.”
“It is confusing,” Ahmed told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday, speaking from his home in Washington, D.C. “Certainly there was some alarm.”
The confusion came not least because Ahmed, as a legal permanent resident, no longer has a visa to revoke. He received an EB-1 visa, which provides a fast pathway to permanent residency, in January 2021, at the end of Trump’s first term and now has a green card.
Ahmed was different from the four other digital anti-hate activists named in the State Department announcement, all of whom are based in Europe. Since 2021, his organization, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, has been registered as a U.S. nonprofit — a status that he notes should confer First Amendment protections. Last year, the group reported $4.2 million in revenue.
Ahmed has received no formal notification of an effort to revoke his residency. Neither Rubio’s own tweet, nor a State Department press release announcing the sanctions, mentioned him. There’s just a tweet, from a State Department undersecretary, mentioning him by name as a “key collaborator with the Biden Administration’s effort to weaponize the government against U.S. citizens.”
The State Department did not answer questions about Ahmed’s case. “The Supreme Court and Congress have repeatedly made clear: the United States is under no obligation to allow foreign aliens to come to our country or reside here,” a spokesperson told JTA in a statement.
At a time of aggressive immigration enforcement activity that has ensnared others with green cards, Ahmed isn’t taking changes. He sought (and was granted) a legal restraining order to prevent the government from seizing him and moving him to an immigrant detention facility without trial, as officials have done to an estimated 59,000 migrants in the last year. On Monday he returned to court, petitioning to make the order permanent.
“We want to make sure that they can’t take me away from my friends, family and support network,” he said. He’s optimistic on that front. “I have faith in the courts, and I have faith that the rule of law is still intact in the United States.”
What happens next is anyone’s guess. But Ahmed’s ordeal has cast a cloud of uncertainty over the work of a trusted Jewish communal ally — and further muddled the Trump administration’s own stated commitment to fighting antisemitism.
“Absolutely fascist — and dangerous — effort by the admin to ban my colleague Imran Ahmed and others from the US,” Amy Spitalnick, head of the Jewish Council of Public Affairs, wrote on X last week.
Ahmed partnered with Spitalnick’s group on a report about the rise of antisemitic influencers on X after Oct. 7. “He’s dedicated his career to fighting online hate and extremism,” Spitalnick recently told JTA, noting the two had first connected after the 2017 “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Virginia, during which one counter-protester was killed.
A columnist at Britain’s Jewish News also criticized the Trump administration’s targeting of Ahmed: “Imran Ahmed was a friend to America and an important voice in debates about free speech,” wrote David Hirsh. “He obeyed the law, just as the Americans he worked with obey the law, and he should be treated the same, while working in and contributing to the United States of America.”
The Trump administration has taken special pains to prevent immigration by Muslims, last month blocking visas for passport holders from 20 mostly Muslim countries and targeting Afghans especially after an Afghan national shot and killed a National Guard member in Washington in November.
Ahmed’s parents are Afghan, and in his column Hirsh called Ahmed, “a brilliant Muslim Brit.” Ahmed, who was born in England, has said that he now considers himself an atheist.
His allies see his case as part of a different Trump administration priority. Spitalnick told JTA the targeting of Ahmed was “all part of the broader weaponization of the federal government to go after perceived political enemies and advance an extremist agenda, which in this case is to push back against any regulation of tech.”
In the State Department’s targeting of him, Ahmed sees the handiwork of his longtime foes: the tech “oligarchs” who control the social media giants he seeks to rein in.
“This is quite clearly an attempt to silence the work that we do studying and exposing the way that social media platforms encourage, amplify and reward — with money — antisemitism and other forms of hate,” he said. “These guys have been lobbying aggressively in Washington long before President Trump was president. They’ve been invited to the White House and treated like demigods for decades now.”
Fighting antisemitism is central to the CCDH’s origin story, Ahmed said. A former staffer with the British Labour Party with plans to run for office himself, he quit after the 2015 ascension of Jeremy Corbyn, whom Ahmed calls “an avowed antisemite.” (Corbyn, who came to lead Labour amid a party overhaul that saw a massive influx of antisemitic sentiment, was suspended by his party over his handling of the antisemitism issue before ultimately being expelled in 2023.)
Ahmed wanted to understand why what he perceived as a newfound flurry of antisemitic social media activity seemed to follow Corbyn and his allies. He was also disturbed by the 2016 murder of Labour parliamentarian Jo Cox by a far-right figure associated with neo-Nazi groups who had been radicalized online. Together, he reasoned, there was something yet undiscovered about the role social media was playing in pushing out antisemitism across the political spectrum.
