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Young Americans increasingly likely to view Hamas as ‘resistance,’ not terrorists
American adults under the age of 30 increasingly view Hamas as “militant resistance” operating on behalf of the Palestinian people, rather than a self-interested terrorist organization, according to data gathered by the American Jewish Committee.
In a poll conducted one year after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack against southern Israel, 33% of 18- to 29-year-olds described Hamas as a “resistance group” — nearly double the 17% of Americans over 30 who used that label — and that figure jumped to 43% this past fall.
The findings, shared with the Forward this month, track with another survey last summer that found 60% of 18- to 24-year-olds sided with Hamas over Israel in the Gaza war. It suggests the support that young Americans express for the Palestinians, and the same cohort’s deeply negative views toward Israel, are breaking through what was long a taboo: sympathy for an organization classified as a terrorist organization by the United States, and which has engaged in decades of violence against Israeli civilians.
Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a fellow at the pro-Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, attributed this shift to a broader disillusionment with mainstream media and the political establishment that has long presented Israel as a close U.S. ally with shared values.
“Americans have come to not trust these traditional narratives,” he said in an interview. “That spills over into thinking, ‘If we’ve been lied to about Israel’s true nature, maybe that means we’re also being lied to about Oct. 7 and groups like Hamas.’”
Open support for Hamas has been relatively rare among the protesters demonstrating against Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza. But constant demands for activists to condemn Hamas after Oct. 7 quickly became a source of derision on the left, while slogans and iconography celebrating Hamas violence became more common as the conflict dragged on and Israel killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, destroyed the vast majority of Gaza’s infrastructure and restricted aid shipments as experts warned of famine and raised the specter of genocide.
But many Jewish leaders and other critics of Hamas say young people are misinformed about the nature of Hamas — including its lukewarm support among Palestinians living in Gaza — and the war.
They also say apparent support for Hamas, especially in a public opinion poll that offers limited response options, may be less about genuine support for the organization and its political platform and more about picking the answer that aligns with their support for Palestinians.
“There’s a tendency in our very polarized society to find a camp and stay in the camp and whatever words the camp is using become your words,” said Julie Fishman Rayman, vice president for policy at the American Jewish Committee.
Complex — and incomplete — views on Hamas
In the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, a core of activists sympathetic to Hamas made their presence known. Demonstrations in major cities celebrated the attacks, while the coordinating body of Students for Justice in Palestine approvingly referred to Hamas militants as “the resistance.”
But as a broader protest movement calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza grew — drawing in Jews and others who simultaneously condemned Hamas violence on Oct. 7 and called for Israeli hostages to be released — some leading Jewish organizations and pundits continued to paint the demonstrators as terror supporters.
What data was available painted a more complex picture.
A study conducted by Eitan Hersh, a Tufts University professor, found that 5% of self-identified leftist college students — those who were generally organizing and participating in the campus protests against Israel — believed that “all Israeli civilians should be considered legitimate targets for Hamas,” compared to 17% of conservative students.
And since the Israel-Hamas war began, the Harvard/Harris poll, a collaboration between the school’s Center for American Political Studies and a private polling firm, has consistently found that between 40% and 50% of the youngest American adults — those aged 18 to 24 years old — side with Hamas over Israel when forced to choose. The monthly poll’s August edition made headlines when that figure briefly jumped to 60% support for Hamas.
A member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City chapter pointed to that statistic while pressing Shahana Hanif, a progressive member of city council, during an endorsement meeting on why she had condemned local protesters who had chanted in favor of Hamas.“With 60% of Gen Z supporting Hamas against Israel, many of us are realizing now that we’ve been lied to all our lives,” the person said, according to a recording obtained by Jewish Insider. (A NYC-DSA spokesperson said that members do not reflect the organization’s position.)
But most coverage overlooked the poll’s other findings, including that 61% of that age group believed “Hamas must release all remaining hostages without any conditions or face serious consequences” and that 63% disapproved of Hamas’s conduct in the war.
The Harvard/Harris survey has been criticized for being unreliable and at times producing results about antisemitism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that are “bizarre and difficult to account for,” in the words of a Harvard Crimson columnist.
But some observers say that people expressing sympathy for Hamas may have nuanced views.
“I speak to a lot of Palestinians who have supported Hamas not because they support terrorism but because they support action to oppose the occupation,” said Roei Eisenberg, chair of the young adults network at Israel Policy Forum, a dovish Zionist think tank. “They have a Palestinian Authority that’s broken and corrupt and not actually standing up for them — and they see Hamas in Gaza at least putting up a fight.”
Ahmed Moor, a Palestinian-American writer and fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace, said that supporters of the Palestinians in the United States are following a similar logic as they see evidence of devastation and Israeli brutality in Gaza. “Why are Zionists so resistant to the idea of Palestinian resistance?” he asked. “Any normal person would look and say, ‘Of course these people have a right to resist.’”
That sentiment has circulated on social media, often among anonymous creators.
After Israel killed Yahwa Sinwar, the military leader of Hamas in Gaza, many users on TikTok created videos praising the bravery of his final moments in which he is recorded throwing a stick at an Israeli drone.
“In a million years, you would never see Joe Biden, you would never see Ben-Gvir, you would never see any of these people die for anyone but themselves,” a Jewish user who goes by Dirty Alex told his 23,000 followers.
He added an ambivalent caveat: “It’s weird because I think — because of Oct. 7, the people who perpetuated it should be held accountable — and I think they would agree, actually — but at the same time I will always support righteous struggle.”
That tendency to equivocate when it comes to Hamas’s most egregious atrocities is common even among those in the U.S. who otherwise express support for the group. Many have sought to downplay the Oct. 7 attack as primarily an assault on Israeli military positions and claiming that atrocities committed against civilians were exaggerated or completely fabricated.
On social media, many users have rushed to highlight any evidence that Israeli hostages were treated well by Hamas during captivity. For example, several large accounts claimed that Israeli Maya “Bengi” had refused to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu because his “hands are stained with the blood of children in Gaza.”
But the real hostage, named Maya Regev, did meet with Netanyahu and said she had been abused by sadistic doctors in Gaza.
The most popular symbol associated with Hamas among Israel’s opponents in the U.S. is also connected with attacks on the Israeli military rather than civilians: The inverted triangle, which comes from grainy propaganda videos that use the red arrow to point out Israeli military units operating in Gaza immediately before Hamas militants fire at them.
Kenney-Shawa, the Al-Shabaka fellow, said the growing support for Hamas among young Americans suggests that “more people are vibing with the idea of Palestinian resistance” rather than aligning with the organization’s specific tactics or policies.
Others acknowledge that while Hamas has engaged in war crimes and violations of international law, Israel stands accused of engaging in similar behavior. “Palestinian resistance has always been armed — and that’s always been in line with international law — and the violation of international law has also occurred both by Zionist groups and Palestinians,” Moor said. “Everyone has committed crimes.”
Hamas officials have also sought to present positions to western audiences that are palatable to progressives, emphasizing measured political positions and portraying Israel as the more radical and intransigent party.
“We are politically realistic,” Khaled Meshaal, a senior Hamas leader, told Drop Site News in December. “We are ready to engage with any serious project to establish a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders even though I realize, unfortunately, that this is impossible because of Israeli policy.”
Hamas as symbol of resistance
Hamas coming to represent the strongest resistance to Israel among young people in the U.S. is frustrating for some Palestinians, who say it sanitizes what Hamas actually represents and overlooks the preferences of Palestinians in Gaza.
Khalil Sayegh, a politician analyst and director of the Agora Initiative, which advocates for Palestinian rights in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, said he appreciated that Americans were turning away from an uncritical pro-Israel narrative but worried about polarization in the opposite direction.
“Resistance has become basically equal to Hamas and Hamas equal to resistance,” Sayegh said. “That’s a very toxic and wrong thing.”
He said that “Israeli apartheid and genocide” was the main problem in Gaza but that Hamas also stood in the way of establishing a “secular, democratic Palestine.”
While around half of Palestinians in Gaza said they were satisfied with Hamas’s performance in the war, according to an October survey, the poll also suggested that the organization would be soundly defeated if open parliamentary or presidential elections were held across the West Bank and Gaza.
Around 33% of voters in Gaza would support a Hamas candidate for president, while most of the remainder would either vote for Marwan Barghouti, a leader of secular rival Fatah who is currently imprisoned by Israel, or not participate, according to Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. Respondents were roughly split on whether negotiations and peaceful protest or “armed struggle” were the best method to establish a Palestinian state.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s there were robust debates in the Palestinian diaspora over which political factions to support. But Sayegh said those faded from public view as Israel eliminated most credible alternatives and fears grew that open critique of Hamas would be weaponized by pro-Israel groups to weaken the pro-Palestinian movement.