“This has always been an organization that, at its heart, has been trying to answer the question, how is it that ancient lies about Jews have been able to gain such purchase in our society?” he said. “And what can we do to change that?”
In the years since Ahmed founded the CCDH (which he relocated to the United States after receiving his green card), his group has published a series of papers on the various ways social media algorithms promote and reward antisemitism and other forms of hate speech. With the ADL, they published a 2023 report on Iranian state media’s use of social media to spread antisemitism. In November, with JFNA, they released a report on how Instagram has effectively monetized antisemitic content.
Ahmed presented those findings at JFNA’s annual meeting, in front of federation heads from around the country; he credits his work with helping groups like JFNA focus more of their attention on the problem of social media algorithms instead of individual bad actors online. A JFNA representative recently told JTA that Ahmed’s research has been integral to the umbrella group’s crafting of its own online antisemitism policy proposals.
“He is a valuable partner in providing accurate and detailed information on how the social media algorithms have created a bent toward antisemitism and anti-Zionism,” Dennis Bernard, a JFNA lay leader who heads their government relations efforts, told JTA.
Ahmed’s work has made him enemies, too. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and head of X, sued the CCDH in 2023, alleging that it violated the X’s terms of service in gathering data for a report on its amplification of hate content. A judge threw the case out, but Ahmed isn’t so sure Musk — who wielded tremendous power over the federal government at the helm of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency and remains close with administration figures, including the president — has moved on.
“I think it’s incredibly telling that the earliest and most vociferous reactions [to the visa sanction] were actually from people like Elon Musk, who himself has spread antisemitic lies and presided over the descent of this platform formerly known as Twitter into a hellscape of antisemitism,” he said. On X, Musk responded to news of the visa sanctions with fire emojis.
If the State Department is indeed targeting activists like Ahmed as a matter of policy, it would seem to be at odds with its newly confirmed special antisemitism envoy, Yehuda Kaploun. He recently indicated that he, too, wanted to see more restrictions on social media platforms that promote antisemitism.
“It makes it very confusing for them to claim foreign policy problems, which is what they’ve claimed, when U.S. foreign policy is to reduce antisemitism,” Ahmed said.
Another possibility: that the State Department’s targeting of Ahmed has to do with something else entirely. In her post blasting him, the public diplomacy undersecretary Sarah Rogers focused on a different research project the CCDH had undertaken during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Ahmed’s group, Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), created the infamous ‘disinformation dozen’ report, which called for platforms to deplatform twelve American ‘anti-vaxxers’, including now-HHS Secretary @SecKennedy,” Rogers wrote. She was referring to a 2021 CCDH report finding that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and 11 other anti-vaccine activists were responsible for more than 65% of all anti-vaccine content on social media. Kennedy, now Trump’s secretary of health and human services, also celebrated the visa restrictions on Ahmed and the others.
Ahmed dismisses the idea. “The pandemic is long over, so it would be very odd to be targeted for work that we did four years ago. That seems implausible to me,” he said.
He is convinced, instead, that he’s being singled out because he seeks to put guardrails on the big technology platforms more generally.
In their case to the judge for the restraining order, Ahmed’s lawyers — including prominent Jewish attorneys Roberta Kaplan and Norm Eisen — brought up one striking comparison: to the pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder detained for months for what the U.S. government argued was exhibiting support for terrorism. Ahmed insists his case and Khalil’s are nothing alike in substance; the government has so few cases of threatening the citizenship of green-card holders that a legal comparison just made sense, he said.
While Spitalnick has vocally rebuked the Trump administration over its targeting of Ahmed, his other Jewish partners have remained relatively quiet. Many Jewish organizations have found themselves torn since Trump took office as the administration has taken an aggressive stance on fighting antisemitism while also pursuing policies that Jewish communities have historically opposed, including barring immigration.
Bernard, while praising Ahmed’s work, also said JFNA would review its collaboration with him and, “if there’s something there we don’t know about,” would “terminate our relationship.”
The ADL, which has found itself in the Trump administration’s crosshairs, has not made any public statement about Ahmed’s case and did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Ahmed isn’t bothered by any of this, though he is grateful for the Jewish support he has received. He says he’s received “hundreds of texts” from Jewish supporters, and even spent his first “Jewish Christmas” with some last month, chowing down on Chinese food and watching American football. Despite their years of collaboration, he didn’t expect the big Jewish names to come rushing publicly to his aid.
“I’m not asking anyone else to fight this fight for me,” he said, worried the spectacle will “distract us from the job” of pressuring tech platforms. “They’ve made this about me as a person. And when they can’t defeat the message, they go after the messenger.”
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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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