Additionally, he said, activists in the U.S. who support Hamas have intimidated its critics within the Palestinian community. “There is still a debate but there is no public debate,” Sayegh said. “The masses that are supportive of Hamas have scared the people who oppose Hamas into silence.”
Ahmed Foud Alkhabtib, who moved from Gaza to the U.S. in high school, has become one of the most prominent Palestinian critics of Hamas and now positions himself in opposition to most of the pro-Palestinian movement.
Alkhabtib, the founder of an initiative called Realign for Palestine at the Atlantic Council, attributed the rise in support for Hamas to a combination of ignorance and malice within the “pro-Palestine industrial complex” composed of “far-left meets far-right meets the Islamists meets the Taliban and al-Qaeda meets the idiot Jewish kids who said they were lied to about Israel at summer camp.”
But he said that some Palestinians had told him during the war that they shared his antipathy toward Hamas — especially as some blamed the group for contributing to aid shortages over the summer — but that they would speak out once Israel ended its military operations. “I did pick up on notes of the pro-Hamas euphoria dying down,” Alkhabtib said.
And yet both Palestinian and Jewish observers said that leading pro-Israel organizations have also contributed to polarization around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that drives some people toward Hamas or makes them reluctnat to criticize the group.
Eisenberg, with the Israel Policy Forum, said that many Jewish groups have refused to acknowledge Israeli atrocities in Gaza and rushed to paint the country’s critics as terror supporters. “It’s coming from a place of being unable to hold complexity,” he said.
Alkhabtib said he has experienced this firsthand. Despite being an unequivocal critic of Hamas and maintaining close ties to many Jewish organizations, he has found little tolerance for also critiquing the Israeli far right.
“The pro-Palestinian people are watching me — the pro-Hamas people are watching me — and saying, ‘Well what incentive do I have if you’re been Mr. Dialogue and Engagement and they turn on you the second you criticize Israel,” Alkhabtib said. “There’s something to be said about the role of Jewish communities to reverse these problematic trends.”
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This Toronto street corner has been a site of anti-Zionist activism for months. Police just opened a hate crime investigation.
The Toronto Police Service hate crimes unit is investigating teacher Abbas Hamze for remarks about “Zionists.” Canadian Jewish groups, including the Jewish Federations of Canada’s advocacy arm and B’nai Brith Canada, have called his speech, which went viral online, “blatant antisemitism.”
Hamze’s remarks invoked antisemitic tropes, accusing “Zionists” of performing “black magic” as well as raping and killing children. He spoke at the intersection of Bathurst and Sheppard, in the heavily Jewish Toronto neighborhood of Bathurst Manor – Clanton Park.
According to his LinkedIn, Hamze works as an instructor at several Canadian colleges in the area, including the University of Niagara Falls and Georgian College. He does not specify what he teaches.
Hamze could not be reached for comment. The University of Niagara Falls and Georgian College did not respond to requests to comment, and the Toronto Police declined a request for comment.
UNF issued a statement addressing Hamze’s remarks, distancing the university from the instructor’s statements and stating that they have “zero tolerance for discrimination, hate, harassment, or any conduct that threatens the dignity and well-being of others.” They announced that they are “launching an internal investigation” into the matter.
In his speech, Hamze claimed that “British colonizers have planted this cancerous, false Zionist state of Israel … right in the heart of Islam.”
Later — wearing a keffiyeh and reading from his phone into a megaphone emblazoned with the Lebanese flag — the instructor repeated numerous antisemitic conspiracy theories, including the debunked idea that Jews have caused or deserved centuries of persecution.
“The Zionists have never had a country of their own because of their mischief,” Hamze said. “They are the most kicked-out people in the world who are making black magic and horrible things.”
He went on to say that Jewish corruption is “crystal clear in Epstein Island where they have the Jewish leaders from all around the world.” He accused “Zionists” of having “raped, and killed, and ate children at the same time.”
Finally, he unfoundedly blamed the actions of President Donald Trump on “Zionists” who “blackmail” and “control” people.
“That’s why you can see now a guy like Trump who caused this genocide in Gaza kidnaps the presidents of Venezuala, kills the supreme leader of Iran Imam Ali Khamenei, may God sanctify his soul,” he said. “This is because of them, the terrorist Zionists.”
It appears that people became aware of Hamze’s remarks after Casey Babb, an Israel and International Relations scholar, posted a video of him on X.
In a joint statement, Canadian Jewish groups described Hamze’s claims as “antisemitic blood libels that have been used for centuries to justify hatred and violence against Jews.”
The statement says that the intersection where Hamze spoke, Bathurst and Sheppard, has long been a site of “antisemitic harassment, intimidation and provocation, too often under the guise of anti-Zionism,” and called on Toronto’s police department to investigate the incident.
“Allowing this behaviour to go unchecked is to normalize antisemitism as an everyday feature of life in this city,” it stated.
The city’s police have opened an investigation. However, online, some said that Hamze had been speaking at the street corner for months without police intervention.
In Canada, public incitement of hatred is considered a criminal offense. The Canadian criminal code says that “communicating statements in any public place” that “incites hatred against any identifiable group where such incitement is likely to lead to a breach of the peace” is a breach of law, resulting in up to two years in prison.
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West Elm’s Russ & Daughters merch did something their in-house line could never
Figuring out one’s Judaica vibe can be a challenging endeavor for those of us who don’t have tastes in line with the colorful stained glass or embossed silver aesthetics that tend to dominate the category. Newer designers have introduced some minimalist options, but that’s also not really for me.
But for those of us with a tendency toward the whimsical or kitsch, furniture retailer West Elm is coming to the rescue with two new collections, geared toward the High Holidays and Hanukkah.
There’s a Russ & Daughters collaboration of blue-and-white ceramics, featuring serving platters with handpainted designs such as a fish or latkes, trinket trays with pickles and more fish, simple Delft-colored dinnerware and napkins with little cutlery printed in the corners.
And, separately, in an apparent attempt to capitalize on the Jewish market, West Elm also released a set of their own plates, bowls and tea towels printed with colorful “deli favorites” — pickles, brisket, hamentaschen, black-and-white cookies, and the like.
The concepts are pretty similar; both lean into the idea of decorating plates with food objects that may or may not be the food you actually put on them.
I do admittedly already have a large blue-and-white platter with a fish painted on it that I find charmingly eclectic, and just as suitable for serving foods that are not of the oceanic persuasion as it is for foods that are indeed from the briny deep. So I’m not inherently opposed to the concept. But I don’t feel as good about the in-house West Elm Jewish designs, like a bowl with a sort of mushy depiction of matzo balls at the bottom. Imagine eating anything else out of that. Honestly, imagine eating matzo ball soup out of it. It seems disorienting.
Everyone’s tastes vary, and if you want to eat a salad off of a plate with a colorful brisket sandwich painted on it, be my guest. But I think the Russ & Daughters offering is the better of the options. For the most part, the collection stays on the artful side of kitsch largely thanks to the simplicity of the designs and the color scheme. And, more importantly, the internal logic seems actually Jewish. The pieces are useful — perhaps with the exception of the latke platter — for multiple Jewish occasions. The matchbox with a challah on it may feel a bit random at first glance but it does conjure an image of lighting candles on Shabbat, and there are matching candle holders. The art kind of evokes Marc Chagall.
The West Elm deli hits sets on the other hand — which are separate from their collab with the iconic Lower East Side deli — feel as though they’re screaming their Jewishness. The tea towel mixes together hamentaschen and sufganiyot (or possibly a bagel, it’s hard to tell) on the same piece of cloth, despite the fact that these desserts correspond to different holidays. The drawings are cute, but the overall effect is frantic, like someone dumped every Jewish food they could name onto the same page and sent it off to the printers. It’s giving Target Rosh Hashanah decorations — the sort that have a menorah alongside the apples and honey.
A few years ago, Crate and Barrel had Jewish lifestyle influencer Rebecca Lowin curate a Hanukkah display, but it was done using items the store already carried in white, blue and silver; only the menorah was specifically Jewish. Now, a similar home decor store is creating entire lines catering specifically to Jewish holidays and culture. That’s a sign of an increased mainstream embrace of Jewish culture, and that’s a good thing — it wasn’t so long ago that it wasn’t possible to find much public recognition of the existence of the High Holidays, and every attempt featured a hanukkiah with the wrong number of branches or a loaf of challah for Passover. Today, if Jews want twee merchandise — and no judgment — there’s plenty. There are even Hanukkah gnomes, if your taste runs to that.
But there’s still a dearth of decor that feels elegant and thoughtful, instead of try-hard. Decor that feels actually rooted in Jewishness, instead of like a Jewish gloss on something that’s really for another holiday. The Russ and Daughters collaboration is rooted in actual Jewish history. Even if you don’t like a fish motif as much as me, that’s a step in the right direction.
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Sephardic and Mizrahi groups accuse New York Magazine of erasing Middle Eastern Jews. The editor-in-chief agreed to a meeting.
As editors of New York Magazine dug in their heels this week, defending the magazine’s viral “Habibi City” package published earlier this month, 14 Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish organizations delivered an open letter on Monday night, accusing the magazine of erasing Middle Eastern Jews from its coverage.
On Tuesday, Editor-in-chief David Haskell invited them to meet in September, saying he wants the magazine’s coverage to reflect the multitude of perspectives in the region.
In addition to asking for a meeting, co-signers of the letter, convened by JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa), asked the magazine to acknowledge what they call the package’s exclusionary framing and provide more representative coverage of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews going forward.
The dispute centers on the magazine’s August issue about the city’s burgeoning Southwest Asian and North African cultural scene known as SWANA. The package explores restaurants, cafes, cultural collectives and dance parties, tracing much of their growth to the war in Gaza that followed theHamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“Out of that resistance,” the magazine writes, “a cultural ecosystem started to bloom.”
This week, the magazine published a statement standing by its use of the term genocide to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza, adding that “accusations of antisemitic intent were in fact obfuscating an overwhelming scholarly consensus, and that its use would be allowed in our pages.”
The open letter did not address the use of that term. Instead, it addressed the article’s framing.
The package describes membership in SWANA community in political terms.
“To be in SWANA community,” one article says, means “embracing a set of shared beliefs: that Palestinians deserve human rights. That what happened in Gaza in the aftermath of October 7 constitutes a genocide. That social justice and social welfare override capitalist concerns.”
The same article describes the place of Israelis within SWANA culture as “complicated,” in part because of the term’s “political framework.”
It also says SWANA New Yorkers “face xenophobia, Islamophobia and Zionism” in the city — language that drew particular ire from the coalition and online critics.
According to the letter, New York Magazine’s framing turns SWANA from a geographic and cultural identity into an ideological one, excluding many of New York’s Jews from the Middle East and North Africa unless they reject Israel — the country where many of their families found refuge after fleeing persecution and discrimination elsewhere in the region.
“A Mizrahi Jew whose grandparents were born in the region, expelled from their country of origin, and who carries the region in her language, liturgy, and kitchen belongs only upon disavowal of the movement through which her family survived,” the letter reads.
As the letter puts it, for a great majority of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews to be represented “as we actually are” means representing them as Zionists.
The letter also faults the package for invoking Oct. 7 repeatedly without acknowledging the atrocities committed that day and erasing the region’s non-Muslim populations.
“When we read ‘Habibi City,’ we immediately saw that this wasn’t something one organization should answer alone,” Sarah Levin, JIMENA’s executive director told the Forward. “The feature made claims about who belongs in contemporary Middle Eastern and North African and ‘SWANA’ communities in NYC, so the response needed to come from the breadth of the communities being written out.”
After she read the package, she began contacting other Sephardic and Mizrahi organizations about writing an open letter. Within four days, all 14 organizations had signed on.
“Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, North African and Sephardic communal organizations almost never act in concert, and they’ve united around one argument,” Levin said.
Signatories include the American Sephardi Federation, the Iranian American Jewish Federation of New York and the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York.
Levin said the groups had little difficulty reaching consensus. “When the argument is, ‘We exist, and we will not be defined out of our own region,’ there isn’t much for our communities to debate.”
What concerned Levin most, she said, was the size of New York Magazine‘s audience and cultural reach. The Pulitzer Prize-winning bi-weekly magazine boasts reaching 1.8 million readers each week.
“When a magazine that shapes American culture tells millions of readers that belonging to the Middle East requires renouncing Zionism, that is not a small thing,” Levin said. “That is why we responded the way we did.”
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